It seems like the story about virtual sweatshops is true after all. Romanian workers play computer games for 10 hours a day to produce virtual goods in MMORPGs which are later sold through eBay or through other websites such as Gamersloot. In those places you can buy powerful accounts, virtual Read more
(Warning: the article is entitled “Patently absurd”, I had never seen that title before!) This is an article by John Naughton about software patents (yes, I know I promised that I would not write about software patents again, but I can’t stop myself). Although the article is an adequate introduction Read more
Swedish police have raided servers belonging to the ISP Bahnhof Internet. They discovered 23 Terabytes of infringing content. Apparently, one of the servers in the ISP was the largest file serving machine in Europe! This case highlights an interesting question about ISP liability. Apparently, two employees are now suspected of Read more
In the last episode, our hero NCSoft, defender of City of Heroes, had been caught by the evil ploy of Marvel Comics Lawyer-Man. The evil Lawyer-Man caught NCSoft in the cave of The Judge, where he alleged that our hero was guilty of willful secondary infringement. Lawyer-Man has all the Read more
The wireless roadshow is a project that creates very cheap wireless solutions that use cans and cheap circuits, and takes it to developing countries, where they can be used to connect to remote communities to the internet at very little cost. This I believe is the way of the future, Read more
I promise that this is the last software patent article for a while. The Guardian has a pretty decent article describing the state of affairs with the approval of the directive-that-shall-not-be-named. It is quite interesting to see that there is something happening that produces enough interest to allow this issue Read more
This is an exercise to test the patent described in the previous article (and infringe a silly American patent in the process). This is the full list of my purchases for the last two months with eBay and Amazon: The Success of Open Source Hack//Sign complete series Nausicaa of the Read more
Take a look at Amazon’s US patent 6865546. This is a patent for a system that determines a buyer’s age according to previous buying records. The patent states that: One embodiment of the present invention is a system and method of determining the age of an item recipient, such as Read more
Today, thousands of activists and open source developers in Europe must be shouting “Damn you all to hell”. The European Council has decided to adopt the proposed text of the software patents directive (pardon me, the Computer Implemented Inventions Directive). The procedure seems to have been dodgy to say the Read more
This is an old article, but I have just read it and found it quite thought-provoking. The article first discusses the economics of mainstream entertainment, which offers us low-quality works from the because of their proven economic return. Those with different tastes must look further and deeper to satisfy their Read more