Ireland has been suffering a bit of a copyright nightmare recently. Firstly, Eircom was sued by the music industry, and settled out of court conceding that it would implement some form of “three-strikes-and-you’re-out” policy. As Sheldon from BBT would say “It is a sports analogy. Baseball to be precise”. Now Read more…
The Digital Britain parliamentary commission has presented its interim report, which has been met with the usual journalistic brouhaha and bombastic statements. The more progressive media has kept a distrusting tone, while the usual suspects at the Telegraph and the Mail have hailed it as going in the right direction Read more…
In the history of bad ideas and misguided Internet regulation, I do not think that I have come across something as ludicrous as the latest proposal from the Rt Hon Andy Burnham (Labour – Leigh), the Secretary of State for Culture. Mr Burnham (I’ll dispense with the honorific for now) Read more…
Today Britons have woken up to the fact that they are also browsing the Internet behind a firewall similar in some ways to the much maligned Great Firewall of China. Every news outlet is reporting that Wikipedia has been censored in the UK. Several UK ISPs are accused of filtering Read more…
A Federal jury in Los Angeles has convicted Lori Drew of three misdemeanour counts of computer fraud, specifically accessing a computer without authorisation. This is not unusual in itself, but the novelty of the decision is that Ms Drew’s conduct was to create a fictional MySpace account to bully neighbour Read more…
(via ORG-Discussion list and various other sources) A teenager in Florida has committed suicide while webcasting the event on video website Justin.tv. Reportedly, as many as 1,500 people were witnesing the event at one time, and some even encouraged the teenager with messages like this one: “Do it, do the Read more…
Hiding meaning through obscure language is a long-held tradition, after all, that is what euphemisms are all about. However, avoiding regulated practices by calling them something else is an entirely different matter altogether. Insurance provision is a heavily regulated area for a reason, yet if you do not want any Read more…
Some years ago, James Boyle made a compelling case in favour of evidence-based policymaking in an article attacking the European database right. Since then, I have become a strong believer in injecting some empirical evidence into copyright debates that are often filled with anecdotes of starving artists, scaremongering tales of Read more…
The nature of good and evil is not the usual TechnoLlama topic, but I have been thinking a lot about what makes people evil after reading the article in the New York Times entitled “The Trolls Among Us“. This is a disturbing and compelling look at certain online communities that Read more…
Electronic evidence and data gathering are becoming an important part of modern litigation. When Viacom requested data from Google pertaining their massive litigation, they did not just ask for all the usage information related to their own content, they requested everything. All information about every single video uploaded to YouTube Read more…