Interesting piece in TechDirt about watermarking content. The associated Press has convinced Boston newspaper Town News to adopts its watermarking service to stop people from copying and pasting content because the biggest threat to online news editions is widespread copying and plagiarism. The article says that they hope to adopt Read more
I’ve been reading some of the fascinating research coming from Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere, and a couple of things have jumped out at me immediately: Two-thirds are male 60% are 18-44 The majority are more affluent and educated than the general population 75% have college degrees 40% have graduate Read more
Press gag orders in the UK have a deservedly bad reputation, they are some of the worst examples of repression of freedom of speech through draconian legal measures. While one could argue that they may be justified in some cases with regards to human rights and privacy, they are currently Read more
Bizarre piece of news. Myspace is being sued by five families who claim that their children were sexually assaulted by men they met in the web space. Details are sketchy, but apparently five teenage girls have joined forces in order to hold Myspace liable for the real-life assaults they were Read more
I have been following with growing interest the online debate between Lily Allen and Techdirt with regards to file-sharing and three-strikes. If you are unfamiliar with the debate, here is a brief introduction. You may have heard that Lord Mandelson has put forward proposals to have our own version of Read more
To quickly answer my own question, no. But sometimes I really wonder about the sanity of current copyright legislation. I enjoy PostSecret, there is something in the anonymous confession of sins that appeals to the lapsed Catholic side of my personality. I have often wondered about the legal issues surrounding Read more
I have been spending perhaps too much time recently engaged in what one could call the war between old media and the Internet. As an avid cybernaut and proud card-carrying member of the social media revolution, I am often puzzled by the level of vitriol directed against the blogosphere, Twitter, Read more
Last night something interesting happened online, a small incident that I think illustrates the problems of instant communications quite well. Geek blog Mashable broke the news that telecomms giant AT&T was filtering access to imageboard 4chan. For those unfamiliar with this site, 4chan is a forum dedicated to the exchange Read more
Several news sites have reported an interesting copyright case involving the Wikimedia Foundation and the National Portrait Gallery (NPG) in Britain. The NPG undertook a £1 million GBP digitisation exercise, and placed high-definition versions of their pictures in a database locked with technological protection measures. Derrick Coetzee, a volunteer for Read more
So, a teenager intern at Morgan Stanley wrote a report categorically stating that teens don’t do Twitter, and you could hear thousands of social media hype-meisters screaming bloody murder. It’s almost as if a million Twitter feeds cried out in pain at once. Being the cynical person that I am, Read more