Why do I get the impression that someone somewhere has declared open season on Google? The Google Book Search deal is under scrutiny from anti-trust regulators in the US; Jeff Bezos thinks that the settlement is a bad idea; it has even been criticised for bad design decisions. Although I Read more…
Yet another Harry Potter copyright case, but this time, the one being sued is the bespectacled teen wizard. The estate of the deceased children’s author Adrian Jacobs is suing Harry Potter publishers Bloomsbury for copyright infringement in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. In 1987, Jacobs wrote a book Read more…
Do you ever wonder how things work? Here at TechnoLlama we spend an obscene amount of time wondering precisely how applications and gadgets work. How does a media server allow me to watch downloaded TV shows in my PS3? How are long files negotiated between a Mac and a PC? Read more…
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 PirateBay’s copyright infringement trial has gotten under way in Sweden. The press has been promising that it will be the “internet piracy trial of the decade” (I guess Grokster is chopped liver), but as Mathias Klang astutely points out, the likely result will be an appeal to the Swedish Read more…
The Bad Science copyright chill has seemingly reached an impasse. The offending clip is still not available on the blog, but it can be found in countless websites as bloggers all across the country have started infringing copyright in a show of solidarity for Ben Goldacre. The Streisand Effect Strikes Read more…
Ben Goldacre is the author of the Guardian column Bad Science (and eponymous blog). Dr Goldacre is a champion of rationality in a world enamoured with sloppy thinking, uncorroborated anecdotes and dodgy statistics. For many years he has been at the forefront of the battle against the pernicious MMR vaccination Read more…
(Via Colin Miller) NCSoft, the producers of virtual worlds such as Lineage, City of Heroes and Guild Wars has been sued by virtual platform developer Worlds.com, which holds several patents on 3D environments. Back in December, Terra Nova had reported that Worlds.com had announced that it would be enforcing its Read more…
As many other academics, I have come to rely on reference software to keep my bibliographic resources organised. For some time I have been using Endnote because it came installed with University computers, but I have been increasingly frustrated with its lack of interoperability and inflexible interface. EndNote has many Read more…
Some time ago we reported on the interesting case of pricing errors involving Dell Chile. The case has continued to develop, and now 40 consumers “affected” by the error have sued Dell for infringing Chile’s Consumer Protection Law by “deceitful error inducing mistake in the price”. The class action suit Read more…