Facebook is being sued for patent infringement by venture capital firm Cross Atlantic Capital Partners, which seems to be the latest in a wave of investors involved in financing patent troll litigation. The plaintiffs are asking for licensing fees. The subject of the suit is U.S. patent 6,519,629, which protects Read more…
One more case in the ongoing battle in Spain between SGAE and small bars over copyleft music. Derecho de Internet reports on this latest appeal by the SGAE against a bar in Madrid called “Buenavistilla Social Club”. The collecting society initially lost the case and therefore appealed to have the Read more…
Colleague and friend Jordan Hatcher has requested me to reproduce this notice. Use of open content licences by cultural heritage organisations The Eduserv Foundation is funding a study into the use of Creative Archive, Creative Commons and similar open content licences by cultural heritage organisations in the United Kingdom. The Read more…
Those interested in the GikII 2 (pronounced geeky) workshop, which will take place on September 19 at UCL, London, will be delighted to know that the provisional programme is now online. Yours Truly will present a paper entitled “From Zero to Hero: Building a New Virtual Economy”. Those of you Read more…
Yes, I know I am coming across as a curmudgeonly harbinger of doom, but I’ve just read an excellent article on Wired on actual traffic numbers for Second Life. To quote from the article: “Once you put in several hours flailing around learning how to function in Second Life, there Read more…
It has been a mixed week for iTunes. Earlier this week it was reported that the site has hit 3 billion downloads, and it is now the 3rd largest music retailer in the United States, ahead of the likes of Amazon. But now the BBC reports on a suit initiated Read more…
Meet Flo and Lucky, two dogs hounding out piracy from Malaysia’s borders. These two black Labradors are part of Operation Double Trouble (now, there’s a name destined for film fame). This operation is funded by the Motion Picture Association, which invested $17,000 USD to have the dogs trained in Northern Read more…
(via net.wars) The official Second Life blog has announced that it will ban gambling from the popular virtual world. The new policy bans all games of chance through random-number generators that provide a payout in Linden dollars or any real life currency. This includes all sorts of casino games (such Read more…
It seems to be social network week here at TechnoLlama. There have been some interesting developments in the ongoing case ConnectU v Facebook (not to be confused with Facebook v ConnectU). ConnectU is yet another social networking site from three Harvard graduates, brothers Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, and Divya Narendra. Read more…
The idea that the Internet is filled with sexual predators has received a boost as MySpace has admitted to having found and removed 29,000 registered sex offenders on its site. The admission comes amongst attempts by North Carolina’s Attorney General to change the law so that social networking sites require Read more…