Florian Müller, the founder of the NoSoftwarePatents.com campaign, has published his long-awaited testimonial of his role in the amazing story of the software patent war in Europe. The book is entitled “No Lobbyists As Such – The War over Software Patents in the European Union”, and it is now available Read more…
I must admit that I have not been following the Net Neutrality campaign, mostly because I felt that it seemed like an American phenomenon, and also because I cannot explain it any better than a ninja. The Communications Opportunity, Promotion and Enhancement Act (Cope Act) is a wide-ranging piece of Read more…
Pirate Bay, the Swedish-based bittorrent search engine, is back online after the raid this week to their servers, where Swedish police confiscated some index files. Pirate Bay is a tricky one for authorities because there are no copies of any shared files, the system apparently only contains links to tracker Read more…
Some interesting papers from the 2nd day: – Institutional Entrepreneurs and the Bricolage of Intellectual Property DiscoursesAnn Westenholz – Open Source and e-JusticeCuno Tarfusser Unfortunately the papers are not available online, which is rather strange from an “open” conference. Why not release them under Creative Commons? I am participating in Read more…
Some very good papers at the conference, I’ve been enjoying the excellent scholarship on offer, although practically none of it is legal. Interdisciplinary conferences can be tiring and challenging, but you are always open to an entirely different way of thinking. Some papers I’ve particularly enjoyed: – Evolution of Open Read more…
I’m in the beautiful Lake Como in Italy for the Second Open Source Systems conference. Some very interesting papers already, and more to come. I will be highlighting some of the best in the next days.
The BBC has a certain journalistic style where they make everything sound reasonable, and always offer both sides of the story (read their global warming reports). Here they comment on the new report on DRM by the All Party Parliamentary Internet Group (APIG). The report to be released later today, Read more…
This is an excellent online game, but quite addictive. Pierce your foe with well-placed arrows. Another addictive game is Plastic Martians.
Ok, so I am a bit obsessed with SSRN ratings. What does it take to have a succesful paper on SSRN? My most popular paper has only 108 downloads. Now witness Fuck by Christopher Fairman (3203 downloads and counting). Yes, this is a paper about the legal implications of the Read more…
The Venezuelan Parliament is going to start discussing the draft legislation called “Ley de Infogobierno”, which will overhaul e-government and software procurement in the Venezuelan public sector. Although I am often sceptical about Chavez and his Venezuelan project, some aspects of the legislation are rather interesting. Here are some highlights. Read more…