I have been involved in an argument on a mailing list with regards to the legal nature of copyleft licences such as the GPL. This is a bit of a pet peeve of mine (and talking to other lawyers, it seems like I’m not alone in this). This is the Read more…
Professor Bernt Hugenholtz has distributed a translation of the Dutch CC case, very useful for those of us who have never been to the Netherlands (unless you count transfers at Schiphol Airport). The relevant text reads: “All four photos that were taken from www.flickr.com were made by Curry and posted Read more…
(Via Terra Nova). There has been a lot of talk in online gaming circles about the gold farming phenomenon. Gold farming is the use of “virtual sweatshops” in which gamers from developing countries spend hours earning in-game currency, rare items or virtual property in order to sell it in exchange Read more…
Last weeks there were reports that police in Belgium had shut down an EDonkey server called Razorback. This server did not hold actual infringing material, it held contact data of people using the EDonkey network. As the P2P weblog suggests, this has no bearing whatsoever on the service, as new Read more…
The first case (as far as I’m aware) enforcing a Creative Commons licence has come out in the Netherlands. The case involves famous podcaster Adam Curry, who had a number of pictures in Flickr under an Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike licence. Some of the pictures were taken by Weekend, a Dutch tabloid, Read more…
Two unrelated stories indicate that there may be a large shift in the way in which we consume media, which could have implications for policy (if only policy was informed by empirical evidence). The first is that 2005 saw a drop in movie attendance, despite being a year that saw Read more…
A new chain email has been making the rounds recently, it is a message that claims that MSN is about to charge for their email service, and links to a story on the BBC website. The problem is that the story is five years old, and dates from an outdated Read more…
The Software Freedom Law Centre (SFLC) has produced its first white paper, which deals with the potential threat to developers who distributes software under the GPL. The alleged threat comes from a securities legislation called the Sarbanes-Oxley Act 2002, which establishes criminal sanctions to corporate board members who fail to Read more…
Google is set to roll out another service for its users that takes advantage of its seemingly unlimited storage and processing power. GDrive is a service that will allow users to store their files online in Google’s servers, where they can access them from anywhere on the Internet. The convenience Read more…
Napster has come out criticising Microsoft Media Player for their inability to catch up with leader iTunes in the music download market. iTunes has 80% market share despite Napster’s instant name recognition. Apparently, Napster has been plagued with problems with Microsoft Media’s DRM. It is an axiom of digital rights Read more…