The new minister for the creative industries, James Purnell, has announced that he plans to introduce and extension to copyright terms to match those in the United States. While the article doesn’t mention it, I am guessing that this means an extension to copyright in sound recordings, which is currently Read more…
World Wind is an open source project from NASA that provides satellite images from around the world. Although the resolution is not the best in many places, it is an amazing tool, and users can add their own plug ins. This is what open source is good at, and it Read more…
I go away for a few days and when I come back I find that everything has been turned on its head. IBM and SUN are the bad guys, they are exploiting open source projects and using them as cheap subcontractors of American multinationals, according to Jesus Villasante, the head Read more…
Bram Cohen, the maker of BitTorrent, must be a brave man. He has created a torrent search site in the main page of Bittorrent.com, probably setting himself as the next target for overzealous copyright bozos. The website does not filter materials subject to copyright protection, I just searched for “Episode Read more…
So, Goggle continues its unstoppable take-over of the world (thanks to Mike Collins for the link). Google Print is the service by Google that allows users to search full text books, and also get information about books and authors, and eventually would allow you to read the entire work online. Read more…
Countries around the world are scrambling to regulate new types of technologies and perceived threats. New legislations are being passed to attempt to curb phishing, spamming, denial of service attacks, defacement and all other sorts of dangerous and annoying practices. But with these efforts, one has to ask the question, Read more…
The FBI, U.S. Customs and the Department of Homeland Security (talk about overkill) have raided a BitTorrent network called EliteTorrents, and seized servers and computers, and arrested a group of “copyright thieves”. Now, if somebody goes to the EliteTorrent site, they will find a warning from the FBI. The FBI Read more…
Poor movie producers. Poor George Lucas. BitTorrent threatens the very existence of filmmakers when evil internet pirates download their movie. Yeah, right. Star Wars Episode III has come out (I loved it by the way), and it has made an astounding $158.4M in 4 days! This is now the weekend Read more…
This is a lengthy and amazingly well-informed debate about software patents in Europe from Lessig’s blog. Seeing who the participants are, this should come as no surprise. It is nice to see some of the best proponents of software patents (I refuse to use the euphemism in vogue) argue their Read more…