I promise that this is the last software patent article for a while. The Guardian has a pretty decent article describing the state of affairs with the approval of the directive-that-shall-not-be-named. It is quite interesting to see that there is something happening that produces enough interest to allow this issue Read more…
This is an exercise to test the patent described in the previous article (and infringe a silly American patent in the process). This is the full list of my purchases for the last two months with eBay and Amazon: The Success of Open Source Hack//Sign complete series Nausicaa of the Read more…
Take a look at Amazon’s US patent 6865546. This is a patent for a system that determines a buyer’s age according to previous buying records. The patent states that: One embodiment of the present invention is a system and method of determining the age of an item recipient, such as Read more…
Today, thousands of activists and open source developers in Europe must be shouting “Damn you all to hell”. The European Council has decided to adopt the proposed text of the software patents directive (pardon me, the Computer Implemented Inventions Directive). The procedure seems to have been dodgy to say the Read more…
This is an old article, but I have just read it and found it quite thought-provoking. The article first discusses the economics of mainstream entertainment, which offers us low-quality works from the because of their proven economic return. Those with different tastes must look further and deeper to satisfy their Read more…
Yahoo is celebrating its 10th birthday by launching an excellent little flash applet that celebrates the 100 most important net moments of the last decade. Yes, the visual net is now 10 years old, so we have a lot to reminisce about. There is Napster, ICANN, Jerry Garcia, Howard Dean’s Read more…
There is an interesting argument between the BBC’s Bill Thompson and Lessig. Thompson recently wrote a thoughtful paper about the great copyright debate, which amongst other things, criticised the lack of thought that Creative Commons has had regarding moral rights. Lessig has replied that moral rights are really important, but Read more…
Lawrence Rosen cannot be accused of being an outspoken attacker of open source. He is one of the main advisors for the OSI, and has written a very good book on open source licences. However, he has recently expressed some lingering concerns about this licensing scheme. He describes some problems Read more…
The papers from the ground-breaking conference State of Play are now online. This conference explores the interaction between the law and computer games. Readers may be tempted to think that this is just another excuse from academics to go to a city, have a conference and ingest large quantities of Read more…
As part of an agreement with the good people at IPKat, we are going to include some pictures of llamas. I hope to make this llama famous, it was a particularly photogenic one: