We tackle the big issues here in Technollama. Do monkeys and cats own copyright? Will the UK government ban Whatsapp? Can you copyright a tweet? Can you knit a Dalek? The latest copyright controversy has arisen in the UK as a result of a written question posed to the Culture Read more…
I admit that I am currently obsessed with non-human copyright. First monkey selfies, then I am writing an article on artificial intelligence and copyright. Now enter Manny, a cat that loves taking selfies with a GoPro camera. According to one site: “The gray kitty is fascinated by his human’s GoPro cameras. Read more…
At 7 seconds, this happy llama is thankfully not infringing.* How much do you need to reproduce a video or broadcast in order to infringe copyright? In the age of Vine, Periscope and animated gifs, this question has become more important than ever. We now may have a partial answer Read more…
Last week I attended an event at the University of Sussex (organised by Charles Meredith and other students) discussing the potential legal implications of Brexit, and I was tasked with looking at some of the aspects that may affect Intellectual Property and Information Technology. Here are a few of my Read more…
The European Commission has finally published the text of the programme called Privacy Shield, the name of the agreement reached with the United States to safeguard the export of personal data from European citizens across the Atlantic. This is in response to the CJEU case of Maximiliam Schrems v Data Read more…
The history of Internet Law is littered with bad legislation and legislative proposals. From the infamous SOPA and PIPA, to the Draft Investigatory Powers Bill, there is no shortage of badly-conceived legislation dealing with the Internet. Sometimes the bad law is the result of powerful lobbying, sometimes it is caused Read more…
John Perry Barlow’s A Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace was published 20 years ago. While it is something that tends to concern mostly Internet regulation theorists, it is surprising just how relevant it continues to be. The text usually deserves a mention in some of the most cited works on Read more…
The European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) has revisited the issue of liability for Internet intermediaries in the case of Magyar Tartalomszolgáltatók Egyesülete and Index.Hu v Hungary. This is the second time in less than a year that the ECHR deals with this issue, as it had already produced a Read more…
A judge in California has dismissed a copyright case brought by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), where the animal rights organisation claimed that it represented the monkey that took the famous selfie depicted above. The case is that of Naruto v Slater, where PETA sued British photographer Read more…
In his great documentary The Century of the Self, Adam Curtis explores topics such as consumerism and social control of the masses, but at its heart it is an exploration of collectivism and individualism. It describes the second half of the 20th century as struggle between collective ideals, and the Read more…