Meet Popcorn Time, the Napster for the streaming age. This is the Netflix of unlicensed P2P file-sharing sites, bringing HD movies to the masses for free, at the click of a button, no waiting required. The service is even entirely cross-platform, with versions for Linux, Windows and Mac, and it Read more…
Bitcoin has continued to rise in price, if not in adoption. Other than small services here and there, commerce is justifiably sceptical about using it as a means of exchange. Where BTC has been generating news is in its price, and there it has shown that some people will invest Read more…
The Court of Justice of the European Union has reached a decision in the latest case dealing with questions about whether linking to content amounts to a communication to the public, and therefore unauthorised linking could be pursued as copyright infringement. The case is Svensson and Others v Retriever Sverige Read more…
This post is working under the assumption that the type of state surveillance that has been uncovered by Edward Snowden’s leaks is an abuse of power, and should be opposed by any right-thinking person. While I am willing to consider national security arguments from time to time, it seems to Read more…
Here is an interesting development in privacy law. The High Court of England and Wales has confirmed the existence of a new Tort, the tort of misuse of private information. In the case of Vidal-Hall & Ors v Google Inc [2014] EWHC 13 (QB), a group of users have sued Read more…
My friend and colleague Renata Avila has asked an interesting question on Twitter: “If the NSA is storing, reproducing – copying my data and works, are they violating Copyright Law?” I do not think that it has been asked before, so I am trying to tackle it today. This is Read more…
[Text of a presentation I gave before a screening of The Lives of Others at Wolfson College, Oxford]. Although I am nowadays more interested in IP issues, I started my academic life as a privacy lawyer. My first publications dealt with something called Habeas Data, an obscure constitutional right that Read more…
All of this week blogs and websites around the globe have been celebrating Copyright Week, an initiative by the EFF to celebrate two years of the defeat of SOPA/PIPA. Copyright Week consists of a series of articles analysing the future of copyright reform, showcased in a number of sites and Read more…
In a world where online security has become an important element of our lives, it is becoming more difficult to trust information, even if they present a trust and/or security seals. A new report by the EU’s cyber security agency ENISA analyses the conditions under which online security and privacy Read more…
Imagine a world where there is a secret society with the capacity of listening into all sort of private communications all the time. This organisation has managed to build backdoors into hardware that allows them to check on sensitive data throughout the world seemingly at the click of a button. Read more…