A coalition of individuals and organisations from the US has released a very interesting initiative, the Declaration of Internet Freedom: We stand for a free and open Internet. We support transparent and participatory processes for making Internet policy and the establishment of five basic principles: Expression: Don’t censor the Internet. Read more…
I know that I am beginning to sound like a scratched record (for younger readers, I refer to this piece of old technology), but when I read headlines like BoingBong’s Last push to kill ACTA: act now or the Internet gets it, I get upset. And angry. Angry and upset. Read more…
When the history of the Internet is written, June 30 2012 may be remembered as The Day The Cloud Failed. An important Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) data centre in Virginia was affected by a powerful storm which knocked out its power (prompting variations of the headline “Real clouds brought Read more…
IT lawyers are always looking for the Next Big Legal Thing (and they also like grandiose generalizations, but I digress). From ebooks to iPods, you can always find an article describing the latest gadget in legal terms. For people involved in this area of law, it is always important to Read more…
Today the Joint Standing Committee on Treaties of the Australian House of Representatives has released a report on the implementation of the Anti-counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA). The report is supposed to look at ACTA and make recommendations to the government about its implementation. I was positively impressed with the document Read more…
We have moved a long way from the days in which any talk of IP at an international level meant calls for harsher protection to foster direct investment. The UN Conference on Trade and Sustainable Development (UNCTAD) has published a report entitled Structural Transformation and Sustainable Development in Africa, and it Read more…
I’ve been reading and watching with interest a UK Channel 4 report on the popular virtual world Habbo Hotel. For those unfamiliar with the story, Channel 4 News got a female producer to pose as an 11-year old girl for 2 months, who complains that she was subjected to extreme Read more…
After reading several tweets about it, I finally got round to reading an article by Dr Mira T Sundara Rajan entitled “Getting Paid is a Moral Right, too! Why Creative Commons Gets it Wrong” in the 1709 Copyright Blog. If I had not read the author before (and enjoyed her Read more…
[blackbirdpie url=”https://twitter.com/joe_hill/status/212902087481241601″] I have just read one of the most interesting tweets in a while, and I suspect that the author’s intention was different from the actual result. In case you cannot read the code above, it is a comment from Joe Hill to Neil Gaiman complaining about how geeks Read more…
Yesterday I wrote about the anti-ACTA protests taking place across Europe, which prompted a very interesting tweet discussion with Geraldine Juarez (Storify in Spanish here). The gist of the argument is that Geraldine disagrees that there is no reason to protest, while my argument continues to be that people have Read more…