One of the most frequent questions I receive is with regards to the 2010 ruling by the Costa Rican Constitutional Court (Sala IV) declaring access to the Internet as a fundamental right. The Costa Rican online jurisprudence system is considerably clunky and difficult to navigate, and most of the requests Read more…
A science fiction author has sued games company Ubisoft for copyright infringement in its wildly popular game series Assassin’s Creed. The plaintiff, one Mr John L Beiswenger, is asking for either $1,050,000.00 USD for infringement, or up to $5 million USD for wilful infringement of his novel Link. It would Read more…
Creative Commons has released the first draft of the 4.0 version of its licences for public comment, and while there is much to discuss about it, I will be doing it in a later post. The following words are prompted by something that I have noticed arising from the public Read more…
This is the first issue of the 9th volume of SCRIPTed, A Journal of Law and Technology. I can’t believe that I’ve been doing it for 9 years! Thanks to the editing team for another good issue. Issue DOI: 10.2966/scrip.090112 Cover Circuit Board Michelle Andresson From the author: “The circuit Read more…
By now there is growing evidence that software patents do not benefit anyone. Really, software developers, software experts, venture capitalists, and industry insiders, everyone who is actually involved in producing software knows that software patents are a blight to the industry. The only ones who seem to benefit are patent Read more…
The Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe has announced that it will adopt two sets of recommendations that favour human rights approaches for search engines and social media platforms. In Recommendation CM/Rec(2012)3, the Committee has adopted a series of impressive-sounding policies that recognise the growing importance of search Read more…
It’s time for this year’s April’s Fools update. One of my favourite days in the tech calendar, as geeks don their silly hats and allow their imaginations to run loose. Down in New Zealand, TPP Watch were the first off the start blocks with the news that the text for Read more…
For some weeks now I have been seeing an article from the Wall Street Journal popping up practically everywhere in my collective social media timeline, from Twitter to Google Reader, from Facebook to mailing lists, there is growing concern that the Internet is about to suffer such an attack that Read more…
El 19 de enero del 2012 quedará grabado en la corta historia del Internet como el día en que se cerró el popular locker digital Megaupload, con el consecuente arresto de su dueño y de varios socios. Muy probablemente esta fecha se vaya a recordar también como el inicio del Read more…
Last week Yours Truly attended the 43rd ICANN meeting in Costa Rica. The gathering had a heavy agenda with more than 200 sessions, and the discussion was centred towards the issue of the new generic top level domains (gTLDs), which will allow the open registration of domains beyond the current Read more…