An advantage of being abroad is having access to a wide range of TV stations from Latin America. I’ve been watching news reports from the excellent TV Chile about the rise of sexting amongst urban teenagers in emerging economies. While it is difficult to filter out the moral panic prevalent Read more…
Yet another Harry Potter copyright case, but this time, the one being sued is the bespectacled teen wizard. The estate of the deceased children’s author Adrian Jacobs is suing Harry Potter publishers Bloomsbury for copyright infringement in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. In 1987, Jacobs wrote a book Read more…
A number of musicians in the UK have sent a letter to The Times objecting to the use of their music by the British National Party (BNP) in order to raise funds. The problem appears to be that the BNP has legally got hold of several compilation CDs of folk Read more…
For the last weeks I have been glued to my torrents watching the final episodes of Battlestar Galactica (two episodes to go!). In case anyone objects to the downloading, I own the entire series on DVD, save for the unaired ones of course. To me there is no doubt that Read more…
Continuing with the coverage of the interim Digital Britain report, something has been bothering me since I read it, so I went back and browsed through it again until I realised what it was. According to the UK’s chief technology policy-makers, we still seem to be living in the 20th Read more…
An expensive and complicated spoof of the New York Times has hit the streets of Manhattan (with accompanying website). The headlines offer something akin to a liberal wish-list, from the end of the PATRIOT Act, to the passing of a new law called the Safeguards for a New Economy (S.A.N.E.) Read more…
I never knew knitting was so popular. Yours Truly had a strange day yesterday, being quoted in The Times, and interviewed in the Daily Mail. The story has travelled far, it has been reported in Wired, Down Under, and even on the CBBC Newsround site (you know you have made Read more…
It’s week two in the Knitting Wars (or Doctor Who and the Curse of Fatal Copyright). I have been surprised by the level of interest this is generating in the blogosphere, it has been ORGd, EFFd and BoingBoinged, it has also been picked up by the knitting community (I did Read more…
The good people at the Open Rights Group forwarded me an email they received from a Doctor Who fan that goes by the screen name Mazzmatazz, who has allowed me to tell his/her story. But beware, this is a scary tale of copyright abuse that will have you hiding behind Read more…
(Thanks to Jordan Hatcher for the link). A London law firm will be sending a murder of lawyers to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival to train comedians on how to protect their intellectual property. No, this is not a cheap joke. Apparently, joke stealing is a serious problem at the Fringe, Read more…