It’s mid-September, and that means Gikii! The geeks packed their gadgets and flew, walked, bicycled, sailed and slithered into Amsterdam for this year’s collection of law and geeky stuff. Gikii is earning a well-deserved reputation as one of the most fun-yet-thought-provoking conferences in the IP and IT circuit thanks to Read more…
To quickly answer my own question, no. But sometimes I really wonder about the sanity of current copyright legislation. I enjoy PostSecret, there is something in the anonymous confession of sins that appeals to the lapsed Catholic side of my personality. I have often wondered about the legal issues surrounding Read more…
I have been spending perhaps too much time recently engaged in what one could call the war between old media and the Internet. As an avid cybernaut and proud card-carrying member of the social media revolution, I am often puzzled by the level of vitriol directed against the blogosphere, Twitter, Read more…
So, a teenager intern at Morgan Stanley wrote a report categorically stating that teens don’t do Twitter, and you could hear thousands of social media hype-meisters screaming bloody murder. It’s almost as if a million Twitter feeds cried out in pain at once. Being the cynical person that I am, Read more…
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…