open...

It is somewhat ironic that the man behind WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, is not a fan of being in the spotlight; and therefore perhaps poetic ju...

You would have thought that what with local initiatives like the Digital Economy Act and global ones like ACTA, the copyright maximalists wo...

As I wrote recently in my Open... blog, copyright is about making a fair deal: in return for a government-supported, time-limited monopoly, ...

As new technologies arrive, and the cost of hardware components fall, innovative designs become possible Here's one that looks promisin...

Part of the quid pro quo of copyright is that works are supposed to enter the public domain after a limited period of monopoly protection. ...

Not quite on the scale of cancelling the ID cards project, the news that Becta would be shut down was nonetheless further evidence of the co...

Most people in the hacking community are well aware that patents represent one of the most serious threats to free software. But the situati...

One of the most amazing - and heartening - developments in the world of openness recently has been the emergence of the open government move...

Last week I wrote a piece about analogue copying. Specifically, it centred on the 3D scanning and copying of an Aston Martin – because that ...

Apparently, there's an interesting thread over on a site called Quora about the future of Firefox. I say apparently, since I can't s...

One of the reasons that digital music will be free - whether the recording companies want it or not - is basic economics: the marginal cost ...

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about Diaspora, a free software project to create a distributed version of Facebook that gives control back to...

If you haven't seen the shocking but important video " Collateral Murder ", which shows the callous gunning-down of Iraqi citi...

Remember the Digital Economy Act? Yes, I thought you might. It's still there, hanging like a proverbial sword of Damocles over our digit...

I write a lot about copyright, and the right to share stuff. In particular, I think that for digital artefacts – text, music, video etc. - f...

Most people in the free software world know about the famous “LINUX is obsolete” thread that began on the comp.os.minix newsgroups in Januar...

Just over a month ago I wrote about a leaked version of the imminent Digital Agenda for Europe. I noted that the text had some eminently sen...

It's a red letter day here on Computerworld UK, for the open source section just gained an important new strand in the form of Simon Say...

What a sad, sad day for this country: A trainee accountant who posted a message on Twitter threatening to blow an airport "sky high...

Here's a nice move from the Internet Archive: More than doubling the number of books available to print disabled people of all ages, to...

One of the key thinkers in the free software world is Eben Moglen. He's been the legal brains behind the most recent iterations of the G...

After I published Rebel Code in 2001, there was a natural instinct to think about writing another book (a natural masochistic instinct, I s...

Where do open source companies come from? That's not a trivial question, for free software startups can arise in all sorts of ways. You ...

...nor any stop to think. Software patents are an issue that crops up fairly often on this blog, since they represent one of the principal t...

The recent battle over the Digital Economy Bill has focussed renewed attention on the area of copying digital artefacts – music and films, f...