open...

I wrote last week about a curious article in the Guardian calling for “caution” on open source. And now we have another odd piece: The sad t...

Google's Summer of Code has been running for a few years now, and is an established and important fixture for the free software world: S...

One of the central arguments I and others make is that piracy is actually *good* for media producers in all sorts of ways (there lots of lin...

It's nearly summertime. How do I know? Not, of course, by looking at the iffy British weather outside, but because Google's Summer o...

As I've written too many times, software patents make no sense for lots of reasons. Although rather more circumspect than me in its phra...

The Guardian has published a very curious piece today, entitled: “A Call for Caution on Open Source”. It concludes: The UK coalition governm...

In a couple of weeks' time, the World Copyright Summit takes place in Brussels: Creating value in the digital economy The World Copyrig...

It's a measure of how central traditionally dry-as-dust subjects like copyright and patents have become to the modern (digital) world th...

One of the problems with the rapid pace of development in the world of computers is that the latter become out of date and slightly slow com...

One of the most powerful emotional tricks used by the copyright industry against those seeking to reduce the term and reach of copyright to ...

Techdirt had an interesting, if depressing, story the other day: according to reports about some of the latest Wikileaks State Department ...

In the digital world, it seems, there are two certainties: that every year the Business Software Alliance will put out a report that claims ...

You may remember a legacy company from a few years back – used to be very big in old market segments like the desktop, but never managed to ...

There's been a lot of chatter about Apple possibly switching to ARM chips for its laptops and even its desktops. Whether or not that is ...

I recently wrote about the suggestion that a "Great Firewall of Europe" should be created - a fine example of political cluelessn...

One of the things that I and others like to emphasise is that investigating new business models is crucial for the survival of art, artists ...

One key property of printed books is that it is very hard to modify them. Digital books, by contrast, are trivially easy to re-write - prov...

Earlier this week, I reported on my travails with Firefox, and how I teetered on the brink of switching to Google's Chromium. Actually, ...

In the early days of companies based around open source, the questions were: would they make any money? Would they survive? Once it was clea...

I have long been appalled by what we are doing to our oceans. Not content with taking out more fish than is sustainable - a mathematically ...

Long-time readers of this blog will know that I like to point out that software patents shouldn't be allowed because (among other reason...

I remember well the moment when the beta version of Netscape Navigator 0.9 was released in October 1994. It was so clearly superior to the m...

As I noted elsewhere, we now know that the US played a major role in pushing for tougher copyright regimes in Canada, Spain and Sweden. It...

It would be something of an understatement to say that open source software has been successful. This has led to many interesting attempts t...

As anyone who has followed the area for a while learns, the copyright industry has an extraordinary sense of entitlement. It seems to think...