open...

On the first LP I ever owned was Tchaikovsky's Serenade, Ravel's Bolero and Smetana's "Bartered Bride" Overture. It w...

Last year, there was a lot of handwringing about Firefox's continuing loss of market share. This was only by relatively small amounts, b...

I've been writing about why software patents are bad from every viewpoint for far too long, but I'm heartened by the recent upswing ...

FAST - "Federation Against Software Theft" - is manifestly one of the more risible copyright organisations, since it doesn't e...

As has been noted many times before, the Internet is essentially a global, digital copier. Anything that is placed online is, by definition...

The idea of the wiki is now so pervasive that we rather take it for granted - "oh, let's just use a wiki" is a typical cry the...

As long-suffering readers will know, I've been warning about the growing problem of patent thickets in the field of software for some ti...

One of the unusual characteristics of the computer industry in recent years is the rapid rise of companies to almost complete market dominan...

You may have noticed a bit of a trend recently. Groups of hackers are getting hold of stuff that has hitherto been kept locked up, and makin...

As I've noted before, the UK government is now arguably the leader when it comes to open data. Of course, that's not really the poin...

There's a column doing the rounds at the moment that is generating some interest. It comes from the King of the Patent Trolls, Nathan ...

Here's an interesting situation at the online academic repository JSTOR: Last fall and winter, JSTOR experienced a significant misuse of...

Here's an interesting situation at the online academic repository JSTOR: Last fall and winter, JSTOR experienced a significant misuse of...

Android is under serious threat. Not so much commercially, where it continues to trounce its rivals and take an ever-larger market share aro...

Well, it seems to be Open Data week here on Computerworld UK. After my report on the Open Knowledge Conference in Berlin, one of whose princ...

Yesterday I mentioned Nigel Shadbolt, who has played a leading role in the opening up of government data in the UK. By chance, I've just...

The Open Knowledge Foundation (OKF) was launched just over seven years ago: May 24th 2004: The Open Knowledge Foundation was launched today ...

HTML began life as a clever hack of a pre-existing approach. As Tim Berners-Lee explains in his book, “Weaving the Web”: Since I knew it wou...

For some reason, I seem to be giving talks all over the place this month. I've already written about the one that I presented at the Eur...

I've noted before that we are witnessing a classic patent thicket in the realm of smartphones, with everyone and his or her dog suing ev...

One of the most fascinating aspects of open source is how its key ideas are being applied elsewhere. Obvious examples include open content -...

Xiph.org has an interesting name and the following forthright self-description: Xiph.Org is a collection of open source, multimedia-related ...

The key hack that made free software possible was a legal one: using copyright to keep software free. It did that by demanding a quid pro qu...

There's considerable excitement about an announcement from the British Library and Google detailing a wonderful gift to the world: The ...

You wouldn't expect much else from a meeting organised by WIPO, but this is pretty rich even for them: Copyright is necessary to allow ...