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Microsoft is currently engaging in some incredible rewriting of history. Here's Horacio Gutiérrez, deputy general counsel at the com...

Creative Commons (CC) has been with us for nearly a decade, so you would have thought people might understand it by now. Apparently not, ...

As we've noted , the US has been using multilateral and bilateral negotiations conducted in secret as a way to craft some very one-si...

It seems so long ago now, but for those of us lucky enough (and old enough) to have been there, the launch of Netscape's 0.9 version o...

As a recent Techdirt post noted, France's HADOPI "three strikes" policy has effectively criminalized vast swathes of that c...

One of the key inspirations for the free software movement was the scientific tradition of sharing information and building on the work of...

The term "shanzhai" literally means a fortified mountain village, and originally meant those places in China that were outside g...

"Think of the children" has become the rallying cry of politicians around the world trying to push for ever-increasing Internet ...

One of the key arguments used by companies who want to see the end of net neutrality is that with growing use of high-bandwidth services l...

Last month I wrote about the UK government's "Making Open Data Real" consultation. That's actually just the first par...

Techdirt has reported on a number people accused of murder googling for things like " neck snap break " or " how to commit m...

One of the recurrent recent themes of IT in the UK has been how moves to open source by local and central government have been stymied by ...

The Olympic Games are not just about sporting success, but also legal excess – in particular, taking laws to extremes in order to "pr...

The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) has now been signed by several nations – even if its actual status is by no means clear. ...

Last week we learned the UK government has precisely no evidence to support its plans for stricter copyright enforcement, which include ...

The office suite has occupied a very strange position in the world of open source. As a key software tool used by practically everyone on...

There have been a number of stories on Techdirt recently about governments diminishing the public domain - not just by extending copyrigh...

Last week Techdirt wrote about a draft of a civil rights-based framework for the Internet that is being considered by lawmakers in Brazil...

The launch of Amazon's Kindle Fire at a price well below expectations has naturally focused people's attention on the e-book sid...

A few weeks back, Techdirt posted a story about a European campaign group called "Europe vs. Facebook" , which is trying to find...

The unprecedented public outpouring of grief in the technical community at the death of Steve Jobs seems to go well beyond the fact that ...

One of the striking changes at Microsoft over the last twenty years is how savvy it has become in terms of lobbying and influencing polit...

Somehow you rather expect the head of the WIPO to come out with a statement on the potential benefits of patenting the World Wide Web. Bu...

The Netcraft Web Server Survey , which appears each month, is usually viewed as offering the spectacle of a two-player fight between the ...

A couple of weeks ago, I was talking about the striking success of the Pirate Party in the German local elections. Since then, an opinion...