open...

Mark Shuttleworth is probably best known for three things. Selling the certificate authority Thawte Consulting to VeriSign for about $5...

One of the many hopeful signs that the Hargreaves team knew what they were talking about was the recognition that patent thickets were an ...

The European Patent Organization (EPO) is a strange entity. Despite its name, it has nothing to do with the European Union. Instead, it ...

The ACTA saga has been grinding on for years now, distinguished by a wilful lack of transparency that is a clear sign that you and I are ...

One of the most striking - and disturbing - trends of recent years has been the assumption by the copyright industries that protecting th...

Earlier this week Techdirt reported on the surprisingly forthright statements of Neelie Kroes concerning the failure of the copyright syst...

Last year, Techdirt reported on the approval by the European Parliament of the Gallo Report, which calls for harsher enforcement of int...

Sometimes you just have to shake your head over patent law. Here's a practice from the UK that has been going on since 1876, and invo...

In the 2005 "Grokster" decision, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that file sharing networks could be held liable for copyr...

One of the recommendations made by the Hargreaves Review in the UK was that a text- and data-mining exception to copyright should be cre...

Neelie Kroes is that rare thing: a politician who actually seems to understand digital technologies. Before she became the European Comm...

Last week I was invited to talk at the South Tyrol Free Software Conference which took place in northern Italy, in the city of Bolzano (d...

Increasingly, publishers are joining the music and film industries in bemoaning the effects of piracy on the sales of digital products – a...

There is a general belief that science proceeds by smooth cycles of discovery and sharing – that scientists formulate theories, investigat...

With so many bad things happening in the digital world at the moment- ACTA, TPP, Digital Economy Act, HADOPI, La Ley Sinde etc. - there ...

As I've noted many times, one of the biggest threats hanging over open source is patents, because of the way trivial but indispensable...

It's a curious fact that the term of copyright only ever gets longer. Since copyright is a government-backed monopoly, and monopolies...

Certain terms crop up time and again in the arguments around copyright infringement and file sharing. Words like "theft" and ...

Copyrightgirl pointed us to a bizarre judgement from the Polish Supreme Court last year, which found that you can become co-author of a s...

Google matters for open source. First and foremost, it is an example of a multi-billion dollar global company that simply would not be po...

One of the recurrent themes on Techdirt is the harm caused by intellectual monopolies – copyright and patents – to the economy in particu...

A couple of weeks ago I posted the first part of an interview with Brendan Eich, who is Mozilla's CTO. That covered the early years ...

Back in April of this year, the Russian government put out a tender : Last week, Roskomnadzor, Russian Federal Service for Telecoms Supe...

It would be hard to overstate the contribution of Richard Stallman to the digital world. The founding of the GNU project and the creatio...

As a search through the Techdirt archives shows, Phorm's behavioral advertising service based on watching your Web activity was bese...