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As Techdirt reported in 2010, the passage of the Digital Economy Act was one of the most disgraceful travesties of the UK parliamentary ...

We take antibiotics and their ability to kill practically all bacteria for granted. But scientists are increasingly warning that we may ...

Techdirt has always been sceptical about Nathan Myhrvold's business plan for Intellectual Ventures (IV) -- build up a huge portfolio o...

One of the earliest proposals for mass surveillance was the Panopticon:  On Techdirt .

As I wrote yesterday, one of the most pressing problems the open source community faces in the near future is the Unitary Patent proposal...

Mike recently reminded us that for some people, bizarrely, stopping "piracy" is more important than making money. Here's an...

Marielle Gallo is probably best known for the Gallo Report, which Techdirt described back in 2010 as a "similarly draconian intellec...

One of the the reasons why legislation like SOPA and treaties like ACTA are so dangerous is that their loose definitions allow measures i...

Something seems to be going on in the European Union. Over the next few weeks a range of really important debates and votes are taking p...

The day before the EU's International Trade committee (INTA) recommended that the European Parliament should reject ACTA, the EU comm...

There's a fairly constant pattern in the world of copyright enforcement. The media companies claim that piracy is "destroying...

Last year I wrote about the OpenCorporates project, which describes itself as follows: On Open Enterprise blog .

Once more, there's good news on the ACTA front. Today, the important European Parliament committee responsible for handling internatio...

Another major milestone has been achieved in the push to get ACTA rejected by the EU: a fifth parliamentary committee has recommended that...

The computing revolution is not the only one driven by constant scaling of technologies: the field of genomics -- the study of DNA sequen...

On the not-very-scientific basis of several calls to MEP s yesterday, the impression I get is that the right-of-centre ECR group on the INT...

Until recently there has been an unchallenged assumption that the more copyright, the better. Although people have begun to realize that...

A few months ago we wrote about a really bad idea that was being floated in Germany: making companies like Google pay for the use of new...

When the history of modern Brazil comes to be written, a special place will be reserved for the soybean, the powerful farmers that grow i...

So, we arrive at the penultimate stage of the battle to stop ACTA in Europe. Before the final plenary vote in the European Parliament in ...

Performing rights societies probably don't have the best reputations here on Techdirt, but just when you think they can't get any ...

Net Neutrality has suddenly become a hot topic again. Partly, that's thanks to some awful ideas about regulating the Internet coming ...

We knew it was coming, and here it is: the Communications Data Bill (. pdf .). First the good news:  On Open Enterprise blog .

As expected, the UK government has published its Draft Communications Bill (pdf) -- better known as the "snooper's charter,...

The Belgian EU Commissioner Karel De Gucht is the driving force behind ACTA, and is apparently really keen to combat crimes like counterf...