open...

I had been vaguely aware that the proposed cull of badgers in the UK was controversial, but had not fully realised that the evidence agains...

Back in July, I wrote about a consultation on net neutrality from the EU, entitled On-line public consultation on "specific aspect...

As Techdirt stories regularly report, governments around the world, including those in the West, are greatly increasing their surveillanc...

In the wake of the Twitter joke trial fiasco, which saw Paul Chambers dragged through the courts for two years before being acquitted , t...

Back in August, I urged people to respond to the consultation on the truly dreadful Draft Communications Bill, aka Snooper's Charte...

As we know, lock-in is one of the biggest obstacles to moving from closed, proprietary formats, to open ones. But so far as I know, no o...

One of the reasons the copyright lobby has been able to get so far with Net-hostile legislation like SOPA/PIPA and treaties like ACTA and...

Transparency is worth having for itself, since governments often tend to behave a little better when they know that someone is watching. ...

Linux went from being a cool personal hack in a bedroom to software that would eventually change world just over 21 years ago when Linus ...

Last week Tim Cushing wrote about the hugely-worrying new "cybercrime" law passed in the Philippines that seemed likely to cr...

In the last year I've written what some might have felt were rather too many thousand words about ACTA. But I'd argue that it wa...

This is getting silly. Over the last year I've been warning about problems with the EU' s plan to bring in a Unitary Patent syste...

A recurrent theme here on Techdirt is the persistent lack of transparency during the drafting of new laws or the negotiation of new trea...

If you think copyright is bad in regions like the US or Europe, this post from Intellectual Property Watch points out that things could be...

It's become something of a cliché that anyone with a mobile phone is carrying a tracking device that provides detailed information ab...

Techdirt has been following the important story of the kidney and liver cancer drug marketed under the name Nexavar since March , when In...

As Techdirt has reported, after a year of amazing successes, the German Pirate Party is going through something of a bad patch at the m...

An increasing number of Open Enterprise posts are about moves to open up government in myriad ways. That's not really surprising, si...

There's plenty of breathless writing about the imminent 3D-printing revolution, but realistically, what is it likely to mean for most...

Techdirt has been following open textbooks for some time now, and 2012 looks to be a bumper year for them. Here, for example, is a major...

The European Union's governmental machine is a complicated beast, with its intertwining of supra-national, national and party-politic...

As I've noted a couple of times , one of the key issues that has yet to be resolved concerning the proposed EU Unitary Patent syste...

One of the most heartening developments recently has been Africa's current embrace of computer technology . That includes open source...

Levies on blank storage media are a relic of older times when copying was a new possibility for copyright works. You no longer needed an...

Last week, I mentioned that I attended the Open Forum Europe 2012 conference. Preceeding it was the first meeting of the Open Forum Ac...