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It's not often that trade agreements make it to the front page of the newspapers, but that's what happened on New Year's Day:...

As we reported a few months back, Keir Starmer, the UK's Director of Public Prosecutions, made the remarkable suggestion that "...

Although there has been some sniping about the quality of Wikipedia's entries from time to time, we generally take it for granted t...

One of the most depressing developments in recent years has been the gradual adoption of legal approaches to tackling copyright infringem...

If ACTA was the biggest global story of 2012, more locally there's no doubt that the UK government's consultation on open standa...

One of the striking -- and depressing -- features of the Internet today is the almost universal desire of governments around the world to...

Despite increasing competition around the world, China remains the leader when it comes to finding ways to censor the online world. A fe...

Techdirt has been covering the UK's long-running saga of attempted copyright reform for some years. Most recently, we wondered whet...

Back in April 2011, we wrote about the Czech Constitutional Court ruling that the country's data retention plans were illegal . As w...

Alongside globe-spanning treaties like ACTA and TPP, there are more subtle efforts to limit the power of national governments, through th...

As Techdirt readers well know, one of the problems with measures brought in for "exceptional situations" -- be it fighting terr...

As readers of this blog well know, copyright reform has been desperately needed in this country for many years. The earlier Gowers Revi...

Last week I wrote a potted history of the defeat of ACTA in the last year. I mentioned that in the original talk, whose slides I embed...

Back in 2010, Techdirt reported on Turkey's habit of blocking Google over certain holdings on its various sites. Mostly these were Y...

Rather out of the blue, Business Secretary Vince Cable has made a series of proposals affecting patents, copyright and trade marks: On ...

The European Commission has announced that it is withdrawing its referral of ACTA to the European Court of Justice. If you had forgotte...

A recent issue of The New Yorker had a fine essay by Mike Spies about the joys of discovering and listening to music . But its overall to...

This year's winner of the Nobel prize in literature , the Chinese writer Mo Yan, was a controversial choice. Some saw him as too clos...

A little while back we wrote about Nathan Myhrvold's sniffy comment that if you're not doing anything to help people suffering f...

The Mayor of London, Boris Johnson , is something of an institution in the UK, famous for his blond mop of hair and outrageous opinions....

Recently, we noted that copyright levies in Europe are looking more and more anachronistic for the high-tech world. It seems that Nigeri...

Mike wrote how both Vint Cerf and Sir Tim Berners-Lee were concerned about the outcome of the WCIT talks currently taking place in Dubai...

As Techdirt has reported over the last year, the Indian government is becoming increasingly keen on using cheaper, generic versions of i...

As I mentioned back in October, the Joint Parliamentary Committee that has been considering the Draft Communications Data Bill, aka Sno...

Today, the European Parliament votes on the Unitary Patent. As I explained yesterday, what is being presented is something of a botch, ...