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As Mike noted a couple of days ago, international trade agreements often have the effect of constraining the power of national legislat...

Yesterday I mentioned the important consultation on IPRED, how it was closing soon, and what a good idea it would be if you applied to ...

Although the European Union finally approved the continent-wide Unitary Patent in December 2012, after decades of discussions, the story...

Today is Document Freedom Day : It is a day for celebrating and raising awareness of Open Standards and formats which takes place on ...

IPRED is not that well known, even among the Net-savvy. And yet it's one of the most important EU directives that affects the onlin...

Hackers and hacking have been much in the news recently - for all the wrong reasons, unfortunately. The most dramatic case, perhaps, was...

Techdirt has been following the rapid rise and current problems of the various Pirate Parties in Europe for some time. Both their su...

As you may have heard, there's been an election in Rome recently. These kind of events tend to bring out the crowds, and NBC had t...

It would be something of an understatement to say that people have strong opinions about patents. But as Techdirt has reported, there...

Techdirt has been pointing out for years that more patents is not the same thing as more innovation, even though many around the world w...

Although the use of open source by the UK government has an unhappy history (and one that certainly isn't finished), one ray of hope ...

Regular readers of this column will know that I am not overly enamoured of the European Patent Office, since it has effectively introduc...

Librarians can play an important role in any society that depends increasingly on access to information to function. One of their jobs ...

In 2001, I published a history of free software, called "Rebel Code: Inside Linux and the Open Source Revolution." One of the...

Two years ago, Techdirt wrote about the major report "Media Piracy in Emerging Economies", which explored how media and softwar...

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about how the irony-immune IT department of the European Parliament was censoring emails complaining abou...

One of the slogans of the copyright industries is that you can't make money from giving things away. Unfortunately for them, example...

Last week we wrote about the important news that Mexico is asking to join what began as a bilateral trade agreement between the US and ...

One of the initiatives gaining momentum around the world is open data -- the idea that, for example, non-personal data affecting the pub...

Back in January, I wrote about what I called the "Trans-Atlantic Partnership Agreement", by analogy with the Trans-Pacific Part...

The UK is famous for its tabloid newspapers and their particular brand of journalism. Here's a fine example from the Daily Express, ...

Over the last few years, Techdirt has been reporting on a steady stream of victories for open access. Along the way publishers have tri...

If you were online late last night - and especially if you were on Twitter - you may have noted an enormous wave of pain and anger sweepi...

Things are moving fast with the proposed US-EU transatlantic free trade agreement (TAFTA). It was only a few weeks ago that the formal ...

Most sane human beings have stopped trying to keep up with the interwined legal actions arising out of the smartphone patent wars betwe...