open...
open source, open genomics, open creation
16 November 2011
Help Fight Against Extrajudicial Suppression of UK Domain Names
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With so many bad things happening in the digital world at the moment- ACTA, TPP, Digital Economy Act, HADOPI, La Ley Sinde etc. - there ...
14 November 2011
Why Barnes & Noble is an Open Source Superstar
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As I've noted many times, one of the biggest threats hanging over open source is patents, because of the way trivial but indispensable...
Want To See Peak Copyright? Here's What To Do
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It's a curious fact that the term of copyright only ever gets longer. Since copyright is a government-backed monopoly, and monopolies...
12 November 2011
Misleading Metaphors That Drive The War On Online Sharing
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Certain terms crop up time and again in the arguments around copyright infringement and file sharing. Words like "theft" and &q...
11 November 2011
How To Become A Scientific Author In Poland: Delete Part Of Someone Else's Article You Think Is Wrong
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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...
10 November 2011
Is Google Losing it?
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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...
09 November 2011
Which Causes More Harm: Copyright Or Patents?
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One of the recurrent themes on Techdirt is the harm caused by intellectual monopolies – copyright and patents – to the economy in particu...
Mozilla's Brendan Eich on the Birth of Firefox
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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 ...
Russian Internet Content Monitoring System To Go Live In December
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Back in April of this year, the Russian government put out a tender : Last week, Roskomnadzor, Russian Federal Service for Telecoms Supe...
07 November 2011
Free As In Freedom: But Whose Freedom?
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It would be hard to overstate the contribution of Richard Stallman to the digital world. The founding of the GNU project and the creatio...
05 November 2011
Phorm Still Looking For A Large-Scale Deployment, Still Finding Investors
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As a search through the Techdirt archives shows, Phorm's behavioral advertising service based on watching your Web activity was bese...
03 November 2011
Academic Publishing Profits Enough To Fund Open Access To Every Research Article In Every Field
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The arguments against open access have moved on from the initial "it'll never work" to the "maybe it'll work, but...
India Wants UN Body To Run The Internet: Would That Be Such A Bad Thing?
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The Internet is under attack – but not, as politicians would have us believe, from hordes of cyber criminals , but from the politicians th...
02 November 2011
Spanish Judge Gets It: Pirated Copies Not Necessarily Lost Sales, May Boost Purchases Later
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One of the favorite assumptions of industries based around copyright used to be that every pirated copy is a lost sale. More recently, th...
01 November 2011
Germany To Put Special Monitoring Software On School Computers To Search For Infringement
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Just under a month ago, the "Chaos Computer Club" (CCC), which styles itself as "the largest European hacker club", had ...
What Exactly Makes A Pop-Up Mall A Pop-Up Mall? On Second Thought, Who Cares?
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One of the pernicious effects of once-obscure legal issues surrounding copyright and patents seeping into everyday life is the belief tha...
31 October 2011
What Microsoft's Patent FUD Reveals About Its R&D
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Microsoft is currently engaging in some incredible rewriting of history. Here's Horacio GutiƩrrez, deputy general counsel at the com...
Why Creative Commons Licenses Help Rather Than Hinder Struggling Artists
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Creative Commons (CC) has been with us for nearly a decade, so you would have thought people might understand it by now. Apparently not, ...
28 October 2011
Will Anti-Free Trade Protectionist Agreements Be Bad For US Citizens Too?
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As we've noted , the US has been using multilateral and bilateral negotiations conducted in secret as a way to craft some very one-si...
Mozilla's Brendan Eich on JavaScript - and Microsoft Buying Netscape
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It seems so long ago now, but for those of us lucky enough (and old enough) to have been there, the launch of Netscape's 0.9 version o...
27 October 2011
Leading French Presidential Candidate Would Repeal HADOPI But Keep Net Surveillance
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As a recent Techdirt post noted, France's HADOPI "three strikes" policy has effectively criminalized vast swathes of that c...
Open Source, Open Science, Open Source Science
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One of the key inspirations for the free software movement was the scientific tradition of sharing information and building on the work of...
Just Because Something's Fake Doesn't Mean It Can't Be Innovative
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The term "shanzhai" literally means a fortified mountain village, and originally meant those places in China that were outside g...
25 October 2011
EU Politician Wants Internet Surveillance Built Into Every Operating System
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"Think of the children" has become the rallying cry of politicians around the world trying to push for ever-increasing Internet ...
Calling the Anti-Net Neutrality Bluff
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One of the key arguments used by companies who want to see the end of net neutrality is that with growing use of high-bandwidth services l...
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