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open source, open genomics, open creation
08 December 2011
Making AIDS Drugs Affordable With Prizes, Not Patents
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Of all the dysfunctional parts of the patent system, drug patents are arguably the worst, since the exorbitant prices that patent monopoli...
Who Owns The Data Collected About You From Devices Inside Your Body?
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People have started to wake up to the fact that companies like Google and Facebook hold huge quantities of data about their users. That r...
07 December 2011
Getting It: In A World Of Digital Abundance, Sell The Scarcities
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A recurrent refrain from the copyright industries is that you can't make money from digital goods if they are freely available online....
Open Source Total Cost of Ownership 2.0
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Back in 2006, I wrote a piece for LXer called " A Brief History of Microsoft FUD ". This ran through successive attempts by Micr...
06 December 2011
More Collateral Damage From SOPA: People With Print Disabilities And Human Rights Groups
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As people wake up to the full horror of what SOPA would do to the Internet and its users, an increasing number of organizations with very ...
Flood of EU Software Patents on the Way?
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The idea of bringing in a unitary EU patent system has been rolling around Brussels so long most people have assumed it will never happen....
Self-Regulation: Should Online Companies Police The Internet?
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For anyone in Belgium on Wednesday, here's an afternoon event open to all that might be of interest: " 'Self'-regulation: ...
03 December 2011
Royal Society Claims 1671 Copyright On Newton Letter (Copyright Law Born 29 Years Later)
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The Royal Society calls itself "a Fellowship of the world's most eminent scientists and... the oldest scientific academy in con...
The Pirate Party Effect: German Greens Scramble To Draw Up Digital Policies To Hold On To Voters
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The founding of the Pirate Party in Sweden in 2006 was regarded by many as a joke. After all, the argument went, who would want to be as...
02 December 2011
Why We Don't Need To 'Think Of The Artists': They're Doing Fine
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Just as politicians routinely invite us to " think of the children " when they want to push through some new liberty-reducing la...
01 December 2011
More UK Open Data Moves - and Why That Makes Sense
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In striking contrast with its disappointing performance in terms of supporting open source, the UK government continues to take huge strid...
29 November 2011
Ubuntu's Self-Appointed Benevolent Dictator For Life: 'Whole Patent System Is A Sham'
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Mark Shuttleworth is probably best known for three things. Selling the certificate authority Thawte Consulting to VeriSign for about $5...
Getting Lost in the Patent Thicket Thicket
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One of the many hopeful signs that the Hargreaves team knew what they were talking about was the recognition that patent thickets were an ...
28 November 2011
Coming To Plates In Europe: Patented Vegetables, Produced By Conventional Breeding
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The European Patent Organization (EPO) is a strange entity. Despite its name, it has nothing to do with the European Union. Instead, it ...
Patent Scandal of Laws Made Behind Closed Doors
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The ACTA saga has been grinding on for years now, distinguished by a wilful lack of transparency that is a clear sign that you and I are ...
24 November 2011
SABAM: A Turning Point in EU Internet Law?
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One of the most striking - and disturbing - trends of recent years has been the assumption by the copyright industries that protecting th...
Sarkozy Worried About The Internet 'Stealing Audience Share' From 'Regulated' TV Services
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Earlier this week Techdirt reported on the surprisingly forthright statements of Neelie Kroes concerning the failure of the copyright syst...
23 November 2011
New EU Parliamentary Forum To Push For Even More Draconian Copyright Laws And Enforcement
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Last year, Techdirt reported on the approval by the European Parliament of the Gallo Report, which calls for harsher enforcement of int...
A Small Victory For Patent Common Sense: Earth Closet Orders Are No More
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Sometimes you just have to shake your head over patent law. Here's a practice from the UK that has been going on since 1876, and invo...
22 November 2011
Why The Supreme Court's 'Grokster' Decision Led To More, Not Less, P2P Filesharing
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In the 2005 "Grokster" decision, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that file sharing networks could be held liable for copyr...
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UK Publishers Moan About Content Mining's Possible Problems; Dismiss Other Countries' Actual Experience
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One of the recommendations made by the Hargreaves Review in the UK was that a text- and data-mining exception to copyright should be cre...
21 November 2011
EU Commissioner Kroes: Copyright Is 'A Tool To Punish And Withhold'; New Business Models, Not More Enforcement Needed
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Neelie Kroes is that rare thing: a politician who actually seems to understand digital technologies. Before she became the European Comm...
Of Open Data Startups and Open Businesses
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Last week I was invited to talk at the South Tyrol Free Software Conference which took place in northern Italy, in the city of Bolzano (d...
19 November 2011
E-Publishing The Chinese Way: Very Fast And Very Cheap
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Increasingly, publishers are joining the music and film industries in bemoaning the effects of piracy on the sales of digital products – a...
Learning From Beethoven: Speeding Up The Exchange Of Scientific Knowledge
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There is a general belief that science proceeds by smooth cycles of discovery and sharing – that scientists formulate theories, investigat...
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