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open source, open genomics, open creation
13 September 2012
Fighting Software Patents in the Unitary Patent Again
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Back in July, I warned about the imminent threat of software patents sneaking into Europe thanks to horse-trading over the proposed EU U...
Has The German Pirate Party Lost Its Way?
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For the last year, it seemed like the German Pirate Party could do no wrong. In November 2011, it won 9% of the vote in the Berlin parlia...
Does The Idea Of Open Source Planes Really Fly?
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The term "open source" was coined back in February 1998, and initially it applied only to software. But as the power of open, c...
Jimmy Wales Threatens To Stymie UK Snooping Plans By Encrypting Wikipedia Connections
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The draft bill of the UK's " Snooper's Charter ", which would require ISPs to record key information about every email ...
A Question of (Open) Standards
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As long-standing readers will know, alongside ACTA, the other main theme of this blog over the last year or so has been the battle for the ...
Evidence That UK Needs Mandatory Porn Filters? Informal Survey Done At One School
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In the UK there is currently a campaign and associated petition from the organization "Safety Net: Protecting Innocence Online",...
New Research Sets The Stage For Next Round Of Cat-And-Mouse Between BitTorrent Users & Snoopers
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The BitTorrent protocol is an extremely efficient way of moving files around the Internet, especially big ones. That makes it highly popu...
Forget The Death-Star Anti-Mosquito Lasers, Here's How Nathan Myhrvold Can Help Tackle Malaria -- And Improve His Image
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Nathan Myhrvold is trying to rustle up a little positive PR for Intellectual Ventures (IV) by appointing a VP of Global Good (although it...
European Commission Looks To Backdoor In ACTA By Pushing For Same Results Through 'Voluntarism'
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This year saw two huge victories for digital activism: against SOPA in the US, and against ACTA in the EU. The big question is now: what ...
03 September 2012
EU Wants to Sneak in a Mini-ACTA by the Backdoor
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Even after ACTA was rejected by the European Parliament on 4 July this year, the European Commission was still refusing to admit that th...
02 September 2012
Could Your Company Survive a Net Block?
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As part of the seemingly endless round of consultations (I'm not complaining - this is how it should be done), the UK government is a...
Apple's Pyrrhic Patent Victory
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The reaction to the jury's decision in the US patent infringement case between Apple and Samsung has been rather remarkable. I've...
The Googlisation of Surveillance
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As promised, here is my submission to the Joint Parliamentary Committee considering the UK government's Draft Communications Bill: O...
Comment on the UK Government's Snooping Bill
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The Draft Communications Bill [. pdf ] is one of the most controversial pieces of UK legislation proposed in recent years - not least bec...
Can open source be democratic?
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One of the most important messages in the history of free software – and computing – was posted 21 years ago, on 25 August 1991: On The ...
10 August 2012
Unleashing the Potential of Open Data
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It seems a long while ago now, but June was a pretty hectic month in this neck of the woods, since it saw the final push to get ACTA reject...
Sibelius Users Forced to Face the Music
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Although the following is a little outside the mainstream of Open Enterprise, it does have a very clear moral with direct relevance to th...
Exploring Anti-Net Neutrality Arguments
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As I noted recently, net neutrality is back in the spotlight, so I thought it would be useful - and maybe entertaining - to look at an an...
Europe Already Has Draft Standard For Real-Time Government Snooping On Services Like Facebook And Gmail
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As the old joke goes, standards are wonderful things, that's why we have so many of them. But who would have thought that ETSI, the ...
Outdated Compulsory Licensing Means Australian Schools Must Pay Millions To Use Free Internet Materials
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Recently we wrote about how copyright rules designed for an analog age were causing problems when transposed without modification to the ...
Microsoft's Patent Strategy Made Patent
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At the end of last year, I wrote about the great service Barnes & Noble had performed by drawing back the curtain on one of Microsoft&...
UK Government Censors Copyright Consultation Submission About How Awful Collection Societies Are
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When the UK Hargreaves Review of intellectual monopolies in the digital age came out last year, Techdirt noted that one of its innovation...
ICANN Continues to Prove It Can't
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I have been writing about the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, ICANN, since its birth in 1998 (see the ICANN entry on...
UK Politicians Don't Seem To Mind That Every Web Page You Load Is Copyright Infringement Under Current Law
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Last year Techdirt wrote about the almost unbelievable Meltwater decision in the UK, where the courts said that viewing a Web page withou...
Consumer Focus and the Digital Economy Act
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I've written a couple of articles recently about Ofcom's consultation on the implementation of the Digital Economy Act. That c...
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