If you listen to rightsholding industry lobbyists long enough, Digital Restrictions Management starts to look like the only way to ensure healthy profits for an entertainment industry that is otherwise starved for profit-generating ideas. Last week, the EFF criticised the EU commissions’ Networked Audiovisual Systems and Home Platforms (NAVSHP) group for assuming that digital rights Read more »
The Economist last week published a survey on patents and technology. While the tone of the thing is not great, and the Free Software part is downright disastrous, the survey is instructive for what it leaves out. While rooting for the “market for ideas” that the system of copyrights and patents creates, the author describes Read more »
On October 13, the Adelphi Charter was launched. Drafted by an international commission of artists, scientists, lawyers, politicians, economists, academics and business experts, it calls for putting Access to Knowledge first: The expansion in the laws breadth, scope and term over the last 30 years has resulted in an intellectual property regime which is radically Read more »
WIPO held its General Assembly for two weeks from Sept. 23 or so. In this exciting round of paper-shuffling, things made the usual slow progress. As I was unable to attend, I am still having a hard time sifting through the countless texts that emerged from that meeting. The most urgent seem to be: Future Read more »
Boing Boing reports: The Finnish culture minister who enacted a copyright act that bans importing personal knockoff goods into Finland, she’s attended an intergovernmental meeting in Slovenia carrying a counterfeit Prada bag. When confronted about this, she complained that the bag had cost too much (“If the bag really is a copy, I paid way Read more »
In the wonderful world of US business process patents, cereal bar chain Cereality added the last drop of milk that made the bowl overflow. It has no fewer than six patent applications pending for the highly secret business methods behind running a breakfast cereal bar. With these applications, Cereality is threatening a rival chain of Read more »
Back again, and finally all the urgent work that had piled up while I was on holiday is gone. I can now start seriously dodging what should be my primary occupation. When asked about my level of computer literacy, I often find myself in a pickle: On the one hand, I am not freaked out Read more »
These are exciting weeks for the fields I’m working in: The third preparatory conference for the World Summit on the Information Society is under way in Geneva, WIPO is holding its general assembly, and the EU Parliament speaks out against data retention. This means that in theory, I would have a lot of blogging to Read more »
One of the next big things being mulled at WIPO is a “Webcasting Treaty”. It took me a while to understand what this is, as it is not intuitive: The legal situation of webcasting seemed rather clear to me. The works being broadcasted via the web are protected by copyright, just like any other work. Read more »
In the struggle for the rights of online journalists, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has seen a small victory in the Apple vs. Does case it is working on. Despite claims that the documents were a trade secret, Apple was ordered by the court to let the defendant’s lawyers look at information about Apple’s internal investigation Read more »