There was one thing I wanted to stress about the, well, totally fucking batshit insane IPRED directive. I’ve already mentioned how major industry organizations can maintain databases containing personal information otherwise considered private without regulation, forcibly extract the matching ...

I promised I’d report more on the Swedish implementation of the optional to implement IPRED EU directive. I stopped last time because I was getting seriously depressed. I just read a good summary of what’s going to happen to you if you’re targeted, and the list (and only the list) ...

Februari är den kortaste månaden på året och var de gamla romarnas sista månad på året. Men för oss väntar fortfarande nästan ett helt år av nya musikupplevelser. Här är några av dem som vi hunnit beta av. Bäst i februari? Det här. Brooklyn, Atlanta, New Orleans, Chicago och London. ...

The Swedish parliament passed a law implementing the EU directive IPRED today. It was an optional EU directive, so they didn’t have to, but they did it anyway, the bastards. IPRED stipulates that any rights holder may, as long as they can produce cursory evidence, retrieve the personal informa...

There’s mosquitoes on the river Fish are rising up like birds It’s been hot for seven weeks now, Too hot to even speak now, Did you hear what I just heard? The Music Never Stopped: The Grateful Dead There’s a fascinating study out in the latest First Monday, the “peer-reviewe...

There are many ludicrous things about DRM: the belief that the internet was designed to be a distribution mechanism for film and music and nothing else; the belief that it is okay to treat everyone as a criminal; the willingness to chisel artists through patently unfair contracts, while making out t...

Chinese steal, pilfer, copy, fake and profit off of other's hard work. But, not all of China does this. "The General Administration of Customs recently unveiled the 2007 Top 10 Intellectual Property Right (IPR) protection events of Chinese Customs in Beijing." 1) Huangpu Customs seized...

Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling, herself rowling in gazillions of dollars, is along with her publisher suing Steven Vander Ark, a poor librarian who produced a lexicon of the Harry Potter universe. Rowling says it’s not about the money, it’s about control. Poppycock. If that was the cas...

Justin Pope from the AP has written a nice article describing the impacts of the open education movement, in particular the Open Courseware Initiative: Internet Opens Elite Colleges to All But MIT's 2001 debut of OpenCourseWare epitomized a key insight: Elite universities can separate their credenti...

nice move: if you are going to charge us with IPR infringement, we will take away all your routes to legitimate distribution. On the other hand: so far they are only letting in 20 movies a year, and they are heavily censored?!? That's hardly a market for hollywood and it explains why there is such a...