A patent underlying the popular GIF format is set to expire soon. That could make PNG, created as a royalty-free alternative, obsolete — unless other issues come into play
George Ziemann’s last installments of his series on Thomas Edison, Intellectual Property and the Recording Industry
show that the controllers of the media bullied folk back then as they do now — and it didn’t work; The Industry Evolves, Copyright and the Grand Illusion and Bringing the Past Into the Present
Bruce Sterling refers to the Pentagon’s Total Information Awareness plan as Poindexter’s nutty scheme
: You have more privacy if everyone’s illiterate, but you wouldn’t really call that privacy. That’s ignorance
An Australian online legal information service is expanding to span the globe. The new World Legal Information Institute, WorldLII, is operating from its Sydney base with the aim to provide free access to crucial legal documents internationally
Invasions of privacy on the Internet are less likely to happen in Europe because laws are generally stricter than in the United States about what can be published about individuals. When balancing freedom of speech against personal privacy rights, the default in Europe is more toward privacy rights. And that default is not just legal but deeply cultural
Unable to sue file-sharing networks into submission, the music industry is stepping up its campaign to instil fear and frustration among the people who use them to copy songs free
The Council of Europe has called on countries to refrain from censoring information transmitted via the internet, promote ease of access for all their citizens to the internet, and to ensure that service providers were not systematically held responsible for material transmitted over their servers without their knowledge
Digital rights management sounds unobjectionable on paper: Consumers purchase certain rights to use creative works and are prevented from violating those rights. In reality, our legal system usually leaves us wiggle room. What’s fair in one case won’t be in another — and only human judgement can discern the difference
Former governor-general Sir William Deane has criticised the federal government’s human rights record, labelling the Liberal leadership intolerant and untruthful
Created by the CIA in Saigon in 1967, Phoenix was a program aimed at neutralising
— through assassination, kidnapping, and systematic torture — the civilian infrastructure that supported the Viet Cong insurgency in South Vietnam. It was a terrifying final solution
that violated the Geneva Conventions and traditional American ideas of human morality
Interesting article at the the Beeb.
Manslaughter charges will soon be able to brought against negligent corporations in the UK. There is some concern that the law does not go far enough, insofar as individual directors may be able to escape prosecution when the company takes the blame.
Canon Jeffrey John, the Chancellor and Canon Theologian of Southwark Cathedral, One of the Church of England’s most prominent advocates of gay rights, who has called for the ordination of practising homosexuals and blessings of gay marriages, has been appointed Suffragan Bishop of Reading
A Pentagon project called LifeLog seeks to record every bit of information that can be had, index it by name, or SSN or even location, and make the database searchable. While locally, a national ID number for students and a new computer system to track them has been compared with the failed Australia card bid in the 1980s
They are the information and research staff of the Parliamentary Library are fuming at the prospect of having access to net nasties cut off by a new filtering system
According to a Shadow G8
report by former top world officials, the Group of Eight world economic summits have become discredited because members preach to other countries while failing to put their own houses in order
On 18 May 2003 in St Petersburg an anti-globalism demonstration, previously approved by the authorities, was brutally smashed and dispersed by police
Tourism Tasmania has lost its bid to secure the rights to a domain name currently being used to criticise the Tasmanian Government’s forestry policy
Lawrence Lessig is predicting that the days of the Commons of the Internet are over, and that as a result of FCC deregulation, the concentration of digital rights in the hands of just a few large media companies will kill the internet for good. Even former FOX and Vivendi executive Barry Diller has criticised the move
The RSPCA has called on the European Union to tighten laws governing the transportation of live animals after unveiling evidence of sickening cruelty
. They have also urged the British government to change domestic laws, insisting that animals be slaughtered at home before being transported to the continent
EMI’s copy-protection technology has resulted in a Melbourne resident doing exactly what the company is trying to prevent — copy a music disc in order to listen to it
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