Wolf Richter

Last Thursday a couple of OII DPhil students had the unique chance to have lunch with Martin Varsavsky, the founder and CEO of Fon and several other start-ups. Before Martin had spoken at the Saïd Business School on European entrepreneurialism and alternatives to emigration to Silicon Valley. I will write some more lines both on [...]

Does YouTube kill the Media Festival star?I spent a fantastic weekend at the annual Transmediale festival for “art and digital culture” in Berlin. The Transmediale is one of the “landmark” festivals of the European digital event circus and has so far ranked among my personal favorites. This year’s motto shouted “Unfinish!” at the visitor to [...]

In a recent publication the Intelligence Unit of the Economist surveyed 405 high-level executives of European companies from a variety of industries like life-sciences, telecom, IT, professional and financial services. Most striking I found the split about the role patents and open source strategies play in the surveyed industries. While 75% of the life-science and [...]

The much anticipated findings of the review of the British Intellectual Property system (a.k.a. the Gowers review) have been presented to the public yesterday. The report contains 55 recommendations on how to change Great Britain’s copyright, patent and trademark laws to reflect the changes brought about by digital distribution and production technology. First reactions to [...]

The discussion on copyright in cyberspace has just gotten a new facet: The use of a script called copybot allows copying of virtual things created in Second Life without the consent of the owner. In a crisis meeting the Sellers guild has pushed Linden Lab to enforce the rights to their creation. Linden is obviously [...]

On Monday, Nov 13, Prof. Jonathan Zittrain gave a key note on copyright extension for sound recordings in front of the Open Rights Group in London. As part of the ongoing review of the UK’s intellectual property system (Gowers Review) a group backed by the British Recording industry is pushing to extend the term of [...]

Just as we discussed about the subversive potential of open source software, I wondered if that is always the case. Linux is built on a kind of UNIX kernel. UNIX has been developed as a multi-user system featuring a sophisticated user rights management system. Windows on the other side had to introduce the rights concept [...]

When I researched Intellectual property in 2002 to find a suitable topic for my master’s thesis, the web was full with articles, comments and opinions on software patents. Most of them I found to lack proper significant scientific foundations and seemed to be more driven by pursuit of a more or less hidden agendas or [...]

As part of their quest to understand the wonders of the universe with particular focus on the Internet, a small group of dauntless OII investigators decided to launch an initiative to explore Second Life, currently the most talked about digital community. Following proper research in the respective sources, they were promised a “user created immersive [...]