Wolf Richter

The UK government today released the long-awaited Digital Britain Report. To start with the positive aspects: The ill-devised disconnection of repeat infringers is off the table, the report recognizes that there is a demand for legal media services, which the industry currently does not serve, and there will be a digital “test bed” to experiment [...]

Ars Technica wrote yesterday that the Isle of Man‘s investment minister Ron Berry had announced that the Isle of Man would introduce a Blanket License. “At the end of the day, we’re not going to stop piracy,” said Berry. “Embrace it… Had the music industry embraced [the original Napster], we’d have a very different medium today.” [...]

MediaScrums.com is a new blog originating at Harvard’s Berkman Centre to trace the evolution of production, distribution, and business models for digital media globally. Core writers are my friends and collaborators Eric Priest, Devon Copley, and Leah Belsky, who are all actively involved in shaping the future of digital media in one way or the [...]

The European Union has awarded a grant of 14 million Euro to a consortium of companies and research institutes gathered around the University of Delft (Netherlands) to develop a “next generation” P2P network. According to the press release the goal of the project is to create a new media delivery mechanism using the emerging P2P [...]

British record labels seem to miss yet another chance to regain leadership in shaping music distribution on the Internet: Instead of announcing the launch of an innovative, convenient, legal file-sharing platform, today the national news broke that the music industry, represented by their lobby organisation BPI, had agreed with 6 ISPs serving the UK on [...]

Last week started with a public announcement by the US lobby group IFPI to increase their enforcement attempts against illegal music downloads in China, allegedly by targeting the big search engines. According to IFPI, 99% of all songs currently circulating on the Internet in China were illegal copies. Unfortunately, IFPI did not have to detail [...]

I realized that I have neglected blogging quite a bit recently. There is no excuse for that, but there is an explanation: Last week we finally presented the findings of the joint project between the OII and the McKinsey Technology Initiative to an audience of academics and invited executives from all over Europe. Coordinating a [...]

Online identity theft has been on the hype cycle for quite a while. But sometimes it is really helpful for Internet researchers to be reminded of the earthly aspects of existence. Such happened to me last Saturday, when my car fell victim to an offline identity theft. OK, it was Rugby Saturday, and yes, there [...]

To continue the OII’s tradition of gathering all active (and wannabe) bloggers at the OII to share their experiences and discuss about possibilities to further improve the visibility of the OII’s blogosphere, Malte Ziewitz has called in another OII blogging roundtable. For the first time, also the new DPhil students were invited to join the [...]

During a recent stay in Beijing, Eric Priest invited me to join him for a panel presentation on “New approaches to the IP Challenge” during the HPAIR 2007 conference. I happily accepted the invitation and used the discussion with the students as a focus group to better understand how Asia’s “Digital Natives” (John Palfrey gave [...]