Wolf Richter

John Perry Barlow’s vision of an autonomous cyberspace outside the control of national governments has to take another blow. After the much-hyped online community Second Life has recently hit the news primarily in relation to very First World problems like theft, gambling, and pornography, the much hoped-for emergence of structures of self-organisation within the community [...]

Offering a product with the goal of getting sued by a major company and enjoy the 15 seconds of free marketing fame has become an increasingly popular go-to-market strategy. A refreshingly new approach has been taken by the so far unknown company MediaRightsTechnology, which instead of waiting to get sued by a major sent out [...]

After the initial controversy about the introduction of the Napster service at PennState University in November 2003 had ceased, it got remarkably silent on legal music download services at university campuses. Similar silence surrounded the announcement of the termination of the agreement between PennState and Napster earlier this month and the switch to the ad-based [...]

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 [...]