EU copyright: as far as we’re concerned, link away

European Union—www.europarl.europa.eu/downloadcentre/en/visual-identity, Public Domain; link I’m reading more about this EU copyright directive that was voted in last month.    Without doing a full analysis, I can say that we won’t go after anyone who links to our publications.    We presently don’t care if you use a brief snippet of our content and link […]

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The end of US ’net neutrality: another step toward the corporate internet

Elijah van der Giessen/Open Media/Creative Commons That’s it for ’net neutrality in the US. The FCC has changed the rules, so their ISPs can throttle certain sites’ traffic. They can conceivably charge more for Americans visiting certain websites, too. It’s not a most pessimistic scenario: ISPs have attempted this behaviour before.    It’s another step […]

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Instagram-created art

I don’t know if Instagram does this on all phones, but when I make multi-photo posts, it often leaves behind a very interesting image. Sometimes, the result is very artistic, such as this one of a Lotus–Ford Cortina Mk II.     You can see the rear three-quarter shot just peer in through the centre. […]

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Paging Dr Libby

Update: scroll down for a happy ending to this! Even famous people can slip up. Two posts on Instagram, one of them mine, the other an hour later on Dr Libby Weaver’s account.    If you’d like a closer inspection, here’s my photo cropped roughly where hers is. The clouds are the giveaway, and trust […]

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RTL orders Blitzkrieg on Alarm für Cobra 11 fan community prior to the show’s 20th anniversary

With the lead-up to the 20th anniversary of the German TV show Alarm für Cobra 11: die Autobahnpolizei, a fan group I run—the largest unofficial community on Facebook for the series—has been the subject of a Blitzkrieg by RTL. Trailers, which made up the majority of the uploaded videos, are indeed copyrighted material, but have […]

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The fall and rise and fall of Kim Dotcom, and why, according to the US, watching YouTube makes us all criminals

In response to a friend’s Facebook post applauding the possibility that Kim Dotcom would get extradited, two days ago. It’s unedited, other than the inclusion of a link and a note, and I apologize for the grammatical errors. Surely this remains the only case in the history of humankind where copyright is a multi-jurisdictional criminal […]

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The political caricatures of old have taken human form, but they’re still nothing like us

That’s another British General Election done and dusted. I haven’t followed one this closely since the 1997 campaign, where I was backing John Major.    Shock, horror! Hang on, Jack. Haven’t the media all said you are a leftie? Didn’t you stand for a left-wing party?    Therein lies a fallacy about left- and right […]

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‘Planet Key’ is good old-fashioned Kiwi satire

Fed up with the Electoral Commission barring Darren Watson from expressing his valid view with his satirical song ‘Planet Key’, I made a spoken-word version of it for my Tumblr a week ago, with copyright clearance over the lyrics. I wrote: Since the Electoral Commission has imposed a ban on Darren Watson’s ‘Planet Key’—in fact, […]

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The shame of Russia (courtesy of Facebook)

At the weekend, 40,000 to 50,000 took to the streets of Moskva—Moscow—to protest their government’s actions in the Ukraine, at the Peace and Freedom March. I understand that media called the country’s actions ‘the shame of Russia’.    A friend provided me with photos of the protest that he and his friends took, which I […]

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It’s Miller time on the Sherlock bandwagon

Elementary is an modern-day, American TV version of Sherlock Holmes. It’s not an American remake of the Steven Moffat–Mark Gatiss update, which I love, and some might say it has taken too many liberties with the original. Watson is now female.    I’ll leave you to comment, but I don’t make my thoughts of remakes […]

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