We've seen a few ridiculous cases whereby local governments claim on a law, but it's still stunning to see what's going on in Liberia. Tom sends in the news that no one knows what the law covers in Liberia, because

alerts us to the news that our good friend is . Tragically, it does not appear that she's used her "time off" to better understand copyright issues very much. Unlike nearly everyone else who complains about copyright infringement, she's apparently

Back in July, we wrote about how a company named Volomedia had gleefully announced that it had . The patent itself seemed ridiculously broad, obvious and covered by prior art. On top of that, it was difficult to see how

I'm wondering if there's more to this, because it seems rather "un-Google-like." The makers of a set top box that can display internet content are complaining that , unless they agree to "partner" and commit to buying lots of ads

Sherwin Siy (one of the few people who actually was allowed to glance briefly at parts of the proposed ACTA treaty, though under strict NDA) has written about to the government in support of ACTA. This letter includes pretty much

Danny Sullivan does a great job calling out the hypocrisy of the Associated Press yet again. The organization, which has taken a very maximalist position on copyright, where fair use gets , apparently so that reporters could search it. Of

Early on, we that Apple's walled garden approach to apps for the iPhone would lead to developer backlash. Even if it was successful at first, the was that it wouldn't just lead to problems that drove developers away, but it

Having recently , where I was impressed at the optimism and the willingness to embrace new technologies and services, it's disappointing to read the following story (found via ) of a Norwegian band who recently released an album on their

We've mentioned the ongoing in Australia a few times. Basically, the movie studios are pissed off at iiNet because it didn't do much in response to letters that were sent concerning IP addresses of those that the studios believed were

Just as the , the UK government has offered up , which includes massive changes to copyright law, including the power of the government to effectively change the law at will with little to no oversight. Basically, it would let

I recognize that NPR news analyst Daniel Schorr is well into his tenth decade of life, and plays the role of the "senior statesman of journalism" on NPR at times, but as a bunch of folks have sent in, he

Over the last few weeks people who are actually concerned about individual rights have done a decent job sounding the alarm about the problems with what little we've seen of the ACTA negotiations. In the last week or so, those

Just this week, James Harding, the editor of The Times (of London), a paper owned by Rupert Murdoch, tried to explain , as the paper starts to put up a new business model to get consumers to pay for news.

Looks like the latest battle over copyright extension is about to take place in Japan, where the new prime minister, Yukio Hatoyama, has . Specifically, he says that posthumous copyrights for compositions should last 70 years, rather than 50. This

writes ", the dominant book retailer in Canada, just recently launched their eBook store, thinly disguised as an independent 3rd party called . Both companies are children of the parent company Indigo Books & Music Inc.The fact that they have

As various folks in the news business (and outside of it) continue to fret about how it could be possible to ever fund the production of news, some are taking more positive looks at the space. Jay Rosen has for

Reader Eileen points us to a thought-provoking article by Joshua-Michele Ross discussing the idea that, rather than a diverse "long-tail" culture, we're actually being driven to a thanks to the rise of our robot overlords, better known as online recommendation

It certainly won't come as much of a surprise to readers around here that lobbyists from Roche/Genentech were able to into the Congressional Record. For way too long, we've seen how much politicians seem to rely on lobbyists to write

In October, we wrote about how, just as Rupert Murdoch and crew look to put up paywalls for online content, the operators of the London Evening Standard were going in the other direction and . So, how's that been working

We've had a few posts recently about the growing scandal in the pharma and publishing worlds, whereby big pharma companies would produce with the stamp of approval from big publishing houses, to make it look like their drugs had a