Category Archives: regulation

The US Net Neutrality Debate; Sleepwalking into Walled Gardens

Posted on February 21, 2014 by ratpie

Being an outsider to the US Net Neutrality debate, I don’t feel the pain of cable monopoly, or the blight caused by expensive and poor quality broadband. Over here in the UK we hear more about Verizon FiOS and Google … Continue reading →

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Record Companies Should Give Up a Hard Won Right. Here’s Why.

Posted on November 24, 2013 by ratpie

When the recording industry was young there was a genuine concern that it might be strangled at birth by owners of popular songs, who might naturally wish to protect their sheet music sales and public performance fees from competition from … Continue reading →

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The Cost of Granularity in Music Copyright

Posted on November 2, 2013 by ratpie

It might be just my very partial view on some high volume/low unit price markets, but it seems that at some point the cost of the granularity required for a royalty based remuneration system is just too high, and the … Continue reading →

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Music Industry Grasps Wrong End of Carrot

Posted on September 26, 2013 by ratpie

A UK Parliamentary report is out today, 26 September 2013, that represents a fierce fight back by the creative industries, led by music, against a rogues gallery of pirates, ISPs, and technology and digital advertising and media companies. No doubt … Continue reading →

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Preserving the Open Internet the Easy Way

Posted on July 7, 2013 by ratpie

No regulation is easy of course, so to start, here’s an apology for the misleading title. Sorry. But it need not be as difficult as it might seem to make the few small adjustments needed to ensure that the next … Continue reading →

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Netflix Explains Why The Internet Is Not Good Enough For Them

Posted on July 5, 2013 by ratpie

The migration of new digital services off the public internet is an established pattern. Driven by economics, and with real money at stake, it is not likely to slow down any time soon. To recap, large content providers such as … Continue reading →

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Inspiration for Privacy from Copyright and Beer

Posted on June 9, 2013 by ratpie

It is quite impossible to make informed choices about privacy, and about the uses of content and data we generate. The terms and conditions of services we use are too long and complicated to read and understand, and anyway are … Continue reading →

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Copyright, Human Rights, Development, Privilege

Posted on June 3, 2013 by ratpie

Two things in particular I have been enjoying surprising people with recently. The first is that copyright is part of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. All right it is near the end, so fewer people will have had the … Continue reading →

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The Internet is No Longer a Duck

Posted on April 3, 2013 by ratpie

It waddles and quacks, but is the Internet still a duck? The Guardian published on March 28th 2013 an article by Cory Doctorow with the headline ‘Copyright wars are damaging the health of the internet’. His argument is simple and … Continue reading →

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Collectives versus Pools in Pursuit of Copyright Efficiency

Posted on February 19, 2013 by ratpie

YouTube’s generous approach to on-demand video streaming, while historically the cause of some friction with copyright owners, is also this year a great blessing to anyone interested in the regulation of copyright business. For it has provided a platform to … Continue reading →

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