Author Archives: ratpie

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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A Humane Approach to Copyright Term

Posted on December 31, 2012 by ratpie

As the increasingly frantic public domain regurgitation business trawls through 1942 deaths of authors and composers (sadly we shall have to wait another 4 years for a copyright free revival of Chu Chin Chow unless someone wants to set the … Continue reading →

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Yet Another Private Internet

Posted on December 18, 2012 by ratpie

Lobbyists sometimes try to simplify issues, for policy makers and for grassroots and other supporters, and one of the most potent ideas surrounding Internet policy is that what you don’t like will ‘break the Internet’. Here’s John Naughton neatly encapsulating … Continue reading →

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Leapfrog or Lag? Music Tech in Developing Markets

Posted on December 15, 2012 by ratpie

We have been conditioned to think that developing nations are somehow privileged to have the opportunity to skip whole generations of technologies, moving straight to what we in developed economies are embracing because of its promise for the future. Here’s … Continue reading →

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