Andrew Orlowski

Collected Journalism

Tag: policy

  • ‘Google is fantastic and should be applauded’ – competition regulator

    ‘Google is fantastic and should be applauded’ – competition regulator

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    Andrew Orlowski

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    What happens when competition watchdogs lose their teeth – and roll over to have their tummies tickled? Via the influential chair of the Commons Culture Media and Sport Select Committee, John Whittingdale MP, comes a very interesting story today. Whittingdale relates a conversation with John Fingleton, the head of the Office of Fair Trading. The MP asked if the agency had looked at the question of Google’s power in the marketplace.

    Google has a dominant market share of paid search … Read More

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  • Julian Huppert’s “One-Speed Internet”

    Julian Huppert’s “One-Speed Internet”

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    Andrew Orlowski

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    Lib Dems are appealing to the vital online pirate vote at this year’s party conference, putting the membership on collision course with LibDem ministers in the coalition government. In a new IT policy paper called “Preparing The Ground”, a team of party activists led by Cambridge MP Julian Huppert calls for the Digital Economy Act to be gutted of its copyright measures. It also threatens new legislation to ensure all “traffic flows at the same speed”, and wants the IR35 … Read More

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  • EU wants to erect opt-in hurdle for creators

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    Andrew Orlowski

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    A potentially incendiary EU report released today recommends making changes to the Berne Convention – and creating several new layers of bureaucracy in order to deal with the digitisation of cultural stuff. Creators would have to “opt-in” to a new database before getting their rights, which have historically been guaranteed by Berne signatories since 1886.

    Berne is administered by the UN quango World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) and changes are made only every few generations – it was last amended … Read More

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  • RIP: The copyright quango that wanted to terminate your rights

    RIP: The copyright quango that wanted to terminate your rights

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    Andrew Orlowski

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    The Strategic Advisory Board for Intellectual Property is to be abolished. The Coalition has decided that dismantling copyright is a task that the Intellectual Property Office is quite capable of performing without assistance, and has folded SABIP’s duties back into the IPO.

    SABIP was founded in 2008 in the wake of the Gowers Report, as a quasi think-tank focusing on copyright policy. New technology has allowed many more people to record and distribute material – “everyone’s a creator” – we’re … Read More

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  • Bloggers, mind control and the death of newspapers (the Internet imagined in 1965)

    Bloggers, mind control and the death of newspapers (the Internet imagined in 1965)

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    Andrew Orlowski

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    Calder invites us to have a giggle, but really it’s not a bad list at all, and compared with the (cough) ‘futurists’ who have come and gone since, Calder and the participants did a good job. Alvin Toffler was repackaging these ideas, particularly mass amateurisation, many years later. As are thousands of Web 2.0 consultants today.

    Read more at The Register

    Best reader comment here.
    … Read More

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  • Lizard People drop ACTA draft from Black Helicopter

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    Andrew Orlowski

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    Emerging briefly from their underground volcano lair, the shadowy A.C.T.A. organisation has released their latest list of demands. It’s another relentless march towards global New World Order governance.

    Actually, that’s how a few bloggers and even professional hacks have portrayed it. But what’s wrong with this picture?

    Read more at The Register… Read More

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