Andrew Orlowski

Collected Journalism

Tag: slacktivism

  • Joi Ito’s Vanity Photo Album: Eicher

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    Andrew Orlowski

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    Powerful aristocrats throughout history have commissioned portraits by master artists to immortalize their achievements. Now amateur photographer and Creative Commons advocate Joi Ito is offering that immortality to bloggers, bureaucrats, coders, CEOs, and other obscure Free Software functionaries, in an expensive limited-edition “blook,” Freesouls. Ito muses, “Now the question is whether the demand for this…

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  • The hitman, the Pirate Bay and the Freetard professor

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    Andrew Orlowski

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    REG: What’s the point of fighting for his right to have babies when he can’t have babies?! FRANCIS: It is symbolic of our struggle against oppression! REG: It’s symbolic of his struggle against reality – Monty Python’s Life of Brian Everyone’s a prankster these days – it’s all in the name of art. On Monday…

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  • The Great Circular Awards Ceremony

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    Andrew Orlowski

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    Is there a more incestuous and self-congratulatory scene anywhere outside the fashion business? What a strange world it is, the world of “digital rights” activism. Campaigners pause only to pat each other on the back. Last week, anti-copyright campaigners Public Knowledge revealed their annual award winners. The group’s president Gigi B Sohn proudly announced the…

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  • Who killed Three Strikes for filesharing?

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    Andrew Orlowski

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    Rejoice! “Three strikes and you’re out” is dead in the UK. Music file sharers will no longer face the threat of seeing the household broadband connection severed. The plague that is currently endemic in France won’t be jumping the English Channel. Strangely, some people want to keep it alive. Stranger still – this includes the…

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  • One or two things you didn’t know about In Rainbows…

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    Andrew Orlowski

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    Radiohead’s Thom Yorke says the band won’t be repeating the band’s digital deal which allowed users to download a version of its most recent album for free. “I don’t think it would have the same significance now anyway, if we chose to give something away again,” he said, describing it as a “one-off response to…

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  • Nokia’s music bundle Comes With Hoover-shaped liabilities

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    Andrew Orlowski

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    Nokia faces a crippling financial bill for its strategy of bundling free music with handsets, which will give users unlimited song downloads with Nokia phones. The world’s biggest label, Universal Music, joined the “Comes With Music” initiative at launch last December, and Sony BMG joined last week. The Register has learned that Nokia must pay…

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