digital/copyrights

ORG event: Release The Music, 13 Nov 06

October 26, 2006

From the ORG blog: Should the term of copyright protection on sound recordings stay at 50 years or be extended? This question has been hanging in the air for the last couple of years, with the music industry lobbying government for an extension on the grounds that the royalties they earn from old recordings are […]

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Cory Doctorow donates RAZR and first ed. of Eastern Standard Tribe to ORG

March 30, 2006

Cory Doctorow, ORG Advisory Council member, famous novelist, copyright activist and one of the driving forces behind BoingBoing, has kindly donated a Razr mobile phone and a signed fist edition of his novel Eastern Standard Tribe, to the Open Rights Group for us to auction. We have duly put both together as one lot on […]

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"Neil Gaiman's our Patron! Squeee!"

January 30, 2006

Was the headline that I chose not to run with in today's Open Rights Group press release, despite the fact that's pretty much how I felt about it. If you're a regular reader of either my or Neil's blog, you will of course already know that Neil's our Patron, but it's nice to finally fess […]

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Second Open Rights Group networking evening

January 29, 2006

The second Open Rights Group, featuring ubergeek Cory Doctorow, is set for the evening of Tuesday 7 Feb 2006. Don't let Hollywood hijack your rights Cory Doctorow American entertainment companies say they're fighting piracy, but they're going at it by punishing the innocent to get at the guilty. A pan-European digital television restrictions proposal will […]

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Gi's cash! ORG now taking donations

January 17, 2006

The Open Rights Group pledge finally matured on Christmas day, and now we're proud to announce that the supporters' database is up and running and you can officially now give us cash! We've had a surge of donations since the email went out to pledge signatories, so please do join the stampede and let us […]

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Music and film industry tries to hijack serious crime legislation in Europe

November 23, 2005

The impudence of the music and film industries never ceases to amaze me. First they make crap products no one wants to buy. Then they sue their own customers because they aren't buying said crap products. Then they follow that up with DRM that kills your computer. And now they are trying to hijack proposed […]

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Invitation to attend 'Digital Rights in the UK: Your Rights, Your Issues’

November 16, 2005

The emergence of new communications technologies has radically changed the civil rights landscape in our society. Privacy, intellectual property, and access to knowledge are just some of the areas where digital rights are being eroded by government and big business. The Open Rights Group (ORG) would like to invite you to an evening of digital […]

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Remix Commons

November 1, 2005

(I'm cross-posting this from the new Open Rights Group blog, which doesn't yet get the traffic CnV gets.) Remix Reading, the group dedicated to promoting free culture and Creative Commons locally in the Reading area is expanding into four cities across the UK and establishing a new project, Remix Commons, to bring Creative Commoners together. […]

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Open Rights Group update

September 21, 2005

Just posted an update on where we're at with ORG over on the temporary ORG blog, along with some information on Free Culture UK and Open Geodata. The most important thing, though, is that we really need to whip up some fuss about data retention: Urgent Data Retention ACTION NEEDED BY THURSDAY 2005-09-22 You don't […]

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The org called ORG

September 6, 2005

May I present to you, in all it's wondrous bloggy glory, the Open Rights Group! Yes, that's right, the organisation with no name is now the organisation called ORG. And no smart-alec comments about what we're going to call our first digital rights conference, thank you kindly. You'd be surprised how much work there is […]

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BBC Radio 5 interview now up online

August 25, 2005

The interview I did with Kevin Anderson for BBC Radio 5 Pods and Blogs show is now up online, for a limited time only. It will likely be replaced some time around Monday 29 Aug-ish, when the next show goes out at which point I'll post/podcast the MP3 of my 10 minute segment. The nice […]

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BBC Radio Five (not quite so live)

August 21, 2005

Have to pop over to BBC TV Centre tomorrow to record an interview about this digital rights group that I'm helping set up, and data retention. The interview will be aired overnight, during the Blog and Podcast Hour. When I get more details, I'll let you know, but I'm guessing it'll be easier to listen […]

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Data retention in 15 words

August 16, 2005

40,000 terabytes of useless, illegal communications traffic surveillance data, paid for by you, the surveilled. digital rights, data retention, europe

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Data Retention in the EU – Your Digital Rights at Risk

August 16, 2005

OK, so here's the data retention story, which I'm going to try to write without recourse to (too much of) the EU jargon that seems to choke these sorts of things. Some is inevitable, and I apologise for that in advance. This is the deal. The UK, France, Ireland and Sweden are trying to push […]

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Grokking data retention

August 14, 2005

I can't quite believe that it's 1.30am and I'm sitting here reading up on data retention and the new directive/framework being proposed by the UK for Europe. It's really ugly stuff, and I'll blog more on it once I've got my head round it. What amazes me – in a way, although also not – […]

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