Suppose there is a website out there that hosts demos and shareware computer games. Some of them are made by amateurs, others are made by teams at the top of their profession. Some games are accompagnied by a fifty page license, others have no license at all, and some are inbetween. You want to download … Read More

Dutch telecommunications watch-dog Opta has fined its first batch of spammers since the introduction of the anti-spam ammendements to the telecom law late last year that granted this power to Opta. (Links lead to Dutch pages.) Fourteen other small-scale spammers received warnings. According to Opta, the amount of complaints received about this group was too … Read More

I am getting a bit out of touch with what real things cost in real stores. Which is surprising, considering I could use being more price-conscious. The past few months, I decided to save up the receipts I get at supermarkets, in order to be able to compare prices. My expectation was that Albert Heijn … Read More

In an earlier post I mentioned the five contributions to the EU Copyright Consultation that I knew about. In the meantime, the EU Commission staff has not sat still, and has now published a full list of all submitted documents (most in English). 134 stakeholders have sent in their opinions on the matter; 126 of … Read More

Hm, I wonder why this wasn’t on the news. Anyway, Reinder at Waffle caught it: man fails Turing test.

“Fourteen years ago, at the first publication of these letters, the important case of authors versus readers–makers of books versus consumers of facts and ideas–had for several years been again on trial in the high court of the people.” (Letters on International Copyright, by Henry Carey, 1868, available at Project Gutenberg.)

My part-time boss asked me to look into archival solutions. Quite soon I stumbled upon a Dutch government plan to make sure all its branches posses the knowledge of how to archive digital documents. The people behind the plan have even set up a website, called Digitale Duurzaamheid (“Digital Durability”), which has all kinds of … Read More

Over a month ago the deadline expired for the Consultation on the review of EU legislation on copyright and related rights, an initiative to consult “interested parties” about further harmonization in the European Union. The site promised to publish the replies, but has remained silent since. I know of the following public replies (and a … Read More

Read on Usenet: “I wish the silent majority would shut up for once.”

Steve Ballmer, the Monkey Man from Microsoft, proposed a while ago that PC makers should make computers that cost no more than 100 US$. Now Slashdot reports that an outfit called SolarPC has taken up the gauntlet and produced Steve Ballmer’s $100 PC. Of course, due to the prohibitive costs of popular operating systems, which … Read More