Museum exhibit “contains strong and accurate IP messages”
Wallace & Gromit have taken on their toughest challenge yet: teaching Australian kids to respect intellectual property rights raising a generation of patent trolls.…
The Orange Prize for Fiction, awarded annually to the best English-language novel from a female human author, will henceforth be known as the "Prize for Fiction" as Orange is taking its money elsewhere.…
Formerly 'uneconomic' costs suddenly affordable for article scraper
The fees that businesses will have to pay news aggregators of newspapers' online content for their services have been set after a Copyright Tribunal determined the terms were "reasonable".…
Analysis There’s an elephant in the room as Parliament’s informal inquiry into intellectual property policy rolls on. In the foreground, there’s the role of the officials who are supposed to support it. In the background, there’s something more troubling.…
How much would your iPhone be worth to you if the only music it could play had been bought on the device itself, from Apple? If your answer is "a lot less" or "not very much", then you're not alone. New empirical research has attempted to measure how much we value the ability to copy our music across formats and devices – and it's a significant sum.…
Site will liberate net from "stupidity, brutishness, earnestness and exploitation"
Clearly not satisfied with being the thinking woman’s sex symbol, philosopher Alain De Botton is taking on sex in a new digital venture that will attempt to position pornography – mostly the online iteration- as a therapeutic tool rather than a grubby thrill. De Botton issued a press release from his philosopher think tank The School of Life extolling the virtues of porn if executed in the right fashion. "No longer would sexuality have to be lumped together with stupidity, brutishness, earnestness and exploitation. It could instead be harnessed to what is noblest in us."…
In the latest episode of the US ad-skipping saga, Dish Networks is facing the wrath of broadcasters such as NBC and Fox, but winning praise from customers and no doubt causing a little churn among competitors. That at least is the intention of the Dish PVR ad skipping feature called Auto Hop, with the company gambling that the gain in subscription revenue will make the pain of having to defend a possibly protracted case against it from broadcasters worthwhile.…
Glasgow-based INSP, which represents magazines distributed by the homeless, is planning to go digital - assuming it can raise enough cash to pay for some trials.…
Iran's Foreign Ministry has threatened to take legal action against Google because the web firm removed the name Persian Gulf from its Maps and left the stretch of water nameless.…
Why is Auntie (literally, this time) in bed with Google?
Analysis “I haven’t felt so good having spoken to a businessman for ten minutes in about 25 years. That’s not normally how I feel! So thanks very much!” And thanks to you, BBC presenter Fi Glover, for sharing the feel-good factor with us.…
Plus: 'IT boys, hiss it through your teeth – Shut up, bitch!'
Quotw This was the week when investor interest hit ever higher feverish pitches as (not sure if you heard about this or not) Facebook prepares to go public.…
Analysis As we reported today, the third-largest advertiser in the United States says it's going to stop advertising on Facebook, citing lack of engagement. General Motors is taking the $10m it spunks on Facebook ads somewhere else. This is a tiny proportion of GM's $1.1bn annual advertising budget, but it's hardly a vote of confidence from major brands in boy-child St Zuck's burgeoning global empire.…
Why shout at the TV when you can yell at the web instead?
There are ten million active Twitter accounts in Blighty, the microblogging wunderkind announced on, er, Twitter this morning. And 80 per cent of UK twits access the site on their mobiles.…
Blue Peter - home to four-legged rascal Shep, the coat-hanger advent crown and school-boy favourite Janet Ellis, is being turfed out of its home on BBC One.…
Plus: Aston Kutcher grows creepy beard for role in the OTHER Jobs film
The screenwriter who brought a bratty young Mark Zuckerberg to life in the film The Social Network has been appointed as the writer of new Steve Jobs biopic.…
NSFW The Advertising Standards Authority has sunk its teeth into the Manhattan Bar in Stoke on Trent, for a Facebook promotion "likely to cause serious or widespread offence".…
For Michael Robertson, it’s déjà vu all over again. The same flexible and somewhat optimistic interpretation of copyright law that sank his music service in the dot.com bubble has also sunk his current music service, over what was essentially the same idea. On Friday Robertson’s cloud music locker – MP3Tunes – filed for bankruptcy protection, blaming music industry litigation.…
Vid Storage is weird, wonderful and sometimes very odd. Did you know floppy disk drives can be used for something other than emergency boots of legacy kit or as cool antiques?…
Getcher applications in for White Space telly channels
Ofcom has received 87 expressions of interest from groups interested in running Local TV channels, and three companies interested in broadcasting them, so has launched the beauty contest to see who gets to be the next Alan Partridge.…
You don‘t have to be a genius to know that mSpot, which has just been bought by Samsung Electronics in the US, is going to go through both a transformation and a huge international upsurge in usage, if it has, or can get, international music rights.…
Mailbag Heard the one about The Pirate Bay being ripped off? This week there was a lovely story of the Swedish scofflaws being annoyed by clone sites. Many of you enjoyed the wedding-cake sized dollops of irony in this, but some furious freetards didn't. El Reg has got it all wrong, they insist.…
A fake celebrity Twitter account posing as that of outgoing French first lady Carla Bruni has been used to spread false rumours that former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher had died.…
It's just a gallery of mobile applications ... for now
Facebook is launching an App Center to recommend mobile applications based on demographic preferences as well as user ratings, just as long as they're tied into users' Facebook credentials – with a view to monetising the process eventually, of course.…
Orange has launched a TV-enhancing iPhone app that is synchronised to 25 Freeview channels. The operator hopes it will keep the fiddling-generation focused on big screen content while catching their straying eyeballs where necessary.…
Virgin Media's main website dropped off the interwebs on Tuesday with hackivist collective Anonymous claiming responsibility for the DDoS attacks in response to the company's recent cut-off of The Pirate Bay.…
Battle for the Johnstone's Paint Trophy taken to Ofcom
The latest onslaught against media baron Rupert Murdoch comes from an unlikely assailant. Former Sun editor Kelvin MacKenzie says he'll lodge a complaint with Ofcom over BSkyB's exclusive ownership of football rights.…
Beware of unauthorised copies of The Pirate Bay, comes a warning from, er… The Pirate Bay. The Swedish site notorious for indexing unauthorised copies of music, films and books has found itself being copied, and it doesn't like it one bit.…
Epic telly hopes for market in Europe for its OTT service
Over-the-top content (OTT) – the online delivery of video and audio content that cuts out the ISP – has always seemed perfectly made for a global age where communities are widely distributed, and now we have the first pan European service for extreme or adventure sports enthusiasts.…
Wil Wheaton asks blogosphere to Stand By Him on Choc Factory outrage
A former Star Trek: The Next Generation actor, who is plastered all over the internet, has blasted Google for trying to force people into signing up to its social network.…
The boss of BSkyB isn't Rupert Murdoch despite what many might think. Today the UK broadcaster and telco reminded the world of that fact as it attempted to distance itself from the 81-year-old media mogul, who has been labelled by MPs as being "not fit" to run a multinational outfit.…
B&N's CEO reckons NFC will be the glue to holds the disparate parts of the business together, with the help of Microsoft's money and a following wind.…
Rupert Murdoch is "not fit" to run a multinational corporation after demonstrating "wilful blindness" in his handling of the phone-hacking affair, which killed off his company's 168-year-old Sunday tabloid News of the World, MPs concluded today.…
Freeview HD got a new channel this morning, which will be filled with events from the Cultural Olympiad as well as the occasional Hitchcock film and the usual arts nonsense.…
Apple iTunes users are peeved at being made to answer a three-part questionnaire about their cars and where they had their first kiss as part of a compulsory security regime.…
'Musicians, sound engineers, video editors deserve to be paid for their work'
As expected, the High Court has ordered British ISPs to block access to The Pirate Bay. Five ISPs – Virgin Media, TalkTalk, BSkyB, Everything Everywhere and Telefonica – are involved in this case, which was brought by nine record labels.…
The YouView set-top box won’t be on sale in time for the Olympics, according to a report. Baron Sugar of Clapton, aka Alan Sugar, the chairman of the consortium, doesn’t deem the technology ready for prime time.…
Gaming studio Cryptic, the company behind Star Trek Online, Champions Online and City of Heroes, has admitted that its players' details were lifted in an unauthorised database access two years ago.…
'Felt blast of Milly Dowler phone-hack scandal come through window'
Media tycoon Rupert Murdoch wished he had closed down the News of the World that has been at the centre of the phone-hacking storm that has gripped his corporation "years ago".…
How the Tories' broken quango promise came back to haunt them
Analysis There are several winners in the wake of News Corp's collapsed BSkyB takeover, but the most unlikely is one we’ve all overlooked. It might surprise you, too.…
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