Category: Intellectual Property
Slave Leia looked on proudly as Admiral Ackbar walked down the aisle
It’s a Star Wars wedding. Not just a a cake grandma made that, from the right angle, looks a bit like a 2D Death Star, but a proper, CAN YOU BELIEVE THEY DID THAT? Star Wars wedding. Everyone put in some effort.
Here’s a small celebratory montage we’ve put together of the finest photos. The highlight is the ginger man who grew his beard out to be Chewbacca, plus the grey-haired man who used his natural assets to do a superb Ben Kenobi. The X-Wings let the side down a bit, mind. What’s with the socks?
The entire set is, incredibly, viewable by the general public over on Flickr. We wanted to poke fun, but… it’s sensational…
Google launches ad-funded music search service in China, to battle local piracy
Google is trying to succeed where all have failed, by stemming the impact of piracy in China.
Its latest venture, an ad-funded music search service, hopes to go some way toward making a bit of money out of flogging music in China, a country where it’s believed 99% of all music distributed has been obtained illegally somewhere along the line.
Google’s music search service will lets users browse “tens of thousands” of songs…
Moderately important men say Radiohead's "Pay what you want" gimmick for In Rainbows was successful.
A shocking new report out today has sent shock waves through the music industry after the revelation that giving away stuff for free is actually really popular.
Will Page, an economist for the MCPS-PRS alliance (perhaps the world’s longest acronym) and Eric Garland (boss of Big Champaign – a company who apparently do “online media measurement”) have taken a look at Radiohead’s In Rainbows album that they released last year with the gimmick of “pay what you want to pay”, and have come to the conclusion that it was actually a pretty good idea…
THE MAN orders boy to hand his Narnia domain name over to the relevant copyright holders
Ahh, it’s always nice to hear about a young person having their dreams crushed and getting baptised into the adult world of misery! Especially on a Friday! We’ll be laughing all weekend.
Today’s innocence-loser is 11-year-old Comrie Saville-Smith, a boy who likes the CS Lewis world of Narnia quite a bit. So much so, in fact, that his dad bought him the domain name Narnia.mobi as a birthday present…
Toilet clogs, tooth pain, athlete's foot and lung cancer – Google Knol launches today
Good lord, Google has finally done something massively, terribly, horribly and publicly WRONG and BAD – thrust Google Knol upon an uncaring world.
The worthy and serious supposed competitor to Wikipedia, which features by-lined articles so you can apparently “trust” the writer more, has now gone public. And it’s great news – if you really need a guide to unblocking toilets in a hurry.
Or if you fancy reading about…
Man awarded £22,000 over fake Facebook profile "libel"
Mathew Firsht has won a sensational and trend-setting court case today, against a friend who set up a fake Facebook profile with loads of personal details – and sex-based lies – about Mathew’s life.
The former friend, cameraman Grant Raphael, also set up a Facebook group called “Has Mathew Firsht lied to you?” – a group which stayed online for 16 days…
UK ISPs and the music industry agree to act on piracy – strongly-worded letters on the way
The extermination plans have been finalised – six of the UK’s largest ISPs have agreed to crack down on music piracy by, er, sending out some letters.
The deal, partially negotiated by the government, will see “hundreds of thousands of letters” sent by ISPs to their users who are currently sharing a massive folder of music with who ever else happens to be using the internet at the same time.
BT, Virgin, Orange, Tiscali, BSkyB and Carphone Warehouse have signed up to the stern-letter-sending programme, something that Virgin’s already…
The BBC gets in on the map mash-up scene with its guide to Beijing's Olympic venues
If you're already getting a bit excited about watching the world's finest athletes wheezing their way through the Beijing smog, our lovely BBC has the perfect internet accompaniment for you. The Interactive Map has icons representing each Olympic venue hovering…
Facebook app Cityware using Bluetooth to spy on people without their consent
Research firm Cityware has hooked up thousands of Bluetooth scanners around the world and is using these to monitor how people move around the place – and dumping the data on Facebook.
The only problem is no one asked for the permission of some of the the scanees – so anyone with their phone’s Bluetooth powers enabled risks having their movements tracked by the freely-available Cityware…
Oyster card hacked – details being published in October. Free travel for all!
The Oyster system could go into meltdown this October, after a court ruling found it’s OK for details of its security failures to be made public.
NXP, the company behind the Oyster technology, had applied for an injunction against a group of Dutch technology experts, who worked out how to hack Oyster cards back in June. The judge has now overturned this injunction, so the Dutch hacking masters (Prof Bart Jacobs and his team…
