100 posts
Eurobubble: blink at your own risk!
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The much anticipated web series 'Eurobubble' - well let's say much anticipated here in Brussels - has finally put out its first episodes. We have three so far. And that is exactly 10 min and 17 seconds of video in total! I am poi...
UK cyber strategy held back by skills shortage
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The need for cyber security experts in the UK far exceeds the pool of qualified personnel – so the government needs to tempt people into the career path at an early age, writes Ross Parsell...
Cameron's poker face?
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No, Europe hasn't collectively turned against Cameron (which you would think from reading headlines like these - seriously?). Though several politicians from around Europe haven't exactly come out celebrating following Cameron's speech - which doesn'...
The EU’s media deficit
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The most depressing result from my analysis of media coverage of EU reform is the complete absence of substance and detail in the arguments presented. Politicians and commentators alike seem Continue reading →...
13 Social Media Marketing Trends For 2013
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How will social media marketing evolve in 2013? What about the platforms themselves? See the infographics.
How social media can make history
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Watch video, where Clay Shirky shows how Facebook, Twitter and TXTs help citizens in repressive regimes to report on real news, bypassing censors (however briefly). The end of top-down control of news is changing the nature of politics.
Study of Members of the Folketing on Twitter – Danish politics has a long way to go
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Following my post about European Commissioners on Twitter, and suggestions to get Danish Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt onto the network, I thought I would next do a brief study of...
If Helle Thorning-Schmidt is to join Twitter, this is how to do it
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TechCrunch this week highlighted that 75% of the world’s heads of state are now on Twitter. While there’s some grounds to quibble about the definition of a head of state,...
LEVESON, BLAIR, EU: a tale of media untruths
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Lawrence Brewer Wednesday, 05 December 2012 The Leveson Inquiry report published last week includes a list of how the British Press misleads the public with regard to the EU and other non-existent bans – like...
Kaan Alper yazdı, bir bakın derim: “.tc alanadı ve Türkiye ilişkisi”
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“.tc alanadı ve Türkiye ilişkisi” İnternet dünyada yaygın olarak kullanılmaya başladığından beri alanadları (domain) varlığını sürdürmektedir. Son zamanlarda ülkemizde yaygın olarak konuşulmaya başlayan “.tc” uzantısın...
Show your support for European fast broadband!
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| Number of views :475You’re probably aware of our targets on broadband. To get every European with basic broadband coverage by 2013; and, by 2020, fast coverage (30 Megabits+) for all, with 50% of households having subscriptions at 100 Megabit...
Mail article on EU banning books dismissed as 'nonsense'
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The Mail claims the EU is now looking to ban...the Famous Five:James Chapman explains:Books which portray ‘traditional’ images of mothers caring for their children or fathers going out to work could be barred from schools under proposals from Bru...
The Open Data Challenge – organising Europe’s biggest open data competition
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Over a year on from the Open Data Challenge many people still ask us about how we organised the competition. Hence we’ve put together a brief slide deck which takes a brief look behind the scenes as to how we organised it. It includes some advi...
Evidence, evidence based policy and IP
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What constitutes evidence for copyright policy? Such is the title of the upcoming event at Bournemouth University as part of the ESRC Festival of Social Science. While evidence in IP is a already a challenge, let's take a look a further look at...
Is there a buzz about newspapers anymore?
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Is The Sun still a British icon? Does The Times still ring bells? In a digital age, our most famous newspaper brands are being overtaken by new media upstarts such as Google, Apple and Samsung, according to a fascinating new study by Harris Interacti...
Tectonic shift: why the “new wave” of digital culture is no ripple
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When a technology proves disruptive and ubiquitous enough to power networks that attract 2.2 billion users – one third of the world’s population – daily, is it reasonable to pretend that nothing is happening and to support status quo? A var...
European and global ICT standards and interoperability
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After the blog posts about a strategic vision for European standards and their importance ”everywhere”, plus one entry in Finnish about standards in the single market for services and one article in Swedish about creating new standards faster, we...
Wrongly excluded, rightly compensated: is "but for" the best solution?
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Professors can makeexcellent Kats ... The IPKat is always thrilled to hear from former members of his blogging team, so it was with great excitement that he opened today's unexpected and unsolicited email from Professor Norman V. Siebrasse, one of t...
The EU Commission Tries To Silence Data Retention Critic
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Dr. Patrick Breyer is the group leader for the Pirate Party in the regional parliament of Schleswig-Holstein. He is also a juris doctor, who wrote his thesis on the subject of data retention, and one of Germany’s leading experts on the subject.
I’m A Celebrity: Broadcasting laws will block Dorries’ abortion rants
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Ofcom rules will almost certainly foil Nadine Dorries’ plan to use I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here as a platform to promote her views on abortion. The Mid-Bedfordshire MP had claimed that the show will be a better forum than parliament to air...
Media freedom at home and abroad
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| Number of views :504I’m shortly off to Baku for the Internet Governance Forum. Azerbaijan is a country with serious issues of media freedom – where journalists regularly face arrest or imprisonment, and the suppression of very basic human...
Fanning the flame of conspiracy theories
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THE editor-in-chief of Poland's leading conservative newspaper, Rzeczpospolita, has left his job after publishing an inaccurate report that explosives were found in the remains of the plane that crashed and killed Polish president Lech Kaczynski...
Still bitter: the lingering taste of Chocosuisse
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Ready for a litigationmeltdown ... "Still feeling the pain!" was the exclamation of much-respected IP litigator Tony Willoughby when he spotted the reference in yesterday's katpost, "Culture clash: Greek yoghurt keeps out Americans, for now" to the...
Digitisation and Online Display of Orphan Works
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Copyrighted works whose rightsholders are not known or cannot be located or contacted in order to obtain copyright permissions are called orphan works. Numerous European cultural institutions hold in their collections orphan works with significant e...
Remember Remember the Rules of Copyright Protection: The Tobermory Cat
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The cat at the heart of this post was a ginger feline that lived on the Main Street of Tobermory, capital of the Isle of Mull in the Scottish Inner Hebrides. It was a footloose fancy-free mascot that belonged to no one and everyone [there is no such...
If you are a junior IP lawyer you must do this....
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The AmeriKat has been letting down her fellow young IP lawyers for too many years. Having been an member of IPSoc, the society for junior IP practitioners, since its inception many years ago, until last Friday she had managed to attend only one of th...
Monday miscellany
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Who says you can't make money out of copyright? Authors, composers and publishers may all be feeling the pinch, but at least you can get a salary for doing some useful copyright research. There's a neat little opportunity going at the University...
The Color Purple: Nestlé v Cadbury
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You don't want to see the next photo of the AmeriKat after eating some chocolate.... Following an unfortunate case of chocolate bar-related salmonella poisoning several years ago, the AmeriKat has never been able to view chocolate in the...
Learning from Obama: Digital Tools in Political Campaigns
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Last week saw a veritable festival of events here at Fleishman-Hillard Brussels. We held a discussion on climate change and energy with NGOs on Wednesday as well as a talk from our very own DC colleague Bill Black on how the Presidential candidates...
Archiving web content
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Number of View: 16This blog post is part of a series on online content strategies developed in cooperation between the Europa.eu web team and web consultant Sue Davis. We will look at key resources, the relationship between content strategy and other...
A million thanks to our readers
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A little while ago this afternoon a very special little something happened in the IPKat's life: we welcomed our one millionth visitor to our weblog this year. This is the first time this has happened. Our previous best calendar year for receiving v...
Cyberculture roundup: Success of Microsoft’s security team, EFF campaigns on Open Wireless and Transparency and more…
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Microsoft’s security team is killing it: Not one product on Kaspersky’s top 10 vulnerabilities list from The Next Web by Emil Protalinski EFF Launches New Transparency Project from EFF.org Updates by Jennifer Lynch IMAGiNE BitTorrent Piracy Group...
European Commission decides to add another 120 MHz for 4g
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"The European Commission has today decided to add another 120 MHz to the radio spectrum portfolio for 4G technologies, such as LTE (Long Term Evolution), around the 2 GHz band. This band is currently solely used for UMTS (Universal Mobile Telecomm...
Manipulating online search results
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Last week the European Consumer Organisation BEUC sent a letter to the Vice President of the European Commission, Joaquín Almunia, concerning the European investigation in the antitrust market practices of Google. The concern is that Google abuses i...
Culture clash: Greek yoghurt keeps out Americans, for now
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The trouble with extempore judgments is that, like autumn leaves dancing in the breeze, they leave few traces behind them. Last week's decision of Mr Justice Briggs in Fage UK Ltd and another v Chobani UK Ltd and another, in the Chancery Divisi...
FSN Reporters Covering Election 2012 Across US
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FSN reporters are fanning out across the US to cover the 2012 election. Our correspondents will be at the following locations around election day and their updates will be seen and heard on news networks worldwide. You can also follow their updates o...
Supporting bottom-up, multi-stakeholder Internet governance
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The Internet has been built from the bottom up. From its origins as a US Government research project, private business, public authorities, civil society, academia and 2.3 billion users have built it over the past three decades into a global informat...
Sky falls on big individuals, but not on small ones
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Sky: licensed to sue ... You just can't keep Sky out of court, it seems. Only last Friday the IPKat was reporting on the company's famous victory against Starbucks in the Speedy Case of the Figurative Figleaf (here), not long after the Court o...
Extended book review: “La théorie de l’information” by Aurélien Bellanger
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I first stumbled over “La théorie de l’information” by Aurélien Bellanger – published this summer – in a review by Le Soir about a month ago. It was a sunny Saturday morning, a rare occasion here in Brussels, and I was...
An idea for a sustainable approach against projects like CleanIT or INDECT
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The Twittersphere has been humming with #CleanIT these days, after a few recent articles commented on current documents which the project and the German government released and the project group prepared for its Vienna meeting. CleanIT is a project t...
In case you hadn't noticed .. some fresh book notices
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Those IP publications just keep coming out, and here's a selection of some of the more recent titles to have come across the IPKat's path. Keeping Secrets: a Practical Introduction to Trade Secret Law and Strategy, is an attractively produce...
From defiance to compliance: Apple amends its notice
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The sign that says it all ... All good things must come to an end, and the saga of Apple's reluctance to post a public statement on its UK website to the effect that Samsung had not after all infringed its Community registered design looks as if it...
Rhythmic prose
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. Distinguished literary critic James Wood at a kitchen-table kit. I’m a big admirer of Wood’s literary criticism – any drummers around to say what they think of his drumming? Should he stick with the day job?
Media Flunky Update
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From his childish and degrading propaganda perch, Chris Matthews insists that Rush Limbaugh reminds him of the 'Guy From Deliverance', or more accurately the oaf who forcibly sodomized the character in Ned Beatty’s role in the film, itself a hatefu...
Crisis communication: learning from Hurricane Sandy
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When we left on a family holiday to New York a week ago, we had no idea that we would end up in the middle of the most serious crisis to hit the city since 9-11. Within a couple of … Continue reading →...
Skyfall: Bond re-Bourne and Oedipal
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. Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’ We are not now that strength which in old days Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are; One equal temper of heroic hearts, Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will To strive, to...
American elections roundup: PEW research on social media users on political news… Open Democracy series how other countries see American elections…
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Online Political Videos and Campaign 2012 from Pew Internet Rss Feed: Reports 55% of registered voters have watched political videos online this election season, and 52% have had others recommend political videos for them to watch online Explo...
Health minister is too sexy for his shirt (and the local newspaper)
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With flu season nearly upon us, health minister Dan Poulter used the opportunity to expose his hairy man quilt to the world. The Tory MP for Central Suffolk and North Ipswich posed for a snap yesterday as he was given the jab in parliament by Dr Geor...
In Effect Throughout the European Union: Samsung Galaxy Tab Does Not Infringe Apple Registered Design On Rectangle With Rounded Corners: High Court of England and Wales Orders Apple to Post Text On Its Website to Make That Clear
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For more than a year, we have been posting at LawPundit about the absurdity of the court injunctions issued against Samsung Galaxy Tab products in favor of Apple, and we can now report to have -- again -- been juridically right all along. This posti...
"Lift the figurative figleaf of distinctiveness", but not just NOW
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Starbucks' Communitytrade mark This morning Mr Justice Arnold gave judgment in Starbucks (UK) Ltd v British Sky Broadcasting Group Plc & Others [2012] EWHC 1842 (Ch). This was one of a pair of trade mark infringement and passing off actions brou...
The week on the EP Library’s blog: Something for everybody
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The week was slightly calmer in the European Parliament. Truly well-deserved after two busy plenary sessions last week. Thus, after a policy overflow we finally had a chance to balance our posts and prepare something for (almost) everybody. We promis...
Will There Ever Be Clear Law About the Terminated Sublicence?
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Why is it that there is sometimes such a stark disconnect between the centrality of an IP-related question and the seeming inability to provide a durable and reliable solution? I can think of no better example than the treatment of a sublicence in th...
Macedonia: Documenting Online Protest Against Censorship
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On October 9, nearly 200 Macedonian websites participated in a day-long blackout, protesting the censorship-inducing provisions [mk, en, sq] that the Government “sneaked in” within the Draft Law on Civic Liability for Defamation, presente...
