Tuesday, August 19, 2008

And meanwhile...

.. while Pangloss continues its summer hiatus and if you want some light reading, you might be interested to know that many of my recent and even not so recent articles are now available in pre-print form on SSRN .

Many thanks to Nadine Ericksson-Smith for doing the admin involved in getting these there!

Happy soggy summer to all, ho ho ho..

Also to whet your appetite for the autumn, upcoming places to see Pangloss.. (gosh , it's just like the Edinburgh Fringe comedy tours!)

Scottish SCL Meeting, September 3rd - Edinburgh, Faculty of Advocates, Mackenzie Building (behind Fringe Office) High Street, Edinburgh - Facebook and the Law: CyberStalking Paradise 2.0?

SCL 3rd Annual Policy Forum 2008 : Legislating for Web 2.0 – Preparing for the Communications Act? 22 & 23 September 2008 , London

GikIII 24th-25 September, Oxford: Data Protection 2.0: This Time It's Personal (Data?)

Practical Law Seminar, 30 September, London : Social Networking, privacy and Other Legal Issues

QMIPRI-SIIA Conference: Digital Publics - 2 October, London

Tel Aviv University, Israel, invited lecture - December 4th

Monday, August 11, 2008

Important Contact News and SCRIPT-Ed conference

Pangloss has temporarily moved back to lovely Auld Reekie pending resettlement at her new job as Professor of Internet Law at Sheffield University. I am currently looking for nice rented accommodation with garden for homeless cyberprof and two well (honest :-) behaved kitties should you know any useful slum landlords in the area (or, indeed, be one) ..

IMPORTANT: From September 1 2008 l.edwards@soton.ac.uk will CEASE TO OPERATE. (Rather unlike,it has to be said, lovely ed.ac.uk which two years on is still faithfully forwarding the odd email..)

My new email is lilian.edwards@sheffield.ac.uk . You can start using this as of now but it will become vital after September 1. Please note the odd spelling of my first name :)

I am also stepping down as Director of ILAWS. I remain Associate Director of SCRIPT/the AHRC Centre for Intellectual property and Technology at Edinburgh.

Talking of which , one of my happiest jobs in that capacity is to still act as a Managing Editor of SCRIPT-ed, the online journal of the AHRC Centre, whose remit is very broadly the interaction between law and technology. The most recent issue (Vol 5 No 1) includes papers on topics as varied as trade mark dilution, user attitudes to P2P services and the ethical issues surrounding 'bionic' athletes. We are always interested in prospective contributions for SCRIPTed, and we are also keen to hear from suitably-qualified referees to help peer-review submissions. One of the key strengths of SCRIPT-ed I think is that in a field as dynamic as IT and IP law we can usually guarantee swift publication, while retaining the rigour of peer-review.

Not content with running a journal, the managing committee are now organising the SCRIPTed Conference, to take place at the University of Edinburgh from 29-31 March 2009. Taking as its theme 'the Governance of New Technologies', it will focus on evolving and emerging technologies and new-technology-driven practices and their impact on the overlapping fields of healthcare, information technology and intellectual property. The Call for Papers is open until 15 November, whilst an outline programme is available. Dan Hunter is one of the special guests whom Panglos herself wil be very eager to meet again - Dan is one of the foremost experts in both the US and Australia on virtual worlds and the law.

So, why not make a date in your diaries for what promises to be a fascinating and enjoyable three days in the beautiful city of Edinburgh?





Saturday, August 09, 2008

Ongoing Trends in Open Source Statistics


I was going to send this to my esteemed colleague Technollama and then I thought, no, everyone deserves to see this!!

I don't know whether this says more about the development of open source, the obesity epidemic, or both!!
(Via Andrew Ducker.)

Tuesday, August 05, 2008

And Another Depressing Copyright Post..

Bill Thompson has an excellent summing up ofthe state of play as UK ISPs like Virgin move towards helping the music industry "re-educate" its users and resist the move to 21st century business models.

"We need a space for experimentation, where we can test the limits of old laws and explore how they might be altered in future, but once ISPs decide that they are no longer neutral carriers of bits and choose to ally themselves with the content industry then we lose another sliver of freedom.

At the moment it's hard to use BitTorrent anonymously, although since the service itself is entirely legal and legitimate there should be no need to do so.

The moves by Virgin and other ISPs will simply spur the development of new ways of sharing files, just as the clampdown on Napster lead directly to the development of the current generation of peer to peer networks.

Virgin has just given its thousands of users an incentive to explore these new tools in order to confuse their administrators."

The Stae of Modern Copyright..

Via many people, a quote from William Patry on why he's closing his blog:

"Copyright law has abandoned its reason for being: to encourage learning and the creation of new works. Instead, its principal functions now are to preserve existing failed business models, to suppress new business models and technologies, and to obtain, if possible, enormous windfall profits from activity that not only causes no harm, but which is beneficial to copyright owners. Like Humpty Dumpty,the copyright law we used to know can never be put back together again:multilateral and trade agreements have ensured that, and quite deliberately."