Internet law
The web at 25 and a digital bill of rights
Much has been made about the fact that the web is 25 years old this month. Certainly, it was 25 years ago that Tim Berners Lee, working at CERN, “invented” the web. But the much more significant date was April 1993 when he (and CERN) gifted the web to us. It is unthinkable that the […]
RSS – who profits?
In response to my last post, Susan Cartier Liebel raises the question of the legalities of streaming others’ feeds without permission. She points to her post Shouldn’t You Have To Ask Permission If You Want To Take A Blog’s Feed For Your Profit? which has attracted considerable comment. Of course your content is your copyright […]
Facing the future
Last Friday/Saturday I attended the SCL Web 2.0 conference in Oxford where speakers and panellists included technology lawyers from large practices, lawyers from Web 2.0 companies, a venture capitalist, an academic and our deputy from the ICO. The majority of the delegates were from large law firms – there to learn what this Web 2.0 […]
RSS and the law
Kevin O’Keefe recently posted a thought-provoking piece on the Law on using others’ RSS feeds, garnered from an article at EContent: RSS: Use, Lose, or Abuse?. The strict position (in US law, but little different here), as stated by Peter Strand, partner of the US law firm Holland & Knight, is that: In general, the […]
Understanding network neutrality
A lot of misinformation flows in the current debate raging on network neutrality. It is this says Tim Berners-Lee (and he should know): If I pay to connect to the Net with a certain quality of service, and you pay to connect with that or greater quality of service, then we can communicate at that […]
Links and law
Tim Berners-Lee, father of the web, has published his first blog post as a member of the Decentralized Information Group (DIG) blog. DIG explores technical, institutional, and public policy questions necessary to advance the development of global, decentralized information environments. He points to his Design Issues writings as the home of his previous “blog”. It […]
New war on spam
Internet service providers (ISPs) have declared war on e-commerce web sites run by spammers in a new ‘get tough’ policy on spam. Shutting down these web sites is intended to remove the financial incentive to send spam. The decision to extend the battle against spam onto web sites was taken by ISPs belonging to the […]
Discrimination: DRC web accessibility report
The Disability Rights Commission (DRC) last year launched a formal investigation into the accessibility of websites in the UK and has now published its findings: ‘The Web: Access and Inclusion for Disabled People’. Accessibility is a legal requirement under the Disability Discrimination Act 1995, but the report concludes that many public websites are impossible for […]
