Can You Outbid Microsoft For The Microsoft Name In Portugal?
Microsoft is reasonably protective of its name -- even to ridiculous levels at times. However, it surprised us to find out that a company other than the Redmond giant happens to have the trademark on...
View ArticleBlockbuster Blames 'Piracy' Rather Than Bad Strategy For Bankruptcy In Portugal
paperbag was the first of a whole bunch of you to send in the news of Blockbuster declaring bankruptcy in Portugal and claiming that it's all the fault of those darn kids and their downloading. Well,...
View ArticlePortuguese Politicians Want To Make Creative Commons Illegal
This is just insane. While we've talked in the past about how difficult it is to put your own work into the public domain by choice, apparently the Portuguese Socialist Party (which is currently in...
View ArticlePortuguese Artists Association Struggled To Get Even 100 Members On List In...
Few ideas display a sense of entitlement better than that of private copying levies. For they assume, by definition, that artists' representatives have a right to money from the public simply because...
View ArticlePortuguese Man Convicted On Criminal Charges For Sharing Three Songs
Nelson Cruz points us to the latest news of totally ridiculous and disproportionate punishments for file sharing. A young man in Portugal has been convicted on criminal charges for sharing 3 songs. He...
View ArticleBroadband In Crisis: Does The US Need Regulation To Force Meaningful...
Susan Crawford believes telecommunications in America are going through the biggest crisis ever, and this is just as bad as the banking crisis was. Monday, at the Freedom 2 Connect conference, the...
View ArticlePortugal: File Sharing For Personal Use Is Legal And IP Addresses Are Not People
In a move that should remind you of Spain's ruling that personal file-sharing was legal, before America's entertainment industry helpfully wrote the Spanish people a new law (wait...what!!?!?),...
View ArticleThe New Imperialism: Forcing Morality Shifts And Cultural Change Through...
As could probably be expected after its quick trip through the Congress, Panama's 510 Bill became law last Friday, granting its Copyright Office unprecedented power to pursue filesharers directly. But...
View ArticlePortuguese Government Capitulates On Copyright Levies, Despite Lack Of...
Back in February last year, Techdirt wrote about the rather pathetic attempts of the Portuguese Society of Authors (SPA) to drum up some support among its members for a new copyright levy on storage...
View ArticleIs Google Regretting Paying Off Belgian And French Newspapers Yet? Other...
For years now, we've talked about how various newspapers (and local governments) around the globe were arguing that Google News was somehow unfairly cheating them out of revenues (even as they sent a...
View ArticleBolivian President's Jet Rerouted On Suspicions Snowden Could Be On Board;...
The Snowden saga continues to deliver surprising twists and turns that may well have important geopolitical knock-on effects. The latest involves the President of Bolivia, Evo Morales, whose country...
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Portuguese 'Anti-Piracy' Site Blocking Used Against US Video Game Developer
One of the reasons why many people are opposed to various "site blocking" laws, is that inevitably such things get abused. And while the US successfully stopped SOPA's site blocking plan, plenty of...
View ArticlePortugal Pushes Law To Partially Ban DRM, Allow Circumvention
You might think that copyright on its own has enough problems. And yet DRM, originally designed to protect digital copyright material from unauthorized copying, has managed to make things much worse....
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Portugal Shows The Internet Why Net Neutrality Is Important
So if you've followed the debate over net neutrality for much of the last decade, you probably remember images like these, purporting to show what the internet might look like if we let broadband...
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