From the monthly archives: May 2009

Filesharing Costs: Dubious Figures Making the Rounds Again

By Rufus Pollock On May 29, 2009 · 1 Comment

The BBC ran a story yesterday headlined “Seven million ‘use illegal files’”. Its bolded first paragraph stated:

Around seven million people in the UK are involved in illegal downloads, costing the economy tens of billions of pounds, government advisers say. [emphasis added]

7 million people involved in unauthorised file-sharing is possible, but costs of [...]

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Visualizing Technology Flows Over Time (I)

By Rufus Pollock On May 22, 2009 · Leave a Comment

In my original post on Visualizing Technology Flows from Patent Data I just presented static information — flows for a single year. As I said there:

The next step is to watch how these flows, and the relationships implied by them, have evolved over time. We can do this by plotting the same graph [...]

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Discounting and Self-Control

By Rufus Pollock On May 19, 2009 · Leave a Comment

I’m posting up an essay on “Discounting and Self-Control” (pdf). The essay, which I haven’t really touched for over a year, is still in its early stages but having lacked the time to do much on it over the last year, and going on the motto of “release early, release often”, I’m posting it [...]

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Empirical Assessment of Impact of DRM on Exceptions and Limitations by Patricia Akester

By Rufus Pollock On May 7, 2009 · Leave a Comment

Patricia Akester, a colleague of mine in the Centre for Intellectual Property and Information Law has just published the results of her recent research in the form of a 208 page report entitled Technological accommodation of conflicts between freedom of expression and DRM: the first empirical assessment.

There has been a lot of [...]

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