Dominic Young

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about

I’ve been around the news media and the internet since the beginning. I am interested in copyright as the basis for a thriving and balanced creative sector and society. Also interested in how the failure of copyright and other laws has led to terrible outcomes for the internet and everyone who uses it. I’ve done a lot of things around these issues.

Category: Copyright

  • Copyright and money: spot the difference

    By me in City AM… I’ll post it here later but in the meantime head over there

  • The Times and Google: what changed?

    Quite a lot has been written recently about The Times allowing Google to index some of its content. Some of the coverage has suggested this is a capitulation by The Times which had previously taken allowed very little indexing. I think they’re missing the point. The most interesting part of this story is that The…

  • The Guardian: a dating site which runs a newspaper on the side

    Digital first, redundancies second, profits last Just over a year ago The Guardian announced its new strategy to go “digital first” and move its efforts away from print towards the internet. My post about it at the time was titled, perhaps a little cynically, “throwing in the towel”. Their plan was to increase digital revenues…

  • Debating copyright changes? How inconvenient! Lets not bother.

    Wherever we stand on the issue, one thing we all know is that copyright law is subject to intense and extended debate. Some say it should be relaxed, some say it should be tightened up, but the law doesn’t actually change without a big debate. But what is this? “28ZA Power to add or remove…

  • A Sergey update: we misunderstood him

    Sergey Brin has posted a response to the Guardian’s interview with him. (He posted it on Google Plus which means I have been on Google Plus twice now! Watch out Facebook!) One clarification is particularly relevant to my previous comments: I became an entrepreneur during the 90’s, the boom time of what you might now…

  • The internet wants to be open, but some internets are more open than others

    Sergey Brin of Google had a discussion with The Guardian and talked about his vision for the future of the internet, alongside his concerns about threats to that vision. It’s an incredible insight into his (and Google’s) world view, which seems to be from a truly unique perspective. There is nobody else who sits astride…

  • It’s OK everyone, turns out everything’s fine

    I went to an interesting talk today. Mike Masnick, founder of Techdirt, was presenting his report “The Sky is Rising”. The report says, in short, that based on analysis of “the numbers”, the market and opportunity for content and entertainment is growing. “We’re living through an incredible period of abundance and opportunity, with more people…

  • Lets play a word game

    Consider this quote from The Guardian: A cross-party committee of MPs and peers has urged the government to consider introducing legislation that would force Google to censor its search results to block material that a court has found to be in breach of someone’s *********. Or these ones, from the parliamentary committee itself: Where an…

  • The German solution for newspaper revenues: two cheers, two boos

    The German government is planning to introduce a new right for newspaper publishers to charge ISPs, search engines and aggregators for use of their stuff. Two cheers, I suppose, because newspapers need all the help they can get when it comes to making money online. They have been pushing for this for a long time…

  • Back to BO.LT

    I wrote before about BO.LT, the startup which is seemingly built on a cynical exploitation of the worst aspects of the Digital Miilennium Copyright Act. BO.LT emailed me today to tell me about the exciting new features they will be launching soon – apparently it will make it easier to “discover interesting things” and “get…