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: Europe

  • The CJEU goes bonkers again…?

    I am very much not a fan of the European Court of Justice and their whimsical way of making up laws which bear little relation to anything actually legislated. Last week they were at it again, “banning” open wifi hotspots because they make copyright infringement too easy. The court said that if users need a…

  • Who’d have thought China would be the defenders of copyright?

    When I was a nipper, trying to licence rights in various things, it was widely reckoned that it wasn’t worth trying to do business in China because they pretty much ignored copyright there. If they wanted to use something they just did, without asking first. Whether that was an unfair generalisation or not, the same…

  • The French fancy making life hard for Google, but are they kidding themselves?

    After the revelation that withdrawing from Google News seems to do little (if any) damage to publishers, Eric Schmidt has been in France trying to persuade the President not to allow news publishers to charge Google for including their content on Google News. Google says such a move would “threaten the very existence” of Google.…

  • Some “facts” from the myth-busting Europeans

    Here’s an odd press release put out by the European Commission. It contains what it says are ten “facts” about the media and content industries. Strangely, the release doesn’t back up any of these “facts” with “evidence”, “research” or “sources” (other than a tiny link to this page which in turn puffs a report which…