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Category Archives: Intellectual Property

Around $1bn Invested in 2018 Into Legal Tech/NewLaw Companies

Artificial Lawyer: “Research by investment bank, Investec, has found that around $1bn was invested into legal tech and related NewLaw businesses in 2018 alone (see below), at least in the major markets. Moreover, capital is expected to keep flowing into this sector in 2019 with consolidation seen as a likely driver of further change. The… Continue Reading

Trends in the Information Technology sector

Brookings: “The U.S. leads the global landscape in technology innovation. The country’s competitive edge, according to the World Economic Forum’s 2018 Global Competitive Index, is due to its business dynamism, strong institutional pillars, financing mechanisms, and vibrant innovation ecosystem. Innovation is a trademark feature of American competitiveness and has powered its global dominance since the post-World-War… Continue Reading

The Beginning of the End for the ‘Big Deal’?

The Chronicle of Higher Education – Inspired by University of California’s decision to drop its “big deal” with Elsevier, university librarians are laying the foundation to follow suit. ” University librarians have long griped about the rising cost of their “big deals” with major publishers, but relatively few have followed through on threats to cancel… Continue Reading

Experts, authors and Guardian readers who illegally download books assess the damage

The Guardian – The UK Intellectual Property Office estimates that 17% of ebooks are consumed illegally. “…The UK government’s Intellectual Property Office estimates that 17% of ebooks are consumed illegally. Generally, pirates tend to be from better-off socioeconomic groups, and aged between 30 and 60. Many use social media to ask for tips when their… Continue Reading

Skyrocketing cost of textbooks prices – Four publishers control more than 80% of the market

Vox: “…A 2014 report by the Public Interest Research Groups [PIRG] found that two-thirds of surveyed students had skipped buying or renting some of their required course materials because they couldn’t afford them.Textbook publishers, for their part, have begun acknowledging that textbooks and other course materials have become so expensive that some students simply can’t… Continue Reading

OpenAI’s Recent Announcement: What Went Wrong, and How It Could Be Better

EFF: “Earlier this month, OpenAI revealed an impressive language model that can generate paragraphs of believable text. It declined to fully release their research “due to concerns about malicious applications of the technology.” OpenAI released a much smaller model and technical paper, but not the fully-trained model, training code, or full dataset, citing concerns that… Continue Reading

IBM X-Force Intelligence Threat Index 2019

“As the cyber threat landscape evolves, what we saw in 2018 is organisations across all industries are facing unmanageable levels of cyber threats brought on by the changing threat landscape, the risk of exposure and an ever-growing attack surface. The IBM X-Force Research team is a crack team of security professionals who run thousands of… Continue Reading

1 in 5 corporations say China has stolen their IP within the last year

CNBC CFO survey: Theft of intellectual property by Chinese companies is a major point of contention between the Trump administration and Chinese government. Just under one-third of CFOs of North America-based companies on the CNBC Global CFO Council say Chinese firms have stolen from them at some point during the past decade. U.S. trade policy… Continue Reading

Internet Archive’s ebook loans face UK copyright challenge

The Guardian UK – “The Society of Authors (SoA) is threatening legal action against the Internet Archive unless it stops what the writers’ body claimed is the unauthorised lending of books unlawfully scanned for its Open Library. Set up in San Francisco 1996 to preserve pages published on the internet, the Internet Archive also collects… Continue Reading

Huawei Is Blocked in U.S., But Its Chips Power Cameras Everywhere

Bloomberg [paywall – alternate free article via Gadget Hours]: “Pelco, a California-based security camera maker, set lofty sales targets last year for a model with sharper video resolution and other cutting-edge features. That was until Congress derailed its plans. In August, updated legislation barred the U.S. military and government from buying tech gear from firms… Continue Reading

Seven Out of Every Ten Open Vulnerabilities Belong to Just Three Vendors

Computer Business Review: “Seven out of every ten open vulnerabilities observed by customers belongs to just three vendors, Oracle, Microsoft and Adobe. These are the findings of cyber security enterprise Kenna Security in their new report Prioritization to Prediction, which explores how enterprises are dealing with open vulnerabilities. In their report Kenna found that Oracle… Continue Reading

For the First Time in More Than 20 Years, Copyrighted Works Will Enter the Public Domain

Smithsonian.com: “At midnight on New Year’s Eve, all works first published in the United States in 1923 will enter the public domain. It has been 21 years since the last mass expiration of copyright in the U.S. That deluge of works includes not just “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” which appeared first in… Continue Reading