While I'm glad to see someone finally NOT assuming 100% of pirates are potential customers, I don't see any justification for the 10% estimate they give here. Anyone have any sources? (Yes, I did RTFA!)

It could be that pirates have significantly more apps installed than anyone else - not an unreasonable possibility, as they won't be wondering if they *really* want to spend their money on, for example, fifteen almost identical clones of the same miniclip game.

I have seen similar things from India, claiming we have already made contact with extra-terrestrial aliens and have a fully working hyperdrive. I have no idea if they are serious-but-wrong like our news often is, or just parody like The Onion.

Given they have a trademark on Mickey Mouse (which is $-renewed eternal), I've never understood is why they care so much about the copyright on Steamboat Willie. Seriously, does anyone still watch the old black and white 'toons? Can they really make more money from republishing 70-year-old works than they spend on lobbying for yet another copyright extension?

This seems like a rather interesting concept. From the summary, it's probably illegal to implement due to medical privacy (and if not, it should be) but it's still interesting.

I only used VB in my Computing A-level because the teacher didn't know any other languages.

Unfortunately, it's a lot further off than you think. To accelerate to near the speed of light, regardless of the method, requires an enormous level of energy: for comparison, the space shuttle (68,000 kg) going at half the speed of light will have a kinetic energy of 9.455x10^20 joules. Again, for comparison, the total solar flux of the earth is about 1.75x10^17 watts, while total human power consumption is around 16x10^12 watts.

As a self-employed game developer, I own the copyright on all the stuff I sell. While I can recognise the need for a unified global copyright system (and unified global laws on sales and export/import tax), my sales model assumes I can sell any given product for 10 years, and I would be perfectly happy if copyright durations were reduced to that. That said, 10 years may well be optimistic, and I doubt I would have any problems if it was reduced to 5 years. Anyone in a who must make their money back quickly is in the same boat — the rest of the profits are just "keeping score".

From what I've seen, this treaty is not going to make the world a better place, it's going to make it worse, especially given how little most people know about IP law (patent != copyright != trademark != database right != industrial design right != geographical indication != trade secret). Short duration IP-monopoly-rights are non-issues for rapidly moving industries, and shorter durations make it easier to move faster.

They didn't get rid of it, they just changed it a lot. No unbalanced trading, and no control over what you win in a PvP fight (at least, that's what I understood of it when they explained it, but I never played it PvP in the first place).

That's great. Now convince the GeoEye Inc. (in charge of the SeaWiFS satellite) that they should give away all the high-resolution data for free — something that would be a direct consequence of there being no NDA. I'm sure that one of my previous employers, a marine research lab who had some involvement in the experiment to seed a carbon-absorbing algal bloom, would be thrilled with the opportunity to better model the rate of photosynthesis in the oceans, something which has direct consequences for both global warming and the fishing industry.

Oh, and while you're at it, convince Nature and Science to make all their journals available for free. That would make life much easier for my girlfriend.

Rough guess, data awaiting publication — If I understand correctly, that's the academic equivalent to keeping things secret until you patent them. The more raw data you have to yourselves, the more papers you can write about that data set before other academics get there, and that's what your promotion prospects are based on. If you stall on a FOIR, you get richer.

Nevermind that, we need a new government. I don't know how well-known Mandy is outside of the UK, but here... well, our satire shows were calling him a "Lord of Darkness" well before he became a Lord. By all rights he shouldn't have any power, he's lost his job several times already due to scandals, but seems to keep coming back.

Actually, the top ten Google searches of the last twelve months are:

1. facebook login
2. michael jackson
3. tuenti
4. facebook.com
5. facebook
6. youtube.com
7. face
8. yahoo mail
9. jogos
10. hotmail

Read that list again. That's right, most people don't know how to use the internet. They often Google for a domain in preference to just using the domain name. I don't know why, but I would suspect it may have something to do with default home pages and built-in search boxes next to the address bar. I can't [be bothered to] find longer list, but I remember a top-100 list of Google searches that included "Google.com" as one of those searches.

No commercial games? How about RuneScape, which has spent the last two years hovering around a million paying subscribers? Almost all of it (client and back end, but not hardware acceleration) is written in Java.

Cushion-stealers loose votes.