Congratulations, you've just nominated someone, pretty much at random, to be the heir to the Shakespeare copyrights, and therefore owner of most of the planet's wealth.

Untransferrable copyrights look like a great idea at first glance, but unless you allow authors to grant some kind of exclusivity to a publisher, then publishers can't do any useful kind of deal with authors. If you do allow this, then authors and publishers will draw up an agreement to hand over all the functional bits of copyright that acts in every practical way like a copyright transfer.

As for copyright expiry on death, I'm not convinced handing rap label owners a massive financial incentive to kill each other's artists would be a wise move!

A blanket expiration of IP after five years would have a problem dealing with trade secrets. Do you give everyone the right to stroll into Coke and KFC's corporate HQs and demand their secret recipies? If so, how do you deal with them replying 'nope, we changed it 4 years ago' without making a lot of lawyers very, very rich?

So you're saying that Microsoft would have an incentive to improve their software more frequently. Is there a downside?

I think the consequence of the thought experiment would be that we'd start attaching equivalent value to official endorsements. While anyone could make a Harry Potter film, JK Rowling would still be able to sell the right to call just one of them the official one, and use her name in the title, the advertising, etc. I'm not convinced that this would be a bad thing. Studios would be kept on their toes by competitors, and authors would actually have some weight to throw around when it matters, rather than when they sold a transferrable right many years ago. Would the world be a better place if Alan Moore could look at the rushes of 'League of Extraordinary Gentlemen' and instead of just taking his name off it and nobody caring much, he could say 'do it properly or I'll find a cool indy filmmaker and give him the endorsement instead'?

JK Rowling has so much money she never needs to work again for as long as she lives. I'm sure she'd be pissed at a 5 year copyright duration, but she would also have an incentive to write more books that is lacking at the moment.

This is one of the big problems with justifying copyright law as an incentive, to do so implies it that more money is always an incentive, and that's simply not true.

Consider the ownership of the Beatles songs, which has presumably passed to Michael Jackson's children. Copyright law assumes that if we give enough money to these kids, it will be sufficient incentive for Lennon and McCartney to start writing together again.

Countries are allowed to leave treaty agreements. Once we've finally convinced the political world that tightening the ratchet on IP law is a vote loser, and serving up the next alphabet soup variant of SOPA PIPA ACTA etc. won't work, the next logical step is rolling back some of the worst and most outdated treaties, and the world won't fall apart when we do this.

The US stayed outside the Berne Convention for over 100 years, and there are lots of countries that haven't signed. Once jobs, data and investment start flowing towards lax IP regimes, we'll see countries either go back to a minimal enforcement approach (one of the factors responsible for China's economic success) or for the ones where law enforcement isn't selective, we'll see them leaving Berne.

In a probably vain attempt to stop this being misquoted, please permit me to start by shouting: I DO NOT THINK TRADEMARKS SHOULD EXPIRE unless the company that holds them closes down without selling them on, or the person that owns them dies with no heirs.

Thank you.

Right, on to actually talking about the idea... Trademark law is there to protect the manufacturer, not the purchaser. If we did abolish trademarks WHICH WE SHOULDN'T then consumer protection law would still do pretty much the same thing. Apple couldn't stop you from slapping their logo on something, but if anyone (including Apple) bought it, they could still sue you for misleading them about who made it. We'd be right back to square one.

1) You're a kid. You've spend most of your life trying to get a high score on computer games. Facebook is fun, interactive, and on a computer, so your instincts are telling you to do well at it and get a high score. It's hard *not* to look at the friends count as a 'score', measuring how good you are at Facebook.

2) Ever been an unpopular kid in school? Social hierarchies mean a lot to kids, and Facebook makes 'being the unpopular kid' a measurable statistic. Add a few more people and you are measurably, provably, not the unpopular kid.

Facebook's exponential growth certainly isn't due to good design, strong privacy or those oh, so enjoyable farmville requests, it's down the the intense pressure on all students to have an above average number of friends.

Dr. Benoît B. Mandelbrot. The B. stands for 'Benoît B. Mandelbrot'

The reason we only lose 6-7% is because we don't build long powerlines, we simply put up with things being built in non-optimal places, and drop projects that have insufficient local demand.

If that constraint goes, we can stop having to put powerplants right next to steelworks and nuclear plants anywhere near population centres, and solar energy/windfarms/hydroelectrics become vastly more competitive, because it no longer matters that the Gobi Desert, the Himalayas and the bottom of Victoria Falls don't have lots of local industrial demand.

It doesn't. The article is horribly misleading about the actual tunnel. The project won't build a 73 mile tunnel at all, it will just join up two existing rail lines that go overground with a new section of tunnel. The total length of the joined lines will be 73 miles, but very little of it will actually be underground.

I'd love to be able to tell you exactly why that would (or wouldn't work), but I can't because of the very unusual way the Digital Economy Act is supposed to work. The bill was passed in the dying hours of the last government, without proper debate. There was no time for it to be properly drafted and for the quirks and loopholes to even be thought about, let alone debated, debugged, and finalised. All of that essential the detail was sidestepped by a promise that it would all be in "the code", a document written by Ofcom (the independent regulator and competition authority for the UK communications industries).

Ofcom have been put in a very difficult position by this, suddenly they have been bound by parliament to step well outside their role as regulators and become unelected legislators. To their credit, they have sidestepped the temptation to power-grab, that have consulted widely, they have told the government they need more time, and they have even taken on board a lot of Pirate Party feedback that warns of absurd situations like the one you suggest. What they haven't yet done is actually finish writing "the code", so nobody really knows precisely how the DEAct will actually do what it is supposed to do, at this stage, which makes it quite difficult to fight. The ISP costs split which sparked off this appeal we're (theroetically) discussing in this story is one of the few bits that's actually in the bill, which is why it's getting all the attention.

Interestingly, it's possible that Ofcom will turn round to the government and say 'You're trying to implement collective punishments here, and that's not just wrong, or even very wrong, it's actually so spectacularly wrong that it's specifically mentioned as a no-no in the Geneva Convention on War Crimes, which means we can't actually write you a code that would stand up to the and degree of judicial scrutiny.'

Having tried a lot of different approaches to writing press releases, we've found that what works best for us in the UK is to issue short press releases like this one within moments of news breaking, and to make one short point, that is sensible, moderate, and very difficult to argue with.

This particular release might not go down so well with the slashdot crowd, but it achieved our objective of getting on to the front page of the BBC news site ( see http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-17270817 ) with a strong, well argued message that doesn't paint us as alarmist, aggressive, or irrational. We did go on to say "Threats to chuck entire households off the web will be bad for the economy, bad for society - and for us as a creative nation too.", (just as you suggest) but we're always at the mercy of editors who, as I think this proves, often cut out most of what we actually say.

At this early stage in the Party's development, getting press coverage is tough, especially because we're don't fit the preconceptions the press have of loony people with eye patches. This particular story gave us a big headache, the verdict was actually on a fairly small portion of the act that referred to ISP costs, and the question of parts of the Act that should have been notified to the European Commission under the Technical Standards Directive and weren't possibly rendering them unenforceable. The full verdict was likely to be several hundred paragraphs of dense legalese, and crucially, there is usually a delay of several hours between the press reporting the yes/no verdict and any of the court's reasoning being available for us to read.

We've found that waiting for the reasoning means we can put out strong, detailed press releases with point-by-point demolitions of our opponents messages... that don't get picked up on by the press. Simlarly, rants full of venom and references to chilling effects don't go down very well either, partly because the UK doesn't have the same constitutional devotion to free speech that the US does, and therefore 'chilling effect? so what' is usually the public's attitude, but mostly because nobody quotes them except for the Register.

Ideally, I'd love to come up with something like HeadOfLegal's analysis (see http://www.headoflegal.com/2012/03/06/bt-talktalk-v-business-secretary/ ) and get it quoted, but realistically, no mainstream journalist is going to read, digest, summarise and quote something like that in the few minutes they have to get the story online. Print journalism is a different matter, as the deadlines are longer, but we've found that if the BBC website quotes us, then we get interview requests where we can go into more detail.

On this particular story, an appeal on a small part of the bill, followups were actually not that likely if the verdict went against the ISPs. There isn't really much in the verdict that's actually interesting to the general public to be honest. We knew that the press coverage would therefore be vague (hence the understandable impression you got that 'we lost the case' because the damage to the public wasn't highlighted, when it was actually two piracy-neutral ISPs that lost a cost-splitting debate over an obscure point of EC procedure), and that on past form the quotes from the copyright lobbyists would be emotional rants with little basis in reality. If you look at the BBC story from the point of view of a neutral observer, we got a much bigger quote than the pro-copyright lobby did, and we come across as more rational and less scare-mongering. For a bunch of unpaid amateurs taking on the might of the copyright lobby, I think we actually did pretty well this time.

"Patents give the proverbial "little guy" the opportunity to compete..."

That's all very well in theory, but in practice the little guy is faced with literally millions of existing patents, all of which impact his business exactly like laws do, but are deliberately so vaguely worded that it's would require a million dollar multi-year lawsuit to get to the bottom of exactly what they do and don't cover.

The little guy doesn't just have no chance of competing (because you could throw a thousand lawyers at the problem of working out if what the little guy is doing is already covered by patents and not get a definitive answer), but he stands a very good chance of being forced by a big guy to licence an existing patent for something incredibly vague and only semi-relevant because the little guy can't risk his business, his house and several years of his life on a legal battle that might hinge on an incomprehensible technicality and not go his way.

Patenting things is, fundamentally, an anti-competitive business practice. If the idea was really to protect the little guy, why are corporations in a monopoly position not prevented from patenting by the law that prevents monopolies from engaging in anti-competitive business practices?