Andrew Orlowski

Collected Journalism

  • Manx P2P for €1 a year?

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    Andrew Orlowski

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    The Isle of Man’s e-commerce minister says he wants to legalise P2P music file sharing – taking just one Euro a year from broadband subscribers. Tim Craine told us today that such a scheme would be voluntary. The Manx government is hopeful that blanket P2P schemes would be rolled out in other countries – including…

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  • Why animals shouldn’t be able to sue you

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    Andrew Orlowski

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    Obama’s “regulation czar” Professor Cass Sunstein wants animals to be able to sue. Animals can’t reason or express themselves, naturally, so the litigation would be handled by human lawyers, acting as ventriloquists on behalf of the animal kingdom. Think Mister Ed the talking horse, crossed with Eliot Spitzer. “Any animals that are entitled to bring…

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  • Joi Ito’s Vanity Photo Album: Eicher

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    Andrew Orlowski

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    Powerful aristocrats throughout history have commissioned portraits by master artists to immortalize their achievements. Now amateur photographer and Creative Commons advocate Joi Ito is offering that immortality to bloggers, bureaucrats, coders, CEOs, and other obscure Free Software functionaries, in an expensive limited-edition “blook,” Freesouls. Ito muses, “Now the question is whether the demand for this…

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  • Google cranks up the Consensus Engine

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    Andrew Orlowski

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    Google this week admitted that its staff will pick and choose what appears in its search results. It’s a historic statement – and nobody has yet grasped its significance. Not so very long ago, Google disclaimed responsibility for its search results by explaining that these were chosen by a computer algorithm. The disclaimer lives on…

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  • Jim Griffin’s Choruss

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    Andrew Orlowski

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    The plan to provide US students with compulsory flat-fee music finally has a name, it emerged this week. Choruss LLC will provide participating universities with a replacement for their current subscription services such as Rhapsody, and has the backing of the the EFF and the tacit support of the RIAA. That alone indicates the magnitude…

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  • Junk science and booze tax – a study in spin

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    Andrew Orlowski

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    “Let’s find out what everybody is doing, and stop them doing it” – A P Herbert Putting the price of alcohol up to a minimum of 40p a unit would keep 41,000 people a year out of hospital, save the NHS £116m a year, and avoid 12,400 cases of unemployment, a report from Sheffield University…

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