e-Book Equal Opportunity Firming Up

3 weeks ago the METISfiles reported on the ruling of the EU court on case C-174/15, which stated that the lending of an electronic book (e-book) may – under certain conditions – be treated in the same way as the lending of a traditional book. After Angela Ruiz Robles patented the idea of the electronic […] Read more »

It is Official: an E-book is a Book

Back in 2012 a study “E-Lending Public Libraries”, carried out on behalf of the Dutch Ministry of OCW (Education, Culture and Science), concluded that the existing lending right regime of the Dutch copyright act did not apply to e-books. Moreover the study also concluded that the current European law and regulation framework does not offer […] Read more »

Twitter’s Catch-22

Jack Dorsey’s first tweet was “just setting up my twttr”. We are talking March 21st 2006 and everybody is about to get their 140 characters of fame. Ten years later Twitter shows some impressive stats. There are some 310 million active users out of a total of 1.3 billion accounts sending 500 million tweets per […] Read more »

Rise of the Machines Part 5: The Final Frontier

In discussing the advance of robotics we tend to concentrate on machines that carry out a seemingly for ever increasing variety of manual tasks: think of flipping burgers, mowing the lawn, vacuum cleaning, dispensing food, medicines or manufacturing cars, boats, things etc. It is just the beginning. Industrial robots were the first to arrive and […] Read more »

Goodbye Cisco Branded Public Cloud, Hello Cisco Cloud Orchestration

Last week Cisco confirmed it’s InterCloud initiative (an attempt to compete with global public IaaS providers through interconnected partner clouds based on Cisco gear) is dead. Instead, Cisco is now concentrating on providing tools to manage hybrid clouds across cloud platforms built on any vendor’s gear, not just Cisco. Cisco is not the first infrastructure […] Read more »