On Opting Out of Copyright
The EU AI Act and emerging practice flip copyright’s default opt-in regime to an opt-out one. What effects is this likely to have on the balance of power between rights holders and reuse?| Mark Nottingham
Is AI a useful option for policymakers who want to evaluate open standards? Let's take a look.| mark nottingham
What can Apple do in the face of a UK order to weaken encryption worldwide? Decentralize iCloud, to start.| mark nottingham
A new book explores an intriguing idea: that there are core processes in some platforms that naturally tilt the table towards being implemented in a single company.| mark nottingham
The EU AI Act and emerging practice flip copyright’s default opt-in regime to an opt-out one. What effects is this likely to have on the balance of power between rights holders and reuse?| Mark Nottingham
A big change in how the Internet is defined - and who defines it - is underway.| Mark Nottingham
RFC 9518: Centralization, Decentralization, and Internet Standards has been published after more than two years of review, discussion, and revision.| Mark Nottingham
Web feeds could be so much more if we put some effort into them. This post explores some ideas of how to start.| Mark Nottingham
It's often assumed that standards work is inherently competitive. This post examines why Internet standards are often more collaborative than competitive, and outlines some implications of this approach.| Mark Nottingham
The phrase 'Open Standards' is widely used but not well-understood. Let's take a look at what openness in standards is, with a focus on whether and how it helps to legitimise the design and maintenance of the Internet.| Mark Nottingham
It’s common for voluntary technical standards developing organisations (SDOs such as the IETF and W3C) to make decisions by consensus, rather than (for example) voting. This post explores why we use consensus, what it is, how it works in Internet standards and when its use can become problematic.| Mark Nottingham
Mandated interoperability is often highlighted as a way to improve competition on the Internet. However, most of the interoperability we see there today was established voluntarily: mandating it is relatively uncharted territory, with many potential pitfalls.| Mark Nottingham
Creating a Large Language Model (LLM) requires a lot of content – as implied by the name, LLMs need voluminous input data to be able to function well. Much of that content comes from the Internet, and early models have been seeded by crawling the whole Web.| Mark Nottingham
No one requires tech companies or open source projects to use most Internet standards, and no one requires people to use them either. This post explains why the voluntary nature of its standards are critical to the Internet's health.| Mark Nottingham
It’s a common spy thriller trope. There’s a special key that can unlock something critical – business records, bank vaults, government secrets, nuclear weapons, maybe all of the above, worldwide.| Mark Nottingham
RFC7540 has been out for about a month, so it seems like a good time for a snapshot of where HTTP/2 implementation is at.| Mark Nottingham
Most of the complexity and nuance of the Web is stuffed into browser engines. Even though they’re a huge burden to develop and maintain, the world is lucky enough to have three major ones, and they’re all Open Source.| Mark Nottingham
