2nd World Copyright Summit coming to DC this week
On Tuesday and Wednesday of this week, over 500 delegates from more than 55 countries are expected to come to DC for the 2nd World Copyright Summit. Yahoo!News reports that one big theme at the Summit will be the threat posed to artists by digital piracy. According to Kathy Garmezy, assistant executive director for government and international affairs of the Directors Guild of America, online piracy has become a bigger problem than counterfeiting. She said that delegates to the summit [...]
Time for EU citizens to take the European parliamentary elections seriously
European parliamentary elections are now a mere 5 days away, but a lot of EU citizens seem to be completely uninterested in voting. According to an FT.com article, “[t]urnout in France, as elsewhere, looks likely to continue its steady decline after dropping to 43 per cent in 2004.” The FT writes that many EU citizens now blame European integration for depressing wages and lowering social standards. This can be partly explained by the EU’s hard-to-define nature (it is neither a [...]
Re-Setting the Record Straight: ICT SME’s Are Not a Monolith
There seems to be some kind of misunderstanding. We have worked productively with PIN-SME on issues regarding ICT SMEs in the past, so we were very surprised to see the attack they launched against us today. For those who don’t know, PIN-SME is a recently created organization whose members are regional ICT-related trade associations from throughout Europe (whose individual members are automatically counted as part of the larger PIN-SME organization). They do a lot of great work on promoting [...]
Health Care and Entrepreneurialism
Over at the Kauffman Foundation’s entrepreneurship blog, Jonathan Ortmans has a post about “unlocking entrepreneurship through health care reform” wherein he writes about how the employer-provided healthcare system constrains entrepreneurialism, as it’s too expensive to provide for employees and generally too expensive for employees of small firms to buy on their own with after-tax earnings. Ortmans rightly talks about decoupling health insurance from employment, a suggestion made by many groups that support small business-friendly policies. I agree. But I misread [...]
How can we use IT to improve financial companies’ risk management?
How can we make sure we have the right information technology to avoid, in the future, the delayed reaction by firms to problems with their balance sheets that was partly responsible for the current financial crisis? That’s the question a ZDNet interview with three execs from Sybase (who recently co-authored a book on managing real time risk in capital markets) seeks to answer. In the interview, Sybase Director of Business Development Sinan Baskan points out that the degree of readiness [...]
ACT Submits Response in EC Browser Case: Why Independent Software Developers Care
Yesterday, the Association for Competitive Technology submitted its official response to the European Commission’s Statement of Objections regarding Microsoft’s integration of Internet Explorer into the Windows operating system. While the Statement of Objections itself and much of the process around it is confidential, we wanted to share the basic reasons why so many small independent software developers are concerned about this case. In fact, 74 SMEs from throughout Europe have signed a declaration of concerns we included as part of [...]