The Death Knell of Success in Business

By Sam VakninAuthor of "Malignant Self-love: Narcissism Revisited" The film “The Artist” describes the waning career of a megastar of the era of silent movies when he refuses to make the transition into the epoch of “talkies” (films with sound.) He mocks the...

Poor Man's Price, Rich Man's Price: Differential Pricing

By Sam Vaknin Author of "Malignant Self-love: Narcissism Revisited" In April 2002, the World Health Organization (WHO), the World Trade Organization (WTO), the Norwegian Foreign Ministry, and the US-based Global Health Council held a 3-days workshop about "Pricing and...

Innovation and the Capitalistic Dream

By Sam Vaknin Author of "Malignant Self-love: Narcissism Revisited"On 18 June business people across the UK took part in Living Innovation 2002. The extravaganza included a national broadcast linkup from the Eden Project in Cornwall and satellite-televised interviews with...

Print Books (p-books) and Electronic Books (e-books)

By Sam Vaknin Author of "Malignant Self-love: Narcissism Revisited" The first-ever print runs were tiny by our standards and costly by any standard. Gutenberg produced fewer than 200 copies of his eponymous and awe-inspiring Bible and died a broken and insolvent man. ...

Fined AUD$1.6m for uploading pre-release of Super Mario Bros Wii

It's game over for James Burt, 24 from Brisbane Australia, who was fined AUD$1.6 million for illegally copying and uploading a pre-release version of the eagerly awaited Nintendo game Super Mario Bros Wii, and made it available for download from a website, which has since...

Pirate Bay Logo Patented By Swedish Retailer, Intent to Exploit

Oh the irony. An online Swedish retailer has registered a patent to the infamous Pirate Bay logo of a pirate ship flying a cassette-tape image and crossbones sail. And get this: the company, Sandryds Handel, intends to exploit the image by selling USB drives splashed with...

Stallman, the Swedish Pirate Party, and copyleft

A few days ago, Richard Stallman of the Free Software Foundation published an op-ed to the GNU project's website, in which he criticized the copyright views of the Swedish Pirate Party, which had recently succeeded...

Facebook URL Policy Favors East Coast

Facebook is wading into territory that domain name registrars found themselves in 10 years ago.  Namely, trying to figure out 'who owns a name?'  Some notable examples include:J. Crew forced the owner of...

Report on Piracy & Digital Economy Slammed by Expert

In unusually harsh language, Michael Geist, who holds the Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-commerce Law at the University of Ottawa has slammed a new report put out by the Conference Board of Canada. ...

Survey: Lawyers Expect Boom in Bankruptcy

A country that elects Barack Obama, a liberal lawyer, as its president should not be surprised by the results of a recent survey by Robert Half Legal: Three-hundred attorneys from among the largest law firms and corporations in the United States and Canada were asked, "In...

French President Sued for Copyright Infringement

French President Nicolas Sarkozy joins a grand tradition of political leaders calling for stringent intellectual-property laws, and then getting caught for violating those same laws. It's difficult enough to swallow the tortured reasoning behind some of these copyright laws...

Section 92A: New Zealand Copyright Law Still Not Dead

New Zealand's bizaare copyright-infringement law, Section 92A, is not dead. Indeed, the RIAA's Kiwi wing and the politicians that love it are still coming up with spurious reasons why they should be able to cut off...

Blackout Protest over New Zealand Copyright Law

New Zealand's netizens are asking for a blackout on web usage from February 16-23 over the highly-controversial Section 92A of New Zealand's Copyright Act. The blackout involves changing blog logos and user...

More ‘Friends’ Added at Barackbook.com

Nearly six weeks after its launch, more friends have been added to the social networking web site, Barackbook.com.The most recent friend updates include Barack Obama’s notable associations...

Will OpenSocial help Google reorganize into the first Galactic Empire?

"The big news in the tech world this week was Google's unveiling of OpenSocial, a set of programming tools that will enable members of multiple social networks to share files and information across different platforms. Noticeably absent from the alliance supporting...

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