Music and movie piracy costs the UK around £400 million a year. My report makes recommendations for cracking down on it.
What happens to capitalism once marginal costs fall to the point at which its products can be given away for free?
A new report suggests the Government’s instinct to filter content is both ineffective and counter-productive.
GDP is a convenient, but wildly inaccurate, measure of our true material wealth
One way or another we’re interacting with systems designed to gather information about who are and what we do.
What if people stop paying the licence fee – not because they’re dodging it, but because they no longer watch broadcast television?
Allowing companies to offer different services for different prices is key to developing the digital revolution.
If some of the growing pains can be tranquilised, the Government’s digital agenda could become one of its most significant legacies.
Whatever the merits of privatising the Royal Mail, it is certain to revive the old calumny that Conservatives ‘know the price of everything and the value of nothing’ and that, consequently, we forget that some things aren't for sale. Writing for the Washington Monthly on the subject of common ownership, Timothy Noah quotes from a […]
Do we use computers, or do computers use us? It’s a silly question, of course – computers don’t have minds of their own, but they do run algorithms that serve the agendas of those who created them. As our lives become increasingly – and often invisibly – reliant upon computer networks (of which our laptops, […]
The patron saint of the internet is St Isidore of Seville – not that he ever got to use it, having died in the year 636. Regarded as one of the greatest scholars of his time, he attempted a compilation of all human knowledge, in the process preserving ancient texts that would otherwise have been […]
The internet is, of course, a wonderful thing. For a start, there’d be no ConservativeHome without it – and, then, where would we be? Yet, however powerful and convenient a tool of communication it may be, there is an ever-present tendency among some internet boosters to mistake the medium for the message. It is a […]
The astonishing pace of change in the digital age was the subject of yesterday’s Deep End. Today, we focus on those who have shaped this brave new world: the global IT corporations who are themselves falling victim to the permanent revolution they helped to bring about. Consider, for instance, the case of Google and Facebook, […]
Here’s a thought: "Chimpanzees, genetically close to us though they are, have bodies two to five times as strong as ours on a relative basis and brains about a quarter as big. In humans, energy that would have gone into other organs instead is used to run energy-hungry brains." The reason why we can get […]
The Home Office wants the Data Retention and Investigatory Bill to be as transparent as possible. Sadly, though, that may not be saying much.