Kester Brewin

Was a HUGE privilege to be invited to speak at TEDx Exeter in April this year. I was given 12 minutes to speak on piracy, so decided to take one aspect of Mutiny! and look at how pirates work to defend and enrich the commons. In preparing the talk it struck me that TED is actually [...]

Interesting piece here exploring the fact that today ‘Please Please Me’ – the hit that really made the band famous – has gone into the public domain, as its 50 year copyright period has expired. The article takes the view that this is a tragedy, one that leaves The Beatles’ music open to exploitation. Anything [...]

It’s been a very very busy 10 days since the NicsFight campaign kicked off. For those of you who don’t know, my very good friend Nic died in October from cancer; his insurance company (Friends Life) have been refusing to pay out on a critical illness policy which would transform the lives of the widow [...]

As you may have read, my very dear friend Nic Hughes passed away last week. He was diagnosed with cancer of the gall bladder, with secondaries in his liver last December (see his very moving post from 18th June via link above.) The metaphor of ‘fighting’ cancer is a troubled one, but he fought hard [...]

  Really nice video here (thanks to Luke Sital Singh for pushing it my way) from the Do Lectures weekend in 2011, at which the Director of Digital content at the British Film Institute, Paula Ledieu, gives a short history of copyright, what’s gone wrong with it, and how it needs to be fixed. This [...]

Interesting story (thanks @KevinThow for the link) about Julia Schramm – a leading member of the German Pirate Party, who signed a very lucrative book deal for her book ‘Click Me‘ – more than $130k – and then proceeded to go after the very pirates who she lauds in her work. One of the key [...]

With more people reading Mutiny!, and some groups studying it in classes or reading groups, I thought it might good to have a discussion space where people can ask questions about the text and debate some of the issues in it. It’s a pretty old school solution, but thought I’d give some discussion boards a [...]

The Rolling Stones celebrate 50 years since their first gig today… a gig at which they moaned ‘We’re a blues band, I hope no one thinks we’re going to play rock and roll…’ Since that time they have sold hundreds of millions of records and made ridiculous amounts of money… all out of ripping off [...]

Good news today: the European Parliament has voted down the proposed Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) – an act which has some parallels with the SOPA / PIPA legislation that was proposed in the US. ACTA sought to tighten up rules on intellectual property, but proposed to do so in ways that would have been highly [...]

One of the issues that people have immediately jumped on when I have told them I’m writing about piracy is the thorny issue of pirated music. I know quite a few people who make a living from recording music, and clearly this is a big issue for them because it gets to the heart of [...]