Cloud-based information intermediaries curate information and distribute in a way that fundamentally challenges the right of access to information.

The American aversion to big government is matched by the German aversion to big data. How to best reconcile the two privacy cultures, is the subject of this analysis.

Algorithms are hidden everywhere in our daily lives. They regulate us, in a sense. How can we, then, take part in the governance by algorithms?

There are significant dangers in surveilling online communications unless the mechanisms and policies of surveillance are subject to strict and legally enforceable standards of transparency, oversight, and control.

The provisions of copyright law can potentially be bypassed by cloud computing applications whose interface is designed to regulate the access, use and reuse of online content.

Over the years, the video game industry has grown into one of the largest, most profitable entertainment industries in the world. Originality and innovation - instead of fueling competition and guaranteeing a diverse market - are regarded by many as risky ventures. Some would even argue that innovation in the industry is not really innovative at all anymore. It doesn’t come as a surprise then, that user-driven innovation has come to play a considerably important role for the industry in recent years.

According to a row of policy institutes, digital fabrication will become a motor for economic growth and social innovation. The sudden appearance of digital fabrication tools only makes sense when understood against the backdrop of an emerging movement around open hardware development.

This article presents a general analysis of how user autonomy in the internet cloud is increasingly put into jeopardy by the growing comfort and efficiency of the user-interface. Although this issue has not been, thus far, explicitly addressed by the law, it is a fundamental ethical question that should be carefully assessed to guide the future deployment of cloud computing.

gTLDs are the highest level of domain names in the domain name system, including .com, .net and .org; their number has been restricted to twenty-two for several years. This will change, as the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) - the organisation responsible for managing and coordinating the system - rolls out a new gTLDs programme. Businesses and organisations are now able to apply for their own customised top-level domain names. But ICANNs move is mired in controvery, as Francesca Musiani reveals.

The last years have seen a growing politicisation of intellectual property issues, especially those relative to the internet. Sebastian Haunss assesses the current state of the policy field and draws attention to three parallel processes, which structure the future development of intellectual property policies related to the internet: the growing focus on enforcement, the plurilateralisation of international IP policies, and the trend to open access.