Over the past year there has been a resurgence in body-hair activism and discussion within the feminist community. From the appearance of Those Pesky Dames – a video-blogging collective – on Cherry Healey’s ‘How to Get a Life’ on BBC3, to Emer O’Toole’s spot on This Morning, to the Armpits4August […]
From a right-wing perspective, copyright is an unnecessary and unwarranted intrusion of government power on individual liberty. According to the US constitution, the ostensible power for Congress to issue laws on copyright is “to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and […]
Scientific research is a dynamic system for creating new ideas. Researchers develop ideas, test them and publish the results, allowing others to build on them. Now imagine that scientists could claim ownership to formulas, such as E=mc2, requiring future researchers to pay royalties to use them. This would put a […]
Intellectual Property laws are immensely controversial in their effects, which range from everyday restriction of free expression through abuse of copyright, to the abuse of patent law, rigged mobile phone markets and the denial of medicines to people in the majority world. The term Intellectual Property was deliberately chosen and promoted by […]
It is the 41st birthday of Christiania, and spirits are high. Visitors from all over Denmark and abroad crowd around the stalls on Pusher Street, in front of artistically graffitied walls and around oil barrels, buying their evening’s smoke before flocking to one of the many venues and bars. The […]
The two recent child abuse scandals have both found themselves derailed by exactly the same method: a protracted session of the mainstream media navel-gazing and taking pops at one another. The Jimmy Savile case turned into a study of why Newsnight didn’t report on the story. Meanwhile, the re-examination of […]
On September 27, 21 year old Alex Haigh became the first person to be sent to prison under the new law that criminalises squatting in residential buildings. He received a sentence of three months in Wormwood Scrubs for the crime of temporarily residing in an empty building while he looked […]
A year has passed since the violent eviction of Dale Farm, a Traveller site in Essex. The eviction cost £4.8m, resulted in 35 arrests and left 80 families homeless. On the anniversary of the eviction, the OT speaks to some of those whose lives have been changed by the challenges […]
By August 2011, the average Brit had endured months of headlines detailing shocking deceit and manipulation. With the News of the World phone hacking scandal having taken place under the editorship of then Conservative Party Communications Chief Andy Coulson, and overseen by David Cameron’s long-time Christmas bunting chum Rebekah Brooks, […]
In 2010, the Higher Education sector, like so many other social provisions coveted by the coalition, was caught in the pincers of neoliberal reform. Like New Labour before, coalition ideologues have reasserted the belief that Higher Education will only be ‘sustainable’ when the ‘dead hand’ of the state is removed […]