U.S. Republican congressional staff said in a report released Wednesday that previous efforts to regulate privacy technology were flawed and that lawmakers need to learn more about technology before trying to regulate it. The 25-page white paper is entitled Going Dark, Going Forward: A Primer on the Encryption Debate and it does not provide any solution to the encryption fight. However, it is notable for its criticism of other lawmakers who have tried to legislate their way out of the encryption debate. It
Source: US Efforts To Regulate Encryption Have Been Flawed, Government Report Finds – Slashdot
There is no question that Sci-Hub is illegal. They are keeping the site live despite a legal injunction. Elbaykan is happy to talk to the press and make specious legal arguments, but has never actually had the courage to show up in court. As the OA advocates, librarians, and publishers try to create a more open and collaborative environment, they should condemn this solution and realize the harm their silence will cause.
Source: A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to OA | The Scholarly Kitchen
A few thoughts on Sci-Hub. I was just quoted in the NYTimes saying that “Unlawful [open] access gives open access a bad name.” http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/13/opinion/sunday/should-all-research-papers-be-free.html I’m already taking heat from friends and allies for saying it. But I also said more on the same subject that was not quoted. I’ll clarify a bit here by providing some of what the NYT omitted. But I’m well aware that some friends and allies who disagree with the short formulation will also
Source: A few thoughts on Sci-Hub. I was just quoted in the NYTimes saying that…
If a for-profit business cannot prosper without demanding huge amounts of free labor, then surely the business model needs reinventing. And if enough professors refuse to referee without compensation, the reinvention will begin.
Source: Want to Change Academic Publishing? Just Say No
He says that many colleges have been targeted by Sci-Hub. In one case at Marquette, a professor received an email stating that he or she needed to update his or her university user name and password by following a link. Once on the site, which was actually in New Zealand, the faculty member typed in new credentials, which were then captured by what the publisher later linked to Sci-Hub.”Then you start seeing your downloads going to unusual locations or downloads that are occurring in huge quantities — thousands of downloads,” Mr. Sanchez says.Typically, the publisher notices such irregularities first, notifies the college, and tells it to shut down the problem quickly. At Marquette, additional layers of security were added, the IP addresses of the compromised accounts were given to the publisher, and the faculty member changed the user name and password within 24 hours. But, Mr. Sanchez says, “it puts us in a tough situation.”
Source: Librarians Find Themselves Caught Between Journal Pirates and Publishers – The Chronicle of Higher Education
 We asked the spokesman of the illegal e-book website Sci-Hub about open access, the future of copyright, the money policy of Elsevier and other publishing houses and last, but not least Alexandra Elbakyan’s role as something of a Jeanne d´Arc of piracy. The interview was performed by our visiting author Manuel Bonik.Sci-Hub recently had to change the domain, because the old one was confiscated after the administrator refused to delete all e-books from Elsevier. Sci-Hub is the biggest illegal source for
Source: e-book piracy: interview with Alexandra Elbakyan from Sci-Hub
Operators of Internet repositories that provide illicit free access to millions of research papers seem determined to keep up their services, despite being barred by an injunction.
A New York district court ruled on 28 October that online services such as Sci-Hub and the Library Genesis Project (Libgen) violate US copyright law. The court ruled in favour of academic publisher Elsevier, which in June filed a complaint against the main operators of the sites for unlawfully accessing and distributing its copyrighted papers.
Sci-Hub downloads articles by aping university IP addresses and stores them in a repository that now contains more than 46 million papers.
Access to the site’s web domain was suspended following the injunction. But Sci-Hub, which is advertised as a service “to remove all barriers in the way of science”, has since moved to a different domain. Its revamped site continues to provide unauthorized free access to millions of papers.
Other pirate services, including Libgen, which also allows users to freely download audiobooks, and BookFi, a free repository of more than 2 million books, have also resurfaced on different Internet domains.
Hide and seek
Sci-Hub had an average of 80,000 visitors per day before its previous domain was blocked, says Alexandra Elbakyan, a former neuroscientist who started the site in 2011. The number of users has since dropped to about 30,000 per day, she says.
It is just a matter of time until Sci-Hub’s new domain name, which is administered by a UK-based Internet company, will be suspended, thinks Eli Dourado, who researches Internet governance and intellectual property at George Mason University’s Mercatus Center in Arlington, Virginia.
But the site also has an alternative anonymous address that can be reached by users of the Tor network, a group of servers that encrypts Internet traffic and disguises its origins. “I could see the site staying up quite a long time through the use of Tor,” Dourado says.
Elbakyan, who was born and educated in Kazakhstan and is now based in Russia, says she doesn’t think that reviving her site violates the New York court ruling, because Sci-Hub is not a US-based company, and she is not a US citizen or resident of New York. That is incorrect, as Sci-Hub infringes US copyright law simply by serving its content to US citizens, says Toby Butterfield, a lawyer with the firm Frankfurt Kurnit Klein & Selz in New York.
In principle, foreigners can be fined by US courts, Dourado adds — but if they do not have any assets in the United States, there is no simple way for the government to collect the fines.
Copyright clash
“We are definitely not going to stop spreading the knowledge,” says Elbakyan, who believes that any limitation on the free distribution of scientific knowledge is unacceptable. She says she hopes that the case will raise awareness of a lack of access to relevant literature faced by many scientists.
In his October ruling, New York district judge Robert Sweet argued that “Elbakyan’s solution to the problems she identifies, simply making copyrighted content available for free via a foreign website, disserves the public interest”.
In a statement on the case made before the court ruling, the Association of American Publishers (AAP) in Washington DC said: “Sci-Hub’s and Libgen’s scheme to reproduce and distribute copyrighted works poses a significant threat to book and journal publishing and to authors and scholarly societies reliant on the royalties derived from sales and subscription income.” On concerns about lack of access for less privileged researchers, the AAP added that scientific publishers, including Elsevier, grant academic institutions in more than 100 developing countries free or very cheap access to scientific literature.
Sci-Hub’s approach has parallels with people who set up sites to illegally distribute music, notes Butterfield. “Scientific publishers are finding themselves in the same spot that record companies faced a few years ago,” he says. “It was only when iTunes and other services made it swift, easy and cheap to buy individual songs that people began turning away from infringement to get their music. So publishers, like record companies before them, have little choice but to get redress from blatant infringers in whatever ways the courts will allow.”
Asked for comment, an Elsevier spokesperson said that the lawsuit was supported by the wider publishing industry and referred Nature’s news team to the AAP.
Tom Allen, president of the AAP, says that his organization will use all available legal means to block access to pirated papers and that the group will continue to support Elsevier’s New York lawsuit. “We will continue to make domain administrators aware of the Sci-Hub enterprise, and urge all service providers to refrain from supporting the sites, which both the operator has admitted and the court found to be illegal,” Allen says.
Elsevier is not the only publisher whose copyrighted papers are available on Sci-Hub. Nature’s parent company – Springer Nature – is another; it says it does not wish to comment on the case. (Nature’s news team is editorially independent of Nature’s research editorial team.)
- Nature
- doi:10.1038/nature.2015.18876
Source: Pirate research-paper sites play hide-and-seek with publishers
Article Sharing Authors who publish in Elsevier journals can share their research by posting a free draft copy of their article to a repository or website. Researchers who have subscribed access to articles published by Elsevier can share too. There are some simple guidelines to follow, which vary depending on the article version you wish to share.
Source: Sharing
So, let’s say I’m doing research on issues related to privilege and inequality. Google Scholar tells me there’s a an article on stratification in higher education that’s looks interesting. Here’ another one on how postcolonial theory can inform resistance to neoliberalism in universities. And ooh, this looks really interesting: digital inequality and participation in the political process. How great that academics turn their methods and theories to solving the problem of inequality. Too bad most people won’
Source: Checking Our Library Privilege | Library Babel Fish | Inside Higher Ed
This Kat sometimes wonders whether every big copyright dispute these days seems to have a major political or philosophical subtext to it — an example of which can be found below. From guest contributor Emma Perot comes this appraisal of a dispute (reported on TorrentFreak here) between a giant publisher of valuable and useful scholarly material on the one hand, and those who seek access to that same information on the other. Writes Emma: In a Robin Hood-like manner, Sci-Hub.org has been providing academic articles to researchers in the science and technology community free of charge since 2011. Now Elsevier, one of the largest academic publishers, is seeking to put an end to this open access model. Elsevier publishes over 2,000 journals and has an income of more than US$1 billion. Wielding its dominance in the research community, Elsevier charges US$30 to access an article. This is a staggering price when you consider how many articles are needed in order to undertake significant research. In the UK, universities generally pay subscriber fees so that students and staff can access journals. However, this is not the case for everyone. Alexandra Elbakyan is one researcher who could not access Elsevier’s journals because the University of Kazakhstan did not subscribe to the service. In order to progress with her research project, she found forums that facilitated the sharing of articles for free. Elbakyan realised that there were many others like herself who were jumping through hoops for their research. From this necessity sprang the creation of Sci-Hub.org which collects journal articles and makes them available to the public without charge. The problem that SciHub is now facing is that the copyright of many of the articles they have published vests in Elsevier. As stipulated by the terms and conditions of publication, authors assign their exclusive rights (s.106 U.S. Copyright Act 1976) to the publisher. As such, Elsevier is entitled to charge whatever access fee they desire, or to restrict access all together. By reproducing these articles without Elsevier’s permission, Sci-Hub is infringing Elsevier’s copyright and is likely to lose the case against it. Nonetheless, Elbakyan is insistent on fighting for continued open access as she believes that “Everyone should have access to knowledge regardless of their income or affiliation”. The author is sympathetic to Elbakyan’s stance and believes that her moral argument is compelling, if not viable under the current capitalist regime. The history of copyright protection reveals an idealistic beginning which better accords with Elbakyan’s philosophy. Copyright protection in the U.S has a foundation in s.8 of the U.S. Constitution which states that “The Congress shall have power … to promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.” This clause underpins copyright with utilitarianism by providing an incentive of control to authors. The purpose of this control is to encourage (but not guarantee) the creation of products which will contribute to the growth of society. The main criticism of the incentive theory is that people create works even in the absence of intellectual property protection. This seems apparent on the facts before us as authors who publish with Elsevier surrender their copyright protection at the first possible opportunity. Even if the control incentive (there are many other forms of incentive such as reputation building, money, and pure interest) were necessary to encourage research, the utilitarian philosophy does not bode well in a capitalist society where publishers such as Elsevier operate to make a profit rather than to further the altruistic goal of disseminating information. Pay wall or ordinary wall? They’re all the same to Hubert Different approaches can be taken to overcome the barriers presented by legal paywalls. One such approach is to publish in independent, open access journals. The problem with this is that researchers want the benefit of the prestige associated with well-established, peer-reviewed journals. While this may seem like an egotistical issue, researchers spend years trying to develop a reputation of excellence in order to be presented with more opportunities for advancement. Publishing in a well-respected journal ensures quality control standards have been met, thus validating the article. This is particularly so in the science world where research often requires funding to access lab facilities and equipment. Alternatively, researchers could boycott publishers such as Elsevier with the aim of reducing access fees. The Cost of Knowledge, which encourages publishing in open access journals, is currently doing this and has attracted over 15,000 signatures to date. Signatories agree not to publish or perform editorial work for Elsevier’s journals. The success
Source: The IPKat: Paywalls and Robin Hoods: the tale of Elsevier and Sci-Hub.org
Newsmax reports that according to according to KRC Research about 64 percent of Americans familiar with Snowden hold a negative opinion of him. However 56 percent of Americans between the ages of 18 and 34 have a positive opinion of Snowden which contrasts sharply with older age cohorts. Among those aged 35-44, some 34 percent have positive attitudes toward him. For the 45-54 age cohort, the figure is 28 percent, and it drops to 26 percent among Americans over age 55, U.S. News reported. Americans overall say by plurality that Snowden has done "more to hurt" U.S. national security (43 percent) than help it (20 percent). A similar breakdown was seen with views on whether Snowden helped or hurt efforts to combat terrorism, though the numbers flip on whether his actions will lead to greater privacy protections. "The broad support for Edward Snowden among Millennials around the world should be a message to democratic countries that change is coming," says Anthony D. Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union. "They are a generation of digital natives who don’t want government agencies tracking them online or collecting data about their phone calls." Opinions of millennials are particularly significant in light of January 2015 findings by the U.S. Census Bureau that they are projected to surpass the baby-boom generation as the United States’ largest living generation this yea
via Except For Millennials, Most Americans Dislike Snowden – Slashdot.
As former CIA officer John Stockwell observed both large corporations and intelligence services are “vigorously committed to supporting the system.” Another former CIA officer, Philip Agee, explained this dynamic more bluntly, stating that the intelligence services are the “logical, necessary manifestations of a ruling class’s determination to retain power and privilege.” These assertions have been rigorously documented by activists like William Blum and filmmakers like Scott Noble.In a nutshell, US intelligence pursues the interests of private capital. Snowden indicated as much in an open letter to Brazil. He warned, in no uncertain terms, that the surveillance state has little to do with preventing terrorism and that instead it was focused on “economic spying, social control, and diplomatic manipulation.” There’s no doubt whom this sort of activity actually benefits.
via Forgetting the Lesson of Cypherpunk History: Cryptography Is Underhanded.
My analysis of the mass protests against Hungarian plans to tax the internet in the Hungarian weekly Magyar Narancs.
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Is Public Debate of Trade Agreements Against the Public Interest?
Posted by timothy on Sunday November 02, 2014 @03:28PM
from the you-can-discuss-it-afterwards dept.
onproton writes The Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP), currently being negotiated in secret, has been subject to numerous draft leaks that indicate these talks are potentially harmful to everything from public health to internet freedom. So why isn’t the public involved, and why are the terms of the agreement being debated behind closed doors? According to New Zealand’s current Trade Minister, Tim Groser, full disclosure of what is being discussed would likely lead to “public debate on an ill-informed basis before the deal has been done.” Leaving one to question how revealing the full context and scope of the agreement talks would lead to an increase in misinformation rather than clarity.
via Is Public Debate of Trade Agreements Against the Public Interest? – Slashdot.
My work—which involved interviews with file sharers as part of a dissertation in Social Anthropology—has focused on the strong non-economic undercurrent to participation in file sharing networks, ranging from the greater sense of agency and freedom they provided in an expanding cultural universe to their role as a perceived alternative to the ongoing Greek delegitimation of most social and political institutions. Freedom of expression, freedom to communicate, access to knowledge and information, excitement at the rediscovery and “rebirth” of old and rare works… All have figured as important motives for engagement with P2P networks. So too do perceptions of the lack of formal infrastructure and institutions for supporting cultural creativity; the successive shrinking of the welfare state; and the ongoing political crisis, shaped by scandals, nepotism and patronage relations. Within this context, P2P networks represent a form of self-organization and reconfiguration of social life outside established channels that has proved both valuable and—for some—inspirational in the context of the larger Greek crisis.
For some Greek youth, especially, the growth of P2P networks in Greece crystallized aspects of their broader social and political disaffection. Since 2008, P2P culture has merged with wider forms of political and sociocultural critique from all sides of the political spectrum. During the riots of December 2008, a popular Greek P2P tracker published a manifesto in which envisioned a full spectrum of social demands, from the development of alternative sources of energy; to free education, health care and public transportation; to the abolition of the anti-riot police units used to suppress protests; to the “copyleft of all spiritual and informative material.”
via File Sharing and the Greek Crisis » infojustice.
The Art of Unblocking Websites Without Committing Crimes | TorrentFreak.
Last month UK police took down several torrent site proxies and arrested their owner. Now a UK developer has created a new & free service that not only silently unblocks any website without falling foul of the law, but one that will eventually become available to all under a GPL 3.0 license.
 The blocking of sites such as The Pirate Bay, KickassTorrents and Torrentz in the UK led to users discovering new ways to circumvent ISP-imposed censorship. There are plenty of solutions, from TOR and VPNs, to services with a stated aim of unblocking ‘pirate’ sites deemed illegal by UK courts.
Last month, however, dozens of these went offline when the operator of Immunicity and other related proxy services was arrested by City of London Police’s Intellectual Property Crime Unit. He now faces several charges including breaches of the Serious Crime Act 2007, Possession of Articles for Use in Fraud, Making or Supplying Articles for use in Frauds and money laundering.
While it’s generally accepted that running a site like The Pirate Bay is likely to attract police attention, merely unblocking a domain was not thought to carry any such risk. After all, visitors to torrent sites are just that, it’s only later on that they make a decision to infringe or not.
In our earlier article we discussed some of the possible reasons why the police might view “pirate” proxies to be illegal. However, there are very good arguments that general purpose proxies, even ones that are expressly setup to bypass filtering (and are able to unblock sites such as Pirate Bay), remain on a decent legal footing.
One such site is being operated by Gareth, a developer and networking guru who grew so tired of creeping Internet censorship he began lobbying UK MPs on the topic, later moving on to assist with the creation of the Open Rights Group’s Blocked.org.uk.
After campaigning and documenting Internet censorship issues for some time, Gareth first heard of last month’s proxy arrest during a visit to the United States.
“I was at DefCon in Las Vegas when the news of the Immunicity arrest reached me and I realized that for all my volunteer work, my open source applications, operation of Tor relays, donations and letters to MPs to highlight/combat the issues with Internet censorship, it was not enough,” the developer told TorrentFreak.
“I felt that this issue has moved from a political / technical issue to one about personal liberty and Internet freedom. e.g. first they came for the ‘pirate proxies’, then the Tor operators, then the ISPs that don’t censor their customers. The slippery slope is becoming a scary precipice.”
Since his return to the UK, Gareth has been busy creating his own independent anti-censorship tool. He’s researched in detail what happened to Immunicity, taken legal advice, and is now offering what he hopes is an entirely legal solution to website filtering and subsequent over-blocking (1)(2).
“Unlike Immunicity et al I’m not specifically building a ‘Pirate Proxy’. Granted people might use this proxy to navigate to torrent websites but were I to sell a laptop on eBay that same person may use it for the same reasons so I see no difference,” he explains.
“In fact Section 44, subsection 2 of the Serious Crimes Act 2007 even states [that an individual] is not to be taken to have intended to encourage or assist the commission of an offense merely because such encouragement or assistance was a foreseeable consequence of his act.”
The result of Gareth’s labor is the anti-censorship service Routing Packets is Not a Crime (RPINAC). People who used Immunicity in the past should feel at home, since RPINAC also utilizes the ability of popular browsers to use Proxy Auto-Config (PAC) files.
In the space of a couple of minutes and with no specialist knowledge, users can easily create their own PAC files covering any blocked site they like. Once configured, their browser will silently unblock them.
Furthermore, each PAC file has its own dedicated URL on RPINAC’s servers which users can revisit in order to add additional URLs for unblocking. PAC ‘unblock’ files can also be shared among like-minded people.
“When someone creates a PAC file they are redirected to a /view/ endpoint e.g. https://routingpacketsisnotacrime.uk/view/b718ce9b276bc2f10af90fe1d5b33c0d. This URL is not ephemeral, you can email it, tweet it (there is a tweet button on the left hand side of the site) etc and it will provide the recipient with the exact same view.
“It’ll show which URLs are specified to be proxied, which have been detected as blocked (using the https://blocked.org.uk database) and if the author passed along the password (assuming the PAC was password protected) they can add or remove URLs too,” Gareth explains.
“Each view page also has a comments section, this could allow for a small collection of individuals to co-ordinate with a smaller subset of password possessing moderators to create a crowd sourced PAC file in an autonomous fashion. There is also a ‘Clone’ button allowing anybody to create their own copy of the PAC file with their own name, description and password if the PAC file they’ve received isn’t quite what they need.”
This user-generated element of the process is important. While dedicated ‘pirate’ proxy sites specifically unblock sites already deemed illegal by the UK courts (and can be deemed to be facilitating their ‘crimes’), RPINAC leaves the decision of which sites to unblock completely down to the user. And since no High Court injunction forbids any user from accessing a blocked domain, both service and user remain on the right side of the law.
In terms of use, RPINAC is unobtrusive, has no popups, promotions or advertising, and will not ask for payment or donations, a further important legal point.
“To avoid any accusations of fraud and to avoid any tax implications RPINAC will never ask for donations,” the dev explains. “The current platform is pre-paid for at least a year, the domain for 10. At a bare minimum PAC file serving and education for creating local proxies will continue indefinitely.”
Finally, Gareth notes that without free and open source software his anti-censorship platform wouldn’t have been possible. So, in return, he has plans to release the source code for the project under the GPL 3.0 license.
RoutingPacketsIsNotACrime can be found here and is compatible with Firefox, Chrome, Safari and IE. Additional information can be sourced here.
Austrian Tor Exit Node Operator Found Guilty As An Accomplice Because Someone Used His Node To Commit A crime
from the bad,-bad-news dept
Three years ago we wrote about how Austrian police had seized computers from someone running a Tor exit node. This kind of thing happens from time to time, but it appears that folks in Austria have taken it up a notch by… effectively now making it illegal to run a Tor exit node. According to the report, which was confirmed by the accused, the court found that running the node violated §12 of the Austrian penal code, which effectively says:
Not only the immediate perpetrator commits a criminal action, but also anyone who appoints someone to carry it out, or anyone who otherwise contributes to the completion of said criminal action.
In other words, it’s a form of accomplice liability for criminality. It’s pretty standard to name criminal accomplices liable for “aiding and abetting” the activities of others, but it’s a massive and incredibly dangerous stretch to argue that merely running a Tor exit node makes you an accomplice that “contributes to the completion” of a crime. Under this sort of thinking, Volkswagen would be liable if someone drove a VW as the getaway car in a bank robbery. It’s a very, very broad interpretation of accomplice liability, in a situation where it clearly does not make sense.
via Austrian Tor Exit Node Operator Found Guilty As An Accomplice Because Someone Used His Node To Commit A crime | Techdirt.
netzpolitik.org: Are you breaking any laws?
Jotunbane: Several 🙂
netzpolitik.org: Do you care? Why (not)?
Jotunbane: Sure I care. But what can I do? The laws are wrong on several different levels (the copyright monopoly have been extended 16 times in my lifetime alone, and will continue to be extended every time Mickey Mouse is getting close to the public domain). There will always be consequences when you decide to break the law and the risk of punishment is clearly part of the equation. Under US law I could get fined $150.000 for each infringement, but this is not a question of money, it’s a question of doing the right thing. Sharing is caring, so of course I care.
Interviews with E-Book-Pirates: “The book publishing industry is repeating the same mistakes of the music industry”.
The report noted that some within MIT believe “there has been a change in the institutional climate over recent years, where decisions have become driven more by a concern for minimizing risk than by strong affirmation of MIT values.”
The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act has been widely condemned as extreme in both its sweeping scope and its grave punishments. Sentencing guidelines suggest Swartz faced up to seven years in prison.
To his supporters, MIT bears some responsibility for that fact. MIT officials privately told the prosecutor that the university had no interest in jail time, but refused to oppose his prosecution publicly or privately, despite repeated entreaties from Swartz’s father, his lawyers, and a couple of faculty members, who argued MIT had the institutional heft to influence the US attorney’s office.
via Aaron Swartz and MIT: The inside story – Metro – The Boston Globe.
An open source textbook on open source cultures (in Hungarian).
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Taunts aside, Tankafetast’s operators appear to be trying to raise the profile of the site. They have launched a clothing range, consisting mainly of t-shirts carrying a range of pro-filesharing slogans such as Keep Calm and Download and Support Your Local Uploader, plus a few with defiant messages on Tankafetast’s return.In addition, on Saturday the site’s operators announced that in celebration of the site’s return they would be hiring three cinemas in Malmö, Gothenburg and Stockholm and giving away tickets to fans of the site. The first viewing has been announced as taking place this Thursday for the premiere of the new Bond movie, Skyfall.What is interesting to observe here is that when it comes to file-sharing the Swedes are very defiant indeed, even in the face of adversaries such as the government and police. Whether the site will be able to back up its defiance with long-term uptime remains to be seen, but even that seems to be more likely than their aim this week of giving away at least hundred of their cinema tickets to girls.
via Raided PRQ Torrent Site is Back and Hiring Cinemas To Celebrate | TorrentFreak.Taunts aside, Tankafetast’s operators appear to be trying to raise the profile of the site. They have launched a clothing range, consisting mainly of t-shirts carrying a range of pro-filesharing slogans such as Keep Calm and Download and Support Your Local Uploader, plus a few with defiant messages on Tankafetast’s return.In addition, on Saturday the site’s operators announced that in celebration of the site’s return they would be hiring three cinemas in Malmö, Gothenburg and Stockholm and giving away tickets to fans of the site. The first viewing has been announced as taking place this Thursday for the premiere of the new Bond movie, Skyfall.What is interesting to observe here is that when it comes to file-sharing the Swedes are very defiant indeed, even in the face of adversaries such as the government and police. Whether the site will be able to back up its defiance with long-term uptime remains to be seen, but even that seems to be more likely than their aim this week of giving away at least hundred of their cinema tickets to girls.
via Raided PRQ Torrent Site is Back and Hiring Cinemas To Celebrate | TorrentFreak.
The Congressional International Anti-Piracy Caucus has just released its 2012 International Piracy Watch List. In addition to countries such as China, Russia and Ukraine, this year Italy and Switzerland make fresh appearances in the list. Both countries are accused of not doing enough to combat online infringement with the latter allegedly proving itself as a “magnet for rogue sites.”
via New Anti-Piracy Watchlist Zooms In On File-Sharing Tolerant Countries | TorrentFreak.The Congressional International Anti-Piracy Caucus has just released its 2012 International Piracy Watch List. In addition to countries such as China, Russia and Ukraine, this year Italy and Switzerland make fresh appearances in the list. Both countries are accused of not doing enough to combat online infringement with the latter allegedly proving itself as a “magnet for rogue sites.”
via New Anti-Piracy Watchlist Zooms In On File-Sharing Tolerant Countries | TorrentFreak.
“IFPI has inadvertently made available its own confidential internal report, penned by none other than IFPIs chief anti-piracy officer, which details its strategy against online piracy for major recording labels across the globe. The document, 30-pages long, talks about file sharing sites, torrents, cyberlockers, phishing attacks, expectations from Internet service providers, mp3 sites and a lot more. The document is a global view representation of IFPIs problems, current and future threats, and the industrys responses to them.”A few tactics: shutting down music services, requiring file lockers filter uploads or be shut down interesting, since the DMCAs one good provision is the safe harbor, and proactive filtering could mean losing that protection, lobbying for DNS blocking legislation, pressuring ISPs into extra-legally enforcing their will, disrupting payment processing for pirate sites through blacklists, and providing “training built around real world experiences and challenges rather than focusing on theory” on copyright law to judges and legal bodies.
via Leaked IFPI Report Details Anti-Piracy Strategy – Slashdot.“IFPI has inadvertently made available its own confidential internal report, penned by none other than IFPIs chief anti-piracy officer, which details its strategy against online piracy for major recording labels across the globe. The document, 30-pages long, talks about file sharing sites, torrents, cyberlockers, phishing attacks, expectations from Internet service providers, mp3 sites and a lot more. The document is a global view representation of IFPIs problems, current and future threats, and the industrys responses to them.”A few tactics: shutting down music services, requiring file lockers filter uploads or be shut down interesting, since the DMCAs one good provision is the safe harbor, and proactive filtering could mean losing that protection, lobbying for DNS blocking legislation, pressuring ISPs into extra-legally enforcing their will, disrupting payment processing for pirate sites through blacklists, and providing “training built around real world experiences and challenges rather than focusing on theory” on copyright law to judges and legal bodies.
via Leaked IFPI Report Details Anti-Piracy Strategy – Slashdot.
Its a dynamic thats been particularly pointed for Dodd, given his efforts to move forward on legislation preventing theft of intellectual property. The Protect I.P. Act and its counterpart in the House, the Stop Online Piracy Act, had broad bipartisan backing last year when Dodd was in his first months with the movie biz and was joined by the recording industry, book publishiers and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in the effort.”Were in a transformative period with an explosion of technology thats going to need content,” he said.But Internet companies such as Google, Facebook and Twitter campaigned effectively against the legislation, mobilizing users on grounds that the new rules would impede the free flow of information on the Internet.”Google chose wisely by making Hollywood the enemy,” Dodd said ruefully.He said Saturday that the industry will need to take a far more nuanced approach to promoting future antipiracy legislation.”Were going to have to be more subtle and consumer-oriented,” he added. “Were on the wrong track if we describe this as thievery.”
via Dodd touts outreach on IP, bizs humanitarian efforts – Entertainment News, Film News, Media – Variety.Its a dynamic thats been particularly pointed for Dodd, given his efforts to move forward on legislation preventing theft of intellectual property. The Protect I.P. Act and its counterpart in the House, the Stop Online Piracy Act, had broad bipartisan backing last year when Dodd was in his first months with the movie biz and was joined by the recording industry, book publishiers and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in the effort.”Were in a transformative period with an explosion of technology thats going to need content,” he said.But Internet companies such as Google, Facebook and Twitter campaigned effectively against the legislation, mobilizing users on grounds that the new rules would impede the free flow of information on the Internet.”Google chose wisely by making Hollywood the enemy,” Dodd said ruefully.He said Saturday that the industry will need to take a far more nuanced approach to promoting future antipiracy legislation.”Were going to have to be more subtle and consumer-oriented,” he added. “Were on the wrong track if we describe this as thievery.”
via Dodd touts outreach on IP, bizs humanitarian efforts – Entertainment News, Film News, Media – Variety.
A nagy forgalmazók megveszik a politikusokat, hogy rendőrt uszíthassanak családokra, csak mert azok Garfield-et néznek a monitoron.
Az internet többek közt arra való, hogy kulturális tartalomhoz juthassunk, a napi hírömlenytől az elmélkedősebb anyagokon át a tudásbázisokig és tovább. Aki pedig azt állítja, hogy mindez ingyenes, és hogy a torrentezés bűn, az vagy téved, vagy hazudik. A hazugság, az tényleg bűn. Persze, a lopás is bűn, de ha valamiért fizettünk, akkor annak magunkhoz vétele nem lopás.
via Tanítsuk meg torrentezni a gyerekeket! – Különvélemény – Balavány György blogja.A nagy forgalmazók megveszik a politikusokat, hogy rendőrt uszíthassanak családokra, csak mert azok Garfield-et néznek a monitoron.
Az internet többek közt arra való, hogy kulturális tartalomhoz juthassunk, a napi hírömlenytől az elmélkedősebb anyagokon át a tudásbázisokig és tovább. Aki pedig azt állítja, hogy mindez ingyenes, és hogy a torrentezés bűn, az vagy téved, vagy hazudik. A hazugság, az tényleg bűn. Persze, a lopás is bűn, de ha valamiért fizettünk, akkor annak magunkhoz vétele nem lopás.
via Tanítsuk meg torrentezni a gyerekeket! – Különvélemény – Balavány György blogja.
Earlier today, Megaupload released a pop video featuring mainstream artists who endorse the cyberlocker service. News of the controversial Mega Song even trended on Twitter, but has now been removed from YouTube on copyright grounds by Universal Music. Kim Dotcom says that Megaupload owns everything in the video, and that the label has engaged in dirty tricks in an attempt to sabotage their successful viral campaign.
This morning we published an article on a new campaign by cyberlocker service Megaupload.
Site founder Kim Dotcom told TorrentFreak he had commissioned a song from producer Printz Board featuring huge recording artists including P Diddy, Will.i.am, Alicia Keys, Kanye West, Snoop Dogg, Chris Brown, The Game and Mary J Blige. These and others were shouting the praises of Megaupload.
By this afternoon #megaupload was trending on Twitter as news of the song spread. Little surprise interest was so high; Megaupload is described as a rogue site by the RIAA and here are some of their key labels’ artists promoting the service in the most powerful way possible – through a song.
And then, just a little while ago, the music stopped. Visitors to YouTube hoping to listen to the Mega Song were met with the following message.
Mega Song Blocked
TorrentFreak immediately contacted Kim to find out what was happening.
“Those UMG criminals. They are sending illegitimate takedown notices for content they don’t own,” he told us. “Dirty tricks in an effort to stop our massively successful viral campaign.”
So did Universal have any right at all to issue YouTube with a takedown notice? Uncleared samples, anything?
“Mega owns everything in this video. And we have signed agreements with every featured artist for this campaign,” Kim told TorrentFreak.
“UMG did something illegal and unfair by reporting Mega’s content to be infringing. They had no right to do that. We reserve our rights to take legal action. But we’d like to give them the opportunity to apologize.”
“UMG is such a rogue label,” Kim added, wholly appreciating the irony.
A few minutes after this exchange Kim contacted us with good news. After filing a YouTube copyright takedown dispute, the video was reinstated. But alas, just seconds later, it was taken down again.
“We filed a dispute, the video came back online and now it’s blocked again by UMG and the automated YouTube system has threatened to block our account for repeat infringement,” Kim explained.
TorrentFreak spoke with Corynne McSherry, Intellectual Property Director at EFF, who says this type of copyright abuse is nothing new.
“This appears to be yet another example of the kind of takedown abuse we’ve seen under existing law — and another reason why Congress should soundly reject the broad new powers contemplated in the Internet Blacklist Bills, aka SOPA/PIPA.
“If IP rightholders can’t be trusted to use the tools already at their disposal — and they can’t — we shouldn’t be giving them new ways to stifle online speech and creativity,” McSherry concludes.
Sherwin Siy, Deputy Legal Director at Public Knowledge, worries that this type of sweeping power would only be augmented with the arrival of the SOPA anti-piracy bill in the US.
“If UMG took down a video it has no rights to, then what we have here is exactly the sort of abuse that careless, overzealous, or malicious copyright holders can create by abusing a takedown law,” he told us.
“What makes this even worse is that UMG, among others, is pushing to expand its power to shut people down by fiat–SOPA lets rightsholders de-fund entire websites with the same sort of non-reviewed demand that removed this video,” he concludes.
Megaupload’s Kim Dotcom informs us that he has now submitted an international counter notification to YouTube, informing them that UMG has no rights to anything in the video and that the label abused the YouTube takedown system to sabotage the company’s business.
“It’s ridiculous how UMG is abusing their intervention powers in YouTube’s system to stop our legitimate campaign. They are willfully sabotaging this viral campaign. They own no rights to this content,” Kim insists.
“What UMG is doing is illegal. And those are the people who are calling Mega rogue? Insanity!”
Streisand Effect, here we come again.
Update: “The fact that this expression could be silenced by a major label — without any apparent infringement — should be seriously troubling to anyone who cares about artists’ speech rights,” says Casey Rae-Hunter, Deputy Director, Future of Music Coalition. “If this can happen to Snoop Dogg and others, it can happen to anyone.”
via Universal Censors Megaupload Song, Gets Branded a “Rogue Label” | TorrentFreak.
Movies and TV are one of America’s biggest exports and biggest employers, with over 2 million Americans working in the entertainment community. But today, this American success story is facing a threat like never before – content theft. Content theft costs U.S. workers $5.5 billion annually in lost earnings. The real victims aren’t stars or studios or networks; they’re middle class people in all 50 states who make their living in film and television.This Creative America documentary explores this important issue and what you can do about it. Visit creativeamerica.org to learn more.
via Content Theft: The Big Picture on Vimeo.
Analysis: Did the content industry lose the legal battle?
Do you remember back in 2001 when Napster shut down its servers? US courts found Napster Inc was likely to be liable for the copyright infringements of its users. Many of Napster’s successors were also shut down.
Aimster and its controversial CEO were forced into bankruptcy, the highest court in the US strongly suggested that those behind Grokster and Morpheus ought to be held liable for “inducing” their users to infringe, and Kazaa’s owners were held liable for authorisation by our own Federal Court. Countless others fled the market in the wake of these decisions with some, like the formerly defiant owners of Bearshare and eDonkey, paying big settlements on the way out.
By most measures, this sounds like an emphatic victory for content owners. But a funny thing happened in the wake of all of these injunctions, shutdowns and settlements: the number of P2P file sharing apps available in the market exploded.
By 2007, two years after the US Supreme Court decided Grokster, there were more individual P2P applications available than there had ever been before. The average number of users sharing files on file sharing networks at any one time was nudging ten million and it was estimated that P2P traffic had grown to comprise up to 90 percent of global internet traffic. At that point content owners tacitly admitted defeat, largely abandoning their long-time strategy of suing key P2P software providers and diverting enforcement resources to alternatives like graduated response or “three strikes” laws.
Why is it that, despite being ultimately successful in holding individual P2P software providers liable for their users’ infringement, content owners’ litigation strategy has failed to bring about any meaningful reduction in the amount of P2P development and infringement?
Physical vs digital
I would argue pre-P2P era law was based on a number of “physical world” assumptions. That makes sense, since it evolved almost exclusively with reference to physical world scenarios and technologies. However, as it turns out, there is often a gap between those assumptions and the realities of P2P software development.
Four such physical world assumptions are particularly notable in explaining this phenomenon.
The first is that everybody is bound by physical world rules. Assuming this rule had universal application, various secondary liability principles evolved to make knowledge and control pre-requisites to liability. But software has no such constraint. Programmers can write software that will do things that are simply not possible or feasible in the physical world. So once the Napster litigation made P2P programmers aware of the rules about knowledge and control, they simply coded Napster’s successors to eliminate them – something no provider of a physical world distribution technology ever managed to do.
In response, the US Supreme Court in Grokster created a brand new legal doctrine, called inducement, that did not rely on either knowledge or control. That rule was aimed at capturing “bad actors” – those P2P providers who aimed to profit from their users’ infringement and whose nefarious intent was demonstrated by “smoking guns” in their marketing and other communications. But the inducement law failed to appreciate some of the other differences that make the software world special and thus led directly to the explosion in the number of P2P technologies. In understanding why, three other physical world assumptions come into play.
One is that it is expensive to create distribution technologies that are capable of vast amounts of infringement. Of course in the physical world, the creation of such technologies, like printing presses, photocopiers, and VCRs required large investment. Research and development, mass-manufacturing, marketing and delivery all require massive amounts of cash. Thus, the law came to assume that the creation of such technologies was expensive.
That led directly to the next assumption – that distribution technologies are developed for profit. After all, nobody would be investing those massive sums without some prospect of a return.
Finally comes the fourth assumption: that rational developers of distribution technologies won’t share their secrets with consumers or competitors. Since they needed to recoup those massive investments, they had no interest at all in giving them away.
All of these assumptions certainly can hold up in the software development context. For example, those behind Kazaa spent a lot on its development, squeezed out the maximum possible profit and kept its source code a closely guarded secret. By creating a law that focused on profits, business models and marketing, the Supreme Court succeeded in shaking out Kazaa and its ilk from the market.
But the Court failed to appreciate that none of these things are actually necessary to the creation of P2P file sharing software. It can be so inexpensive to develop that some university programming courses actually require students to make an app as part of an assignment. When the software provider puts in such a small investment, there’s much less need to realise a profit. This, combined with widespread norms within the software development community encouraging sharing and collaboration, also leads to some individuals making the source code of their software publicly available for others to adapt and copy.
When the US Supreme Court created its new law holding P2P providers liable where they “fostered” third party infringement, as evidenced by such things as business models, marketing and internal communications, the result was an enormous number of programmers choosing to create new applications without any of those liability attracting elements. In the absence of any evidence that they had set out to foster infringement, they could not be liable for inducement, and having coded out of knowledge and control they could not be held liable under the pre-P2P law either.
The end result? The mismatch between the law’s physical world assumptions and the realities of the software world meant that the law created to respond to the challenges of P2P file sharing led to the opposite of the desired result: a massive increase in the availability of P2P file sharing software. The failure of the law to recognise the unique characteristics of software and software development meant the abandonment of the litigation campaign against P2P providers was only a matter of time.
Dr Rebecca Giblin is a member of Monash University’s law faculty in Melbourne. Her new book Code Wars tells the story of the decade-long struggle between content owners and P2P software providers, tracing the development of the fledgling technologies, the attempts to crush them through litigation and legislation, and the remarkable ways in which they evolved as their programmers sought ever more ingenious means to remain one step ahead of the law. The book explains why the litigation strategy against P2P providers was ultimately unsuccessful in bringing about any meaningful reduction in the amount of P2P development of infringement.
Visit codewarsbook.com where you can read the first chapter in full. Physical copies can be ordered online from stores like Amazon and Book Depository, and electronic copies are available via Google books at a heavily discounted price.
via How litigation only spurred on P2P file sharing – Telco/ISP – Technology – News – iTnews.com.au.
The United Nations Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression has released an important new report that examines freedom of expression on the Internet. The report is very critical of rules such as graduated response/three strikes, arguing that such laws may violate the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights Canada became a member in 1976. Moreover, the report expresses concerns with notice-and-takedown systems, noting that it is subject to abuse by both governments and private actors.On the issue of graduated response, the report states:he is alarmed by proposals to disconnect users from Internet access if they violate intellectual property rights. This also includes legislation based on the concept of “graduated response”, which imposes a series of penalties on copyright infringers that could lead to suspension of Internet service, such as the so-called “three strikes-law” in France and the Digital Economy Act 2010 of the United Kingdom.Beyond the national level, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement ACTA has been proposed as a multilateral agreement to establish international standards on intellectual property rights enforcement. While the provisions to disconnect individuals from Internet access for violating the treaty have been removed from the final text of December 2010, the Special Rapporteur remains watchful about the treaty’s eventual implications for intermediary liability and the right to freedom of expression.In light of these concerns, the report argues that the Internet disconnection is a disproportionate response, violates international law and such measures should be repealed in countries that have adopted them
via Michael Geist – UN Report Says Internet Three Strikes Laws Violate International Law.
Global Congress on Public Interest Intellectual Property LawCall for Applications to ParticipateAugust 25-27, 2011American University Washington College of Law4801 Massachusetts Ave, NWWashington DC, 20016REGISTRATIONRegistration is now open to participate in one of the most important meetings on international intellectual property law and policy of the year.HOSTS AND SPONSORSAmerican University Washington College of Law WCL will host the inaugural Global Congress on Public Interest Intellectual Property August 25-27, 2011. The Global Congress will be co-hosted by WCL’s Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property, Fundação Getulio Vargas’s Center for Technology and Society Brazil, the American Assembly at Columbia University and the International Centre for Trade and Sustainable Development Geneva. Sponsors include Google Inc., the Institute for Global and International Studies at George Washington University, Seattle University School of Law and the American University International Law Review the sponsoring journal for symposium publications. Other sponsors are currently being solicited.
via Global Congress on Public Interest Intellectual Property Law.
Wikileaks represents a new type of (h)activism, which shifts the source of potential threat from a few, dangerous hackers and a larger group of mostly harmless activists — both outsiders to an organization — to those who are on the inside. For insiders trying to smuggle information out, anonymity is a necessary condition for participation. Wikileaks has demonstrated that the access to anonymity can be democratized, made simple and user friendly.
Read the rest of this entry »
| TorrentFreak
Operation Payback has been without a doubt the longest and most widespread attack on anti-piracy groups, lawyers and lobbyists. Despite the massive media coverage, little is known about the key players who coordinate the operation and DDoS attacks. A relatively small group of people, they are seemingly fuelled by anger, frustration and a strong desire to have their voices heard.
 In the last two months, dozens of anti-piracy groups, copyright lawyers and pro-copyright outfits have been targeted by a group of Anonymous Internet ‘vigilantes’ under the flag of Operation Payback.
Initially DDoS assaults were started against the MPAA, RIAA and anti-piracy company AiPlex Software because these outfits had targeted The Pirate Bay. Those DDoS attacks were later replicated against many other targets that have spoken out against piracy or for copyright, resulting in widespread media coverage.
Even law enforcement agencies showed interest in the operation recently. Last week CNET reported that an FBI probe is underway, and TorrentFreak personally knows of at least one court case against a person that was associated with the operation.
Besides covering the results of the DDoS attacks and website hacks, very little is known about the people who are part of the operation. Who are they? What do they want, and what are their future plans? In this article we hope to solve a few pieces of the puzzle.
After numerous talks with people who are actively involved in Operation Payback, we learned that there are huge differences between the personal beliefs of members.
We can safely conclude that this Anonymous group doesn’t have a broad shared set of ideals. Instead, it is bound together by anger, frustration and the desire to be heard. Their actions are a direct response to the anti-piracy efforts of pro-copyright groups.
Aside from shared frustration, the people affiliated with the operation have something else in common. They are nearly all self-described geeks, avid file-sharers and many also have programming skills.
When Operation Payback started most players were not looking to participate in the copyright debate in a constructive way, they simply wanted to pay back the outfits that dared to target something they loved: file-sharing.
Many of the first participants who set the DDoS actions in motion either came from or were recruited on the message board 4Chan. But as the operation developed the 4Chan connection slowly disappeared. What’s left today are around a dozen members who are actively involved in planning the operation’s future, and several dozen more who help to execute the DDoS attacks.
An Anonymous spokesperson, from whose hand most of the manifestos originated, described the structure of the different groups to us.
“The core group is the #command channel on IRC. This core group does nothing more than being some sort of intermediary between the people in that IRC channel and the actual attack. Another group of people on IRC (the main channel called #operationpayback) are just there to fire on targets.”
Occasionally new people are invited to join the command to coordinate a specific attack, but a small group of people remains. The command group is also the place where new targets are picked, where future plans are discussed, and where manifestos are drafted. This self-appointed group makes most of the decisions, but often acts upon suggestions from bypassers in the main IRC channel.
Now let’s rewind a little and go back to the first attacks that started off the operation in September.
The operation’s command was ‘pleasantly’ surprised by the overwhelming media coverage and attention, but wondered where to go from there. They became the center of attention but really had no plan going forward. Eventually they decided to continue down the road that brought them there in the first place – more DDoS attacks.
What started as a retaliation against groups that wanted to take out The Pirate Bay slowly transformed into an attack against anyone involved in anti-piracy efforts. From trade groups, to lawyers, to dissenting artists. Since not all members were actively following the copyright debate, command often acted on suggestions from the public in the main IRC channel.
What followed was an avalanche of DDoS attacks that were picked up by several media outlets. This motivated the group to continue their strategy. Anonymous’ spokesperson admitted to TorrentFreak that the media attention was indeed part of what fuelled the operation to go forward. But not without some strategic mistakes.
As the operation continued more trivial targets were introduced and the group started to lose sympathy from parts of the public. While targeting the company that admittedly DDoSed The Pirate Bay could be seen as payback by some, trying to take out Government bodies such as the United States Copyright Office and UK’s Intellectual Property Office made less sense. In part, these targets were chosen by anarchistic influences in the operation.
“I fight with anonops because I believe that the current political system failed, and that a system based on anarchy is the only viable system,” one member told TorrentFreak. “I encouraged them to go after political targets just because I like Anarchy.”
The Anonymous spokesperson admitted to TorrentFreak that mistakes were made, and command also realized that something had to change. The targets were running out and the attacks weren’t gaining as much attention as they did in the beginning. It was a great way to gather attention, but not sustainable. In fact, even from within the operation not everyone was convinced that DDoS attacks were the best ‘solution’.
“I personally don’t like the concept of violence and attacking, but violence itself does raise attention,” Anonymous’ spokesperson told TorrentFreak.
“Attacking sites is one side of the story, but this operation would finally have to serve a purpose, otherwise it wouldn’t exist. We all agree that the way things [abuse of copyright] are currently done, is not the right way.”
Last week command decided to slow the DDoS attacks down and choose another strategy, mainly to regain the focus of attention. It was decided that they would make a list of demands for governments worldwide. In a move opposed to the desires of the anarchic influences, command decided to get involved in the political discussion.
Copyright/patent laws have to change, they argued, and from the bat they were willing to negotiate. They called for scrapping censorship, anti-piracy lawsuits and limiting copyright and patent terms, but not getting rid of copyright entirely. Interestingly, there is also no word in the demands about legalizing file-sharing.
To some this new and more gentle position taken by Anonymous came as a complete surprise. We asked the spokesman of the group about this confusing message and he said that there are actually several political parties that already adopt a similar position, like the Pirate parties and the Greens in Europe.
However, according to the spokesman (who wrote the latest manifesto with other members in Piratepad) they consciously chose this set of demands. “Some of us have the vision of actually getting rid of copyright/patents entirely, but we are at least trying to stay slightly realistic.”
“What we are now trying to do, is to straighten out ideals, and trying to make them both heard and accepted. Nobody would listen to us if we said piracy should be legal, but when we ask for copyright lifespan to be reduced to ‘fair’ lengths, that would sound a lot more reasonable,” the spokesman told TorrentFreak.
The demands have been published on the Operation Payback site for nearly a week, but thus far the media coverage hasn’t been as great as when they launched their first DDoS. Some have wondered whether this is the right path to continue in the first place, as it may get in the way of groups and political parties that have fought for similar ‘ideals’ for years already.
The spokesman disagreed and said that Operation Payback has “momentum” now.
So here we are nearly two months after Anonymous started Operation Payback. The initial anger and frustration seems to have been replaced by a more friendly form of activism for the time being. The group wanted to have their voice heard and they succeeded in that. However, being listened to by politicians and entertainment industry bosses might take more than that.
I was a program committee member of the 3rd Free Culture Research Conference. So many nice people, so many interesting discussions. I put up a poster there, that summed up this presentation:
.prezi-player { width: 550px; } .prezi-player-links { text-align: center; }
Idén Berlinben volt a Free Culture Research Conference, már a harmadik. Idén is benne voltam a programbizottságban, és bár mostr elő nem adtam, azért egy posztert elvittem, ami nagyjából ezt a prezit mondta el (sajnos csak statikusan):
TorrentFreak
Last week an Italian court ruled that ISPs should block access to The Pirate Bay. A few days later this block was enforced, but it is doubtful that the blockade will affect the piracy rate at all since other torrent sites are experiencing a massive increase in Italian visitors.
tpbThe Italian Pirate Bay case came to an end last week after a lengthy legal battle. The Court of Bergamo concluded that The Pirate Bay was engaging in criminal activity by linking to torrents that point to copyrighted material.
The judge ordered all Italian ISPs to block the site’s DNS and all current and future IP-addresses. A few days later the blockade went into effect, preventing millions of Italians from accessing The Pirate Bay.
Many Italians described the ruling as outrageous and labeled Italy as “the new China,” but, as with most technical measures taken to hinder file-sharing, the Pirate Bay blockade is relatively easy to circumvent. True Pirate Bay fans can sign up at a free VPN service to regain access or simply move on to one of the many Pirate Bay alternatives.
The latter is what hundreds of thousands of Italian Pirate Bay users are doing.
The owner of BTjunkie has informed TorrentFreak that he has seen a huge jump in traffic from Italians after the blockade was enforced. His site today received 50% more Italian visitors compared to a week ago, indicating that Italian Pirate Bay users are not planning to stop using BitTorrent.
The problem remains that the Court ruling sets a worrying precedent, and leaves the door open for many more censorship requests to be made against other popular torrent sites. A virtual cat and mouse game will be the result, with the only beneficiaries being the lawyers.
Techdirt
We were just talking about whether or not countries are really able to push back on the US’s attempts to export draconian anti-competition/anti-innovation copyright and patent policies elsewhere. Michael Geist points us to two cases where US trade representatives are going overboard in trying to get foreign countries to put in place stringent intellectual property rules. The first is in Costa Rica, which is included in the Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA). Yet like with other free trade agreements that the US has agreed to elsewhere, this one includes draconian intellectual property law requirements. I still cannot understand why intellectual monopoly protectionism — the exact opposite of “free trade” — gets included in free trade agreements. At least in Costa Rica, a lot of people started protesting these rules, pointing out that it would be harmful for the economy, for education and for healthcare. So the Costa Rican government has not moved forward with such laws. How has the US responded? It’s blocking access to the US market of Costa Rican sugar until Costa Rica approves new copyright laws. Nice of the US, right? Bankrupting Costa Rican farmers to force Costa Rica to put in place a copyright regime it does not want.
Then there’s the Bahamas, where US trade representatives are demanding new intellectual property laws, claiming that the country is not in agreement with WTO treaties. Apparently, the USTR is particularly upset about the police force in the Bahamas not cracking down on the sale of unauthorized DVDs, CDs and counterfeit clothing. However, as the Bahamas Chamber of Commerce president notes, nearly all of those counterfeit products actually originated in the US — and that the majority of people doing the buying are US tourists. In other words, the issue is really with the US, but it seems to want everyone else to deal with it.
December 3rd, 2009| politics | Comments:Kommentek: 0
Boing Boing
1 .- Copyright should not be placed above citizens’ fundamental rights to privacy, security, presumption of innocence, effective judicial protection and freedom of expression.
2 .- Suspension of fundamental rights is and must remain an exclusive competence of judges. This blueprint, contrary to the provisions of Article 20.5 of the Spanish Constitution, places in the hands of the executive the power to keep Spanish citizens from accessing certain websites.
3 .- The proposed laws would create legal uncertainty across Spanish IT companies, damaging one of the few areas of development and future of our economy, hindering the creation of startups, introducing barriers to competition and slowing down its international projection.
4 .- The proposed laws threaten creativity and hinder cultural development. The Internet and new technologies have democratized the creation and publication of all types of content, which no longer depends on an old small industry but on multiple and different sources.
5 .- Authors, like all workers, are entitled to live out of their creative ideas, business models and activities linked to their creations. Trying to hold an obsolete industry with legislative changes is neither fair nor realistic. If their business model was based on controlling copies of any creation and this is not possible any more on the Internet, they should look for a new business model.
6 .- We believe that cultural industries need modern, effective, credible and affordable alternatives to survive. They also need to adapt to new social practices.
7 .- The Internet should be free and not have any interference from groups that seek to perpetuate obsolete business models and stop the free flow of human knowledge.
8 .- We ask the Government to guarantee net neutrality in Spain, as it will act as a framework in which a sustainable economy may develop.
9 .- We propose a real reform of intellectual property rights in order to ensure a society of knowledge, promote the public domain and limit abuses from copyright organizations.
10 .- In a democracy, laws and their amendments should only be adopted after a timely public debate and consultation with all involved parties. Legislative changes affecting fundamental rights can only be made in a Constitutional law.
October 4th, 2009| politics | Comments:Kommentek: 0
BusinessWeek
hancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party sits at the top of the list. Below are the Social Democrats (SPD), the Free Democratic Party (FDP), the Left Party, the Greens and the Christian Social Union (CSU). And there, at the very bottom, are the Pirates.
At around 2:20 a.m. local time, when the organization managing the federal elections published the voting results for all of Germany’s 16 federal states on its Web site, the nation saw a new power sitting on the seventh rung of the political ladder: The Pirate Party had managed to get 2 percent of the vote.
Granted, it’s not enough for the party to enter the German government, since a political party has to get 5 percent of the vote to do that. But for political newcomers like the Pirates, this can be interpreted as a success worth paying attention to. In many large German cities, they even got as much as 3 percent of the vote. And they were particularly popular among first-time male voters, from whom they might have won as much as 13 percent of the vote.
“This election has shown that the issues we’re campaigning for are important and that we will be more successful in the future,” party leader Jens Seipenbusch said at its post-election celebration. In a short time, his party has become the unofficial representative of Internet activists in Germany who don’t feel any affinity for the other parties and who have been feeling threatened in their natural environment—that is, online.
CDU Internet Laws Boost Pirate Popularity
The Pirates have the CDU to thank for their strong result. When it comes to Internet issues, two politicians from the CDU embody the treachery of the grand coalition—that is, the uneasy combination of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the Social Democrats (SPD) that has been running the country for the past four years: Interior Minister Wolfgang Schäuble, with his laws regarding Internet surveillance and spying, and Family Minister Ursula von der Leyen, with her well-publicized list of banned sites in her campaign to fight online child pornography. Internet activists have suggested that rather than banning the sites, the content should be erased. An online petition started by Franziska Heine against “Zensursula” laws—a word play on the German word for censorship and von der Leyen’s first name—secured more than 130,000 signatures. The petition got a lot of media attention—and so did the Pirate Party.
During discussions about the law on blocking Web sites, politicians from the grand coalition demonstrated their ignorance about technical aspects of the online world—and a bit of arrogance to boot. That certainly didn’t hurt the Pirates’ numbers in the election. The Pirate Party was founded in 2006, and since the beginning of the year, its membership has increased tenfold. At last count, it had around 9,200 members, which makes it the seventh-largest party in Germany.
High on Hype, Low on Ideology
The Pirates’ power was only really recognized after the elections for the European Parliament in June. At that time, the original Swedish version of the Pirate Party made it into the European Parliament with 7.4 percent of the national vote. The German Pirate Party managed to get 0.9 percent. Since then, its proposals championing the free exchange of culture and scientific information on the Internet and a new set of copyright laws have been seen and heard everywhere.
Still, the young party continues to wrestle with its identity, while its members wrangle with each other. They primarily campaign for strengthened data privacy protection, respecting users’ rights and Internet freedom. And the members recognize this. But the fact that its platform only includes these few items—and that the party seems to lack a deeper ideology—makes the Pirates seem to many much more like a protest party.
July 23rd, 2009| politics | Comments:Kommentek:
BBC NEWS | Programmes | Newsnight | Why the pirates are on the rise in Sweden
Newsnight’s Matt Prodger visits Sweden’s Peace and Love music festival in Borlange to investigate what it is about the Swedes that has put them at the heart of a raging debate about internet freedom.
July 20th, 2009| politics | Comments:Kommentek: 0
Techdirt
Didn’t expect this one. With France pushing forward yet again with a three strikes law, Laurent GUERBY points us to the news that France’s new culture minister, Fredic Mitterand has said that he wished he was downloaded more often (translated by Google from French — Updated to fix poor original translation — thanks Laurent!) and that he got two internet connections, just in case he got cut off by a three strikes law. He also admits that his son downloads unauthorized content often. That’s probably not what the entertainment industry wanted to hear.
June 30th, 2009| politics | Comments:Kommentek: 0
Ars Technica
After the electoral success of Sweden’s Pirate Party earlier this month, Pirate Parties are a-popping in Europe. The newest ones have appeared in France and the Czech Republic over the last few weeks.
Umair Haque
“…Sales of his recordings through Sony’s music unit have generated more than $300 million in royalties for Mr. Jackson since the early 1980’s.”
Want to know why we have a zombieconomy? Because the beancounters killed the incentives to create real value.
Let’s use MJ’s tragic death as a mini case-study. $300 million over, for example, 25 years? That’s $12 million a year.
I’m deliberately leaving out ads, endorsements, concerts, etc., to focus on the the structural problems in one industry: music.
If the world’s biggest pop star only made $12 million a year from his recordings, why would anyone make serious music? Where did the rest of the money go? Why, straight into record labels’ pockets. Did they make better music with it? Nope — they made Britney and Lady GaGa. And that’s how they killed themselves: by underinvesting in quality, to rake in the take.
Wait a second — that sounds familiar. You can add back in the endorsements, etc. now — they only double the figure: to about $25 million.
If the world’s biggest pop star only made $25 million a year in total, something’s very, very wrong. Where’s the rest of the money? Why can’t a resource as scarce as the King of Pop capture more value?
After all, that’s not even mega-rich.
The world’s top hedge fund “managers” regularly pull in hundreds of millions. That’s an order of magnitude difference.
No wonder everyone wants to be a banker, investor, or [insert beancounter here]. There’s no money left in anything else.
That’s the big problem behind the zombieconomy. We don’t reward people for creating, growing, nurturing, or even remixing assets. We just reward them for allocating the same old assets.
That ‘s not an economy: it’s just a game of musical chairs.
Hence, no new finance, healthcare, educational, auto, or, yes, music, industry — for decades.
“…Darkness falls across the land
The midnight hour is close at hand
Creatures crawl in search of blood
To terrorize y’alls neighborhood.”
Indeed. Everytime you look at today’s economic landscape — you should see the Thriller video playing in your head. Because what we’ve built is a zombieconomy, where little net value is created.
And MJ’s death-by-financial-desperation should be a case study in that zombieconomy if ever there was one. Yes, he spent money on absurdly ludicrous stuff. But if top hedge fund managers can do it — why couldn’t the world’s most famous singer?
PS — The ultimate irony? I can’t even link to the Thriller video. It’s unavailable on YouTube in the UK…”due to copyright restrictions”. Lulz.
June 19th, 2009| politics | Comments:Kommentek: 0
BBC NEWS | UK | Magazine |
Now, the film and TV industry’s anti-piracy drive has gone off down different avenues in different countries. In the UK, the emphasis is on achieving an “attitudinal change” using more subtle means.
The PR agency Blue Rubicon specialises in this field, typically advising on health campaigns such as the clown smokefree message pictured right.
Now it is helping the UK film and television industry in “attaching social stigma” to illegal downloading.
June 7th, 2009| politics | Comments:Kommentek: 0
Index – Külföld – EP-választás 2009
Az előzetes eredmények szerint Svérországban két képviselőhelyet sikerült szereznie a Kalóz Pártnak. A szabad fájlmegosztásért harcoló párt a szavazatok 7,4 százalékát kapta meg.
May 31st, 2009| politics | Comments:Kommentek: 0
Index
Egy friss felmérés szerint a svéd Kalóz Párt 5,5 és 7,9 százalék közötti eredményre számíthat a jövő heti Európai Parlamenti választásokon, közölte vasárnap az AFP hírügynökség. Az Európai Parlamentben négy százalék fölötti eredmény kell egy mandátumhoz, így a harmadik legnagyobb svéd pártnak komoly esélye van az EP-be jutásra.
Free Software Foundation
We don’t make (much) music here at the Free Software Foundation, so it’s natural for people to wonder why the FSF has been standing up for individuals targeted by lawsuits launched by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). Most recently, we filed an amicus curiae brief in the case of Sony BMG Music Entertainment, et al. v. Joel Tenenbaum showing the RIAA’s theory of statutory damage awards to be unconstitutional.
ISPreview UK
TThe European Parliament has, in its FINAL vote (there have been five so far) on the matter, chosen to retain amendment 46 (138) of the new Telecoms Package
by a majority of 407 to 57. Amendment 46 states that restrictions to
the fundamental rights and freedoms of Internet users can only be put
in place after a decision by judicial authorities, which protects ISPs
from having to disconnect customers suspected of involvement with
illegal broadband file-sharing (P2P) downloads.
La Quadrature du Net
confirms that the European Parliament has nevertheless adopted a soft
compromise on issues of network equity: no strong protection against “net discrimination” was adopted.
“A
formidable campaign from the citizens put the issues of freedoms on the
Internet at the center of the debates of the Telecoms Package. This is
a victory by itself. It started with the declaration of commissioner
Viviane Reding considering access to Internet as a fundamental right.
The massive re-adoption of amendment 138/46 rather than the softer
compromise negotiated by rapporteur Trautmann with the Council is an
even stronger statement. These two elements alone confirm that the
French ‘three strikes‘ scheme, HADOPI, is dead already.” explains Jérémie Zimmermann, co-founder of La Quadrature du Net.
However
it’s not all good news as the changes do not prevent similar schemes
from being introduced by individual member states. Likewise nothing
will forbid ISPs from turning the Internet away from a neutral zone where people have equal access to all content applications and services. [geek]We doubt the Romulans would approve.[/geek]
“The
strong statement for the access to the Internet as a fundamental right
demonstrates that the Parliament can be courageous and reject the
pressure to compromise when essential values are at stake.
Unfortunately, on issues that appear more technical such as the absence
of discrimination of services and contents on the Internet, the
Parliament did not take the full measure of what it is at stake yet.
Citizens must remain mobilized on these crucial questions,” concludes Gérald Sédrati-Dinet, analyst for La Quadrature.
Mercifully
we’re unlikely to see Three-Strikes style legislation in the UK,
although some rights holders are still privately pushing for it. To
date the industry as a whole has failed to agree a concrete way forward
on the matter, although it’s expected that Lord Carter’s final Digital
Britain report (due in another month or so) may present one. See our ‘To Ban or Not to Ban (Illegal File Sharers)‘ – article for more background to all this.he European Parliament has, in its FINAL vote (there have been five so far) on the matter, chosen to retain amendment 46 (138) of the new Telecoms Package by a majority of 407 to 57. Amendment 46 states that restrictions to the fundamental rights and freedoms of Internet users can only be put in place after a decision by judicial authorities, which protects ISPs from having to disconnect customers suspected of involvement with illegal broadband file-sharing (P2P) downloads.
La Quadrature du Net confirms that the European Parliament has nevertheless adopted a soft compromise on issues of network equity: no strong protection against “net discrimination” was adopted.
“A formidable campaign from the citizens put the issues of freedoms on the Internet at the center of the debates of the Telecoms Package. This is a victory by itself. It started with the declaration of commissioner Viviane Reding considering access to Internet as a fundamental right. The massive re-adoption of amendment 138/46 rather than the softer compromise negotiated by rapporteur Trautmann with the Council is an even stronger statement. These two elements alone confirm that the French ‘three strikes’ scheme, HADOPI, is dead already.” explains Jérémie Zimmermann, co-founder of La Quadrature du Net.
However it’s not all good news as the changes do not prevent similar schemes from being introduced by individual member states. Likewise nothing will forbid ISPs from turning the Internet away from a neutral zone where people have equal access to all content applications and services. [geek]We doubt the Romulans would approve.[/geek]
“The strong statement for the access to the Internet as a fundamental right demonstrates that the Parliament can be courageous and reject the pressure to compromise when essential values are at stake. Unfortunately, on issues that appear more technical such as the absence of discrimination of services and contents on the Internet, the Parliament did not take the full measure of what it is at stake yet. Citizens must remain mobilized on these crucial questions,” concludes Gérald Sédrati-Dinet, analyst for La Quadrature.
Mercifully we’re unlikely to see Three-Strikes style legislation in the UK, although some rights holders are still privately pushing for it. To date the industry as a whole has failed to agree a concrete way forward on the matter, although it’s expected that Lord Carter’s final Digital Britain report (due in another month or so) may present one. See our ‘To Ban or Not to Ban (Illegal File Sharers)’ – article for more background to all this.
May 6th, 2009| politics | Comments:Kommentek: 0
BBC NEWS | Technology
Each April, the US releases the Special 301 Report, which examines the intellectual property laws of its main trading partners.
The release generated international headlines last week as countries such as Canada and Israel found themselves on the “Priority Watch List” of countries that the US claims are the world’s worst piracy offenders.
In all, the US targeted 46 countries. In addition to the usual suspects such as China and Russia, Europe came in for heavy criticism with Finland, Norway, Spain, Italy, Greece, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland all on the Watch list.
Unrecognised
The Report yielded predictable lobbyist support from groups such as the International Intellectual Property Alliance and the Motion Picture Association of America, who used the opportunity to chastise the countries on the list for failing to address their concerns.
Yet the lobby group victory may ultimately prove illusory. By wildly overstating its claims on many countries, the US has undermined its credibility and confirmed criticisms that the report lacks reliability or objective analysis.
Rather than increasing the pressure for reforms, it seems more likely to be characterised as little more than a lobbyist document that is best ignored.
For example, in previous years, Canadian officials have done little more than express disappointment with the US findings. According to government documents obtained under the Access to Information Act, the Canadian Minister of Foreign Affairs has been repeatedly advised that “Canada does not recognise the Special 301 process due to its lacking of reliable and objective analysis, and we have raised this issue regularly with the US in our bilateral discussions.”
Frustration
Canada may move beyond behind-the-scenes discussions now that it finds itself on the Priority Watch List alongside China, Russia, and Indonesia. If so, it would likely remind the US that it is compliant with its international copyright obligations. In recent years, it responded to US pressure by becoming one of the few countries to enact anti-camcording legislation. Law enforcement has prioritised intellectual property cases and the law contains tough statutory damages provisions that are regularly used by rights holders to obtain significant judgments.
Moreover, grouping Canada together with high-piracy nations does not stand up to even mild scrutiny. The Business Software Alliance’s 2008 statistics show that among the 11 other countries on this year’s Priority Watch List for which data is available, the lowest rate of software piracy is 66%. By comparison, Canada stands at 32%, not remotely close to any other country on the list. In fact, Canada’s software piracy rate is lower than all 46 countries named in the Special 301 report.
Similarly, 2008 data from the US Customs and Border Protection Agency on intellectual property seizures reports that Taiwan and South Korea rank fourth and fifth as sources of seized goods (China is number one), yet both were dropped this year from the Watch List. By comparison, Canada does not even appear in the rankings.
Frustration with the list is not limited to Canada. Israel was one of twenty countries to submit briefs to the US defending their laws and policies. The Israeli brief anticipated the criticism over the absence of anti-circumvention legislation, rules that provide legal protection for technological protection measures (TPMs).
It argued that “given the industry objections to TPM, lack of uniform implementation worldwide and its nascent obsolescence, non implementation of TPM can not be the basis for determining that a country, as in the words of the Trade Act of 1974 (19 USC 2242) ‘denies adequate and effective protection of intellectual property rights or deny fair and equitable market access to US persons who rely on intellectual property protection.'”
Questionable findings
The US ignored the argument (and its own law) and placed Israel on the Priority Watch list.
US officials similarly dismissed Finland’s and Italy’s brief.
Given the US relies heavily on the IIPA report in compiling its list, the lobby group’s claims were also heavily criticised by many countries including Poland, Spain, and South Korea. For example, Spain stated that the “arbitrary conclusions are drawn in this report which on numerous occasions offends Spanish Government action.”
The Special 301 Report does more than just anger US allies. It also calls into question their ongoing support for US international intellectual property policies such as the negotiation of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement and the proceedings at the World Trade Organisation against China over its copyright rules.
In targeting so many countries with questionable findings, the US has now sent a message that this support is not good enough. Copyright law may be in need of reform in many countries, but new laws should come on their terms and in their national interest, not as a result of misleading and inaccurate bully tactics.
USTR – USTR Releases 2009 Special 301 Report
Hungary will remain on the Watch List in 2009. Hungary’s National Board Against Counterfeiting and Piracy, established in January 2008, has promoted collaboration on IPR issues between the Government and the private sector, and issued a two-year IPR strategy to combat counterfeiting and piracy. The United States urges Hungary to take concrete steps to implement its IPR strategy and to improve its IPR enforcement regime. Further improvements are needed to ensure that prosecutors follow through with cases against IP infringers, and that judges are encouraged to impose deterrent-level sentences for civil and criminal IP infringement.
U.S. copyright industries also report that Internet piracy in Hungary is a major problem, and note that the Hungarian Government should provide adequate resources to its law enforcement authorities to combat IPR crime, especially on the Internet. The United States will continue to work with the Hungarian Government to address these IPR concerns.
Yahoo! Finance
A defense lawyer in the Pirate Bay file-sharing case said Thursday he will demand a retrial after the judge admitted he was a member of copyright protection organizations.
A Stockholm court last week convicted four men behind the notorious Web site of helping others commit copyright violations and gave them one-year prison sentences.
They also were ordered to pay damages of 30 million kronor ($3.6 million) to entertainment companies, including Warner Bros., Sony Music Entertainment, EMI and Columbia Pictures.
Peter Althin, who represented Pirate Bay spokesman Peter Sunde in the case, said he would request a retrial after Judge Tomas Norstrom confirmed Swedish Radio reports that he was a member of two Swedish copyright groups.
Althin said that constituted a conflict of interest, especially considering that three people who represented the entertainment industry during the trial also held membership in one of the organizations.
Technet
A Svédországban megalakult, önmagát Kalóz Pártnak nevező csoport elsősorban azok támogatására számíthat, akik a szellemi termékek megosztása, letöltése és másolása ellen kiszabott szigorú büntetések ellen tiltakoznak.
Mint az EUobserver írja, a svédek több mint 10 százaléka vesz részt valamilyen hálózati fájlcserélő tevékenységben, a 26-35 éves férfi korosztály esetében az arány eléri az 56 százalékot. Ez azt jelenti, hogy akár 1,3 millió is lehet azoknak a száma, akiket a bűnözővé nyilvánítás fenyeget.
A hobbikalózok a legkülönfélébb foglalkozási, képzettségi és korcsoportból kerülnek ki, ezért rendszeresen figyelik a szerzői jogok szabályozása terén történő változásokat, és várhatóan támogatni fogják a „hálózati radikálisokként” ismert jelölteket a júniusi európai parlamenti választásokon.
A Kalóz Párt fő célja az on-line kultúra vívmányainak díjtalan használata. Ennek részeként a párt követeli a copyright szabályozás alapvető megreformálását, a szabadalmi rendszer eltörlését, valamint az állampolgárok magánéletének és adatainak háboríthatatlanságát. A KP szerint ezek a célok megvalósíthatóak a mai Európában.
A Kalóz Párt növekvő népszerűségét jelzi, hogy támogatói és aktivistái száma messze meghaladja a Svédországban hagyományosan népszerű környezetvédő szervezetekét. A kalózjelöltek azt is remélik, hogy az EP-választásokon nagy létszámban tudnak mozgósítani olyan választókat is, akik egyébként passzívan viszonyulnak az uniós ügyekhez.
Newswise Business News
Abolishing patent and copyright law sounds radical, but two economists at Washington University in St. Louis say it’s an idea whose time has come. Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine see innovation as a key to reviving the economy. They believe the current patent/copyright system discourages and prevents inventions from entering the marketplace. The two professors have published their views in a new book, Against Intellectual Monopoly, from Cambridge University Press.
“From a public policy view, we’d ideally like to eliminate patent and copyright laws altogether,” says Levine, John H. Biggs Distinguished Professor of Economics. “There’s plenty of protection for inventors and plenty of protection and opportunities to make money for creators. It’s not that we see this as some sort of charitable act that people are going to invent and create things without earning money. Evidence shows very strongly there are lots of ways to make money without patents and copyright.”
Levine and Boldrin point to students being sued for ‘pirating’ music on the internet and AIDS patients in Africa dying because they cannot afford expensive drugs produced by patent holders as examples of the failure of the current system. Boldrin, the Joseph Gibson Hoyt Distinguished Professor in Arts & Sciences and Chair of the economics department says, “Intellectual property is in fact an intellectual monopoly that hinders rather than helps the competitive free market regime that has delivered wealth and innovation to our doorsteps.”
The authors argue that license fees, regulations and patents are now so misused that they drive up the cost of creation and slow down the rate of diffusion of new ideas. Levine explains, “Most patents are not acquired by innovators hoping to protect their innovations from competitors in order to get a short term edge over the rest of the market. Most patents are obtained by large corporations who have built portfolios of patents for defense purposes, to prevent other people from suing them over patent violations.”
Boldrin and Levine promote a drastic reform of the patent system in their book. They propose the law should be restored to match the intent of the U.S. Constitution which states: Congress may “promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writing and discoveries.”
They call on Congress to reverse the burden of the proof on patent seekers by granting patents only to those capable of proving that:
• their invention has social value
• a patent is not likely to block even more valuable innovations
• the innovation would not be cost-effective absent a patent
The authors acknowledge that such drastic reform is unlikely and outline an incremental approach for Congress to gradually reduce the scope of patents, regulation and licensing.
Nevertheless, their call for changing the system is urgent. The economists compare intellectual monopoly (patents) to medieval trade monopolies which were proven to be economically detrimental. They write, “For centuries, the cause of economic progress has identified with that of free trade. In the decades to come, sustaining economic progress will depend, more and more, on our ability to progressively reduce and eventually eliminate intellectual monopoly.”
Professors Boldrin and Levine maintain a blog on this topic: www.Againstmonopoly.org.
TorrentFreak
The global amount used by IFPI on lobbying and fighting piracy is £75 million.
O’Reilly Radar
That’s pretty much my view, too. DVDs (mentioned in the note at the start) became a big boon for the studios, once their crazy ideas about self-destructing Divx discs went the way of the Dodo. The studios have a very long history of betting against technology people want, and on technology people don’t want. This is just another such case. The technology people want always wins in the end — no duh — and usually benefits the businesses who fought that technology to the death. Here’s hoping the technology people want — Boxee — doesn’t wind up benefiting the studios fighting it now.
Ars Technica
Have you ever wondered how many people around the globe are seeding
and leeching torrents? The Pirate Bay, one of the most popular torrent
trackers, has published an interactive map
with data for each country, both in terms of an exact percentage of
users and how many connections are going through that country at any
given time. The statistics may not give a complete picture of P2P
activity across the globe, but they do offer some insights into habits
of different users.
The data points, laid over a Google Map, are shaped and colored
depending on how many connections are coming out of each location. For
example, as of publication time, about 5.515 percent of all TPB
connections are coming from the US, while Canada sits at 2.949 percent
and Japan at 6.553 percent. China, which is the only country that gets
the little bonfire icon, represents a whopping 34.822 percent of all
TPB connections at the moment.
Have you ever wondered how many people around the globe are seeding and leeching torrents? The Pirate Bay, one of the most popular torrent trackers, has published an interactive map with data for each country, both in terms of an exact percentage of users and how many connections are going through that country at any given time. The statistics may not give a complete picture of P2P activity across the globe, but they do offer some insights into habits of different users.
The data points, laid over a Google Map, are shaped and colored depending on how many connections are coming out of each location. For example, as of publication time, about 5.515 percent of all TPB connections are coming from the US, while Canada sits at 2.949 percent and Japan at 6.553 percent. China, which is the only country that gets the little bonfire icon, represents a whopping 34.822 percent of all TPB connections at the moment.
January 27th, 2009| politics | Comments:Kommentek: 0
Lawrence Lessig | January 8th | ColbertNation.com
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Recording Industry vs. The People
According to a report on Wired.com, the RIAA spokesman claims that the RIAA has not filed any new lawsuits “for months”; according to the Wall Street Journal report
the RIAA stopped filing mass lawsuits “early this fall”; and the
Associated Press was apparently told that the RIAA had stopped bringing
new lawsuits in August.
Being very familiar with the RIAA’s penchant for “misspeaking”,
even when under oath, I investigated the matter a bit, and learned that
a large number of suits have been brought by the RIAA quite recently,
one as recently as this Monday. Here are just a few. Those marked green were contributed by some of our great readers:
Intellectual Property Watch
By David Cronin for Intellectual Property Watch
BRUSSELS – Europe’s copyright rules are ill-suited to an age when millions of music files can be accessed at the click of a mouse, a Brussels conference has been told.
About eight million tracks by musicians from a wide variety of genres can now be listened to via the internet, a figure that is projected to rise to 12 million by 2012. With the entertainment industry estimating that 90 percent of music downloads are illegal and sales of CDs having declined sharply over the past few years, some technology firms are urging that the whole basis of copyright law needs to be rethought.
Kurt Einzinger, president of the Internet Service Providers Association (EuroISPA), believes that attitudes to music have changed so fundamentally that the “established copyright regime is not fit for the internet.”
“I personally have LPs [records] of The Rolling Stones and Cream at home,” he said. “But my kids get a piece of music and they listen to [it] and that’s it. They don’t keep it. They wouldn’t pay one euro or one dollar for listening one time to a piece of music.”
While acknowledging that there is a “culture of disrespect for copyright rules,” he added that “when downloading, people don’t feel they are illegal, they don’t feel they are doing something wrong.”
Einzinger was speaking at a conference organised by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) that took place in Brussels on November 24 and 25.
A markedly different view was offered by Feargal Sharkey, former singer with Irish punk-rock band The Undertones.
Now chief executive of UK Music, which represents artists, record companies, managers and royalty collecting societies, Sharkey contended that the “voice of the creator is frequently overlooked” in the debate about the internet.
The proliferation of free downloading, he said, is a contributory factor to the often meagre income of artists, citing estimates that more than 80 percent of musicians in Britain earn less than €15,000 euros per year.
“The copyright system was introduced to protect true originality,” he added, stating that freedom of expression does not confer “a freedom to steal and plagiarise.”
A ‘memorandum of understanding’ between the British government, the recording industry and technology firms signed during July aims to set up new business models, which allow listeners access to music using whichever means they prefer but in a way that “the creator gets paid,” according to Sharkey.
Jean Bergevin, a European Commission official handling single market issues, suggested there is considerable confusion about how copyright legislation applies.
Many internet service providers have claimed that they merely host data and should not be held responsible for whether its content violates copyright law. But Bergevin stressed that the European Union’s directive on electronic commerce, which dates from 2000, does not make such firms “fully exempt from liability.” Once they receive knowledge that copyright is not being respected, they are supposed to take action. Yet he said that the issue of how courts should interpret what constitutes knowledge in such cases is “an issue that might require some clarification.”
His colleague Jean-Eric de Cockborne, an official dealing with audiovisual policy, described internet piracy as “a massive problem.” While he insisted that “doing nothing is not an option,” he argued that it would be premature to introduce fresh laws.
“It is unlikely that new punitive legislation will be adopted,” he added. “There is a very strong political view on the need to balance the protection of intellectual property rights with other fundamental rights, in particular data protection and the right to information.”
Jürgen Becker, vice-president of GEMA (the society for musical performing and mechanical reproduction rights in Germany), complained that “copyright is not being adequately protected online” and that a “crisis of copyright” has been taking place for the past two decades. His organisation, he noted, has initiated legal action in Germany in a bid to pressurise internet firms into blocking access to websites which breach copyright rules.
“All rights-owners agree that they do not wish to put up with this any longer,” he said. “But the options open to them in this respect are limited. Only lawmakers – both national and European – are in a position to remedy the situation.”
Zeropiad
Kevin Bermeister who, along with Nikki Hemming, created the KaZaA file-sharing software and was sued for millions by the RIAA from 2004 to 2006, has now partnered with Michael Speck who ran the RIAA’s case as the head of its anti-piracy arm, Music Industry Piracy Investigations, have teamed up at Brilliant Digital Entertainment to fight online piracy.
The company has developed software which will run on an ISPs network
and enable the “instantaneous conversion of infringing activity into
legitimate content transactions.” In other words, instead of seeing
search results for illegally free copyrighted material users will
instead see legal copies available for instant purchase.
The incentive for the ISPs to run the software is that they are
promised a share of the revenue. The legal download is delivered by the
ISP which then simply adds a charge for it to the customer’s monthly
Internet bill.
“When the architecture of the internet that has our technology
recognises one of those proven illicit files, it blocks it, disconnects
the link to it and adds to the search results the opportunity to
purchase the legitimate material,” said Mr. Speck.
“At that point there is no other information collected – the entire
action revolves around the identification of the content and action
taken against illicit content; there’s an absolute protection of
privacy.”
Ars Technica
If you pay any attention to the endless debates over intellectual property policy in the United States, you’ll hear two numbers invoked over and over again, like the stuttering chorus of some Philip Glass opera: 750,000 and $200 to $250 billion. The first is the number of U.S. jobs supposedly lost to intellectual property theft; the second is the annual dollar cost of IP infringement to the U.S. economy. These statistics are brandished like a talisman each time Congress is asked to step up enforcement to protect the ever-beleaguered U.S. content industry. And both, as far as an extended investigation by Ars Technica has been able to determine, are utterly bogus.
Kosmopolit
What happened with the “Telecoms Package” (that I have mentioned here and here)? It seems that most of the worrying amendments regarding copyright issues (especially the three strikes approach) were not adopted by the European Parliament. A detailed analysis by La Quadrature du Net will be published in the next days. However, it was an impressive example of digital citizen lobbyism. If you read German head over to netzpolitik.org and heise.de. EurActiv has a long and rather general article on the whole initiative. But it is true: the Internet is rather quiet about this success in the European Parliament as A Fistful of Euros notes. Bashing the EU is much easier, I guess.
PC Magazine
A bipartisan group of senators introduced a bill in the U.S. Senate on Thursday that would allow the U.S. Attorney General to bring civil actions against Americans that violate copyrights.
The bill, the “Enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights Act of 2008”, was scheduled to be introduced on Thursday, according to Judiciary Committee chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), who authored the bill along with Arlen Specter (R-Pa.). The bill’s co-sponsors include Senators Evan Bayh (D-Ind.), George Voinovich (R-Ohio), Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and John Cornyn (R-Texas).
The bill is similar to the “Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Act” of the 2007 Congress, which set out to establish a so-called Intellectual Property Enforcement Network (IPEN) made up of the deputy secretaries of the Department of Homeland Security, Justice, the Treasury, Commerce, and State, plus the Deputy Attorney General and other senior government members.
However, the current bill would pair the IPEN with a designated Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator, an advisor who would report directly to the President. Enforcement would be left to the FBI, who would be authorized to form an operational task force to fight copyright crime. An organized crime task force would also be created at the Department of Justice to link copyright violations to organized crime, such as DVD piracy. Five “intellectual property law enforcement coordinators” could be sent overseas to work with local law enforcement.
“The time has come to bolster the Federal effort to protect this most valuable and vulnerable property, to give law enforcement the resources and the tools it needs to combat piracy and counterfeiting, and to make sure that the many agencies that deal with intellectual property enforcement have the opportunity and the incentive to talk with each other, to coordinate their efforts, and to achieve the maximum effects for their efforts,” Sen. Leahy said in a statement. “The Enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights Act of 2008 does just that.”
The proposed bill would also tighten civil IP laws, requiring that an actual copyright be filed before a criminal case can be brought. However, according to the text of the bill, no actual copyright would need to be filed in the case of a civil suit brought by the Attorney General or another individual or company.
The bill would also explicitly allow documents and records to be seized in the course of a civil copyright-infringement suit. And a “harmless error” provision would allow prosecutors to gloss over minor errors in copyright filings that would otherwise provide defendants a loophole.
Reactions split across industry lines
Unsurprisingly, the bill was welcomed by software groups, including the Business Software Alliance. “”BSA and its members commend Senators Patrick Leahy (D-VT), Diane Feinstein (D-CA), Evan Bayh (D-IN), John Cornyn (R-TX), George Voinovich (R-OH) and others for their leadership on intellectual property issues, as further illustrated today, with the introduction of the Enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights Act of 2008,” the BSA said in a statement. “This important legislation will go a long way to curbing software piracy which cost more than $48 billion around the globe. The bill will provide US law enforcement with new legal tools to combat software piracy and counterfeiting. It will also provide much needed resources to investigate and prosecute IP crimes and expand the successful program of placing IP attaches in key US embassies around the globe.”
“American innovators and creators are driving our nation’s economy. Whether they are born of research, technological innovation or the strum of a guitar, creative expression of ideas are the backbone of job creation, growth and surplus trade,” executive director Patrick Ross of the Copyright Alliance added.
“We urge Congress to act quickly so that copyright owners can see new enforcement measures on the President’s desk this Congress,” Ross said in a statement.
Public interest group Public Knowledge said it was concerned, however. “We are concerned that several provisions in this bill could have harmful, if unintended, consequences that would harm consumers,” Gigi Sohn, president and co-founder of the organization, said in a statement. “The bill rightly targets enforcement of copyright law against commercial infringers, but some of these same enforcement provisions are likely to hurt ordinary consumers.
“The provisions allowing seizure of equipment may be harmful to consumers,” Sohn added. “Seizing expensive manufacturing equipment used for large-scale infringement from a commercial pirate may be appropriate. Seizing a family’s general-purpose computer in a download case, as this bill would allow, is not appropriate. This bill goes even farther, expanding the penalties under the flawed Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) to create new grounds for allowing a family’s computer to be seized if used to circumvent digital rights management, even if for fair uses.
“In addition, this bill would turn the Justice Department into an arm of the legal departments of the entertainment companies by authorizing DoJ to file civil lawsuits for infringement, forcing taxpayers to foot the bill,” Sohn concluded.
Yahoo! Finance
A recommendation to punish Comcast Corp. for blocking subscribers’ Internet traffic should serve as a warning to other service providers, the nation’s top telecommunications regulator said Friday.
Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin Martin said he hopes his action will make network operators sensitive about putting “arbitrary limits on the way consumers can access information on the Internet.”
The Associated Press reported Thursday night that Martin will recommend to his fellow commissioners that Comcast, the nation’s largest cable company, be punished for violating agency principles that guarantee customers open access to the Internet.
Martin provided more details of his proposed disciplinary action in a meeting with reporters Friday.
Comcast was accused by consumer groups of blocking “peer-to-peer” Internet traffic, where users share large data files using special software. The complaint followed an AP investigation in October.
Comcast denies it blocks content, but says it uses “carefully limited measures” to manage traffic on its broadband network to ensure all customers receive quality service.
Martin wants Comcast to stop using its current practice, to tell commissioners where it has used it in the past, and to disclose to the agency and consumers what limitations will be placed on customers under its new traffic management plan, which it hopes to have in place by the end of the year.
Martin said he is not recommending a fine against Comcast because he wants to use the case as a means of laying out agency policy.
TorrentFreak
Jesse Alexander has co-produced and written for both ‘Heroes’ and ‘Lost’, two of the most successful TV-series today. In addition to millions of viewers on TV, both shows are are also extremely popular on BitTorrent. In fact, millions of people share a single episode and this can go on to 10 million downloads per episode.
One could argue that their availability on BitTorrent actually helped ‘Lost’ and ‘Heroes’ to build a stronger fanbase. With torrents, no-one has to miss an episode anymore which keeps the fans more engaged. So called “pirates” advertise the shows to their friends, or write about it on their blogs. Accordingly, when we asked Jesse Alexander whether he thinks that BitTorrent might have helped to reach a broader audience, he answered with a clear cut “Yes”.
Not that Jesse wants everybody to get the shows off BitTorrent, but he said that it certainly signals that there is a market for on-demand and interactive TV. “People watching shows such as Lost and Heroes on BitTorrent is the present world reality,” Jesse told TorrentFreak. TV networks have to recognize this, give their viewers more ways to interact with the shows, and find ways to generate revenue from every member of the global audience.”
“It’s the same for music artists. The reality is, people share music. Artist now make money by driving people to concerts, through community websites, and by offering exclusive events. TV networks are focusing too much on one exclusive product, instead of building a community. This is a mistake I think.”
The success of Heroes on BitTorrent didn’t pass by the cast of the show unnoticed either. “The cast and the people behind the scenes have all been talking about it,” Jesse said. As an example he mentioned last year’s promotional tour in France, where the actors were recognized by hundreds of fans, even though the show had not even premiered on TV yet.
Alexander has hit the nail on the head. This is in fact one of the main reasons why shows like ‘Heroes’ are so popular on filesharing networks. It can take up to six months after the US premiere before these shows are aired in Europe, Australia and other parts of the world. Jesse agreed that this is indeed one of the major causes of piracy. “This gap is something that is certainly going to change in the future,” he added.
Jesse went on to say that in the near future, thanks to the Internet, the viewers of TV-shows will see more interactive components and alternate realities they can participate in. The future of TV will be more international, with real interaction, and shows will be more and more integrated into the core part of an online community.
When we asked Jesse if he has ever downloaded TV-shows off BitTorrent, he told us: “I can’t confirm or deny, but I’m familiar with all kind of new technologies.” I guess we all know what he’s trying to say.
It is no surprise that Jesse is more positive towards new technologies than some others in the entertainment industry. Last week we reported on the upcoming “Pirate TV” show that he is working on, together with Matt Mason, the author of ‘The Pirate’s Dilemma’.
“Matt’s book needs to get a broader audience,” said Jesse. “We want to discuss the negative and the positive side of piracy, and place things in a broader historical context. We want to start a real conversation about the future of intellectual property.”
We’re happy to join the debate, what about you?
June 12th, 2008| politics | Comments:Kommentek: 0
UiD születik » Blog Archive »
Szeretnék pár szót szólni, és ezzel a figyelmet kicsit felkelteni, a torrent világban egyre durvábban működtetett új pénzszerzési módszerről amit „etikus mert nem kötelező” felkiáltással próbálnak beadni nekünk.
Egészen pontosan az sms-sel vagy bármi más módon vásárolt előnyökre gondolok. Néhány torrent oldal előnyöket kínál nyíltan pénz, vagy burkoltan támogatás fejében, és ezt azzal próbálják kifehéríteni, hogy az nem kötelező.
Nem igaz az, hogy minden ami nem kötelező az emiatt már etikus is. Nézzük egy példán keresztül. Tegyük fel, hogy én kezelem egy csoportnak a kasszáját. A csoport tagjai tesznek bele pénzt és vesznek ki belőle. Persze hosszútávon csak annyit vehetnek ki amennyit beleraknak, én erre vigyázok. Na most ha én azt mondom az embereknek – ha valaki ad nekem x forintot akkor kétszer annyit vehet ki a kasszából – akkor ez etikus vagy sem? Ez annak ellenére sem etikus, hogy nem kötelező. Az előnyt nem a magam „kárára” hanem másokéra adtam.
Jó lenne ha mindenki felfogná – minden olyan előny ami a le/fel töltési arányt befolyásolja (áttételesen a regisztráció biztosítása is ide tartozik), az a többi felhasználó kárára történik és ezért nem etikus ilyet adni, különösen nem pénzért.
Entertainment News, Technology News, Media – Variety
For the first time, Spain and Greece join usual suspects Russia, China, Canada and Mexico on a congressional list of countries with the highest levels of piracy.
The Intl. Antipiracy Caucus issued Thursday its annual list of countries “based on levels of piracy and the need for government intervention in lawmaking, enforcement and prosecution of intellectual property theft,” according to the Motion Picture Assn. of America, which supports the caucus.
The list is essentially Congress’ smaller-scale version of the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative’s annual 301 Report. But unlike the 301 Report, the caucus list does not carry with it the authority directly to affect trade relations with any countries.
Still, the MPAA and the Recording Industry Assn. of America hailed the list, and Hollywood particularly emphasized the inclusion of Spain.
“The Spanish government’s persistent failure to address Spain’s epidemic Internet piracy problem, which is wreaking havoc on the legitimate market, has caused Spain to appear on the list,” the MPAA said.
The RIAA said: “Joining China and Russia in ‘the ignominious three’ is Canada, which, notwithstanding numerous public announcements, has failed to join the rest of its partners in the developed world in modernizing its copyright laws to address the challenges — and to seize the opportunities — of the digital age.”
May 26th, 2008| politics | Comments:Kommentek: 0
Slashdot |
“I’m an anarcho-capitalist, and a huge supporter of property rights, both physical and intellectual. At the same time, I find the current trend of increasing penalties for minor violations, criminalizing civil IP matters, anti-consumer technologies like DRM, and abuse of the legal system by the *AA’s of the world really disturbing. You’d think that by now, there’d be a reasonable solution to the problem of protecting intellectual property while at the same time maintaining the rights of consumers and protecting individuals from absurd litigation, but I have yet to find one. So, I pose these questions to the Slashdot community: 1 — Do you acknowledge the legitimacy of intellectual property to begin with? That is, do you believe that intellectual property is a valid construct equivalent to physical property, or do you think it’s illusory? If not, why? 2 — If so, how would you go about protecting the rights of intellectual property holders in a way that doesn’t require unfair usage limitations or resort to predatory abuse of the tort system?”
Variety
The inauguration of Russia’s president, Dmitry Medvedev, on May 7 signaled a new era in the battle to combat copyright crime, Konstantin Zemchenkov, head of the Russian Anti-Piracy Organization (RAPO), believes.
Ten years after the Motion Picture Assn.-backed group was set up to both lobby for and lead front-line assaults against Russia’s massive, organized video and DVD piracy networks, steady progress is being made.
Criminal law reform has increased maximum prison terms and doubled fines to $20,000 for producers and sellers of pirated product.
A wide range of new administrative measures, which include requirements to report the purchase and sale of large-scale DVD and video copying equipment, coupled with municipal trading-standards laws, are also being employed to tighten the grip on pirates.
Stepping up the fight against intellectual piracy offenses is a key part of Medvedev’s strategy to gain coveted Russian membership in the World Trade Organization.
Russia’s lax record on stemming vast piracy that costs legitimate license holders an estimated $2 billion a year has been among the key stumbling blocks to its getting membership in the world’s top trade club.
May 6th, 2008| politics | Comments:Kommentek: 0
tune-out.com …. a response to the music industry
There is no digital music battle or piracy war. That is a figment of your imagination, and, every time you preach our digital crimes to us, we ‘tune out’ of your deranged ranting. Your declining profits are the symptom of a business model that is fast becoming irrelevant.
PC Magazine
On the heels of its arrangement with BitTorrent , Comcast on Tuesday announced that it would partner with Pando Networks to create a P2P bill of rights for file-sharing networks and Internet service providers.
Comcast and Pando will meet with industry experts, other ISPs, and P2P companies in order to come up with a set of rules that would clarify how a user can use P2P applications and how an ISP can manage file-sharing programs running on their networks.
Last month, Comcast announced that it had reached an agreement with BitTorrent whereby Comcast agreed to alter its network management practices, and BitTorrent acknowledged that Comcast has the right to police its own network.
Comcast’s battle with P2P networks started last year after the Associated Press published an article that accused Comcast of blocking peer-to-peer services like BitTorrent. Comcast admitted to delaying P2P traffic during peak times, but denied that any file-sharing applications were being completely blocked.
Nonetheless, the FCC has opened an inquiry into the matter. The commission will sponsor a Net neutrality hearing that will address network management practices on Thursday at Stanford Law School, but has yet to take any definitive action.
The FCC has invited Tony Werner, Comcast chief technology officer, and Robert Levitan, CEO of Pando Networks, to participate in the Stanford hearing, an FCC spokesman said Tuesday night.
The Comcast-Pando deal is “an interesting idea with potentially important implications for all Internet users,” he said.
Under the Pando deal, Comcast will run a test of Pando’s Network Aware technology on its fiber-optic network in order to measure performance, speed, distance, and geography as well as the bandwidth consumption impact to the ISP, Comcast said. Pando will also conduct tests on other ISP networks, including cable, DSL, fiber, and wireless.
The results of these tests are intended to help Comcast move to a protocol-agnostic network management policy by year’s end – which was part of the deal with BitTorrent.
“We hope to get other industry experts, ISPs and P2P companies together this spring and publish the ‘P2P Bill of Rights and Responsibilities’ later this year,” Comcast’s Werner said in a statement.
“By sharing the test methodology and results, all P2P companies and ISPs can learn how to more efficiently deliver legal content,” said Pando’s Levitan.
The National Cable and Telecommunications Association (NCTA) praised the annoucement as “further evidence that private sector collaboration, not government intervention, is the most appropriate way to address complicated technological issues,” NCTA president and CEO Kyle McSlarrow said in a statement.
The Distributed Computing Industry Association (DCIA), which represents P2P and social-networking providers, urged industry participation in the process.
“The DCIA and our member companies and participants in our working groups believe that private sector initiatives are generally preferable to regulatory measures in such areas,” DCIA CEO Marty Lafferty said in a statement.
Free Press, which filed the FCC network management petition, was skeptical that the Pando deal would protect consumers.
“Slick press releases by a dishonest would-be gatekeeper do nothing to protect consumers,” Marvin Ammori, general counsel of Free Press, said in a statement. “The need for Net neutrality remains urgent. The FCC should do its job to uphold the existing bill of rights for consumers and should do so quickly.”
The Comcast-Pando deal “is little more than the fox telling the farmer, ‘I’ll guard the henhouse, you can go home.’ And that’s all the attention it deserves,” Ammori concluded.
Gigi Sohn, president and co-founder of Public Knowledge, said the deal was “ludicrous.”
“Comcast should fix its internal problems with customers being kicked off the Internet service for no good reason, or are disappointed about having programming switched to expensive digital services before it starts pretending to solve the problems of the Internet that it helped to cause,” Sohn said in a statement.
BBC NEWS | Technology
The head of one of Britain’s biggest internet providers has criticised the music industry for demanding that he act against pirates.
The trade body for UK music, the BPI, asked internet service providers to disconnect people who ignore requests to stop sharing music.
But Charles Dunstone of Carphone Warehouse, which runs the TalkTalk broadband service, is refusing.
He said it is not his job to be an internet policeman.
– Entertainment News, Chasing Pirates, Media – Variety
The government of Antigua is likely to abrogate intellectual property treaties with the U.S. by the end of March and authorize wholesale copying of American movies, music and other “soft targets” if the Bush administration fails to respond to proposals for settling a trade dispute between the two counties, according to the lawyer representing the Caribbean island nation.
The Motion Picture Assn. of America has been closely following the case with tremendous concern, an org official said, fearing that the copying could be extensively damaging and that — worse — a dangerous precedent could be set for other small countries angry at U.S. trade policy.
“It is not our preferred option to punish the MPAA or others for the U.S. government’s intransigence, but the U.S. has refused to negotiate fairly,” said Mark E. Mendel, who represents Antigua.
Goods and materials that would be copied include “virtually everything from pharmaceuticals to music, anything with IP protection that can be duplicated, though we’ll go for softer targets first,” Mendel said.
Antigua has previously suggested it might retaliate as such — with approval from the World Trade Organization — but has never stipulated when. So far, the U.S. Trade Representative has dismissed that threat simply as a negotiating ploy.
“Antigua would be breaking the law if it did that,” said USTR spokesman Sean Spicer.
The WTO ruled last year that Antigua was entitled to $21 million in damages because of a dispute with the U.S. over Internet gambling. But Antigua has not received WTO approval to procure its damages via reproducing and selling domestically U.S.-copyrighted goods and materials, Spicer added.
“They continually engage in disinformation,” Mendel responded. “The reality is, yes, we have to go before WTO and request their authorization for IP sanctions against the U.S., but we can do that at any time and the WTO will agree. That is 100% guaranteed.”
Mendel acknowledged his client would like such entities as the MPAA, the recording industry and Microsoft — orgs that depend on IP protection — to pressure the Bush administration into negotiating a “preferred” settlement, which would allow Internet gambling between Antigua and the U.S.
But he insisted the threat was neither idle nor empty. “Perhaps the U.S. doesn’t think we’re serious,” Mendel said. “We are.”
The case dates back to 2003, when Antigua claimed that the U.S. unlawfully prevented Antigua’s online gambling operators from accessing American markets although the U.S. allowed domestic online bets for horse racing. Antigua claimed $3.4 billion in losses and took its grievance to the WTO, which agreed, but awarded only $21 million in damages.
Mendel said his client has been trying ever since to work out an agreement that would allow online gambling between the two countries, but instead the U.S. has responded by “using every possible appeal, counterattack and side attack it could think of. We’ve been through five separate full-blown WTO proceedings on this and have won every step of the way.”
The most recent victory was in December, when the WTO ruled that Antigua could exact damages by ignoring IP agreements with the U.S. should a negotiated settlement fail.
Mendel said the U.S. promised then to respond to proposals for settling the dispute. “We have been waiting for three months already and there’s been nothing,” he said. “If the U.S. doesn’t come in with something by the end of March, my suggestion to the Antiguan government will be to forge ahead and impose IP sanctions.”
In a letter to the USTR about the potential effects of Antigua’s retaliation, sent prior to December’s ruling granting $21 million in damages, the MPAA wrote: “The proposed retaliation would be impossible to manage. The real and resulting economic harm would vastly exceed any amount the (WTO) might approve, even the grossly exaggerated amount ($3.4 billion) for which Antigua seeks approval, plus the economic harm would extend to other WTO members.
“MPAA believes it would be very difficult to insulate other WTO members from the effects of Antigua’s proposed retaliation,” the letter continued. “The unfortunate reality is that the failure to offer or enforce adequate protection of intellectual property rights in Antigua could foster abuses in other countries.”
TorrentFreak
Following a huge increase in complaints from the music, movie and software industries, the four major Japanese ISP organizations have agreed that they will work with copyright holders to track down copyright infringing file-sharers and disconnect them from the internet.
The Huffington Post
Apple Inc. is negotiating with record labels over a deal to give iPhone and iPod customers free access to the entire iTunes music library if they pay extra for the devices.
The Financial Times is reporting that the sticking point in the talks is how much Cupertino-based Apple will pay the record labels for the access. The newspaper cites unnamed music industry sources for Wednesday’s report.
Apple declined to comment.
The newspaper reports that Apple is looking at offering the unlimited music bundle with for the iPod and iPhone, and also a monthly music subscription service only for the iPhone.
Karl Sigfrid
Decriminalizing all non-commercial file sharing and forcing the market to adapt is not just the best solution. It’s the only solution, unless we want an ever more extensive control of what citizens do on the Internet. Politicians who play for the antipiracy team should be aware that they have allied themselves with a special interest that is never satisfied and that will always demand that we take additional steps toward the ultimate control state. Today they want to transform the Internet Service Providers into an online police force, and the Antipiracy Bureau wants the authority for themselves to extract the identities of file sharers. Then they can drag the 15-year-old girl who downloaded a Britney Spears song to civil court and sue her.
- News – The Phoenix
“While networks may have legitimate network issues and practices, that does not mean that they can arbitrarily block access to certain network services,” said FCC chairman Kevin Martin. “The commission is ready, willing and able to step in if necessary to correct any practices that are ongoing today.”
BBC NEWS | Technology |
UK net firms are resisting government suggestions that they should do more to monitor what customers do online.
The industry association for net providers said legal and technical barriers prohibit them from being anything other than a “mere conduit”.
The declaration comes as the government floats the idea of persistent pirates being denied net access.
And in the US one net supplier has admitted to “degrading” traffic from some file-sharing networks.
at Jonathan Zittrain
Seems increasingly likely.
February 11th, 2008| advertising, archives, books, DRM, economics, google, image, In Focus, isps, legislation, market data, middlemen, movies, music, politics, technology, theory, this is bad, tv, virtual | Comments:Kommentek: 0
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p2pnet.net
Two weeks ago we reported on Greens EFA launching the pro-filesharing campaign “I Wouldn’t Steal“. With new editorials in Swedish newspapers coinciding with The Pirate Bay’s charges, it seems the Green Party is looking to push the issue forward, thereby supporting The Pirate Bay.
In recent years, the Swedish Green Party, which holds 19 seats in parliament, has taken a clear stance on filesharing. Following the raid on The Pirate Bay in 2006, the party board released a memo entitled “Free the files!”in which they suggested to fully legalize non-commercial filesharing.
Reuters.com
COPENHAGEN (Reuters) – A Danish court has ordered Denmark-based Internet service provider Tele2 to shut down its customers’ access to the popular file-sharing site Pirate Bay, Danish IT magazine Computerworld reported on Monday.
Computerworld said on its Web site that a court had ordered Denmark’s Tele2 — one of the Nordic country’s largest Internet providers — to close access to the site at the request of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI).
On its Danish Web site, the IFPI said Frederiksberg county court had ordered an Internet provider to shut down its customers’ access to The Pirate Bay.
“The provider had agreed to follow the order and it is expected that other Internet service providers will voluntarily follow the court order,” the organization said.
Tele2 Denmark was bought last year by Norway’s Telenor from Swedish telecoms operator Tele2 and has about a 4 percent market share of Denmark’s roughly 2 million Internet subscriptions.
Tele2 and Telenor were not immediately available to comment, however, Tele2’s regulatory director Nicholai Pfeiffer told Computerworld Tele2 would abide by the ruling.
Other large Danish Internet service providers said they would not immediately follow the order.
The restriction is another blow for the Internet-based music and film sharing site. Last week four men linked to Pirate Bay were charged by a Swedish prosecutor with conspiracy to break copyright law.
Listening Post from Wired.com
The major labels, eager to wrest control over digital music pricing and distribution from Apple, are considering a project called Total Music that would allow them to charge device manufacturers, cellphone service providers, and other businesses $5 per month for the right to let their customers listen to free music. At this point, Total Music is being championed by Universal Music Group and Sony/BMG, but the other two majors could be interested too.
But there’s at least one problem with the plan. When an entire industry colludes to set terms and pricing, the Department of Justice tends to get interested for antitrust reasons.
Apparently, that is what is happening. According to the Music Ally newsletter, the DoJ has served Universal and Sony/BMG with notices to find out more about Total Music, and has also requested information from Warner Music Group and EMI (see update below).
Intellectual Property Watch »
CANNES – Music industry 1.0 is dead, but 2.0 has not arrived quite yet. New models for making money from music and music rights are being looked for desperately at the world’s largest music fair, Midem, this week in Cannes.
| News | This is London
Music fans around the world faced confusion today as it was announced they would be able to download unlimited, free songs without breaking the law.
A revamped online file-sharing service had vowed to offer a catalogue of 30million free songs that are compatible with iPods, but record labels have denied they had granted permission to share the songs.
Qtrax, which makes its debut today, is the latest online music venture counting on the lure of free songs to draw in music fans.
The key to their revolutionary venture was thought to be advertising, which they hope will pay the bills, namely record company licensing fees.
The New York-based service was among several peer-to-peer file-sharing applications that emerged following the shutdown of Napster, the pioneer service that enabled millions to illegally copy songs stored in other computers.
But Warner Music said it had not authorised the use of its tracks by Qtrax – and later Universal Music Group and EMI followed suit, saying they did not have licensing deals with Qtrax and discussions were continuing.
Justin Kazmark, a spokesman for New York-based Qtrax, has declined to comment.
Wolfe’s Den Blog – InformationWeek
Innocent consumers are being bothered by another round of the record industry behaving badly, via more lawsuits and anti-copying threats. This time, though, I’ve got a solution. We should do what we do to children who misbehave: Take away their privileges. Here’s the deal.
Motley Fool
As I’ve said before, a good sign of a dying industry that investors might want to avoid is when it would rather litigate than innovate, signaling a potential destroyer of value. If it starts to pursue paying customers — which doesn’t seem that outlandish at this point — then I guess we’ll all know the extent of the desperation. Investor, beware.
November 23rd, 2007| politics | Comments:Kommentek: 0
Ars technica
The Copyright Alliance, which counts the MPAA and RIAA amongst its members, has sent letters and questionnaires to presidential candidates in an effort to determine where they stand on issues relating to intellectual property law. In a copy of the letter seen by Ars, Copyright Alliance executive director Patrick Ross says he speaks “on behalf of the 11 million Americans employed in the creative industries,” and asserts that piracy reduction is essential.
November 23rd, 2007| politics | Comments:Kommentek: 0
Ars technica
The Copyright Alliance, which counts the MPAA and RIAA amongst its members, has sent letters and questionnaires to presidential candidates in an effort to determine where they stand on issues relating to intellectual property law. In a copy of the letter seen by Ars, Copyright Alliance executive director Patrick Ross says he speaks “on behalf of the 11 million Americans employed in the creative industries,” and asserts that piracy reduction is essential.
October 15th, 2007| politics | Comments:Kommentek: 0
TorrentFreak
IFPI.com, the domain that used to belong to The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry or (IFPI) – an infamous anti-piracy organization – is mysteriously transferred to The Pirate Bay. The Pirate Bay team says it will use the domain to host the newly founded International Federation of Pirate Interests.
October 15th, 2007| politics | Comments:Kommentek: 0
Los Angeles Times
It was the first major event for the Copyright Alliance, a new organization formed by deep-pocketed content producers from Hollywood, Silicon Valley and other regions. The Washington-based group intends to make a unified case to Congress that its members’ industries are a vital component of the U.S. economy and need to be protected from piracy.
Together, they make a powerful lobbying group.
The association lured congressional staffers with free gourmet sandwiches and DVD-size cookies to a room filled with big-screen TVs, laptops and glossy brochures. Capitol Hill aides took turns playing video games such as “Madden NFL 08” and “Super Mario Bros.” at one booth. At another, they lined up for autographs from soul singer Isaac Hayes.
And in a demonstration of the clout behind the Copyright Alliance, the group lured powerful House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.) to speak at its coming-out party. “When you walk into this room,” Conyers told the crowd, “copyright becomes real.”
The Harvard Crimson
“We lose 44 percent of what we lose through piracy on college campuses. There is no academic freedom in downloading a copy of the ‘Bourne Ultimatum’ while it’s out in theaters.”
CNET News.com
An AT&T executive on Wednesday sought to defuse fears that forthcoming tools aimed at identifying pirates on its network will harm the average Net surfer’s online experience.
The planned tactic is “not about heavy-handed tactics that go after the vast majority of our customers that want to consume content legally,” AT&T assistant vice president of regulatory policy Brent Olson said at an antipiracy summit here hosted by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. “It’s about making more content available to more people in more ways going forward.”
September 27th, 2007| news, politics | Comments:Kommentek: 0
Business Week
An ethics group is urging Congress to scrutinize Google Inc.’s copyright controls after finding hundreds of apparently pirated movies available on the Internet search leader’s Web site.
In letters sent to several lawmakers Wednesday, the National Legal and Policy Center excoriated Google for allowing its video-hosting service to become an online theater for showing and promoting illegally copied movies.
The nonprofit group, which says it has no financial ties to the movie industry, is best known for helping to expose a 2003 corruption scandal involving the Air Force and Boeing Co. that landed two executives in jail.
The grievances made to Congress focused exclusively on content found on Google’s Web site rather than the company’s more popular YouTube subsidiary that is being sued by Viacom Inc. for alleged copyright infringement.
The harsh critique echoes similar complaints that have asserted Google is more interested in boosting its audience — and potential profit — than protecting the intellectual property of Hollywood studios, record labels, authors and publishers.
Google says it adheres to federal law by removing unauthorized content whenever asked by copyright owners.
But that method has proven to be woefully inadequate, said Ken Boehm, chairman of the nonprofit National Legal and Policy Center.
The New Yorker
The Piracy Paradox
by James Surowiecki September 24, 2007
T
In 1932, a group of American fashion manufacturers found themselves beset by a proliferation of cheap knockoffs. Designs, then as now, were not protected by patents or copyrights, so the manufacturers decided to take direct action to stop the copying. They set up the Fashion Originators Guild of America to monitor retailers and keep track of original designs; if you look at vintage dresses from the thirties, you can find labels reading “A registered original design with Fashion Originators Guild.” Retailers selling knockoffs were “red-carded,” and guild members wouldn’t sell their merchandise to red-carded stores. This was unpopular with the retailers, but it seems to have put a damper on the copying. The only hitch in the plan was that it was illegal: in 1941, the Supreme Court ruled that the manufacturers’ arrangement violated antitrust law, and the knockoff artists stayed in business.
In the decades since, copying has remained ubiquitous in the fashion industry. Fashion-forward but low-priced retailers like H & M and Zara have flourished, thanks to their ability to take designs from Milan to the mass market. Private-label designers for major department stores trumpet the fidelity of their imitations. And almost as soon as hot new designs appear on the runway, photographs and drawings of them are on their way to Chinese factories that can produce reasonable facsimiles at a fraction of the cost. Designers are as annoyed by this as their prewar forebears were, and so Congress now finds itself considering a bill, pushed by the Council of Fashion Designers of America, that would give original designs a legal protection similar to copyright.
Designers’ frustration at seeing their ideas mimicked is understandable. But this is a classic case where the cure may be worse than the disease. There’s little evidence that knockoffs are damaging the business. Fashion sales have remained more than healthy—estimates value the global luxury-fashion sector at a hundred and thirty billion dollars— and the high-end firms that so often see their designs copied have become stronger. More striking, a recent paper by the law professors Kal Raustiala and Christopher Sprigman suggests that weak intellectual-property rules, far from hurting the fashion industry, have instead been integral to its success. The professors call this effect “the piracy paradox.”
The paradox stems from the basic dilemma that underpins the economics of fashion: for the industry to keep growing, customers must like this year’s designs, but they must also become dissatisfied with them, so that they’ll buy next year’s. Many other consumer businesses face a similar problem, but fashion—unlike, say, the technology industry—can’t rely on improvements in power and performance to make old products obsolete. Raustiala and Sprigman argue persuasively that, in fashion, it’s copying that serves this function, bringing about what they call “induced obsolescence.” Copying enables designs and styles to move quickly from early adopters to the masses. And since no one cool wants to keep wearing something after everybody else is wearing it, the copying of designs helps fuel the incessant demand for something new.
The situation is not necessarily easy on designers, who have to keep coming up with new ideas rather than being able to milk a trend for years. But it means that in the industry as a whole there is more innovation, more competition, and probably more sales than there otherwise would be. And the absence of copyrights and patents also creates a more fertile ground for that innovation, since designers are able to take other people’s ideas in new directions. Had the designers who came up with the pinstripe or the stiletto heel been able to bar others from using their creations, there would have been less innovation in fashion, not more.
If copying were putting a serious dent in designers’ profits, it might slow the pace of innovation, since designers would have less incentive to produce good work. But while knockoffs undoubtedly do steal some sales from originals, they are, for the most part, targeted at an entirely different market segment—people who appreciate high style but can’t afford high prices. That limits the damage knockoffs do, as does the fact that fashion is one of the few industries in the world where people are still willing to pay a considerable premium to own original brands instead of imitations. (That’s why counterfeits, which pretend to be original products, are illegal.) The best evidence of this is the fact that luxury-goods makers, far from cutting their prices in response to the knockoff boom, have instead been able to raise prices consistently. In fact, given the importance to fashion of what the law professor Jonathan Barnett calls “aspirational utility”—the enjoyment people get from imitating the life style of the rich and famous—one might think of knockoffs as being like gateway drugs: access to the lower-quality version makes buyers all the more interested in eventually getting the real stuff.
The fashion industry is not alone in its surprising mixture of weak intellectual-property laws and strong innovation: haute cuisine, furniture design, and magic tricks are all fields where innovators produce new work without being able to copyright it. This doesn’t mean that we can always do without copyrights and patents, and fashion has unique characteristics that limit the damage that copying can do: it’s relatively cheap to come up with new designs, there’s a culture of novelty, and people are willing to pay more for the right brands. But we should be skeptical of claims that tougher laws are necessarily better laws. Sometimes imitation isn’t just the sincerest form of flattery. It’s also the most productive. ♦
We’re back!
Suprnova has been down for some years due to some heavy pressure from the copyright lobby. The former owner sloncek donated suprnova to The Pirate Bay – and as you know, we like to kick ass and bow for noone!
We were going to keep this site a secret until we had finished it, but of course it leaked, that’s how internet works. So now that the word is out, we’re releasing it!
Please consider these first weeks/months as a beta test. Since we love all you guys and gals so much we decided to keep it an open beta test.
That means, please behave, don’t complaint to much and if you discover any weird bugs or problems, let us know.
Some of you have also already discovered our new forum, Suprbay! Which is a joint forum for both Suprnova and The Pirate Bay. Discuss movies, music, love and whatever with your fellow pirates.
Finally, some words for non-internet loving companies: This is how it works. Whatever you sink, we build back up. Whomever you sue, ten new pirates are recruited. Wherever you go, we are already ahead of you.
You are the past and the forgotten, we are the internet and the future.
y’arr!
o0o
ABC News
Forget about digging a hole with a spoon to escape from prison. Four federal inmates are accused of going above and beyond that call.
The four were indicted Tuesday on allegations that they copyrighted their names, then demanded millions of dollars from prison officials for using the names without authorization.
techwack
Belgian music copyright group SABAM has been reported to have asked the country’s leading telecom company Belgacom to commit to blocking or filtering illegal music file sharing.
This report was first published by the Belgian daily Le Soir which claimed that the telecom company has been given eight days to react.
Incidentally, this new development takes place just days after a Belgian court’s decision which ordered Belgian ISP, Scarlet to implement measures to block or filter copyright-infringing material on p2p networks like torrents.
A spokesman for Belgacom however responded back in a statement: “As access provider our role is simply to transport information. We are not opposed to technical solutions but under the sine que none condition that they do not hamper our clients’ privacy.”
This is interesting because I see adult entertainment companies as good preliminary indicators to future trands. If they decide to side with MPAA, that it is a bad news for file-sharers.
XBIZ.com
Adult industry members have announced formation of the Global Anti-Piracy Agency, a nonprofit trade organization dedicated to combating content theft, from illegally downloaded Internet content to illegally reproduced DVDs. Initial funding for GAPA has been provided by Sureflix Digital Distribution, Inc., parent company of gay distribution network Maleflixxx.
“This is really in recognition of a problem that everyone is aware of and is affecting everyone in the industry,” GAPA Interim Executive Director Caryn Goldberg told XBIZ.
GAPA estimates that illegal downloading, file-sharing and other forms of piracy are costing adult industry producers, distributors, retailers, cable operators, VOD and mobile providers nearly $2 billion a year in lost revenue.
“We’re not talking so much about a guy that downloads a couple of videos illegally, although that is a problem. It’s all the file-sharing services. Look what the recording industry did to Napster. It’s these gross infringements, like file-sharing and BitTorrent.” said Goldberg.
July 11th, 2007| politics | Comments:Kommentek: 0
No comment – Tóth Benedek blogja
Egy korrekt ügyintézés és egy csapat hőzöngő igazságbajnok. Bravó mindekettőjüknek. Plusz a Homár közönségének.
Név, ügyfél-azonosító: Tóth Benedek, **** [takarás tőlem – T.B.]
Tisztelt Ügyfelünk!
Ezt a levelet a Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. (továbbiakban Warner Bros.) értesítését követően küldjük Önnek
A Warner Bros. évek óta működtet internetmonitor-rendszert, amely
minden országban és minden fájlcserélő rendszeren figyeli a feltöltött
és megosztott, a Warner Bros. tulajdonát képező szerzői jogvédelem
alatt álló tartalmakat.
A Warner Bros. e rendszer alapján jelezte Társaságunknak, hogy az Ön
IP címéről az internetre feltöltésre és/vagy fájlmegosztásra került
egy, a Warner Bros. tulajdonát képező szerzői jogvédelem alatt álló
filmalkotás.
Az alábbi IP cím az adott időpontban az Ön internet-előfizetői hozzáférésének azonosítására szolgált.
IP cím: 84.2.***.*** [takarás tőlem. T.B.]
Időpont: 2007. 5. 9. 23:49
Film címe: 300
File neve: CD1_nep-300-xvid-cd1.r07
File mérete: 14,648k
Fájcserélő hálózat: BitTorrent
Felhasználónév: –
Ezúton tájékoztatjuk Önt, hogy a szerzői jogvédelem alatt álló
filmalkotás interneten történő megosztása, vagy internetre feltöltése
megsértheti a hatályos jogszabályokat, és az alábbi következményeket
vonhatja maga után:
– a hatályos magyar jogszabályok és a T-Online Magyarország
Internetszolgáltató Zrt. Általános Szerződési Feltételei (ún.: ÁSZF)
szerint korlátozhatja, vagy megszűntetheti az Ön internet szolgáltatási
szerződését.
– a Warner Bros. és hazai jogi képviselete hatósági eljárást kezdeményezhet Ön ellen az általa észlelt IP cím alapján,
A fenti következmények elkerülése érdekében kérjük, hogy:
– azonnali hatállyal szüntesse meg a fent megnevezett szerzői jogi
védelem alá eső filmalkotás és további, a Warner Bros. tulajdonát
képező filmek feltöltését, megosztását az internetre, illetve a
fájlcserélőkre, továbbá harmadik személyek irányába.
– törölje ezen tartalmakat a merevlemezéről (Hard Disc) és adathordozóiról
– azonnal jelezze Társaságunknál, ha valaki feltételezhetően visszaélt az Ön adott időpontban használt IP címével.
Jogi megjegyzés
A T-Online Magyarország Zrt. nem adta és a jövőben sem adja ki az Ön
személyes adatait harmadik fél, így a Warner Bros. számára, és nem
monitorozza előfizetői adatforgalmát. Ezt a levelet a T-Online
Magyarország Zrt a Warner Bros. által átadott IP címek és időpontok az
előfizetői adatokkal való párosítása után készítette. Tájékoztatjuk
továbbá, hogy a hatályos jogszabályok alapján a hatóságok megkeresésére
előfizetői adatait az internet szolgáltató köteles kiadni.
Egyúttal tájékoztatjuk Önt, hogy a Warner Bros. nem kap másolatot erről a levélről.
Kérjük a fentiek tudomásulvételét!
Tisztelettel,
T-Online Magyarország Zrt.
Budapest, 2007. július 2.
New York Times
The Universal Music Group of Vivendi, the world’s biggest music corporation, last week notified Apple that it will not renew its annual contract to sell music through iTunes, according to executives briefed on the issue who asked for anonymity because negotiations between the companies are confidential.
Instead, Universal said that it would market music to Apple at will, a move that could allow Universal to remove its songs from the iTunes service on short notice if the two sides do not agree on pricing or other terms in the future, these executives said.
Universal’s roster of artists includes stars like U2, Akon and Amy Winehouse.
Representatives for Universal and Apple declined to comment. The move, which comes after a standoff in negotiations, is likely to be regarded in the music industry as a boiling over of the long-simmering tensions between Mr. Jobs and the major record labels.
With the shift, Universal appears to be aiming to regain a bit of leverage — although at the risk of provoking a showdown with Mr. Jobs.
Ars Technica
“Our law enforcement resources are seriously misaligned,” NBC/Universal general counsel Cotton said. “If you add up all the various kinds of property crimes in this country, everything from theft, to fraud, to burglary, bank-robbing, all of it, it costs the country $16 billion a year. But intellectual property crime runs to hundreds of billions [of dollars] a year.” Cotton’s comments come in Paul Stweeting’s report on Hollywood’s latest shenanigans on Capitol Hill.
So Yahoo got busted because of linking to infringing content. That is not a very good news to anyone in the search business: my estimate is that the majority of any content in the search services’ indexes is infringing to a certain extent from the Colbert Report clips on YouTube to blog entries like this one. The DMCA in the US and similar laws in other countries may shield search engines from liability at least till the Viacom-YouTube lawsuit ends with another conclusion. I wonder if the reason behind the Yahoo China decision is the lack of such a safe harbour.
But nevertheless, this is a very dangerous road to go down. If it turns out that search engines are liable, because they link to infringing content, that would effectively end the web-search as such.
washingtonpost.com
A court has ordered Yahoo Inc.’s China subsidiary to pay $27,000 for aiding music piracy, the company and a music industry group said Tuesday.
The ruling came amid U.S. pressure for Beijing to stop rampant copying of music and other goods.
The lawsuit filed by the International Federation of Phonographic Industries accused Yahoo China of violating copyrights because its search engine linked to sites that carried 229 pirated songs. It was filed on behalf of 11 recording companies including Sony BMG, Warner Music, EMI and Universal Vivendi.
“We’re very pleased with the outcome,” said Leong May Seey, Asia regional director for the federation.
“We think it is a step in the right direction in creating a legitimate online music service in China.”
The ruling Monday by the No. 2 Intermediate People’s Court ordered Yahoo China to pay 210,000 yuan ($27,000) in damages, the official Xinhua News Agency said. Court employees declined to confirm the report or release any other information.
April 16th, 2007| politics | Comments:Kommentek:
In February 2005 Venstre and its coalition partner, The Conservartive
Party, got reelected. Since the 2001 election Venstre has been the
largest party represented in the Danish Parliament. Venstre holds 12 of
the 19 government offices in the current government.
Sorry, for spreading the misinformation. Thx. for the commenters.
Culture wants to be free! — Unge Venstre
The Norvegian Liberal Party (Venstre) Congress states that today’s legal frameworks for copyrights are not adapted to a modern society. The balance between consumer demands, a society’s need for openness and access to culture, and the artists’ right to revenue and attribution, must improve.
The Liberal Party wants to reinstate the balance in copyright law through these following changes:
- Free file sharing
- Free sampling
- Shorter commercial copyright life span
- Ban DRM
via nettime.
Call for Support: Link to Google Will Eat Itself by Geert Lovink
http://www.networkcultures.org/geert/2007/03/22/call-for-support-link-
to-google-will-eat-itself/
Google Will Eat Itself (http://www.gwei.org/) announced that is now
fully censored on all Google Search-Indexes worldwide. What a scandal!
The idea behind GWEI is simple:
Google Will Eat Itself generates money by serving Google text
advertisments on a network of hidden Websites. With this money GWEI
automatically buy Google shares. GWEI buys Google via their own
advertisment. Google eats itself – but in the end “we” own it. By
establishing this autocannibalistic model we deconstruct the new
global advertisment mechanisms by rendering them into a surreal click-
based economic model. After this process GWEI hands over the common
ownership of “our” Google Shares to the GTTP Ltd. [Google To The
People Public Company] which distributes them back to the users
(clickers) / public.
Let’s break the silence and put a link to this project on our sites
and blogs: http://www.gwei.org. Give Google back to people! GWEI is
an interesting case how to imagine a new global public sphere. How to
reverse privatization and rethink a truely public Internet without
the Googles and Yahoos.
Thanks for your support!
The GWEI-Team
Vienna, Bari, Turin, March 2007
UBERMORGEN.COM (Lizvlx/Hans Bernhard), Alessandro Ludovico and Paolo
Cirio
http://www.gwei.org
Chron.com – Houston Chronicle
Radio listeners weary of hearing the same songs over and over may have something to cheer about: Broadcasters have tentatively agreed to anti-payola settlements that could shake up music playlists at some of the nation’s largest radio chains.
Four major broadcast companies would pay the government $12.5 million and provide 8,400 half-hour segments of free airtime for independent record labels and local artists, The Associated Press has learned.
The agreement is aimed at curbing payola — generally defined as radio stations accepting cash or other consideration from record companies in exchange for airplay. The practice has been around as long as the radio industry and was made illegal after scandals in the late 1950s.
Two Federal Communications Commission officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because final language has not been approved by the full commission, said the monetary settlement is part of a consent decree between the FCC and Clear Channel Communications Inc., CBS Radio, Entercom Communications Corp. and Citadel Broadcasting Corp.
The settlement was reached at the same time as a separate deal designed to lead to more airtime for smaller record companies and their lesser-known artists as well as local musicians.
The American Association of Independent Music, a group of independent record labels, has received a commitment from the same four broadcasters for the free airtime, the officials said.
In addition to airplay, the broadcasters and the independent labels have also negotiated a set of “rules of engagement” that will guide how record company representatives and radio programmers interact.
The free airtime would be granted to companies not owned or controlled by the nation’s four dominant music labels — Sony BMG Music Entertainment, Warner Music Group, Universal Music Group and EMI Group.
This is the most important thing that has happened on the intellectual property front lately. Former Soviet president Gorbachev asks Microsoft’s Bill Gates not to pursue IP litigation against a high school teacher in Perm who used pirated software in classroom because:
– he is poor
– he is dedicated his life to teaching
– he was just using pirated software, but has not installed and/or downloaded it,
– because the possible punishment (imprisonment is Siberia) is disproportionate.
The situation is super-interesting because if Gates does not do anything (claiming that he cannot, or can but not willing to) intervene, that will create super -bad PR not only for him as a philanthropist and Microsoft, as a company, but for all IP cases as well.
But by intervening, he admits, that such legal actions around the world are initiated by a handful of individuals like him, and he also admits that there are exceptions from copyright infringement, in some or all of the cases above.
Seems very much like a loose-loose situation.
MOSNEWS.COM
Prosecutors accuse Ponosov, headmaster of a middle school in the Perm region, of violating Microsoft’s intellectual property rules by using computers in his school that contained unlicensed copies of the firm’s software.
Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev on Monday asked Microsoft
co-founder Bill Gates to intercede on behalf of a Russian teacher
accused of using pirated software in his classroom.
“A teacher, who has dedicated his life to the education of children and
who receives a modest salary that does not bear comparison with the
salaries of even regular staff in your company, is threatened with
detention in Siberian prison camps,” read the letter, posted on the
Internet site of Gorbachev’s charitable foundation www.gorby.ru.
FT.com
Google’s strategy for its newly acquired YouTube site was dealt a serious blow on Friday when Viacom, the owner of MTV, demanded that all its clips be removed from the user-generated internet company’s site.
Viacom, which owns youth brands such as Nickelodeon and Comedy
Central, made the demand after months of negotiations with YouTube and
Google. It said more than 100,000 affected video clips on the YouTube
site had generated more than 1.2bn video streams.
The
move threatens to wreck Google’s attempts to cement commercial
relationships with traditional media groups, which supply most material.
Since
acquiring YouTube for $1.65bn in October, Google and Eric Schmidt, its
chief executive, have made a frantic effort to forge relationships with
traditional media companies. They have managed to sign short-term deals
with
CBS, Warner Music, Sony-BMG and Universal Music.
Discussions
with Viacom appeared to break down over the splitting of advertising
revenues from Viacom content. There was also a fight over which company
would make those sales.
Viacom executives were frustrated that
YouTube had failed to implement a content-monitoring system by the
beginning of the year, as it had promised, so companies could easily
tell when their material was being posted.
It accused Google and
YouTube of reaping all the revenue from their material “without
extending fair compensation to the people who have expended all of the
effort and cost to create it”.
YouTube said it would comply with the request.
“It’s
unfortunate that Viacom will no longer be able to benefit from
YouTube’s passionate audience which has helped to promote many of
Viacom’s shows,” YouTube said in a statement. “We take copyright issues
very seriously. We prohibit users from uploading infringing material,
and we cooperate with all copyright holders to identify and promptly
remove infringing content as soon as we are officially notified.”
Viacom
and other traditional media groups are eager to distribute their
content to audiences of social networking and user-generated websites,
which are wildly popular with young consumers. But they are wary of
losing commercial and editorial control.
They complain that most
clips posted on the sites are derived from their copyrighted work and
have been appropriated without permission.
Viacom believes it
has particular leverage because it specialise in youth-oriented and
short-form video clips. It has previously demanded that clips from
programmes such as Comedy Central’s Daily Show be removed.
Under
US copyright laws, sites are protected from legal action as long as
they respond in a timely manner to requests to remove unauthorised
material.
NBC Universal, Disney and Viacom complain that they have to monitor hundreds of thousands of clips.
The New York Times has an excellent article on the different views on mash-up culture:
Did you miss Eminem’s hit movie “8 Mile”? You’re in luck: Many of its rap battles and other major scenes are available for viewing on YouTube, the video-sharing Web site owned by Google. Indeed, until recently, the entire film was there, broken up into 12 nine-minute chunks to get around YouTube’s ban on longer clips.
An 18-year-old YouTube user calling himself Yosickoyo posted the movie six months ago. He declined to give his real name, but said in an e-mail message that he had made the film available as a favor to others who had shared movies. “I just want to thank them by uploading a movie that I have,” he wrote.
NBC Universal, whose Universal Pictures distributed “8 Mile” in 2002,
did not appreciate the gesture. The company asked YouTube to take down
the clips after it learned of them from a reporter.
“I think studios will sue if they don’t get a licensing deal they like,” said Jessica Litman, a professor at the University of Michigan
Law School. “My guess is if I were a movie studio, getting a cut of the
money is more profitable than shutting it down. But it’s complicated,
very complicated, and it’s only going to get worse.”
No one knows exactly how much Hollywood-derived content is uploaded to
the site without the studios’ consent, but academics and media
executives estimate it could be anywhere from 30 percent to 70 percent.
The studios are happy to have some of their content on YouTube. Marc
Shmuger, chairman of Universal Pictures, said that for each new
release, Universal’s marketing team sends out a digital “tool kit” to
sites like YouTube with studio-approved graphics, clips, sound effects
and music videos that can be shared.
Mr. Shmuger said the studios need to embrace sites like YouTube because
they are the future of movie marketing. “If you want to be involved in
the cultural debate, you have to allow consumers to be more actively
involved,” he said. “That’s a different world order which we are not
used to.”
Already, several major music companies, including Universal Music
Group, once a corporate sibling to Universal Pictures but now owned by Vivendi,
have forged agreements with YouTube, which makes its money from
advertising, that allows music to be played in videos for a fee.
“We don’t want to kill this,” said Larry Kenswil, a Universal Music executive. “We see this as a new source of revenue for us.”
“I don’t consider any of this stuff piracy,” said Professor Litman of
the University of Michigan. “Folks are taking snippets and making them
their own.”
Ron Wheeler, a senior vice president of content protection at Fox
Entertainment Group, said that even though Fox was not being paid for
the right to use the “Napoleon Dynamite” clips, the company had not
asked that the video be taken down.
“We are not in the business of just saying no, but we do consider it unauthorized use,” Mr. Wheeler said.
Brian Grazer,
a producer of “8 Mile,” said some of the mashups he had seen were
“pretty hip.” But he said he, too, viewed them as a form of piracy: “It
bothers me artistically. Here’s this thing where you have no control;
they are chopping it up and putting your memories in a blender.”
The Directors Guild of America is already taking a hard line. The guild’s president, Michael Apted,
said in a statement that he and his fellow directors would challenge
the unauthorized use of any work. “We will aggressively protect our
members’ creative and economic rights,” he said.
Mr. Cotton, the NBC Universal lawyer, said that the YouTube
removal-request game could continue for only so long. “Sand is running
out of the hourglass,” he said. “Companies aren’t prepared to sit by
and not let this be addressed.”
Technorati Tags: YOutube, mash-up, NYT, copyright
ACFI is a group of people working for the peoples right to it’s Internets. We have made progress in Ladonia and are now working on the Micronation of Sealand.
Recently it was made clear that this country is for sale. To make sure the owners will be kopimistic and that the country won’t be governed by people that do not care about it’s future, we have come up with a plan.
This is what http://buysealand.com/ sais about the plans buying Sealand, a sovereign piece of land in the North Sea.
But there are no more white spots on the map. Autonomy in the sense Hakim Bey describes is not a geographical notion. Pirate utopias are not designed to maintain themselves in the long run: there is no such thing as radical and uncompromising independence, separation from the rest of the world.
There is though guerrilla warfare, temporary autonomy, hit and run independence. But you need more than a bunch of 12 years old, who have not read The Lord of the Flies to achieve that…
ACFI is a group of people working for the peoples right to it’s Internets. We have made progress in Ladonia and are now working on the Micronation of Sealand.
Recently it was made clear that this country is for sale. To make sure the owners will be kopimistic and that the country won’t be governed by people that do not care about it’s future, we have come up with a plan.
This is what http://buysealand.com/sais about the plans buying Sealand, a sovereign piece of land in the North Sea.
But there are no more white spots on the map. Autonomy in the sense Hakim Bey describes is not a geographical notion. Pirate utopias are not designed to maintain themselves in the long run: there is no such thing as radical and uncompromising independence, separation from the rest of the world.
There is though guerrilla warfare, temporary autonomy, hit and run independence. But you need more than a bunch of 12 years old, who have not read The Lord of the Flies to achieve that…
2006: Year in Music: It Was Free Cuz I Stole It (Seattle Weekly)
Now is a bad time to be a giant music corporation, but ethically challenged music fans couldn’t ask for better days. Bootlegging has always been about catering directly to the fans, and the Internet breeds the best bootleggers yet: bigger and stronger and faster than ever before, the better to handle the demands of 10 million file sharers trading a billion and a half songs daily.
It’s clear now that the CD-R bent the CD over and the MP3 player finished it off, and although the industry is still in shock, smaller and more agile labels are already accepting the inevitable and locking in a vinyl/digital-only production schedule, then using merch like T-shirts—low production cost, high sale price, lots of options to ratchet up collectibility—to plug their revenue gaps.
Since file sharing is permanent enough now that you can buy $19-per-year lawsuit insurance, it’s time to acknowledge the bright side. Out-of-print doesn’t mean anything anymore. If you can learn about it, you can listen to it, and if the record company doesn’t want to reissue it, you can probably find it without even having to stand up. The romance is gone but the music is cheap, accessible, and instant—that’s the music industry of the future, brought to you now by Russian MP3 pirates, obsessive genre bloggers, and criminals selling albums off a blanket on the street. Highlights of a year of unfair shares:
December 26th, 2006| politics | Comments:Kommentek: 0
Scrooge and intellectual property rights
Joseph E Stiglitz
A medical prize fund could improve the financing of drug innovations
At Christmas, we traditionally retell Dickens’s story of Scrooge, who cared more for money than for his fellow human beings. What would we think of a Scrooge who could cure diseases that blighted thousands of people’s lives but did not do so? Clearly, we would be horrified. But this has increasingly been happening in the name of economics, under the innocent sounding guise of “intellectual property rights.”
Intellectual property differs from other property—restricting its use is inefficient as it costs nothing for another person to use it. Thomas Jefferson, America’s third president, put it more poetically than modern economists (who refer to “zero marginal costs” and “non-rivalrous consumption”) when he said that knowledge is like a candle, when one candle lights another it does not diminish from the light of the first. Using knowledge to help someone does not prevent that knowledge from helping others. Intellectual property rights, however, enable one person or company to have exclusive control of the use of a particular piece of knowledge, thereby creating monopoly power. Monopolies distort the economy. Restricting the use of medical knowledge not only affects economic efficiency, but also life itself.
We tolerate such restrictions in the belief that they might spur innovation, balancing costs against benefits. But the costs of restrictions can outweigh the benefits. It is hard to see how the patent issued by the US government for the healing properties of turmeric, which had been known for hundreds of years, stimulated research. Had the patent been enforced in India, poor people who wanted to use this compound would have had to pay royalties to the United States.
In 1995 the Uruguay round trade negotiations concluded in the establishment of the World Trade Organization, which imposed US style intellectual property rights around the world. These rights were intended to reduce access to generic medicines and they succeeded. As generic medicines cost a fraction of their brand name counterparts, billions could no longer afford the drugs they needed. For example, a year’s treatment with a generic cocktail of AIDS drugs might cost $130 (£65;  170) compared with $10 000 for the brand name version.1 Billions of people living on $2-3 a day cannot afford $10 000, though they might be able to scrape together enough for the generic drugs. And matters are getting worse. New drug regimens recommended by the World Health Organization and second line defences that need to be used as resistance to standard treatments develops can cost much more.
Developing countries paid a high price for this agreement. But what have they received in return? Drug companies spend more on advertising and marketing than on research, more on research on lifestyle drugs than on life saving drugs, and almost nothing on diseases that affect developing countries only. This is not surprising. Poor people cannot afford drugs, and drug companies make investments that yield the highest returns. The chief executive of Novartis, a drug company with a history of social responsibility, said “We have no model which would [meet] the need for new drugs in a sustainable way … You can’t expect for-profit organizations to do this on a large scale.”2
Research needs money, but the current system results in limited funds being spent in the wrong way. For instance, the human genome project decoded the human genome within the target timeframe, but a few scientists managed to beat the project so they could patent genes related to breast cancer. The social value of gaining this knowledge slightly earlier was small, but the cost was enormous. Consequently the cost of testing for breast cancer vulnerability genes is high. In countries with no national health service many women with these genes will fail to be tested. In counties where governments will pay for these tests less money will be available for other public health needs.
A medical prize fund provides an alternative. Such a fund would give large rewards for cures or vaccines for diseases like malaria that affect millions, and smaller rewards for drugs that are similar to existing ones, with perhaps slightly different side effects. The intellectual property would be available to generic drug companies. The power of competitive markets would ensure a wide distribution at the lowest possible price, unlike the current system, which uses monopoly power, with its high prices and limited usage.
The prizes could be funded by governments in advanced industrial countries. For diseases that affect the developed world, governments are already paying as part of the health care they provide for their citizens. For diseases that affect developing countries, the funding could be part of development assistance. Money spent in this way might do as much to improve the wellbeing of people in the developing world—and even their productivity—as any other that they are given.
The medical prize fund could be one of several ways to promote innovation in crucial diseases. The most important ideas that emerge from basic science have never been protected by patents and never should be. Most researchers are motivated by the desire to enhance understanding and help humankind. Of course money is needed, and governments must continue to provide money through research grants along with support for government research laboratories and research universities. The patent system would continue to play a part for applications for which no one offers a prize . The prize fund should complement these other methods of funding; it at least holds the promise that in the future more money will be spent on research than on advertising and marketing of drugs, and that research concentrates on diseases that matter. Importantly, the medical prize fund would ensure that we make the best possible use of whatever knowledge we acquire, rather than hoarding it and limiting usage to those who can afford it, as Scrooge might have done. It is a thought we should keep in mind this Christmas.3 4 5 6
Joseph E Stiglitz, professor
1 Columbia University, New York, NY 10025, USA
jb2632@columbia.edu<!–
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Competing interests: JES was chief economist of the World Bank from 1997 to 2000 and a member and then chairman of President Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers from 1993 to 1997. He won the Nobel Prize for economics in 2001.
References
- Médecins
Sans Frontières. People not getting the treatment they need to stay
alive. Newer AIDS drugs unaffordable and unavailable. Geneva: MSF, 29
November 2006.
- Andrew J. Novartis chief in warning on cheap drugs. Financial Times 29 September 2006.
- Stiglitz JE. Making globalization work. New York: WW Norton, 2006.
- Hollis
A. Optional rewards for new drugs for developing countries. Geneva:
World Health Organization, 5 April 2005.
www.who.int/entity/intellectualproperty/submissions/Submissions.AidanHollis.pdf.
- Pogge T. Human rights and global health: a research program. Metaphilosophy 2005;1/2(36).
- Love J. Submission of CPTech to IGWG. 15 November 2006. www.who.int/entity/public_hearing_phi/summary/15Nov06JamesLoveCPTech.pdf
(Disclaimer: the article is reprinted here in full, as the BMJ archives are for subscribers only. Should the article remain in the free section, we will remove the article from this page.)
December 21st, 2006| politics | Comments:Kommentek: 1
Slyck News – The Pirate Party Ramps up for 2008
“We gather to change laws, not break them
We strive to use Copyright law to promote Progress
We strive for more privacy and less invasion of it by government and private business
We aim for a Patent system that rewards Innovation
We work against people losing control of the devices and software they own
Not every action conducted by each local chapter necessarily reflects the positions of the national Pirate Party.”
The Pirate Party of the United States, based upon Sweden’s Piratpatiet,
is seeking grass roots leadership as well as potential candidates for
the 2008 elections.
December 21st, 2006| politics | Comments:Kommentek: 0
p2pnet.net – the original daily p2p and digital media news site
p2pnet.net news interview:- Last weekend, the Swedish Pirate Party founded its youth organisation, “Young Pirates”.
The Young Pirates have over 1000 members, and are therefore eligible to receive funding from the Swedish government. We had a chance to interview its chairman Hugi Ásgeirsson who’s 18 and lives in the northern Swedish city of Kiruna, where he’s currently on his last high-school year studying Space Science.
IGN: RIAA Petitions Judges to Lower Artist Royalties:
“Mechanical royalties currently are out of whack with historical and international rates,” RIAA executive VP and General Counsel Steven Marks said. “We hope the judges will restore the proper balance by reducing the rate and moving to a more flexible percentage rate structure so that record companies can continue to create the sound recordings that drive revenues for music publishers.”
Now this sounds very much like RIAA wants to keep the artists on leash. Not only they have lost their grip on the production and distribution segment, they are now in heavy competition with other sources of revenues, that endanger their ability to control artists. Strange tactics, that is for sure.
The story was /.-ted, there the comments were heavily in favor of the artists and against RIAA. This is a signal that those, who do not condemn p2p networks (i guess the slashdot crowd is more on the p2p side) are not automatically against the artists, they are against the music industry.
AGORAVOX – The Citizen Media:
Sony’s Grouper application gives users a way to share music videos with each other and, in entertainment and software cartel parlance, that’s a criminal offence not even second to murder and rape.
The people who run Sony are “criminals” and “thieves,” says Vivendi’s Universal Music Group, to all intents and purposes.
“In a filing with the U.S District Court in Los Angeles on Tuesday, Grouper denied the copyright-infringement allegations and said Universal was using the lawsuit to boost a rival video-sharing site in which it has a stake,” says Reuters, going on:
“Universal, owned by French media group Vivendi and the world’s largest music company, has been leading an aggressive drive to get paid for all uses of its works on new digital services over the Internet.”
October 2nd, 2006| politics | Comments:Kommentek: 0
via: FromGeneva: WIPO General Assembly-Impressions from Day One:
“We are living a historical moment when, more than ever, intellectual property deserves to be the object of a debate that corresponds to the breadth and complexity that this subject has acquired. We have seen that a number of sectors of the international community has become increasingly aware of the importance of discussing intellectual property in all its aspects, particularly its effects on social and economic development, as illustrated by the Doha Declaration on TRIPS and Public Health. It is clear to us that development will only be ensured if there is a balance between intellectual property rights and obligations and the public interest, as had been highlighted by the Ambassador of Argentina, on behalf of the Group of Friends of Development. If such balance is lost we will violate the nature of knowledge itself: we should never forget Thomas Jefferson’s words, according to which there would not be any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property than ideas, whose sharing does not necessarily harm anyone….”
September 25th, 2006| news, politics | Comments:Kommentek: 0
Wired News: Voters Keelhaul Pirate Party:
The Pirate Party not only failed to score the 4 percent required for a seat in Sweden’s Parliament, but appears to have missed the 1 percent that would have afforded the party state assistance with printing ballots and funding staff in the next election. Final numbers won’t be in until Wednesday the 20th, but the Pirate Party appears to be pulling .62 percent of the vote, or about 33,000 votes, according to party leader Rick Falkvinge. “This percentage may change somewhat as more districts are counted … but I don’t expect it to change to a significantly different number.”
September 11th, 2006| politics | Comments:Kommentek: 0
Piratenpartei: Partei:
Die Piratenpartei Deutschland wurde gerade erst – am 10.09.2006 – in Berlin gegründet. Sie ist basisdemokratisch organisiert: die Gründung, Parteiprogramm und Satzung wurden für jedermann öffentlich in unserem Forum und Wiki erarbeitet. Dabei konnte jeder Inhalte hinzufügen, ändern und kritisieren. Der Werdegang der Partei ist dort archiviert. Wir laden sie ein dort zu stöbern, Gemeinsamkeiten zu entdecken und sich an der regen Diskussion zu beteiligen. Denn unseren Wurzeln bleiben wir treu, die Mitarbeit an den Inhalten soll auch weiter niemandem verwehrt bleiben. Das Engagement eines Jeden ermöglicht erst die Kettenreaktion des Erfolges der Piraten – darum: verbreiten Sie ihre Entrüstung über den Status Quo, verbreiten Sie das Wort.
via Torrentfreak:
On August 28, the Pirate Party of Sweden made their election program official. An introduction stating the ideas and ideology behind their program, the party stated their program for the election in a number of concrete points.
In a situation where they can gain position of forming a government by striking a deal with us in an issue that they, themselves, believe to be less important, there is every reason to believe that they will be eager to find a solution.
But in either case, there are three possible scenarios:
1) One of the factions agree to our demands, and the other does not. Then we will choose the faction that agree with us. Whether this is the red faction of the blue faction is of no concern for us. As long as we see that they are doing their best to seriously run our issues, we will support the government in all other issues as well, without questioning.
2) Both the factions agree to our demands. If there are differences of nuances making one faction looking slightly better than the other, we will choose this faction. If both are exactly as good, we will support the faction with the more votes. This way we won’t influence the balance between the factions in Swedish politics. As long as the government is running our issues, we will support them in all decicions, just as in the first scenario.
3) Both the factions refuse to meet our demands. This is the more complicated case, but we can handle this one too. Initially we will support one faction, and make a government possible. Most likely this will be the ones with the less votes, so that the others, the ‘victors’, will feel that they have lost power they were entitled to. They can, however, not do much about it, since we will support the government without questioning in anything that does not involve our principles.
When the “victors” are safely placed in the penalty box of opposition, we start our businesslike, low-voiced conversations with them, until they realize that our proposals are not, in fact, that dangerous, and that they can only win from working with us. When they have seen our arguments in the glow of the miraging governmental position for a while, there are good reasons to believe they will agree with us. This is when we will call for a vote of non-confidence and change the government. After that, the Pirate Party with support the new government without questioning, in all issues, as long as the government runs our issues forcefully, just as in scenario 1 and 2.
This is our entire strategy. This way we can guarantee that our policies will have a break-through.
Here I collect the texts I have written as part of the research:
The Club model of cultural consumption and distribution
When it comes to the market of digital goods, clubs –buyers teaming up to buy a single item and share it among themselves– seem to have little or no economic significance. Digital files are either perfectly controlled, thus the producer can appropriate all of the consumer surplus that could have arose by forming a club, or there is no way to control unauthorized copying thus there is no price at which it would be reasonable to sell a good on the market.
But if we include other, noneconomic aspects of clubs, notably their ability to negotiate and
enforce norms on how a given good is accessed and used, clubs can have a significant effect
on markets. So far we have seen that technological protection measures and copyright laws cannot effectively curb unauthorized uses of digital content. User communities around jambands can be an exception from this general trend as together with the artists they have created a normative environment that is able to police and enforce undesirable actions.
Is there a way to propagate the emergence of such communities through adequate
technologies designed to connect artists and fans? What can we do to help fans and artists to negotiate rules they are both are happy with?
Bodó Balázs- Gyenge Anikó: A könyvtári kölcsönzések után fizetendő jogdíj közgazdasági
szempontú elemzése
A nyilvános könyvtári kölcsönzések után a jogosultaknak fizetendő jogdíj (Public Lending
Right – a továbbiakban PLR) ötlete több sebből is vérzik.
Ha a PLR-re mint a nemzeti kulturális politikától független eszközre tekintünk, mely e jogot természetjogi érveléssel a tulajdonhoz való jogból vezeti le, minden esetben oda jutunk, hogy a jogosultak monopoljogát kiterjesztjük és az ezzel járó járadékot növeljük. Ennek következménye jelentős fogyasztói csoportok kulturális fogyasztásból való kiszorulása lehet, melyre eddig a legolcsóbb és hatékonyabb megoldás a könyvtári kölcsönzés szabadsága volt.
Ha a PLR nemzeti kultúrpolitikai eszköz, akkor viszont azt a megállapítást tehetjük, hogy a PLR a meglévő kultúratámogatási rendszerek mellett való üzemeltetése indokolatlanul
bonyolult, és költséges, és ha az állami döntéshozók úgy találják, hogy van a költségvetésben kultúratámogatásra fordítható tartalék, akkor azt érdemes a meglévő intézményrendszeren keresztül szétosztani.
Végül pedig a jogosultak, szerzők szemszögéből megvizsgálva a kérdést: nincs olyan szerző a földön, aki visszavonná egy megjelent művét a könyvtárakból csak azért mert azt vélelmezi, hogy a kölcsönzések miatt eladásoktól esik el. Ennek az egyetlen oka az, hogy a szerzők számára a könyvtárban való jelenlét haszna nagyobb, mint a könyvtári olvasók által okozott kiesett kereslet. Már csak emiatt sem érdemes a PLR bevezetése.
The Pirates of The Pirates of the Caribbean
This is the PowerPoint presentation of the talk I gave on the Chicago Kent Law School this March.
Robin Hood Digital – english
“File-sharing communities are also remembering communities. They direct attention and thus demand, they discuss and thus keep alive cultural goods. When something is posted as available for download, not only those fetch it have requested a particular item, but also those who were standing nearby. These individuals are reciting work long forgotten like those who in Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 memorize books to be able to share them with others.”
Sobri Joska Digital – in hungarian
Megjelent a Café Babel 2006 decemberi, Hiány c. számában.
“A Csendes Könyvtár és az összes többi hasonló szolgáltatás az úgynevezett közjavakra épülő internetes kooperációs hálózatokra (commons based peer production networks) példa. A piac által (kényszerűségből) szabadon hagyott résekben, marginális igények, érdekek körül a semmiből jönnek létre olyan közösségek, melyek a hálózat tagjai között elosztott különböző képességeket, erőforrásokat (időt, szkennert, karakterfelismerő programot, korrektúrázó képességet) képesek hatékonyan összehangolni egy olyan feladat érdekében, melynek gyümölcseit aztán mindenki szabadon és ingyenesen élvezheti.”
A szerzői jog gazdaságtana az online világban
Frissen elkészült könyvfejezet.
“A szerzői jog közgazdasági elemzése során a szerzőknek biztosított monopoljog különös figyelmet vívott ki magának. Ennek az az oka, hogy a monopol helyzetben levő termelők maguk határozzák meg a piaci árat, és ez az ár jellemzően nagyobb, mint amennyi versenyhelyzetben lenne. Tökéletes verseny esetén a piaci ár megegyezik a termék határköltségével, azaz azzal az összeggel, amennyibe a legutolsó példány elkészítése kerül. A monopóliumok határköltségnél magasabb ára azzal jár, hogy a piaci kereslet egy
része nem tudja megfizetni a monopolista szabta árat.”
A szőnyeg alá söpört archívum
Megjelent a Manager Magazin 2006. Decemberi számában Tartalomraktárak címen.
“Ma Magyarországon az a kérdés, hogy a piacra várnunk-e, hogy ezeket az archívumokat kiépítsék, a nehézkesen működő és alulfinanszírozott közintézményekre lőcsöljük-e ezt a feladatot, vagy megteremtjük annak lehetőségét, hogy a magyar kulturális közösség fenntartsa önmagát. A Neumann-ház megrendelésére elkészített Nemzeti Digitális Adattár 2.0 vitaanyag a közösségi archiválás lehetőségének kiterjesztését tartalmazza, az első lépés tehát ezügyben megtörtént. Még egy lépés azonban hátra van. Dekriminalizálni kellene kirillt, scan_dalt, helpert és társaik. Hogy ne fordulhasson elő az, hogy ennek az örökségnek piaci, személyes érdekeket sértő részei esetleg nem maradnak fenn. Hogy ne legyen bűnöző az a soktízezres közösség, amelyik a magyar audiovizuális örökség archiválásán dolgozik – társadalmi munkában.”
A retardált archívum
Megjelent az Élet és Irodalom 2007. január 5-i számában.
“A közpénzből finanszírozott, közszolgálati archívum kapuit minél szélesebbre kell tárni. A hat havi elérhetőséget nem szűkíteni kell, hanem az archívum digitalizálásával bővíteni. Az archívumi anyagok lementését, felhasználását, adott esetben átalakítását nem megakadályozni kell hanem a megfelelő jogi konstrukció kidolgozásával megengedni , támogatni, bátorítani. Ezt követeli a finanszírozás módja. Ezt követeli a közszolgálatiság jelentése. Ezt követeli a piaci értékesítés igénye. Ezt követeli a józan ész.”
PhD 2-page research proposal in english
A short description of my research.
Régebbi cikkek/ older writings
A „mély link”
Internetes tartalomszolgáltatók vs. internet
Megjelent a Beszélő 2003 szeptemberi számában.
“Mély link valójában nincs. Link van, mely mutathat bárhová: egy portál címoldalára, a legutolsó, senki által nem olvasott cikkére, képre, linkgyűjteményre, bárhova. A mély linkelést nem lehet megtiltani, csupán azt lehet technológiai eszközökkel elérni, hogy egy adott gyűjteménybe csak egy, a hivatalos kapun keresztül lehessen bejutni. Ott pedig, ahol korábban szabad volt az átjárás, jogi vagy technológiai falak kezdenek épülni, melyek az internet mindent mindennel összekötő hipertextuális szövetéből kiragadnak, elérhetetlenné tesznek tartalmakat. Az intertextualitásból kiemelt, a többi szöveggel való kapcsolatától megfosztott valami pedig megszűnik szövegnek lenni.”
Bolyongás egy áldás nélküli térben
Graffiti és street art mint a társadalmi diskurzus eszköze
Megjelent a Café Babelben 2004-ben.
“Az egyre lezáródó fizikai, média- és kulturális terekben az autonómia megteremtése egyre költségesebb: magas a lebukás veszélye és nagy a várható büntetés, megfizethetetlenek a kártérítési és nem utolsó sorban jogi költségek. Nehéz felbecsülni, hogy az egyre szigorodó ellenőrzési technikák milyen mértékben gátolják üzenetek megjelenését, hiszen a leginkább kockázatvállalókat kivéve az alkotóknak nem áll érdekükben láthatóvá válni, nem szeretnék magukra felhívni a figyelmet. Ha mégis, akkor a szólás szabadságát keresők szükségszerűen mozognak a gyengébb ellenállás, tehát olyan médiumok felé, melyek könnyebben támadhatók, azaz ellenőrzésük architekturális okokból nehezebben megoldható”
CARFAC – the coalition of canadian artists with the question “if artists are not paid for what they create, why would anyone make art?” on their banner and Appropriation Art- a coalition of appropriation artists seem to have some issues among each other. From the letter of the latter in reply to the former:
The practice of appropriation is internationally recognized as a long standing, historic art practice. It includes works of collage, found footage and conceptual art. Works that use appropriation are collected and exhibited by major galleries and museums internationally, are written about in virtually every art history book and taught in universities and colleges throughout the world. Works that use appropriation are legitimate works of art. Period. Contemporary sources of appropriation are found in film, radio, television, advertising, text, character, situation, cast off material, found material, quoted material, borrowed material, …and on and on. Artists use this rich vein of source material because it is meaningful; because it holds and reflects popular, cultural or civic memory, because it conjures personal associations or connects us together in a profound way. These works question, push boundaries, advance technologies; they encourage experimentation and invention. They tell new stories. Contemporary culture should not be immune to critical commentary. Without this new work our cultural environment would be much the poorer. It is surprising that an organization that claims to speak for Canadian artists can be so out of touch with contemporary art practice.
What is on stake? Moral rights in the new canadian copyright law.
July 24th, 2006| politics | Comments:Kommentek: 0
Bob McChesney and John Podesta has a nice article in the Washington Monthly on the need to have an universal broadband access as it is a public infrastructure: “Without real competition or innovation, broadband deployment in the United States has stagnated. […] Simply empowering local governments and community groups, in coordination with private entrepreneurs, to provide universal affordable, broadband may be the single best thing we can do to make America the pre-eminent economy—and democracy—of the 21st century.” – Let There Be Wi-Fi
Who was Pavlik Morozov? A 13-year old soviet boy, who reported his father to the KGB. He served as a role model for generations of soviet youth as someone who, when he had to choose between the values of the soviet state and his family, he has choosen the former.
Well, history will repeat itself. New York Times reports: “Starting this summer the Hong Kong government plans to have 200,000 youths search Internet discussion sites for illegal copies of copyrighted songs and movies, and report them to the authorities.
The campaign has delighted the entertainment industry, but prompted misgivings among some civil liberties advocates. The so-called Youth Ambassadors campaign will start on Wednesday with 1,600 youths pledging their participation at a stadium in front of leading Hong Kong film and singing stars and several Hong Kong government ministers.”
And it is not the mainland, communist China, this is Hong Kong.
I have found this browsing through Michael Geist’ s site. In his Rethinking the Public in Public Broadcasting article he mentiones” The Danish Broadcasting Corporation, which already features hundreds of hours of archival material on its website, recently announced plans to provide content to the wikipedia project, thereby enabling users to build on its materials. Later this month officials in the Netherlands intend to unveil plans to digitize 700,000 hours of feature films, documentaries, television shows, and radio programs. This remarkable project, which will take several years to complete, will transfer an incredible array of historical materials into the hands of the public.”
Well, in Hungary, the fate of the archives of the public television MTV are -how to say- interesting. In 2005 nearly 11 thousand hours of archive material was sold for 4.2 billion HUF (20 million USD, 1800 USD /hour) to the National Audiovisual Archives responsible for digitally archiving contemporary and historic audiovisual material. MTV could choose what material she handed over. The transaction will repeat itself this year.
MTV is notoriously underfinanced (or to put it in another way notoriously mismanaged), and this 4 billion per year is a hidden support from the government to the station. The price for this? They loose their archives, or that part that was not stolen in the last two decades. The National Audiovisual Archive makes these materials available at dedicated terminals set up in libraries. Wow. Talk about open access to materials the taxpayers had payed for at least twice: at the production and at the sale.
Sometimes I feel ashamed (dont forget to scroll down on the target page to see why) for spending my time with copyright issues while in the world outside the wars in the middle east, escalating conflicts over energy supplies, the global ecological catastrophy we are heading to is happening, and instead of doing something for those issues I am in a comfortable, air conditioned room thinking about the rights of artists and users. Seems like entertaintment compared to what is happening out there right now.
But I am more worried when it comes to the assessment of the results of the G8 summit: pump more oil , ignore the ecologic consequences, turn a blind eye to the middle east and the developing nations and strenghten the IP protection – this is how the result of the meeting of the world’s strongest people can be summed up.
Anyway. The world leaders have issued the document”Combating IPR Piracy and Counterfeiting‘ in which they say: “We consider it necessary to give priority to promoting and upholding laws, regulations and/or procedures to strengthen intellectual property enforcement, raising awareness in civil society and in the business community of the legal ways to protect and enforce intellectual property rights and of the threats of piracy and counterfeiting, and also to providing technical assistance in that area to developing countries. Close cooperation between law enforcement agencies, including customs authorities, is also of great importance.” This means more FBI raids in Hungarian university campuses, and i guess more publicly financed police squads patrolling the interests of the entertainment industry (A police unit dedicated to combating movie piracy and those responsible for the manufacture and distribution of pirated films has launched in London. – BBC) Thank You, just what we need.
One of the first victims of this can be the russian AllOfMP3.com, which is a legal service selling music and paying royalties under russian copyright laws. So that is the problem with allofmp3? “The labels demand, and get, between 60 and 85 cents wholesale for each music file. This means iTunes, for example, wants £9.79 (almost $18.20) for an album where an AllofMP3.comn typically pays only about £0.75 (about $1.40) for a download. ” (P2Pnet)
We are talking about information products here. The marginal cost of any song in mp3 format is very-very close to zero. So what is the reason behind charging 1 dollar/song, and puuting this on the agenda of G8? I tell you: GREED.
July 17th, 2006| politics | Comments:Kommentek: 0
Today the Center for American Progress hosted an event where Vint Cerf (Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist for Google) and David Farber (Distinguished Career Professor of Computer Science and Public Policy at the Carnegie Mellon University) clashed on the issue whether the US government should pass laws granting neutrality to the net, or just let service providers set up the rules and fees by which they would allow application and content providers use their broadband network.
For those who are into scoring things, the final result would have been Cerf winning the celebrity deathmatch if Farber would have not massacred himself with some pretty uncautious remarks well before the end of the show.
At first it seemed this need not happen. Vint Cerf was in a very delicate position in this debate being not only the one responsible for creating the end-to-end, application neutral architecture of the net, but also being on Google’s payroll, a company with heavy financial interest in this issue.
But he managed to balance his arguments. On one hand he argued against broadband providers to tax application and content providers because they were not able to come up with a viable business model based on charging the users of that network. He mentioned several examples from Europe and Asia where ISP’s were able to build high coverage broadband networks using revenues from the users, and proposed to help american ISP’s to think about similar models in the US. He also cited statistcics according to which only half of broadband subscribers have a choice from where they buy the broadband access.
On the other hand he argued vehemently for net neutrality as the only way to secure continuous innovation on the network.
Farber have not had any real counterarguments except for voicing the immanent fear of government intervention. For me, someone from Europe, or to be more exact from post-communist Central Europe it was not easy to understand the real weight and depth of this fear. Farber said that if we allow government to make rules on net neutrality, it will be a foot in the door, and other laws interfering with more and more online issues were down on that road.
He had three main points against the regulation: (1) existing control mechanisms are adequate to provide net neutrality, (2) the network was never a fair playground anyway, and (3) there is no sign of carriers behaving badly. Well, soon after that he had to admit that (1) even though the FCC, the FTC and the Dept. of Justice do provide adequate tools to curb unvanted ISP behaviour, the are anything but fast to do justice. (2) and (3) say nothing about possible future dangers of a non-neutral internet.
At the end the conclusion (at least for me) was that turning the internet into something like the cable business is plain wrong. Broandband providers defining which applications (VoIP, IPTV) and content from which countries, sources, providers can reach their customers gives power to carriers that are much more dangerous than a government move to reinstate a piace of regulation – that of the status of common carrier- that was there before, but it is not anymore because in “2005, the FCC reclassified DSL services as Information Services rather than Telecommunications Services, and replaced common carrier requirements with a set of four less-restrictive net neutrality principles”. (Wikipedia)
You can listen to the event here.
More to read on net neutrality:
Wikipedia has an excellent article on Network neutrality.
July 14th, 2006| politics | Comments:Kommentek: 0
And events like this:The Internet and the Future of Consumer Protection
For the first time since 1996, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) this fall will hold major hearings on consumer protection, the Internet, and globalization. On July 24, the Center for American Progress will host the principal event that will frame and inform those hearings. The event will feature senior leadership from the FTC itself, as well as academic, consumer, and industry leaders. Presenters include: FTC Commissioners Jon Leibowitz and J. Thomas Rosch Former FTC Chairman Robert Pitofsky Former FTC Directors of Consumer Protection Howard Beales & Jodi Bernstein.
🙂
For accessibility reasons mentioned in my previous post for those of You, whose local library doesn’t carry WSJ, or you dont have a credit card or the necessary means to pay for that article, here is a reprint of a copyrighted WSJ article. The rest of you, go and buy it, so they can write such articles in the future.
“Picks Rare Art Films Surface Online By IAN MOUNT July 8, 2006; Page P2
A groundbreaking experimental Man Ray film, made in 1923, is now available for anyone to watch free online. It isn’t on the Web sites of the Library of Congress or the Internet Moving Image Archive. But you’ll find it at both YouTube and Google Video, two amateur-video-sharing sites. Increasingly, rare and avant-garde films are showing up on sites like these, best known for hosting homemade video spoofs. On YouTube, there are 1969 art videos by Nam June Paik, a 1967 student movie by George Lucas and an iconic 1930 film by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, as well as a clip of Dalí in a chocolate commercial (pictured).
It’s the latest reflection of an online culture where fans can function as curators of digital entertainment, bypassing libraries and museums with their own collections of music or movies. In many cases, these rare film clips are posted by amateur film buffs who’ve scooped up film reels or rare VHS tapes from eBay or local sales, and then digitized them for online viewing. A handful of Web sites and blogs, such as the Greylodge Podcasting Company (www.greylodge.org/gpc), link to the clips, many of which aren’t available on DVD.
The posting of these rare films can raise legal issues, however. Some of the films are still under copyright, and will be taken down if a copyright holder objects. Two short films by director David Lynch, for instance, were recently removed from YouTube when Mr. Lynch’s production company complained. People who post these films say they’re only trying to increase awareness of overlooked cinematic gems, and say they receive few complaints. Because the posters generally aren’t profiting from the film clips, and aren’t cutting into anyone’s profits in cases where the films aren’t sold commercially, lawsuits over these film clips are rare. “Is George Lucas going to spend money chasing down his grad-school films? Probably not,” says attorney Daniel Harris, who heads the intellectual-property group at the law firm of Clifford Chance in Menlo Park, Calif. HOW TO FIND IT: For an index of rare films on YouTube, go to http://www.greylodge.org/gpc and choose “link dump” under “categories.” — Ian Mount”
(Note: CC licence does not apply to the WSJ article).
Well, this is very much like the point i am trying to make here. A Nam June Paik video piece might be interesting for 1620 people worldwide, and that might be enough to make a business model on. But aggregating this demand on the physical infrastructure is impossible. The question whether all of these 1620 people would be willing to pay for watching the film is yet to be answered. But the risk of the answer being no, might be a pretty high entry barrier for copyright owners when it comes to digitizing the archives in large quantities.
But what is costly and risky for one entity is cheap, easy, (but not quite) risk-free for the users.
Distributing the costs of digitization among the network members is a wise choice, even if it means you have to think about copyright in different terms.
Derek Slater was lucky enough to receive a copy of Andersons book the “The Long Tail“. In his review he mentiones one statement:
“Hollywood economics is not the same as Web video economics, and Madonna’s financial expectations are not the same as Clap Your Hands Say Yeah’s. But when Congress extends copyright terms for anothe decade at the request of the Disney lobby, they’re playing just to the top of the curve. What’s good for Disney is not necessarily what’s good for America. Likewise for legislation restricting technologies that allow digital file copying or video transmissions. The problem is that the Long Tail doesn’t have a lobby, so all too often only the Short Head is heard.”
I am happy to read this. I would continue this line of thought: What’s good for America is not necessarily good for other big cultural entities (like for example the French, see their effort on “Cultural Exception“), and what is good for the French is not necessarily good for small languages and cultures, like Hungarian.
Different country sizes, different number of native speakers, GDP per capita, different scope of cultural markets, different systems of cultural production and distribution.
To what extent does the uniform global IP legislation leave space for local specifities? Can they, shold they be regulated in a single policy space? I hope to have answers in a few months.
Torrentfreak has collected the pro-piracy political parties forming an international coalition. Wow.
I was wondering lately how something which by its very nature should be and is hiding from public eye because it is illegal would affect policy-making and public discourse. People active in illegal file-sharing want to avoid publicity. They have no interest in being part of the public annales. Or at least that was the theory of James C. Scott in his Domination and the Arts of Resistance : Hidden Transcripts: „The goal of […] subordinate groups, as they conduct their ideological and material resistance, is precisely to escape detection; to the extent that they achieve their goal, such activities do dot appear in the archives.”
But it seems that we are witnessing a coming out of filesharers and that is very-very important. I see them as the only group that propose a serious alternative to current IP legislation, the rest is softie blabla respecting the rules of the global IP playground. Revolutions do not start like this. Revolutions start by announcing the discontinuity.
“When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation. ” (declaration of independence)
Now, what is only left is to lay out the causes, isn’t it, 😉
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