Taiwan's Copyright Proposals Would Combine SOPA With A Dash Of The Great Firewall Of China

You might have hoped that the extensive discussions that took place around SOPA a year or so ago would have warned off governments elsewhere from replicating some of the really bad ideas there, like DNS blocking, but it seems that Taiwan didn't get the message, as Global Voices reports: 

On Techdirt.

Taiwan Adopts "Three Strikes" Law

Bad news, bad law:

The Legislative Yuan ratified yesterday the latest revision of the Copyright Law to empower Internet service providers (ISPs) to "strike out" Internet surfers who have violated others' copyrights and posted unauthorized content on any Web sites.

The new rules will exempt the ISPs from any responsibility for offenses caused by pirating parties in order to avoid litigation by copyright owners.

But the service providers will be obliged to inform the pirating parties about the infringement on the copyrights.

They can suspend part or all services to the pirates after giving three warnings.

The pirates will still face lawsuits from the copyright owners.

No details on whether this needs judicial oversight, but don't hold your breath...

The Birth of Blognation

I was a big fan of the Vecosys blog - I even got used to its horrible name. And then it went away, only to emerge, phoenix-like, from the ashes, as something bigger and bolder: Blognation.

Blognation is certainly an ambitious”“Go Big or Go Home”” project, the aim being to report on the Web 2.0 startup ecosystem around the globe including, United Kingdom, Ireland, Belgium, Germany, France, Spain, Denmark Portugal, Italy, Iceland, Netherlands, Japan, China / Taiwan / Hong Kong, Australia, Brazil, South America, all with the help of 16+ blognation editors who are getting ready to start writing.

Today sees the launch of blognation UK and over the coming weeks and months all of the other aforementioned blogs will be launched. And proving that I certainly don’t lack ambition, I am currently speaking with a further 10 more prospective editors to cover Canada, Russia, India, South Africa, South Korea, South-East Asia, Poland, Czech Republic, Turkey and Greece.

Makes sense, but it depends critically on the quality of the blogger team that Sam Sethi has assembled. We shall see. At least the name is better than the previous one.