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One of the bitter lessons we learned from Snowden's leaks is that the
Internet has been compromised by the NSA (with some help from GCHQ) at
just about every level, from our personal software and hardware, through
ISPs to major online services. That has prompted some in the Internet
engineering community to begin thinking about how to put back
as much of the lost security as possible. But even if that's feasible,
it's clearly going to take many years to make major changes to something
as big and complex as the Net.
On
Techdirt.
As Techdirt has noted many times, much of the debate around filesharing
is driven by dogma rather than data. That's beginning to change,
although there has been a natural tendency to concentrate on economic
issues: that is, whether filesharing causes sales of music and films to
drop or not. But copyright is not fundamentally about making money: it's
about encouraging creativity. So arguably a more important question to
ask is: does filesharing harm or help creativity?
That's precisely what an interesting new paper entitiled "Empirical Copyright: A Case Study of File Sharing and Music Output,"
written by Glynn S. Lunney, Professor of Law at the Tulane University
School of Law in New Orleans, seeks to explore (found via TorrentFreak.) Here's the background:
On
Techdirt.
Both TPP and TAFTA/TTIP are based on the premise that by boosting trade
and investment, general prosperity will increase too. And yet, despite
the huge scale of the plans, and their major potential knock-on effects
on the lives of billions of people, precious little evidence has been
offered to justify that basic assumption. To its credit, the European Commission has at least produced a report (pdf) on the possible gains. But as I've analyzed elsewhere,
the most optimistic outcome is only tangentially about increased trade,
and requires a harmonization of two fundamentally incompatible
regulatory systems through massive deregulation on both sides of the
Atlantic. In any case, the much-quoted figures are simply the output of
econometric models, which may or may not be valid, and require
extrapolation to the rather distant 2027, by which time the world could
be a very different place.
On
Techdirt.
A few months ago, we quoted the EU trade commissioner Karel De Gucht, who is responsible for handling the TAFTA/TTIP negotiations on the European side, as saying:
On
Techdirt.
Back in October, we introduced the term "corporate sovereignty"
as an alternative to the standard but misleading phrase "investor-state
dispute settlement" (ISDS) that is generally used. We noted that
perhaps the worst manifestation of corporate sovereignty so far can be
seen in Ecuador, where one of the secret tribunals used in these cases
had ordered the Ecuadorean government to place Chevron above the
country's constitution.
On
Techdirt.
Last week we wrote about how Norway
had come up with a way to provide online access to all books in
Norwegian, including the most recent ones, available to anyone in the
country. Here, by contrast, is how not to do it, courtesy of publishers in the UK:
On
Techdirt.
One of the key insights driving open access is that if all the money
currently paid by libraries and other institutions for subscriptions to
academic journals was instead used to pay processing charges --
effectively, the cost of publishing -- all articles could be made freely
available online to everyone. Unfortunately, getting from one system to
the other has proved hard, since it requires many libraries to drop
subscriptions and pool their resources so that enough top-quality
journals can be published on an open-access basis. That's what makes this news from CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, such a milestone:
On
Techdirt.
Back in January, Sony released the 'Bob Dylan Copyright Collection Volume'. As its name shamelessly
proclaims, that was purely to take advantage of an EU law to extend the
copyright term on recordings from 50 to 70 years there. Copyright is
supposed to offer an incentive to create new works, so extending
it after they are written is clearly nonsensical. Similarly, the idea
that musicians will suddenly be inspired to write more new songs because
of the extra 20 years of protection that only kicks in 50 years from when the song is recorded is just silly.
On
Techdirt.
Even though Creative Commons licenses have only been in existence for
just over a decade, it's now hard to imagine the online world without
them. The ability they offer to modify or even cancel copyright's
monopoly has led to all kinds of innovation, and given that success (as
well as one or two failures), you might think there's no need for any more CC licenses. Creative Commons begs to differ:
On
Techdirt.
As the US applies more and more pressure to the other nations taking
part in the secret TPP negotiations in an attempt to get them to accept
its demands, one issue that is starting to be raised is the central one
of benefits. Given the sacrifices the USTR is demanding from other
countries in order to strike a deal, people in affected countries are
rightly questioning what exactly they will get in return. The growing
doubts about the value of TPP are presumably why at this late stage the USTR has just released a document touting its "economic benefits". There are two things worth noting about this.
On
Techdirt.
Almost exactly a year ago, we wrote about two important cases before
Europe's highest court, the Court of Justice of the European Union
(ECJ). They both involved the European Union's Data Retention Directive,
which obliges telecoms companies to retain metadata about their
customers -- now an even more contentious issue in the wake of Edward
Snowden's leaks. One case was from Ireland, brought by Digital Rights
Ireland, which needs donations to carry on its great work, and the other from the Austrian digital rights group AKVorrat (which probably also needs support.)
On
Techdirt.
It's taken a while for Europeans to recover from the discovery that they
are being spied upon by the NSA (with some help from its friends at
GCHQ and elsewhere) pretty much everywhere online and all the time, but
finally the legal fightback is beginning to gather pace, at least in the
UK. Things got moving in October, with a case filed at the European Court of Human Rights:
On
Techdirt.
As Techdirt has noted many times, the patent system is broken, and in various ways. One major problem is the way it inhibits innovation, rather than promoting it, as its supporters usually claim. Here's why:
On
Techdirt.
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