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For a while, Techdirt has been tracking Iran's continuing efforts to
throttle its citizens' access to troublesome materials online. These
have included blocking all audio and video files, and even shutting down Gmail, albeit temporarily.
But stopping people accessing sites in this way is not the only approach. Here's another, from a report by Der Spiegel (original in German):
On
Techdirt.
A natural response to the increasingly harsh enforcement of laws
against unauthorized sharing of copyright files is to move to encrypted
connections. It seems like a perfect solution: nobody can eavesdrop,
and so nobody can find out what you are sharing. But as TorrentFreak
reports, a German court has just dealt a blow to this approach.
On
Techdirt.
Techdirt wrote about how the UK's Twitter Joke conviction dragged its slow way through the various appeals before finally being resolved with the defendant's acquittal.
As you will recall, the issue was somebody making an ill-advised joke
about blowing up an airport if he couldn't fly out of it:
On
Techdirt.
As I noted
at the time, perhaps the most revolutionary aspect of the Hargreaves
Review of copyright in the digital age was simply the idea that
copyright policy should be based on evidence. Of course, the fact that
until now it has been determined purely by dogma, and drawing on bogus
statistics put out by the copyright industries, is incredibly damning.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
The evolution of the V for Vendetta Guy Fawkes mask from a clever element in a comic book and film to a meme and a global symbol of online and offline resistance has been quite remarkable. A highlight of that trend was earlier this year when MPs in the Polish parliament donned the masks in protest against ACTA, spurred on by massive street demonstrations against the treaty that had recently been held across Poland.
On
Techdirt.
Recently I've written about several moves towards mandating openness in various ways - in the UK,
Spain and Portugal. That's all well and good, but what people want to
know is whether moving to open solutions brings benefits - in
particular, whether it saves money. Fortunately, we have a long-running
experiment being carried out by the city of Munich that provides us
with some hard data.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
One of the biggest problems with the current approach to dealing with
alleged copyright infringement is the totally disproportionate nature
of the action undertaken in response to it. The "three strikes"
collective punishment of households that is available in France, New Zealand and South Korea is one example of this. From Finland, we learn about another completely over-the-top action:
On
Techdirt.
A couple of weeks ago, I was reviewing
Spain's move to open standards. The good news is that elsewhere on the
Iberian peninsular, Portugal, too, is doing great work in this area.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
It seems extraordinary that in the area of copyright it is only
recently that people have started to consider the evidence before
formulating policy. Even now, there is still resistance
to this idea in some quarters. Elsewhere, though, there is a growing
recognition that policy-makers must have access to the data they need
when considering how to achieve given goals.
On
Techdirt.
Yesterday I was writing about open access and open data in the context of the EU's
Horizon 2020 initiative. Closer to home, I came across a wonderful
real-life example of how open data can almost certainly save not just
money, but lives.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
In retrospect, it is now clear that the pivotal moment in the
campaign against ACTA was last January, when thousands of people took to
the streets in Poland
despite the sub-zero temperatures there. A few weeks later, similar
protests took place across the continent, especially in Eastern Europe,
which then influenced politicians at all levels, culminating in the rejection of ACTA by the European Parliament on July 4.
On
Techdirt.
The Stuxnet worm that attacked an Iranian nuclear enrichment facility a couple of years ago was exceptional from several viewpoints.
It is believed to have been the costliest development effort in
malware history, involving dozens of engineers. It also made use of an
unprecedented number of zero-day exploits in Microsoft Windows in order
to operate. Finally, Stuxnet seems to be the first piece of malware
known with reasonable certainty to have been created by the US, probably
working closely with Israel.
On
Techdirt.
Neelie Kroes has emerged as perhaps the most Net-savvy politician in the European Commission, with her repeated calls for a new approach to copyright
in Europe that takes cognizance of the shift to a digital world.
That's one measure of how mainstream the idea has become. Another is
the fact that even copyright hardliners like Michel Barnier, the
Commissioner responsible for the Internal Market in Europe, are starting
to frame the discussion in a similar way. A recent speech, for example,
is entitled "Making European copyright fit for purpose in the age of internet", where he asks whether Europe has found the optimum balance between a number of factors:
On
Techdirt.
Yesterday I was reviewing
Mozilla's current position in the browser sector and its wider
achievements in the Web world. One thing I omitted to mention there was
that even if it did nothing more for the rest of its existence -
unlikely given its current fecundity - it would still deserve our
thanks for what it managed to accomplish in the early years of its life.
On
Open Enterprise.
One of the many problems with the "guilty until proven innocent"
approach to tackling unauthorized filesharing is that it's not clear
exactly who should get the punishment. For example, in France, we saw
someone convicted
not for infringement that he had committed, but something his then-wife
had done and even admitted. And it's not just spousal activity that is
problematic, as TorrentFreak reports in this interesting case from Germany:
On
Techdirt.
The rapid uptake of ebooks by the public shows that there is a
widespread recognition of their advantages. This would be good news for
the publishing industry as it faces the transition from analog to
digital formats, were it not for the fact that some publishers keep
finding new ways of making ebooks less attractive than physical versions.
On
Techdirt.
Mozilla is now something of a venerable institution in the open
source world - the first release of browser code by Netscape took place
back in 1998. Even Firefox is eight years old, which seems pretty incredible.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
Last week, Techdirt wrote about a US teenager being banned
from using the Internet until his 21st birthday as punishment for his
involvement with some Web site break-ins. That seems incredibly harsh,
and as Mike noted, earlier bans have been tossed out on the grounds that they were unreasonable.
On
Techdirt.
Techdirt has been following the worsening censorship situation in Russia for some time. Back in July, the country's parliament passed a new law ostensibly designed to "protect the children". It took only a couple of weeks before it was used to shut down
the whole of LiveJournal for part of the country. That was apparently
because a neo-Nazi blog had been found among the thousands of others
hosted there -- an indication of just how blunt this new instrument of
censorship is.
On
Techdirt.
One of the rationales behind opening up government data is that it
provides greater transparency. That's particularly true in the field of
procurement: too often in the past it has been hard to find why exactly
all that money was spent, and on what. One of the undoubted
achievements of the present UK government is to require much of that
data to be made freely available for people to inspect, analyse and
query.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
Last week I wrote a piece suggesting that FRAND is dying. It was written in the wake of the major UK decision on open standards, and was mostly based on odd bits of anecdotal evidence. So I was rather pleased to learn from Techrights that Spain made a similar decision some years back, something I missed at the time.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
Just over a year ago Techdirt wrote about Brazil's Marco Civil
-- essentially a civil-rights based framework for the Internet. At the
time, we dubbed it an "anti-ACTA", since it seemed to protect many of
the things that ACTA sought to attack. It all seemed a little too good
to be true, and the post concluded by questioning whether it would
survive in its present form.
On
Techdirt.