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Numerous Wikileaks cables have highlighted the pressure that the US has
brought to bear on several foreign governments behind closed doors in an
attempt to get the latter to pass maximalist copyright laws. But it's
worth noting that plenty of arm twisting takes place openly. Here, for
example, is a letter (pdf) from the American Chamber of Commerce in Estonia addressed to the Minister of Justice, and the Minister of Economic Affairs and Communications of that country:
On
Techdirt.
Anyone who follows me on Twitter or identi.ca, or on Google+
will have noticed something of a crescendo of posts about the
Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) recently. There are two
reasons for this.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
The annual Digital Music Report (pdf)
of the International Federation for the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) is
a curiously conflicted production. On the one hand, it must celebrate
"a healthy 8 per cent increase in our digital revenues in 2011 -- the
first time the annual growth rate has risen since records began in 2004
"; on the other, it must continue to push the party line about how the
industry is being destroyed by piracy.
On
Techdirt.
Twitter has taken quite a lot of heat
for putting in place the capability to block tweets on a geographical
basis. This begins to look a little unfair in light of the fact that
Google quietly adopted a similar policy before Twitter. That's shown by
the answer to a question on Google's Blogger site about blogs being redirected to country-specific URLs, which at the time of writing was last updated on 9 January 2012. Here's what it says:
On
Techdirt.
Can the future aggregate actions of people be predicted from relevant
sets of data that describe them? That, of course, is what Isaac
Asimov's invented mathematical discipline of psychohistory was supposed to do. Some Japanese researchers claim to have made some progress towards that goal:
On
Techdirt.
It's now widely recognized that the extreme demands of SOPA/PIPA
catalyzed a new activism within the Net world, epitomized by the
blackout effected by sites like Wikipedia on January 18. But as
Techdirt has reported, SOPA and PIPA are not the only attacks by the
copyright industries on the digital commons: another is the Research Works Act (RWA), which attempts to remove the public's right to read the articles written by tax-funded researchers in open access journals form.
On
Techdirt.
Open source lies at the heart of Google – it runs a modified form of
Linux on its vast server farms, and uses many other free software
programs in its operations. This makes giving back to the open source
community not just the right thing to do but enlightened self-interest:
the stronger free software becomes, the more Google can build upon it
(cynics would say feed off it).
On
The H Open.
One of the recurrent themes on Techdirt is the sense of entitlement
the owners of various kinds of monopolies display, and their common
belief that being able to maximize the profit from those monopolies
trumps any other consideration.
On
Techdirt.
Well, this one's bizarre. Back in March 2010 we wrote
about the UK Usenet aggregator Newzbin being found liable for the
copyright infringment of its users. A year later, the ISP BT was
ordered to block access to Newzbin2, its successor. What amounted to the UK's first Internet censorship order was upheld soon afterwards.
On
Techdirt.
We've written
about the hugely-successful Brazilian writer Paulo Coelho many times
before, because he is a great example of an artist embracing piracy as a
boon not a bane. So it's great to see him offering his thoughts on SOPA:
On
Techdirt.
After years of unforgivable inaction, the education world is finally
addressing the continuing disgrace that is computer teaching in this
country. A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the UK Education Secretary Michael Gove's comments on this area, and now we have the Royal Society's report on computing in schools.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
For a long time, the copyright industries have taken the position
that they won't launch new digital music services until piracy is
"solved" – or at least punished. The inevitable consequence of that
position is obvious to everyone outside the copyright industries –
people turn to other, unauthorized sources to satisfy their musical
needs. Fortunately, a few startups have launched pioneering digital
music offerings and some, like Spotify, look like they might succeed.
On
Techdirt.
So the Tweedledum and Tweedledee of copyright maximalist legislation, SOPA and PIPA, have
been halted in their passage through the US legislative process. Of
course, they're not dead, but are sure to return, zombie-like, either as
modified versions of the current texts or new ones that turn out to be
exactly the same as the old ones at their heart. However, the
unprecedented action by the Net world to get the message across that
these bills were not fit for purpose does mean that our attention can
swivel back to somewhere else where bad things are happening: ACTA.
On Open Enterprise blog.
One of the useful side-effects of the groundswell of protest against
SOPA and PIPA is that a surprising number of people in positions of
power have come out against their approach, notably in Europe. First,
we had Neelie Kroes, Vice President of the European Commission
responsible for the Digital Agenda for Europe, who tweeted:
On
Techdirt.
One new approach to teasing apart the complex relationships between
genes and common diseases such as cancer, heart disease, asthma and
diabetes is by creating huge biobanks of medical data and samples. The
idea is that by tracking the health and habits of very large populations
across many years, and then examining their DNA, it will be possible to
spot factors in common. Here's a major biobank that is shortly opening up its holdings for research:
On
Techdirt.
Given its general contempt for the repeated attempts to close it
down, you wouldn't expect The Pirate Bay to be particularly worried by
SOPA. But in its very own press release on the subject,
it goes much further: it flings the ultimate insult at Hollywood by
claiming that not only are the two of them spiritual kin, but that The
Pirate Bay is the New Hollywood.
On
Techdirt.
There is a rather odd atmosphere within the parts of the online
community that fought so hard against SOPA this week – relief that all
that work seems to have had an effect, mixed with a certain disbelief
that for once the outside world sat up and took notice of the tech
world's concerns. Amidst all the justified back-patting, there is a
temptation to celebrate the fact that both SOPA and PIPA are "delayed", and to move on.
On Techdirt.
Since SOPA and PIPA are US bills, the focus has naturally been on the
US response to them – notably in the list of major sites that
participated in the blackout, or who have otherwise protested against
the proposed legislation. But it's important to remember that the whole
rationale of these new laws is tackling copyright infringement outside the US.
On
Techdirt.
Canonical pulled off something of a coup at the recent Consumer Electronics Show (CES) when it announced its Ubuntu TV – inevitably dubbed "TV for human beings":
On
The H Open.
A couple of months ago, Techdirt wrote about an EU politician's plan
to build Internet surveillance into every operating system. As we
pointed out then, this could easily be circumvented by using non-Net
means for swapping files. It may not be driven by fears about spying,
but it seems that communities in Western Africa are using Bluetooth connections between mobile phones to do exactly that:
On
Techdirt.
The role of technology in the wave of protests that swept the world last
year is a matter of debate. While some claim that social networks and
mobile phones allowed protesters to organize themselves with an
unprecedented speed and efficiency, others have seen their role as
marginal – or even counterproductive, since these same technologies also
allow governments to monitor events with greater ease than in
pre-Internet days.
Techdirt.
Among the many high-profile organizations that are joining the SOPA
blackout today is Greenpeace. That's great, except that you can't read
an important post on the Greenpeace UK web site about why it is opposing
SOPA and PIPA (it should be available at 5 pm PST from the home page or here.
On
Techdirt.
One of the more unfortunate consequences of Moore's Law is that
technologies that erode privacy are becoming cheaper every year – and
hence more attractive to governments eager to spy on their own populace.
The latest to heed the siren call of mass surveillance is Argentina.
On
Techdirt.
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