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One of the positive outcomes of the debate that has raged around
SOPA/PIPA is that more people have looked at the facts, rather than
listened to the rhetoric, surrounding piracy. In particular, the
copyright industries' hitherto unchallenged claim that piracy is
destroying their business is finally being challenged – not least by
reports like "The Sky is Rising" that consolidate industry figures to show that things are really looking pretty good across the board.
On
Techdirt.
One of the bolder ideas in the UK's Hargreaves report was the suggestion that a Digital Copyright Exchange
should be set up. The idea here is to promote innovative uses of
digital content by making it much easier to acquire the necessary
licenses from rightsholders.
So it's interesting to see the UK Publishers Association (PA) backing the idea:
On
Techdirt.
One telling sign of the widespread concern about SOPA/PIPA was that the
non-profit Mozilla Foundation, which oversees the open source Firefox
and Thunderbird projects, abandoned its non-interventionist policy, and
came out strongly against the bills. It first signed a joint letter sent to the key sponsors of both bills, and then modified its home page, pointing to further information about SOPA. That, in its turn, linked to a post entitled "PIPA/SOPA and Why You Should Care," written by Mitchell Baker, the Chair of the Mozilla Foundation.
On
Techdirt.
Yesterday, a disturbing story appeared on the German taz.de site:
EU MPs have received thousands of emails from ACTA opponents. But no more: the Parliamentary authorities have decided that all ACTA emails will go straight into the spam folder.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
Open e-textbooks are hardly new: Techdirt has been reporting on the pioneer in this market, Flat World Knowledge, for several years now. But a new entrant called OpenStax College is noteworthy for a number of reasons:
On
Techdirt.
Well, here's a turn-up for the books. At a time when the European
Commission is insisting that the copyright ratchet should be tightened
up a few notches by bringing in ACTA, with its perilously vague terms
that potentially criminalize even low-level acts of online sharing,
here's the Dutch government planning to go in the opposite direction:
On
Techdirt.
It's a sign of the European Commission's increasing desperation over
ACTA that it has been forced to send out a document entitled "10 Myths
About ACTA" [pdf]
that purports to debunk misinformation that is being put around.
Unsurprisingly, the EC's document is itself full of misinformation.
Here are just a few of the more outrageous examples.
On
Techdirt.
The European Commission's defence of ACTA has
essentially two prongs. The first is that "ACTA changes nothing for
Europeans"; I discussed why that was simply not true in my previous two
updates. The other is: "we need ACTA to
protect our economies from counterfeiting." Leaving aside the sleight
of hand that blurs the distinction between physical counterfeits and
digital copies - something I've noted before - I want to show why this
claim too is false.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
In the last few days, we've seen an extraordinary wave of announcements
by governments in Europe, particularly its eastern part, that they
would not be ratifying ACTA immediately. That sequence of events,
culminating in today's news that Germany, too, would be holding off, has suddenly made lots of people sit up and take notice.
But even against that tumultuous background, few of us would have
expected that two of the most serious business publications in Europe,
The Economist and Financial Times, would both go much further than
simply noting the problems the treaty now faces, and declare that ACTA
is pretty much dead.
On
Techdirt.
Danah Boyd (or danah boyd as she prefers to be called) is widely
recognized as an authority on privacy, identity and social networks. A
couple of weeks ago, in the context of the fight against SOPA, she wrote
a blog post where she made an interesting distinction between different kinds of piracy:
On
Techdirt.
This is a continuation of my previous post examining the European
Commission's attempt to dispel what it calls ten "myths" about ACTA [.pdf].
I'm commenting only on the most egregious attempts by the Commission
to talk away the issues - it would be too tedious to go through every
point in detail.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
Publishers find themselves confronted by a difficult dilemma at the
moment. On the one hand, they might want e-books to succeed, because
digital devices represent a huge new market to which they can sell their
back catalogs. On the other, they might want them to fail, because
e-books will cannibalize sales of traditional books, and it's not yet
clear how low the price of e-books will have to go in order to avoid the
kind of piracy problems the recording industry exacerbated through
persistent overcharging.
On
Techdirt.
It's a sign of the European Commission's increasing desperation over ACTA that it has been forced to send out a document entitled "10 Myths About ACTA" [.pdf] that purports to debunk misinformation that is being put around. Unsurprisingly, the EC's
document is itself full of misinformation; over the next few days I'll
be going through some of its most egregious attempts to obfuscate and
generally explain away the deep problems of ACTA.
On Open Enterprise blog.
With all the heat
that publishers are starting to feel from the academic community, you
might have thought that they'd avoid upsetting anyone else. But it
seems that some publishers have decided to go after lawyers who make
patent applications that include copies of academic articles as prior
art. As the PatentlyO blog explains:
On
Techdirt.
Nicolas Sarkozy, the President of France, has the sad distinction of
being in the vanguard when it comes to really bad ideas concerning the
Internet. On his initiative, France became the testing-ground for the
three-strikes approach of throwing people off the Internet upon multiple
accusations of copyright infringement, without the need for proof or a
court order, known there as HADOPI. He also helped put into circulation a view that is much in vogue at the moment:
On
Techdirt.
With the immediate threat from SOPA/PIPA on hold, people have started
to turn their attention to the long-running saga of ACTA. While it was
being negotiated behind closed doors, few people knew about it, and
protests against it were muted. Now that it has finally emerged into
the open and begins its last dash towards the finishing line of
ratification, the pace of anti-ACTA activism is beginning to pick up
quickly. That's especially true in Europe, where everything hinges on
the result of the European Parliament's vote on the treaty later this
year. If it rejects it, ACTA is dead.
On
Techdirt.
Although ACTA is billed as a global treaty,
there are only two participants that really matter: the US and the
European Union. If either of those dropped out, it would be completely
ineffectual.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
A key element of the political rhetoric around SOPA/PIPA was the idea that it was about jobs,
and that jobs are so critical in the current economic climate that
safeguarding them overrides any other concern the Net world might have
about the means being proposed to do that. But then the key question
becomes: who are really more important in terms of those jobs - the
copyright industries, or companies exploiting the potential of the
Internet that would be harmed if the Net were hobbled by new
legislation?
On
Techdirt.
Last Year Techdirt wrote
about the case of the huge collection of historic jazz recordings that
had been acquired by the US National Jazz Museum. The central problem is
that even if the recordings can be digitized before they deteriorate,
very few people will hear them because of their complicated copyright
status.
On
Techdirt.
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.
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