Stopping ACTA: JURI and LIBE Committees

Yesterday I posted my submission to the ITRE committee; today I include my email to the JURI (legal affairs) and LIBE (civial liberties) committees, both of which are voting on what their recommendations should be on May 31. I have lumped them together since both are largely concerned with legal issues. Here's how JURI describes itself:

On Open Enterprise blog.

How Much Would It Cost To Pre-Screen YouTube Videos? About $37 Billion Per Year...

Last week we reported that videos were currently being uploaded to YouTube at the rate of 72 hours every minute, and asked how anybody could expect Google to pre-screen such a deluge. Techdirt Insider xenomancer has gone a little further by working out how much it would cost to screen that material for potential copyright infringement, doubtless something the media industries would love to see imposed. 

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Stopping ACTA: ITRE Committee

This is the first of my posts about the various committees that will be offering their recommendations to the European Parliament through the main INTA (international trade) committee. It concerns ITRE, the Committee on Industry, Research and Energy, which will be holding its crucial vote on May 31 - so, no time to lose.

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Which is Worse -- Sharing With Attribution, Or Plagiarism Without?

At the end of last year we wrote about the case of Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, former Federal Minister of Defense in Germany, who lost both his post and his doctorate when it turned out that he had plagiarized portions of his doctoral thesis. Now the journal Science is reporting another possible case: 

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ACTA Doomsday Approaches - Please Help

I have been writing about ACTA here for what seems several centuries. The good news is that I will stop doing that soon, because the key vote on ACTA will be taking place in the European Parliament at the beginning of July. Contrary to some reports, ACTA is not dead: although there have been some important shifts in the last few months - actually, pretty staggering ones when you consider the situation at the end of last year - votes in the European Parliament are notoriously hard to predict. This means we must assume that the battle is still on, and not become complacent.

On Open Enterprise blog.

Spotify In A Box: Why Sharing Will Never Be Stopped

Most people will be familiar with Moore's Law, usually stated in the form that processing power doubles every two years (or 18 months in some versions.) But just as important are the equivalent compound gains for storage and connectivity speeds, sometimes known as Kryder's Law and Nielsen's Law respectively. 

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Greece Stares Into the Abyss; Meanwhile, Local Music And Audiovisual Collecting Society Gets Court Order To Block Web Sites

As you may have heard, Greece is having a spot of bother at the moment. Its economy shrank by 6.2% in the last three months alone, and the austerity measures imposed in return for international loans to keep the country running have contributed to a 40% jump in the suicide rate. 

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Which Would You Rather Have: The Planet, Or A Patent?

One of the more controversial approaches to the already controversial field of climate change is geoengineering, which Wikipedia defines as "deliberate large-scale engineering and manipulation of the planetary environment to combat or counteract anthropogenic changes in atmospheric chemistry." 

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Generics Drive Down Drug Prices In India, TPP Trying To Stop That

Back in March, we wrote about an important development in India, where a compulsory license for Bayer's Nexavar anti-cancer drug was granted. Bayer, of course, is fighting back: 

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Opening Up About the Open Data Institute

As I've noted before, open data is one area where the UK government shines - unlike open source, where it has yet to deliver the goods. One of its bright ideas was the creation of an Open Data Institute (ODI), which I wrote about at the end of last year. It still doesn't exist yet, but it does have a Web site with some interesting further information about its intentions.

On Open Enterprise blog.

YouTube Uploads Hit 72 Hours A Minute: How Can That Ever Be Pre-Screened For 'Objectionable' Material?

YouTube has announced that 72 hours of video is now being uploaded to its service every minute. Earlier this year, the statistic was that 60 hours of video was uploaded to its service every minute: 

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As UK Government Considers Opt-Out Porn Censorship, Report Already Finds Overblocking On Mobile Networks

A few weeks ago, we noted the UK government was considering plans to bring in an opt-out form of censorship, in what would amount to a kind of porn license, and that such an approach runs the risk of blocking a far wider range of materials. Now the Open Rights Group (ORG) has released a report that shows the "child protection filters" on UK mobile Internet networks are already overblocking sites: 

On Techdirt.

Some Countries Want To Fix TPP... By Making It More Like ACTA

ACTA and TPP have much in common, but the way in which they represents two aspects of the same impulse has never been shown more clearly than here, in this proposal to re-use elements of one in the other: 

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BSA Piracy Study: Mere Shadow Boxing?

So, once again, the Business Software Alliance (BSA) has come out with its annual report on software piracy around the world, entitled "Shadow Market" [.pdf]. And, once again, it makes all the same methodological mistakes - it's almost as if the BSA hasn't been reading my critiques of last year and the year before....

On Open Enterprise blog.

Should People Learn To Code? Yes – If They Are Judges Ruling On Cases Involving Software

Recently Techdirt wrote about the heated debate on the subject of whether people should learn to code. We pointed out that some knowledge of that subject could be particularly useful in helping people understand why copyrighting APIs or patenting software is just crazy -- whatever the abstract legal arguments, in practice both make programming much, much harder. 

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One Area Where China Should Definitely Stop Ripping Off The West: Copyright Law

When it comes to ACTA and TPP, China is the elephant in the room -- or maybe that should be the dragon in the room. For without China's participation, these treaties designed to reduce counterfeiting will have little effect. And despite rather desperate optimism on the part of some that China will rush to sign up, itscomments so far suggest otherwise.

On Techdirt.

London Police To Extract Data From Suspects' Mobile Phones -- And Keep It Even If No Charges Are Brought

As the mobile phone moves closer to the center of daily life in many parts of the world, combining phone, computer, camera, diary, music player, and much else all in one, it becomes a concentrated store of the digital DNA that defines us -- who we talk to, what we search for, who we meet, what we listen to. However convenient that may be for us as users, it's also extremely dangerous if it falls into the wrong hands.

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Poland Betrays Its Past, Moves Closer To Allowing Software Patents

Earlier this year, Poland played a crucial role in igniting street protests that pretty much stopped ACTA in its tracks. That's not the first time it has had a major impact on European tech policy. Half a decade earlier, it derailed a proposed EU software patent directive, which had sought to make software patentable in Europe -- something that Article 52 of the European Patent Convention had appeared to rule out. That led to a later vote in the European Parliament wheresoftware patents were decisively rejected.

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ACTA Update XVI

On Monday I posted my talk "Before and After SOPA". In it, there's a reference to "country club" treaties (slide 17) that may have intrigued some people. It's a term I came across recently, and I think provides us with a useful way of thinking about ACTA (and TPP).

On Open Enterprise blog.

The Sky Continues To Rise: EU Gross Box Office Returns And EU Film Production Both Hit Record Highs In 2011

Even though just about every objective statistic suggests otherwise, the copyright industries still take turns bemoaning the terrible toll that piracy is supposedly taking on their markets. So it's good to come across some official figures that suggest the contrary, particularly because in this case they come from the European Audiovisual Observatory—not a market research company, but a public service body. Here are the latest numbers for the European film industry:

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UK ISPs Are Already Planning To Offer Porn Filters -- So Who Needs New Legislation?

Last week Techdirt wrote about the possible introduction of an "opt-in" license to view porn online in the UK. As we noted then, there is nothing to stop parents from installing their own filters to block access to certain kinds of Web sites now. But it seems that soon, they won't even have to do that:

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How Microsoft Fought True Open Standards V

Ten years ago, people were saying that open source would never be able to best proprietary software. But what they overlooked was the fact that Apache had already beaten Microsoft's IIS Web server offering back in the mid-1990s, and had never lost that leadership once. 

On Open Enterprise blog.

They're Not 'Orphan Works', They're 'Hostage Works'

Words matter -- just think of the number of times flame wars have broken out in Techdirt's comments over whether you can "steal" music or films. But one phrase that nobody really questions is "orphan work". And yet, as Lydia Pallas Loren points out in a brilliant paper, this is a loaded term with a very particular agenda:

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Harvard And MIT Back Open Education With $60 Million Online Learning Project

News that Harvard University is the latest to join the growing revolt against the exorbitant pricing of academic journals caused something of a stir recently -- although it has been pointed out that its case would be stronger if it followed its own advice and made the Harvard Business Review open access, or at least cheaper.

On Techdirt.

Before and After SOPA

A few weeks ago, I gave a talk at the Reykjavik Digital Freedoms Conference with the title "Before and After SOPA". Much of it will be familiar to readers of this blog, since it was reviewing the events around the extraordinary anti-SOPA Internet Blackout Day on January 18, which has now emerged as a turning-point in Net activism, and exploring what might happen now. As usual, I've embedded my slides below, and they may also be viewed online and downloaded.

On Open Enterprise blog.