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Techdirt writes a lot about the problems with DRM, and how
inefficient and inconvenient it is. But for millions of
visually-impaired people, those "inconveniences" represent something
much deeper, and much worse. Somebody who has started writing
eloquently about this issue is Rupert Goodwins. He is one of the UK's
most respected technology journalists and also, sadly, is losing his
sight. As he points out in a powerful new piece, things ought to be getting better for the visually impaired in the Internet age:
On
Techdirt.
Any EU project called "Clean IT",
with all that implies for elements that are regarded as "dirty", is
worrying enough. But combined with a stated intention of "reducing the
impact of the terrorist use of the Internet", the concerns naturally
grow. After all, it is precisely by invoking the vague and emotional
threat of "terrorism" that the UK government has sought to short-circuit
criticism of many of its most illiberal policies, most recently with
the ill thought-out Draft Communications Bill.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
Just when you think the Megaupload farce can't get any more ridiculous, it does. Following revelations
that New Zealand's Government Communications Security Bureau illegally
intercepted communications in the Megaupload case and provided those
details to law enforcement authorities, the country's Prime Minister has
been forced to apologize personally to Kim Dotcom:
"Of course I apologize to Mr Dotcom, and I apologize to New
Zealanders." From his position of increasing strength as more and more
missteps by the New Zealand authorities come to light, Dotcom graciously accepted those apologies.
On
Techdirt.
Remember back in 2009, when Techdirt reported
that Rupert Murdoch hated Google so much he had decided to block the
search engine from indexing his titles, even though this would
inevitably cut down their visibility and online traffic? He obviously
thought that he would put this upstart technology in its place, showing
that mighty media moguls don't need this Internet thing in order to
flourish just like they did 50 years ago. According to this story in
paidContent, it seems that strategy hasn't worked out too well:
On
Techdirt.
Neelie Kroes is not your average European Commissioner. Before she
became the European Commissioner for Digital Agenda, her current post,
she was European Commissioner for Competition, and in that capacity made
a speech about open standards in 2008, which included the following statements:
On
Open Enterprise blog.
As Tim Cushing rightly noted earlier this week, the UK's "Free Speech" laws are more about the many things you can't say. As if to back up that view, in the last few days, there's been yet another case of somebody being arrested there for "an offensive Facebook page."
On
Techdirt.
A recent scandal in the UK concerned the country's worst sporting
disaster, when 96 football/soccer fans were crushed to death at a
stadium in Hillsborough in 1989. Prime Minister David Cameron issued an official apology to the families of the victims
for the fact that the safety measures at the ground were known to be
inadequate, and that police and emergency services had tried to deflect
the blame for the disaster onto fans.
On
Techdirt.
Large-scale surveillance of private communications is becoming depressingly routine, even in supposedly enlightened democracies. In less freedom-loving locations, Internet cafes are viewed with particular suspicion, and subject to tight controls. But it looks like Cambodia is taking surveillance of Internet cafes in particular, and communications in general, to new heights/depths:
On
Techdirt.
The debate is still raging whether Bitcoin is a brilliant idea that will revolutionize business and society, a high-tech money laundering scheme, or just a fad that will soon pass into history. But in a fascinating post, Jon Matonis points to a problem that doesn't really seem to have been considered before:
On
Techdirt.
Back in February we wrote
about the ominously-named "Clean IT" project in Europe, designed to
combat the use of the Internet by terrorists. At that time, we
suspected that this would produce some seriously bad ideas, but a leaked document obtained by EDRI shows that these are actually much worse than feared
(pdf), amounting to a system of continuous surveillance, extrajudicial
removal of content and some new proposals that can only be described as
deranged.
On
Techdirt.
As Techdirt observed
back in 2007, Brazilian artists were some of the first to recognize
that piracy can be a positive force that helps get the word out about
their creations. That was part of a larger openness to new ideas about
copyright that was symbolized by the appointment of the well-known
Brazilian musician Gilberto Gil
as Minister of Culture, a post he held from 2003 until 2008. However,
more recently, things have gone into reverse on the copyright front.
Ana de Hollanda, the Minister of Culture appointed by the current
President, ordered the CC license to be removed from the Ministry of
Culture's website, and there were indications that harsher copyright laws were coming.
On
Techdirt.
One of the depressing things about net neutrality is that it is a
battle that must be won again and again. It's becoming increasingly
clear that another effort will be made by telecoms companies to destroy
net neutrality at the big World Conference on International
Telecommunications (WCIT). Here's how it describes itself:
On
Open Enterprise blog.
Remember that sweet octogenarian lady in Spain who tried to restore a 19th-century fresco
"Ecce Homo" and ended up producing something that the BBC's Europe
correspondent described as "a crayon sketch of a very hairy monkey in an
ill-fitting tunic"? Remember how the poor woman had an anxiety attack as a result of the criticism she received, but that everything worked out fine when her work became an Internet meme, and sightseers started flocking to see it?
On
Techdirt.
Techdirt has had many posts pointing out that the huge and vibrant fashion industry is a perfect demonstration that you don't need monopolies to succeed, and that bringing in copyright for clothes and accessories now would be positively harmful. One of the people who's been making that point for years is Kal Raustiala (co-author of this month's Techdirt book club choice, The Knockoff Economy). NPR Books has just posted a short interview with him that succinctly explains why copyright would be a disaster for the fashion industry. Here are a couple of the key points.
On
Techdirt.
Techdirt has written about earlier moves
by India to block Web sites and censor Twitter accounts. The central
concern seems to be that inflammatory online activity might stoke or
provoke local outbreaks of violence of the kind seen recently in Assam. Now The Times of India is reporting that the Indian government wants to go further, and actively monitor who's saying what by setting up a new agency:
On
Techdirt.
Julia Schramm is one of the rising stars of the German Pirate Party:
in April, when she was just 27 years old, she was elected to the
national party's executive committee. No surprise, then, that she is
against copyright: in a podcast she described intellectual property as
"disgusting" (original in German.)
More surprising is that, despite this, she signed a contract with
Knaus-Verlag, part of the publishing giant Random House group, to write a
book. Perhaps the $130,000 advance had something to do with it.
On
Techdirt.
Reports about open source tend to be rather one-sided: either
polemics against, or propaganda for, depending on who's paying for them.
That makes a new report written by Jim Norton, former President of the
BCS, with the rather unoriginal title "Open for Business", particularly welcome, since it has been sponsored by Amadeus, which describes itself as follows:
On
Open Enterprise blog.
Police and security forces around the world -- and that includes in
the West -- hate being recorded when they're overstepping the mark in
the execution of their duties, since it allows the public to challenge
official accounts, and even to use videos to seek redress.
But there's one thing worse than being recorded, and that's being
livestreamed: even the most nimble authorities can't confiscate the
recording from its creator, since it's already been uploaded for the
world to see.
On
Techdirt.
As Techdirt has reported,
open access (OA) is scoring more and more major wins currently. But
the battle to gain free access to academic research has been a long one.
One of the key moments was the launch of the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) ten years ago, which saw the term "open access" being defined for the first time:
On
Techdirt.
Well, here's a nice contrast: just when a judge in the US has ruled
that users there have no obligation to lock down their wifi
connections, a court in France decides the exact opposite. What makes
the story even more significant is that the individual concerned is the
first person to be convicted under France's 3-strikes law, generally
known as HADOPI.
On
Techdirt.
Open data continues to spread around the world - here's a great recent summary
of what's happening where. But simply making government data available
is no longer enough: now we need to move on to the far trickier job of
doing something with it.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
The negotiations behind closed doors of major treaties like ACTA and
TPP, and the refusal of participants to release official drafts or to
engage in any kind of substantive dialog, has meant that activists and
observers have been obliged to seize upon even the smallest signs and
hints emerging from those talks in an attempt to guess what is going on.
In a way, we are witnessing the birth of a new form of Kremlinology, which Wikipedia explains as follows:
On
Techdirt.
When we talk of free software, we typically think of things like GNU/Linux,
Apache or Firefox. But one aspect that often gets overlooked is that
of multimedia codecs. There's a good reason for this: most of them are
patent-encumbered, which makes using them with free software hard -
well, hard if you want to do it legally. In practice, most people have
employed implementations of dubious legality, and the licensors have
taken the sensible view that they are hardly losing millions from this
kind of activity, and have turned a blind eye.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
As Techdirt reported,
the European Commission is conducting a major consultation on the
"procedures for notifying and acting on illegal content hosted by online
intermediaries" that could radically affect the liability of online
service providers in the European Union. Other parts of the world are
doubtless examining this area too, and one at least -- Chile -- has
already come up with a novel approach.
On
Techdirt.
Despite the absence of credible studies supporting the idea, part of
the copyright maximalist dogma is that the wider the reach of copyright,
and the stricter the application, the better. As a corollary,
copyright exceptions are anathema, which is why the US and EU are still
shamefully resisting
an international treaty that would enable more books covered by
copyright to be produced in versions suitable for the visually impaired,
since it would create a minor exception to help make that happen.
On
Techdirt.
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