When we wrote last year about a Dutch idea to give police there the power to break into computers -- even those located abroad -- we and many others pointed out a number of deep flaws with the plan. Undeterred, the Dutch government seems to be going ahead with the scheme, as Bits of Freedom explains:
Back in November 2011, we wrote about the Belgian music royalty collection agency SABAM's demand for 3.4% of Internet subscriber fees as "compensation" for online piracy in Belgium. As Tim Cushing explained back then, this was ridiculous on just about every level. But SABAM doesn't let little things like that get in the way of its desperate attempt to avoid moving with the times and coming up with new business models. So after failing dismally to convince Europe's highest court that it could force ISPs to spy on their customers, SABAM has now moved on to suing ISPs instead, as TorrentFreak reports:
Here on Techdirt we often talk about the copyright ratchet -- the fact that for three hundred years changes to copyright have always been in one direction: longer, wider and stronger. But there's a group of countries where the copyright ratchet isn't in place yet. These are the so-called LDCs -- the Least Developed Countries -- where many of the world's poorest citizens live. That's because the main Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights, better known as TRIPS, explicitly allows LDCs a transitional period of ten years, during which time they are not required to meet all the stringent requirements laid down there for granting intellectual monopolies. Moreover, the TRIPS agreement specifies:
Techdirt has written several times about the increasing tendency for governments around the world to turn to malware as a way of spying on people, without really thinking through the risks. One company that is starting to crop up more and more in this context is Gamma International, thanks to its FinFisher suite of spyware products, which includes FinSpy. A recent report by Citizenlab, entitled "For Their Eyes Only: The Commercialization of Digital Spying", has explored this field in some depth. Among its findings is the following:
Unless we are farmers, we tend to take seeds for granted. But civilisation is built on seeds: it was the rise of large-scale agriculture, based in part on the skilful breeding of ever-better seeds, that eventually allowed towns and then cities to form; and with them, the trades, arts and sciences that were possible once enough food could be produced by just a fraction of the population. That makes national seed policies -- how governments regulate the production and sale of plant varieties -- a crucial if neglected aspect of our urban lives.
As Africa continues to develop rapidly, Western countries and companies are increasingly interested in bringing it into existing international legal and commercial frameworks, but always on terms that maintain their dominance. One way of doing that is through intellectual monopolies: last year we wrote about proposals for a Pan-Africa Intellectual Property Organization (PAIPO), whose benefits for Africa seem dubious. Meanwhile, here's another plan that is being presented as a vital part of Africa's modernization process, and yet oddly enough seems to benefit giant Western companies most, as AllAfrica reports:
Techdirt has been following the story of Brazil's innovative Marco Civil project, a civil-rights based framework for the Internet, for a while. Last time we wrote about it, it had been shelved following some aggressive work by lobbyists. As we noted then, it wasn't clear whether it would be resuscitated or not, but here's Kuek Yu-Chuang, Yahoo!'s Regional Public Policy Director, who seems to think it still stands a chance of being approved:
the "political" bodies the corporations fear are the democratically elected representatives of the people.
The world's largest producer of seeds, Monsanto, has apparently given up on attempts to spread its genetically modified plant varieties in Europe. A German media report said the firm would end all lobbying for approval.
The German newspaper "taz" reported Friday that US agriculture behemoth Monsanto had dropped any plans to have farmers grow its genetically modified (GM) plant varieties in Europe.
Monsanto Europe spokesman Brandon Mitchener was quoted as saying the company would no longer engage in any lobbying fur such plants on the continent, adding that at the moment the firm was unwilling to apply for approval of any GM plants.
WTO members celebrated the 50th anniversary of 186-member Codex Alimentarius, which sets international standards for food safety, by calling, on 27–28 June 2013, for continued support for the body, and for trade measures to be based on science.The calls came in a two-day meeting of the WTO’s Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures (SPS) Committee, which consists of all 159 WTO members and deals with food safety and animal and plant health — measures having an increasing impact on trade.
“The increase in the number of SPS measures that are not based on international standards, guidelines and recommendations, or that lack scientific justification, is a point of concern that has often been raised by many members in the SPS Committee and other contexts,” Brazil observed.The discussion of the six new specific trade concerns and the 10 previously raised and discussed in this meeting reflected that theme.They covered; processed meat, genetically modified organisms (GMOs), restrictions related to the Japanese nuclear plant accident, orchid tissue culture plantlets in flasks, citrus fruits (a complaint by South Africa against the EU about black spot, which is the first dispute settlement case in the International Plant Protection Convention), offal, salmon, pesticide residues, sheepmeat, phthalates (materials added to plastics in food and drink containers) in wines and spirits, shrimp, mad cow disease (BSE), GMO pollen in honey, Indonesia’s port closures, and pine trees and other products.
A few weeks back, we wrote about the Indian Supreme Court's rejection of Novartis's attempt to use "evergreening" to prolong its patent on Gleevec, sold as Glivec in India. That term refers to the trick of making small changes to a drug, usually one about to come off patent, in order to gain a new monopoly that extends its manufacturer's control over a medicine. But how does that work in practice?
The photographers are freaking out again. After last year's excitement with Instagram's changes to its terms of service, now it's the UK's Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (ERR) Act that's getting people worked up. Here, for example, is a post on the site of Stop43, a photographers group which successfully fought against the inclusion of orphan works in the UK's Digital Economy Act, with the title: "The Enterprise And Regulatory Reform Act Has Reversed The Normal Workings Of Copyright":
Given the massive impact that new-style trade agreements like TPP and TAFTA/TTIP are likely to have on the lives of hundreds of millions of people, it's surprising how few members of the public know about what's being negotiated in their name. Fortunately, publications are starting to run more articles on the subject, like this great piece by David Brodwin in US News.
We last wrote about the Russian social network site VKontakte, often called "The Facebook of Russia," a year ago. Since then, lots of bad stuff has been happening in Russia as a part of clampdown on online activity there, and now VKontakte is back in the news, with a pair of rather contradictory stories.
As a post on the French site Numerama reminds us (original in French), the department responsible for implementing the three-strikes plan known as HADOPI was also supposed to provide Internet users with information about technical solutions to reduce infringement. That never happened -- instead, the body has preferred to send out warning messages on a massive scale and to seek convictions, even of those who are innocent. But in the meantime, the US company McAfee seems to have obtained a patent on just the kind of thing the French law originally had in mind:
Techdirt has written about the Special 301 report many times, but that's not the only US government publication putting other countries on the naughty step. Another is the less well-known National Trade Estimate Report on Foreign Trade Barriers (pdf):
Last month, Techdirt wrote about the requirement for librarians employed by the Canadian government to self-censor their opinions, even in private. This came in the wake of similar restrictions being placed on government scientists. We pointed out that this kind of muzzling created a really bad precedent that might one day even be extended to the public. It seems that moment has come sooner than expected:
Since the UK government published the draft version of its Communications Data Bill -- better known as the "snooper's charter" -- with plans to store data about every British citizen's emails, mobile calls and visits to Web sites, there has been almost total opposition to it from everyone else. Indeed, there has been growing resistance even within the UK government's ranks, largely from the smaller of the coalition partners, the Liberal Democrats. Here's what the party's leader and Deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg, has been up to, as described by one of the Liberal Democrat MPs, Julian Huppert:
Despite increasing calls for the imminent TAFTA/TTIP trade negotiations to be conducted as openly as possible, it seems likely that, as with ACTA and TPP, everything will be decided behind closed doors. That means the rest of us are forced to take our information about what is likely to happen where we can find it. For example, a new survey entitled "The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership: Ambitious but Achievable" (pdf), carried out by The Bertelsmann Foundation and Atlantic Council, offers some interesting thoughts on the subject. Here's the description:
Techdirt has been covering the free trade agreement being negotiated between India and the EU for a while now -- that is, as well as anyone can report on something that is being conducted behind closed doors. Despite or maybe even because of that secrecy, one issue in particular has raised concerns: that India's crucial role as supplier of low-cost generics to the world's poor might be under threat. Against that background, this report on the Live Mint site comes as something of a surprise:
Traditionally, there has been a blithe assumption that more innovation occurs when patents are granted than when they are not. But as Techdirt has reported, people are finally beginning to call that into question. A forthcoming paper from an economist at MIT, Heidi Williams, provides another example of where that is not the case: in the field of genomics (via @gsDetermination).
Techdirt has written a few times about Turkey's difficult relationship with new technology. Unfortunately, it looks like that now includes Twitter, as two troubling decisions against users have been handed down recently. Here's the first, as reported by the Turkish Web site Hürriyet Daily News:
The last time Techdirt wrote about "pay for delay" deals, whereby a big pharma company essentially buys off manufacturers of generics so that the former can continue to enjoy monopoly pricing long after its patents have expired, things didn't look too good. Back in 2010, the Second Circuit had refused to re-hear a case on the issue after dismissing a lawsuit arguing these deals were anti-competitive. But now things seem very different, and not just in the US.
The whole point about adopting Creative Commons licenses is to make it easier for people to share and use works released under them. Sometimes, though, you get the impression that certain organizations adopting these licenses would rather that didn't happen, as in the following case from Australia, reported by IT News:
Last year we wrote about EMI suing the Irish government for having the temerity not to pass a SOPA-Like censorship law. That truly extraordinary sense of entitlement seemed to be a one-off, but The Hollywood Reporter now brings us another (via @LifeinSicily):
Most companies have a natural tendency to keep details of their activities secret -- the fear being that competitors might be able to exploit for commercial advantage the information that they obtain. But it may be in the public interest for some details to be released, even if this might prove inconvenient for the company concerned. That's the background to a letter sent by ten law professors, including Larry Lessig, to the Alaska Oil & Gas Conservation Commission, pointed out to us by infojustice.org.
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