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Almost exactly a year ago, we wrote about two important cases before
Europe's highest court, the Court of Justice of the European Union
(ECJ). They both involved the European Union's Data Retention Directive,
which obliges telecoms companies to retain metadata about their
customers -- now an even more contentious issue in the wake of Edward
Snowden's leaks. One case was from Ireland, brought by Digital Rights
Ireland, which needs donations to carry on its great work, and the other from the Austrian digital rights group AKVorrat (which probably also needs support.)
On
Techdirt.
It's taken a while for Europeans to recover from the discovery that they
are being spied upon by the NSA (with some help from its friends at
GCHQ and elsewhere) pretty much everywhere online and all the time, but
finally the legal fightback is beginning to gather pace, at least in the
UK. Things got moving in October, with a case filed at the European Court of Human Rights:
On
Techdirt.
As Techdirt has noted many times, the patent system is broken, and in various ways. One major problem is the way it inhibits innovation, rather than promoting it, as its supporters usually claim. Here's why:
On
Techdirt.
We've had a few posts about plagiarism here on Techdirt, and how it differs
from copyright infringement. One important question that needs to be
considered is: what's the correct way to acknowledge and correct
plagiarism when it is discovered? Probably not like this, in a case pointed out to us by Ivan Oransky via Jonathan Eisen, and reported by Retraction Watch:
On
Techdirt.
Techdirt has been writing about corporate sovereignty (also known as investor-state dispute settlement -- ISDS) for a year now. Back in April, we noted that it was likely to be part of the TAFTA/TTIP negotiations, which were just about to start. Since then, more and more people have woken up to its dangers, and called for corporate sovereignty to be dropped from the negotiations.
On
Techdirt.
There's no shortage of critics of massive trade agreements like TPP and
TAFTA/TTIP, but today saw strong condemnation from a very unexpected
quarter: the Holy See, often, if erroneously, equated with the Vatican. Whatever the jurisdictional differences, the statement
delivered by His Excellency Archbishop Silvano M. Tomasi, Apostolic
Nuncio, Permanent Observer of the Holy See to the United Nations and
Other International Organizations in Geneva at the 9th Session of the Ministerial Conference of the World Trade Organization
presumably comes with the full approval of Pope Francis himself. We can
assume that because of the extremely controversial statements it
contains, which would have required approval at the highest level.
Things like this:
On
Techdirt.
Hashtags like #techdirt are not only an indispensable part of Twitter,
but are also increasingly to be found elsewhere as a handy way of
flagging up key topics in a compact and recognizable way. Given the
monopoly-mad world we inhabit, it's something of a miracle that they
weren't patented. Business Insider points out that Chris Messina, the
former Google employee who came up with the idea in the first place, has
explained precisely why he didn't try to patent them. The first reason is practical:
On
Techdirt.
Insofar as we know what's in them, both TPP and TAFTA/TTIP appear to
have deep, thorough-going problems, which are unlikely to be addressed
by the current approach being used to draw them up. However, a justified
criticism of that view might be that anybody can carp, but what should
we put in their place? Rising to that challenge is an alliance of some
50 civil society groups, who over four years have put together what they
call The Alternative Trade Mandate (pdf), which is specifically designed to present a radically different emphasis for European trade negotiations:
On
Techdirt.
One of the key problems with TAFTA/TTIP is the same one that plagued ACTA and has recently been highlighted with TPP:
the complete lack of any meaningful transparency. However much the
negotiators may claim that transparency is important to them, there's no
evidence to support that view. Or perhaps the politicians think the
existence of conferences like one being held in Brussels next January
provide enough opportunities for anyone who wants to convey their views
to the EU's Chief Negotiator, say. He'll be attending, along with
several other senior European Commission officials, according to the
program.
On
Techdirt.
In their obsessive war on piracy, the copyright industries have tried
various approaches. For a while, the "three strikes and out" was
popular, until it became clear that it was completely ineffectual.
At the moment, the preferred method is to try to force ISPs to block
access to sites holding material that infringes on copyright. The UK led the way, and has now made the whole process pretty routine, as a recent post on the TechnoLlama blog explains:
On
Techdirt.
An increasing number of online services use location information. This
places suppliers like Google, with its Google Maps, in a strong
position, since creating such geodata for entire countries -- or the
world -- is something that can only be undertaken by large, well-funded
companies. At least, that was true in the past, but increasingly the
free, crowd-sourced alternative, OpenStreetMap, is gaining both contributors and commercial users:
On
Techdirt.
The problems with DRM for videos, music, ebooks and games are well
known. Despite those issues for the purchasers of digital goods,
companies love DRM because it gives them control over how their products
are used -- something that has been much harder to achieve in the
analog world. The risk is that as digital technologies begin to permeate
traditional physical products, they will bring with them new forms of DRM, as this post by Karsten Gerloff about Zoe, one of Renault's electric cars, makes clear:
On
Techdirt.
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