South Korean Spy Agency Allegedly Tried To Influence Presidential Vote - By Posting 1.2 Million Tweets

Twitter is still a young medium, and it's interesting to see yet more uses being found for it. Here's a rather dubious one from South Korea: 

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European Commission Desperately Tries To Justify Inclusion Of Corporate Sovereignty In TAFTA/TTIP; Fails Dismally

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. 

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UK Court Rules That Software Functionality Is Not Subject To Copyright

Yesterday, Mike wrote about some worrying indications that the US Appeals Court may be considering overturning a ruling that APIs aren't covered by copyright. Happily, over in Europe, there's better news. The long-running battle between SAS and World Programming Limited (WPL) over the more general issue of whether copyright covers software functionality has now been settled by the UK Court of Appeal in favor of WPL. Here's a good report on the judgment from Out-law.com: 

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Holy See (The Pope) Criticizes TPP And TAFTA/TTIP In WTO Speech

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: 

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Companies Developing Crowd Analysis Programs To Detect 'Abnormalities' In Behavior And Match Faces Against Giant Databases

One of the reasons that the total surveillance programs of the NSA and GCHQ are possible is that computers continue to become more powerful and cheaper, allowing ever-more complex analyses to be conducted, including those that were simply not feasible before. Here's another example of the kind of large-scale monitoring that is now possible, as reported by Nikkei Asian Review: 

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Twitter Hashtag Inventor Explains Why Patenting It Would Have Been The Wrong Thing To Do

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: 

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TPP And TAFTA/TTIP Done Right: The Alternative Trade Mandate

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: 

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TAFTA/TTIP: What Price Transparency?

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. 

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Increasing European Moves To Block Access To Websites Accused Of Helping People Infringe Copyrights

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: 

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Resistance Grows To Inclusion Of Corporate Sovereignty In Canada-EU Trade Agreement (CETA)

Remember CETA, the Canada-EU trade agreement, officially known as "Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement"? You could be forgiven for losing track of where things were with the negotiations, which have been dragging on since 2009, but a kind of milestone was passed recently: 

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Suitcase-Sized Drones Extend And Deepen OpenStreetMap's Coverage

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: 

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100,000 Users Of Chinese Microblog Sina Weibo Punished For Violating 'Censorship Guidelines'

We've written a number of times of the various ways in which China tries to police its online world. These include punishing individuals, as well as imposing general rules that apply to everybody. Until now, it's been hard to tell to what extent the latter were just saber-rattling. Now we know, thanks to a new post on the Global Voices site: 

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Royalty Collection Agency SABAM Sued By Belgian Government Over 'Piracy License' Plans

Back in May, we wrote about how the Belgian music royalty collection agency SABAM was taking ISPs there to court over its demand for 3.4% of Internet subscriber fees as "compensation" for online piracy in Belgium. In yet another slapdown for SABAM -- it had previously failed in its attempt to turn ISPs into copyright cops -- the Belgian regulator says SABAM's plan falls foul of the EU's e-commerce directive, as IT World reports: 

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Won't Somebody Think Of The Cows? New Zealand On The Brink Of Sacrificing Its Digital Future In TPP Negotiations

Even before Wikileaks released the full text of TPP's IP chapter, New Zealand's Creative Freedom Foundation had already been given some hints about what was coming: 

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TPP IP Chapter Leaked, Confirming It's Worse Than ACTA

We've been waiting a long time for a major leak of the secretive TPP agreement, and thanks to Wikileaks, we now finally have it (pdf - embedded below). It's long and heavy going, not least because of all the bracketed alternatives where the negotiators haven't been able to agree on a text yet. Even though the draft is fairly recent -- it's dated 30 August, 2013 -- it contains a huge number of such open issues. Fortunately, KEI has already put together a detailed but easy-to-understand analysis, which I urge you to read in full. Here's the summary:

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Chinese CCTV Surveillance Defeated By Chinese Smog

Techdirt has often written about CCTV surveillance, and its many pitfalls. But according to this story in the South China Morning Post, the provincial capital Harbin, in north-eastern China, has a very particular problem in this regard: 

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Internet Archive Fire Shows Vulnerability Of The World's Online Memory

The Internet Archive is a jewel of the digital world: 

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Renault Introduces DRM For Cars

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: 

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Australia Spied On Japanese Companies To Help Its Industries Negotiate Trade Deals

As more information comes to light about the global snooping being conducted by the NSA and GCHQ, it is becoming clearer that much of it had little to do with combating terrorism, as a recent EFF article makes plain. But most damaging to the idea that massive surveillance was justified, because it was to protect people from extreme threats, is the revelation that commercial espionage was also being conducted. So far, the chief example of that is in Brazil, but The Sydney Morning Herald (SMH) now has information about large-scale industrial spying on Japanese companies carried out by Australian secret services: 

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How China Is Going Global With Its Censorship

It is neither a secret nor much of a surprise that China keeps its media under tight control. But one knock-on consequence of its rise as a global power is that it is now seeking to extend that influence to those located outside China, including mainstream Western media. That trend is explored in a new report from The Center for International Media Assistance (CIMA), entitled "The Long Shadow of Chinese Censorship: How the Communist Party's Media Restrictions Affect News Outlets Around the World." 

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South Africa Plans To Terminate And Renegotiate Treaties That Include Corporate Sovereignty

Despite the growing evidence that corporate sovereignty clauses in international treaties pose considerable risks to nations that sign them, such "investor-state dispute settlement" (ISDS) mechanisms are present in both TPP and TAFTA/TTIP -- at least as far as we know: it's hard to be sure given the obsessive secrecy surrounding them. 

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Australian Government Announces Rare Public Consultation On TPP -- Then Bans All Journalists From Attending

As Techdirt has noted many times, the TPP negotiations -- like ACTA before them and now TAFTA/TTIP -- are distinguished by an almost complete lack of transparency. That makes the rare opportunities offered by governments participating in TPP to find out more, particularly valuable and important. Here's one announced recently by the Australian government: 

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Is There Any Alternative To The NSA's 'Take It All' Approach?

At the moment, the only half-way serious attempt at justifying the NSA's "take it all" approach to surveillance is to claim that there is no alternative if we want intelligence agencies to spot and stop extreme threats like terrorism: 

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US Court Rules Again That Natural Phenomena Cannot Be Patented, Casting Further Doubt On Gene Patents

Back in June, Mike wrote about the important Myriad Genetics judgment from the Supreme Court, which said that naturally-occuring genetic material could not be patented. However, because of some hedging from the judges, there were concerns about how much this would block gene patents in practice. Last week we had an indication that the impact is indeed likely to be significant, as VentureBeat reports: 

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Is Snowden Inspiring A New Wave Of Whistleblowers?

We noted last week that Japan was bringing in severe new punishments designed to discourage whistleblowing. That might suggest that following Snowden's leaks, there will now be a period of repression where potential whistleblowers lie low to avoid bringing down the wrath of governments on their heads. One person with a better idea than most about what is really going on here is Jesselyn Radack. She's employed by the General Accountability Project (GAP), a leading US whistleblower protection and advocacy organization. Here's part of her biography on the GAP site: 

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