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Back in December, we wrote about a legal action that a group of digital
rights activists had brought against GCHQ, alleging that the UK's mass
online surveillance programs have breached the privacy
of tens of millions of people across the UK and Europe. In an
unexpected turn of events, the court involved -- the European Court of
Human Rights -- has put the case in the fast lane:
On
Techdirt.
The battle over online privacy, and how personal data should be treated
as it moves over the Internet, is being fought between the US and EU
points of view in multiple ways. There is the EU's Data Protection
Regulation, currently grinding its way through the legislative process;
there are the discussions about the NSA's spying program, and how it
impacts Europeans; and finally, there are various court cases involving
US companies and the personal data of EU citizens. One of these is in
the UK, where The Telegraph reports that an important decision has been handed down:
On
Techdirt.
Back in May last year, we wrote about how the European Commission's "Licences for Europe" initiative had turned into a fiasco,
with public interest groups and open access supporters pulling out in
protest at the way it was being conducted. The central problem was the
Commission's attempt to force everything into the straitjacket of
copyright licensing, refusing to allow alternative approaches to be
discussed. Fortunately, its public consultation on copyright, launched back in December, and closing soon, does not make this mistake, and is broad in scope:
On
Techdirt.
One of the many problems with DRM is its blanket nature. As well as
locking down the work in question, it often causes all kinds of other,
perfectly legal activities to be blocked as well -- something that the
copyright industry seems quite untroubled by. Here's an example from Europe involving Nintendo (pdf):
On
Techdirt.
Reading Techdirt, it's all-too-easy to get the impression that copyright
is an utter disaster for the public -- with current laws abused by
governments, companies and trolls alike, and international agreements
like TPP aiming to make the situation worse. But as Andres Guadamuz
points out on his Technollama blog, things aren't quite as bleak as they sometimes seem:
On
Techdirt.
Here on Techdirt, we've been writing about the dangers of corporate sovereignty
for a while. In recent months, more and more people and organizations
have pointed out that the plan to include an investor-state dispute
settlement (ISDS) in the TAFTA/TTIP agreement currently being negotiated
is fraught with dangers -- and also completely unnecessary given the
fair and efficient legal systems that exist on both sides of the
Atlantic. It seems that this chorus of disapproval has finally been noticed, in Brussels at least:
On
Techdirt.
Here on Techdirt we've written a number of times about India's efforts to provide key drugs to its population at prices that they can afford, and how its approach is beginning to spread
to other countries. That's a big worry for Western pharma companies,
which see their business model of selling medicines at high prices
threatened by newly-assertive nations. The latest to join that club is
South Africa.
On
Techdirt.
In addition to being an opportunity to stretch copyright and trademark
rules way beyond the law, over the years, the Olympics has also become
an occasion when the feeble "because terrorism" excuse is deployed to
justify all kinds of additional restrictions on personal freedoms. It
will come as no surprise to learn that the Winter Olympics in Sochi,
Vladimir Putin's pet project, will continue the tradition:
On
Techdirt.
Monsanto is best-known for its controversial use of genetically-modified
organisms, and less well-known for being involved in the story of the
defoliant Agent Orange (the company's long and involved story is well
told in the book and film "The World According to Monsanto",
by Marie-Monique Robin.) Its shadow also looms large over the current
TPP talks: the USTR's Chief Agricultural Negotiator is Islam A.
Siddiqui, a former lobbyist for Monsanto.
But it would seem that the company is starting to explore new fields,
so to speak; as Salon reports in a fascinating and important post, Monsanto is going digital:
On
Techdirt.
Techdirt has already noted how the NSA's massive spying programs around the world are costing US companies money through lost business -- and are likely to cost them even more in the future. But it seems that the fallout is even wider, as this story from The Voice of Russia makes clear:
On
Techdirt.
As Mike reported
recently, the NSA has presented no credible evidence that its bulk
metadata collection is stopping terrorist attacks, or keeping people
safe. Instead, the argument in support of the secret activities of the
NSA and its friends abroad has become essentially: "Trust us, we really
have your best interests at heart." But that raises the question: Can we
really do that? New revelations from The Independent newspaper about massive and thorough-going corruption of the UK police and judiciary a decade ago show that we can't:
On
Techdirt.
Techdirt has already examined the issue of corporate sovereignty many
times over the past year, as it has emerged as one of the most
problematic areas of both TPP and TAFTA/TTIP. A fine article by Simon
Lester of the Cato Institute examines a hidden assumption in these negotiations: that an investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) mechanism is needed at all.
On
Techdirt.
Yesterday, Mike reported on the introduction of the "fast track authority" bill in the Senate, and pointed out some of its most troubling
aspects. But it's a long document -- over 100 pages -- and hidden away
within it are some other areas that raise important questions. Take, for
example, Section 8, which concerns sovereignty:
On
Techdirt.
Despite overwhelming evidence that the public hates DRM, companies
persist in coming up with new ways to impose it in an effort to control
how their products are used. Here's the latest twist, pointed out to us by @dozykraut:
On
Techdirt.
Back in 2012, Ben Zevenbergen wrote a long piece exploring a complicated
Dutch case that had been referred to the Court of Justice of the
European Union, the EU's highest court. It concerned the home-copying
exception of European copyright legislation, and hinged on the question
of whether the Dutch collecting society could charge for the "losses"
that result from people downloading both authorized and unauthorized
uploads. That distinction needs to be made, since in the Netherlands
downloading copyright material is permitted, but uploading it is not.
Manufacturers of blank media claimed that they should only have to pay a
lower copyright levy that covered just the downloads of
legally-uploaded materials.
On
Techdirt.
One of the most contentious aspects of the NSA's surveillance is the
central belief by General Alexander and presumably many others at the
agency that it must "collect it all"
in order to protect the public. To stand a chance of overturning that
policy, those against this dragnet approach need to come up with a
realistic alternative. An interesting article by Matt Blaze in the Guardian offers a suggestion
in this regard that takes as its starting point the recent leaks in Der
Spiegel about the extensive spying capabilities of the NSA's Tailored Access Operations (TAO). As Blaze points out:
On
Techdirt.
One of the bitter lessons we learned from Snowden's leaks is that the
Internet has been compromised by the NSA (with some help from GCHQ) at
just about every level, from our personal software and hardware, through
ISPs to major online services. That has prompted some in the Internet
engineering community to begin thinking about how to put back
as much of the lost security as possible. But even if that's feasible,
it's clearly going to take many years to make major changes to something
as big and complex as the Net.
On
Techdirt.
As Techdirt has noted many times, much of the debate around filesharing
is driven by dogma rather than data. That's beginning to change,
although there has been a natural tendency to concentrate on economic
issues: that is, whether filesharing causes sales of music and films to
drop or not. But copyright is not fundamentally about making money: it's
about encouraging creativity. So arguably a more important question to
ask is: does filesharing harm or help creativity?
That's precisely what an interesting new paper entitiled "Empirical Copyright: A Case Study of File Sharing and Music Output,"
written by Glynn S. Lunney, Professor of Law at the Tulane University
School of Law in New Orleans, seeks to explore (found via TorrentFreak.) Here's the background:
On
Techdirt.
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