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January 18, 2012 may well go down as a pivotal date in the
history of the Internet – and of copyright. For on that day, the
English-language Wikipedia and thousands of other websites were blacked
out or modified to protest against two bills passing through the US
legislative system that were designed to fight copyright infringement.
To understand why that unprecedented action took place, and what it
means for the future of the Net, it’s necessary to review the history of
copyright briefly.
On Stir to Action.
Somewhat belatedly (apologies), here is the second part of my
analysis of the UK government's Open Standards consultation. As well as
a quick look at the remaining two chapters, I include my responses to
individual questions at the end.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
A few months ago, I wrote
about the library management program Koha, and how the irruption of
money into the previously tranquil world of open source led to some
painful arguments. Sadly, that's not a unique example, as the recent
case of WURFL demonstrates.
On
The H Open.
As Techdirt reported
at the time, the UK's Digital Economy Bill was rammed through
Parliament, without proper scrutiny or even much democratic process, in
the dying hours of the previous government. Since then, the
implementation of the Digital Economy Act has moved forward relatively
slowly. That's partly because there have been a series of legal challenges
from ISPs concerned about its legality (and likely cost for them). In
addition, it made sense for the current UK government to wait for the
completion of the Hargreaves report on copyright in the digital age
before proceeding.
On
Techdirt.
A couple of weeks ago the popular ebook portal Library.nu was shut down,
apparently voluntarily, after a coalition of book publishers obtained
an injunction against it and a similar site. As an excellent post on the
kNOw Future Inc. blog points out, Library.nu was significant in a number of ways:
On
Techdirt.
The governmental body that oversees France's "three-strikes" law, HADOPI, has already been caught once infringing
on the copyright of others -- by using a logo designed with unlicensed
fonts. Now it's been spotted using photographs without respecting the
so-called "moral rights" of the photographer, which include the right to attribution (French original),
absent on HADOPI's site. Such moral rights are taken very seriously in
France, where they are automatic, perpetual and cannot be waived
(unlike in some other jurisdictions, such as the United Kingdom.)
On
Techdirt.
It was only yesterday that the European Commissioner Karel de Gucht made the surprise announcement
that the European Commission would be referring ACTA to the European
Court of Justice (ECJ) "to assess whether ACTA is incompatible -- in any
way -- with the EU's fundamental rights and freedoms." Just a few
hours after that, there are already signs of panic among ACTA's
supporters that the treaty may indeed be incompatible -- and thus dead
in the water as far as the European Union is concerned.
On
Techdirt.
The British Journal of Photography (BJP) brings us yet another story of aggressive assertion of copyright wreaking harm on artists
-- the very people it allegedly empowers. It concerns some photos in
Getty Images' stock library that have chairs in them. Because a few of
those chairs are "famous" in the sense that they were produced by a
couple of designers that worked with the architect Le Corbusier, the
heirs of those designers, together with the Le Corbusier Foundation,
have sued Getty Images in France for copyright infringement -- and won:
On
Techdirt.
Last week, we had a story
about the IFPI (the international equivalent of the RIAA) saying that
the ACTA protests were trying to "silence the democratic process". You
might have thought that was bad enough, but here's worse.
On
Techdirt.
One of the widely-recognised problems with ACTA is the lack of transparency surrounding its negotiation. Since I have addressed this issue at length elsewhere,
I won't repeat myself here. But it occurred to me that there is
another way of looking at transparency, and that is in terms of
consultation. In a sense, it's the flip side of transparency.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
Nicolas Sarkozy, who hopes to be re-elected as French President this
year, seems to have little love for the Internet. At best, he regards
it as a "Wild West" that needs taming. Despite that, Sarkozy joined Twitter last week -- you can follow him @NicolasSarkozy.
Posts are mainly written by his re-election team, although there seem
to be a handful of personal tweets (marked "NS"). But at least he's
finally engaging with the new medium on its own terms.
On
Techdirt.
The increasingly heated debates about the traditionally dull area of
computer standards is testimony to the rise of open source. For the
latter absolutely requires standards to be truly open - that is, freely
implementable, without any restrictions - whereas in the past standards
were pretty much anything that enough powerful companies agreed upon,
regardless of how restrictive they were.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
One of the key problems with ACTA is the lack of transparency during
its negotiation. That this is becoming a big issue in Europe is shown by
the fact that the European Commission has tried to dispose of the
question twice -- first in its "10 myths about ACTA", which I discussed recently on Techdirt, and now with a page entitled "Transparency of ACTA negotiations":
On
Techdirt.
As Techdirt noted
recently, policy-making behind closed doors is no longer acceptable.
Until the end of the 20th century, it was hard for the general public to
make their views heard, and so governments didn't really bother asking
them. But that's no longer the case: the Internet has blown government
wide open, and there is now no excuse for not consulting as widely as
possible -- including the public -- before passing legislation or
signing treaties.
On
Techdirt.
Although DMCA takedown notices figure quite frequently here on
Techdirt -- especially abusive ones that use the system to remove
material covered by fair use or even in the public domain
-- the industry that has grown up around them remains somewhat in the
shadows. That's what makes the site with the self-explanatory name "Takedown Piracy", found via the 1709 Blog, so fascinating: it offers a glimpse of the world of DMCA takedowns as seen from the other side.
On
Techdirt.
Yesterday I wrote
about the unusual aspects of the Serious Organised Crime Agency's
take-down of the music site RnBXclusive. As I noted then, there are
still lots of questions to be answered here, but another piece of the
puzzle has been given to us in the form of the following statement on SOCA's Web site:
On
Open Enterprise blog.
As sales of its products soar, and its share price continues to
climb, Apple has come under increasing scrutiny because of the working
conditions in the Chinese factories where its iPhone and iPad are
manufactured. This has led Apple's CEO, Tim Cook, to announce recently
that the Fair Labor Association will be conducting audits of Apple’s final assembly suppliers, including Foxconn factories in China.
On
Techdirt.
Few ideas display a sense of entitlement better than that of private
copying levies. For they assume, by definition, that artists'
representatives have a right to money from the public simply because
there is some kind of storage that could be used to hold digital
copies of copyright files, and that every time such a file is copied,
money must be paid (never mind if you are just making backups or
transferring your holdings to bigger storage sizes.)
On
Techdirt.
One of the positive outcomes of the debate that has raged around
SOPA/PIPA is that more people have looked at the facts, rather than
listened to the rhetoric, surrounding piracy. In particular, the
copyright industries' hitherto unchallenged claim that piracy is
destroying their business is finally being challenged – not least by
reports like "The Sky is Rising" that consolidate industry figures to show that things are really looking pretty good across the board.
On
Open Enterprise..
One of the positive outcomes of the debate that has raged around
SOPA/PIPA is that more people have looked at the facts, rather than
listened to the rhetoric, surrounding piracy. In particular, the
copyright industries' hitherto unchallenged claim that piracy is
destroying their business is finally being challenged – not least by
reports like "The Sky is Rising" that consolidate industry figures to show that things are really looking pretty good across the board.
On
Techdirt.
One of the bolder ideas in the UK's Hargreaves report was the suggestion that a Digital Copyright Exchange
should be set up. The idea here is to promote innovative uses of
digital content by making it much easier to acquire the necessary
licenses from rightsholders.
So it's interesting to see the UK Publishers Association (PA) backing the idea:
On
Techdirt.
One telling sign of the widespread concern about SOPA/PIPA was that the
non-profit Mozilla Foundation, which oversees the open source Firefox
and Thunderbird projects, abandoned its non-interventionist policy, and
came out strongly against the bills. It first signed a joint letter sent to the key sponsors of both bills, and then modified its home page, pointing to further information about SOPA. That, in its turn, linked to a post entitled "PIPA/SOPA and Why You Should Care," written by Mitchell Baker, the Chair of the Mozilla Foundation.
On
Techdirt.
Yesterday, a disturbing story appeared on the German taz.de site:
EU MPs have received thousands of emails from ACTA opponents. But no more: the Parliamentary authorities have decided that all ACTA emails will go straight into the spam folder.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
Open e-textbooks are hardly new: Techdirt has been reporting on the pioneer in this market, Flat World Knowledge, for several years now. But a new entrant called OpenStax College is noteworthy for a number of reasons:
On
Techdirt.
Well, here's a turn-up for the books. At a time when the European
Commission is insisting that the copyright ratchet should be tightened
up a few notches by bringing in ACTA, with its perilously vague terms
that potentially criminalize even low-level acts of online sharing,
here's the Dutch government planning to go in the opposite direction:
On
Techdirt.
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