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It's been fairly quiet on the TAFTA/TTIP
front recently. That's largely because Europe shuts down for its summer
hols during August, and has only just got going again. Unfortunately
(for TAFTA/TTIP), the next round of negotiations has just been cancelled
because the US administration was busy being, er, not busy. But as a
consolation prize, we have a couple of documents from the European
Commission on the subject of Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS),
which by a happy coincidence was the subject of my previous TTIP Update.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
A couple of months ago, we reported on some interesting research into the reality
of US trade agreements, in contrast to the rosy pictures always painted
when they are being sold to the public by politicians. In particular,
it turned out that far from boosting US exports and creating more jobs,
both the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and KORUS, the free
trade agreement with South Korea, actually did the opposite --
increasing the US trade deficit with those countries, and destroying
hundreds of thousands of American jobs.
On
Techdirt.
One of the ironies of European outrage over the global surveillance
conducted by the NSA and GCHQ is that in the EU, communications metadata
must be kept by law anyway, although not many people there realize it.
That's a consequence of the Data Retention Directive, passed in 2006, which:
On
Techdirt.
Techdirt has been reporting for a while the efforts of the Russian government to bring the Internet there under control.
It now seems that it is taking a new approach: as well as banning or
criminalizing activities it doesn't like, it wants to compete with them
directly. Specifically, it plans to fund a new Russian search engine,
called "Sputnik", named after the first artificial satellite, put into space by the Russians in 1957. According to an article in the news magazine "Der Spiegel" (original in German), this is designed to address two problems at once.
On
Techdirt.
A few months back, we wrote about the University of California's plan to lock up
even more knowledge in the form of patents, in the hope that this would
bring in lots of cash. But as Techdirt has reported time and again
over the years, patenting research does not bring in more money to fund further research, in fact it probably doesn't bring in any money
at all, once you allow for the costs of running tech transfer offices.
Moreover, there's evidence that making the results of research freely
available is much better for the wider economy than trying to turn them into intellectual monopolies.
On
Techdirt.
Back in April, we noted that the Canadian government has been trying to muzzle various groups in the country, including librarians and scientists. It now seems that some scientists have had enough, as the Guardian reports:
On
Techdirt.
We've noted before attempts to inflate the importance of copyright,
patents and trademarks by including a bunch of other sectors that are
only tangentially related to them when it comes to totting up their
economic impact. For example, last year Mike wrote about a joint
Department of Commerce/US Patent and Trademark Office "study" that
included 2.5 million grocery store jobs in its definition of "IP-intensive" industries.
On
Techdirt.
Last week we wrote about China's worrying new censorship
approach, which threatens up to three years in prison for those
spreading "false information" if their posts are viewed 5000 times, or
forwarded 500 times. Improbable though that law is in its exactitude, it seems it has already been applied:
On
Techdirt.
A month ago, we wrote about Kim Dotcom's plans to form his own political party
in New Zealand. But that's not the only way that Dotcom is going on
the attack against the system. Here's Vikram Kumar, the Chief Executive
of Dotcom's "privacy company" Mega, on another bold move:
On
Techdirt.
The Internet may be a series of tubes, but those tubes have to be joined
together. That takes place at Internet exchanges (IXs), where
different ISPs can pass on and receive data. One of the largest and
most important such IXs is AMS-IX, which is based in the capital of the
Netherlands, Amsterdam. Techdirt reader Dirk Poot points out that AMS-IX has just made the following move:
On
Techdirt.
Back in 2010, Techdirt reported on a fairly remarkable comment from the US ambassador to the UN in Geneva, Betty E. King, who said at a press conference:
On
Techdirt.
One of the unfortunate consequences of the revelations about NSA spying
on just about everyone is that it creates a false impression that such
activities are really quite normal these days, and nothing much to worry
about. This probably encourages nations that don't carry out such
comprehensive snooping on their populations to think about doing so. In
Nigeria, for example, a proposal is making its way through the
legislative process that would grant the Nigerian government wide-ranging surveillance powers, as reported here by Premium Times:
On
Techdirt.
In the recent demonstrations in Istanbul, the Turkish government may
have had superior police and security forces on the streets, but one
area where it lost the battle was on social networks, which
anti-government protesters used adroitly to get their viewpoint out to
the world. It seems the Turkish government has learned its lesson, and has decided to fight back according to this report in the Wall Street Journal:
On
Techdirt.
It was expected
that the Brazilian President, Dilma Rousseff, would raise the issue of
NSA spying when she addressed the opening session of the UN General
Assembly in New York this week. But few would have predicted that her speech would be quite so excoriating (pdf), especially since it was given in the presence of President Obama, who spoke immediately after her.
On
Techdirt.
As Techdirt has been pointing out for years,
newspaper paywalls make no sense. By stopping people from reading your
stories unless they have a subscription, you diminish your influence in
the media world, drastically reduce the number of readers and thus make
it much harder to generate revenue from them. Paywalls are also a gift to your competitors, as this story in the Guardian indicates:
On
Techdirt.
As I noted a couple of years ago, one of the most important legacies
of the Hargreaves review of copyright in the digital age was its
insistence that policy must be based on evidence,
not dogma. There were some heartening signs that the UK government was
indeed following through on that, notably in terms of a series of reports
from Ofcom that explore in detail many aspects of the online use of
copyright materials - something that was simply unavailable before.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
Earlier this week I posted Richard Stallman's recollections of the AI Lab at MIT, where
he first encountered and came to love the hacker world and its spirit.
That idyllic period came to an end as a result of the commercialisation
of the AI Labs' computer system, called the Lisp Machine, which led to
the destruction of the unique environment that created it in the first
place, and to its re-birth as the GNU project.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
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