I want to denounce in the strongest possible manner the entire process that led to the signature of this agreement: no inclusion of civil society organisations, a lack of transparency from the start of the negotiations, repeated postponing of the signature of the text without an explanation being ever given, exclusion of the EU Parliament’s demands that were expressed on several occasions in our assembly. As rapporteur of this text, I have faced never-before-seen manoeuvres from the right wing of this Parliament to impose a rushed calendar before public opinion could be alerted, thus depriving the Parliament of its right to expression and of the tools at its disposal to convey citizens’ legitimate demands. Everyone knows the ACTA agreement is problematic, whether it is its impact on civil liberties, the way it makes Internet access providers liable, its consequences on generic drugs manufacturing, or how little protection it gives to our geographical indications. This agreement might have major consequences on citizens’ lives, and still, everything is being done to prevent the European Parliament from having its say in this matter. That is why today, as I release this report for which I was in charge, I want to send a strong signal and alert the public opinion about this unacceptable situation. I will not take part in this mascarade.
Kader Arif, rapporteur for ACTA in the European Parliament
Tagged: Information property RSS Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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mazsa
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mazsa
Policing the Police: Apps That Let You Spy on the Cops http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/06/policing-the-police-the-apps-that-let-you-spy-on-the-cops/240916/
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mazsa
Counterfeiting and piracy is a global crime, and it requires a global solution.
Victoria Espinel, the U.S. Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator -
mazsa
SCOTUS Affirms High Standard of Proving Patents Invalid “Today the Supreme Court upheld the Federal Circuit’s rule that, in litigation, a patent may only be proved invalid by clear and convincing evidence. EFF filed an amicus brief in the case – Microsoft Corp. v. i4i Limited Partnership – supporting Microsoft’s request that the standard for proving invalidity merely be by a preponderance of the evidence (more likely than not) rather than clear and convincing evidence (a high probability). [...]” https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/06/supreme-court-affirms-high-standard-proving
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mazsa
We must reject ebooks until they respect our freedom.
Richard Stallman -
mazsa
“[...] Data Retention Directive does not meet the requirements set out by the rights to privacy and data protection, for the following reasons:
- the necessity of data retention as provided for in the Data Retention Directive has not been sufficiently demonstrated;
- data retention could have been regulated in a less privacy-intrusive way;
- the Data Retention Directive lacks foreseeability.
86. The EDPS calls upon the Commission to consider seriously all options in the impact assessment including the possibility of repealing the Directive, either per se or combined with a proposal for an alternative, more targeted EU measure.
87. A future Data Retention Directive could be considered only if there were agreement on the need for EU rules from the perspective of the internal market and police and judicial cooperation in criminal matters and if, during the impact assessment, the necessity of data retention, supported and regulated by the EU, could be sufficiently demonstrated, which includes a careful consideration of alternative measures. Such an instrument should fulfil the following basic requirements:
- It should be comprehensive and genuinely harmonise rules on the obligation to retain data, as well as on the access and further use of the data by competent authorities.
- It should be exhaustive, which means that it has a clear and precise purpose and the legal loophole which exists with Article 15(1) of the ePrivacy Directive is closed.
- It should be proportionate and not go beyond what is necessary.” http://www.edps.europa.eu/EDPSWEB/webdav/site/mySite/shared/Documents/Consultation/Opinions/2011/11-05-30_Evaluation_Report_DRD_EN.pdf
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mazsa
Microsoft joins pre-emptive patent protection program http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2011/06/microsoft-joins-pre-emptive-patent-protection-program.ars
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mazsa
I expect that the Battle of Internets is about to begin. Upon this battle depends the survival of an Uncensored civilization! Upon it depends our own free life, and the long continuity of our sites and our trackers. The whole fury and might of the enemy will very soon be turned on us.
Winston Bay -
mazsa
Why The Copyright Industry Isn’t a Legitimate Stakeholder in Copyright http://torrentfreak.com/why-the-copyright-industry-isnt-a-legitimate-stakeholder-in-copyright-110430/
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mazsa
Netflix Is Killing BitTorrent in the United States http://torrentfreak.com/netflix-is-killing-bittorrent-in-the-us-110427/
Competing with free: anime site treats piracy as a market failure http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/04/competing-with-free-anime-site-treats-piracy-as-a-market-failure.ars
Cf. http://theunitedpersons.org/blog/the-only-way-to-stop-piracy-is-to-cut-prices
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mazsa
Download a free version of The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind http://www.thepublicdomain.org/download/
Cf. http://www.amazon.com/Public-Domain-Enclosing-Commons-Mind/product-reviews/0300137400
“Why am I allowing you to copy the book for free? And why is Yale University Press letting me? To understand why I am doing it, watch this video by Jesse Dylan.
And if you want to understand why it makes economic sense to my publisher, read this short article. https://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/b46f5a58-aa2e-11db-83b0-0000779e2340.html ” -
mazsa
“[...] how about if Google *did* buy the music industry? That would solve its licensing problems at a stroke. Of course, the anti-trust authorities around the world would definitely have something to say about this, so it might be necessary to tweak the idea a little.
How about if a consortium of leading Internet companies – Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Baidu, Amazon etc. – jointly bought the entire music industry, and promised to license its content to anyone on a non-discriminatory basis? [...]” http://opendotdotdot.blogspot.com/2011/04/why-google-should-buy-music-industry.html
Cf. http://news.slashdot.org/story/11/04/15/2118220/Why-Google-Should-Buy-the-Music-Industry
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mazsa
Patently Obvious “ON Monday the Supreme Court will consider whether to fundamentally alter the way American patent law is litigated. Specifically, in the context of an otherwise unremarkable patent dispute, the Court has promised to decide the degree to which juries should be allowed to question whether a patent should have been issued at all. [...]” http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/16/opinion/16Lichtman.html
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mazsa
The Continuing Saga of the Gene Patenting Case
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“Why the US needs to blacklist, censor pirate websites”: “Piracy runs rampant on the Internet, but Daniel Castro says it doesn’t have to be this way. He wants the US government to start creating a blacklist of Internet sites; once approved by a judge, each site would be cut off from American Internet users at the Domain Name System (DNS) level, where readable locations like “arstechnica.com” are turned into numerical IP addresses. US-based credit card companies would be forbidden from doing any business with the site, and US-based advertising networks couldn’t serve ads to the site. [...]
I spoke to him recently about Web blocking, censorship, and why he believes that deep packet inspection (DPI) of Internet traffic by ISPs is more like Gmail than wiretapping. As for due process, Castro says COICA is fair—but he’s open to some tweaks”: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/04/why-the-us-needs-to-censor-pirate-websites.ars
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mazsa
6Reasons Google Books Failed + Judge Chin’s original opinion:
http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2011/mar/28/six-reasons-google-books-failed/
http://thepublicindex.org/docs/amended_settlement/opinion.pdf
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mazsa
7 kinds of objections to the Google Books settlement: http://laboratorium.net/archive/2011/03/22/inside_judge_chins_opinion
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Bye, Bye, Miss American Pie? The Supply of New Recorded Music
Since Napster: “In the decade since Napster, file-sharing has undermined the
protection that copyright affords recorded music, reducing recorded
music sales. What matters for consumers, however, is not sellers’
revenue but the surplus they derive from new music. The legal
monopoly created by copyright is justified by its encouragement of
the creation of new works, but there is little evidence on this
relationship. The file-sharing era can be viewed as a large-scale
experiment allowing us to check whether events since Napster have
stemmed the flow of new works. We assemble a novel dataset on the
number of high quality works released annually, since 1960, derived
from retrospective critical assessments of music such
best-of-the-decade lists. This allows a comparison of the quantity
of new albums since Napster to 1) its pre-Napster level, 2)
pre-Napster trends, and 3) a possible control, the volume of new
songs since the iTunes Music Store’s revitalization of the single.
We find no evidence that changes since Napster have affected the
quantity of new recorded music or artists coming to market. We
reconcile stable quantities in the face of decreased demand with
reduced costs of bringing works to market and a growing role of
independent labels.” http://papers.nber.org/papers/W16882 -
mazsa
“The only way to stop piracy is to cut prices. That’s the verdict of a major new academic study that reckons copyright theft won’t be halted by ‘three strikes’ broadband disconnections, increasing censorship or draconian new laws brought in under the anti-counterfeiting treaty ACTA.
The Media Piracy Project, published last week by the Social Science Research Council, reports that illegal copying of movies, music, video games and software is “better described as a global pricing problem” – and the only way to tackle it is for copyright holders to charge consumers less money for their wares.
The three-year study into media piracy in emerging economies concentrated on countries such as Russia, Mexico and India, where piracy is endemic.
The academics concluded that societies where piracy is rife are no more immoral, or less willing to pay for content – the problem is that in those parts of the world, legitimate CDs, DVDs and software are five to ten times higher relative to local incomes than they are in the US and Europe.
No amount of anti-piracy enforcement will change the economics that drive copyright theft, say the report’s authors. They claim to have seen, “little evidence – and indeed few claims – that enforcement efforts to date have had any effect whatsoever on the overall supply of pirated goods. Our work suggests, rather, that piracy has grown dramatically by most measures in the past decade. [...]
The report condemns what it calls the “strong moralization of the debate” about an issue that the authors claim is really a matter of price and consumer demand.
Interestingly, the report itself is distributed under a ‘Consumer’s Dilemma’ licence that charges $8 to residents of ‘high-income’ countries – but offers it free for non-commercial use everywhere else.” http://www.thinq.co.uk/2011/3/15/cutting-prices-only-way-stop-piracy/”
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admin
Piracy isn’t just about price http://radar.oreilly.com/2011/03/piracy-price-manifesto.html
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mazsa
Cell phones are ‘Stalin’s dream,’ says free software movement founder / Richard Stallman: iPhones and Androids are ‘Big Brother’ tracking devices: “[...] “It just recently became possible to run some very widely used phones with free software,” Stallman said. “There’s a version of Android called Replicant that can run on the HTC Dream phone without proprietary software, except in the U.S. In the U.S., as of a few weeks ago there was still a problem in some dialing library, although it worked in Europe. By now, maybe it works. Maybe it doesn’t. I don’t know.” [...]
Stallman does his computing on a Lemote Yeeloong laptop running gNewSense, a GNU/Linux distribution composed only of free software. [...]
There are four essential software freedoms, Stallman explained. “Freedom Zero is the freedom to run the program as you wish. Freedom 1 is the freedom to study the source code, and change it so the program does your computing as you wish. Freedom 2 is the freedom to help others; that’s the freedom to make and distribute exact copies when you wish. And Freedom 3 is the freedom to contribute to your community, which is the freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions when you wish.” [...]
“I don’t admire a person who says freedom is not important,” Stallman says. “Torvalds set a bad example for the community by publicly using a non-free program for the maintenance of Linux (his kernel, which is his main contribution to the GNU/Linux system). I criticized him for this, and so did others. When he stopped, it was not by choice. More recently, he rejected [the] GPL version 3 for Linux because it protects the users’ freedom from tivoization. His rejection of GPLv3 is why most Android phones are jails.” [...]”
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2011/031411-richard-stallman.html
mazsa
“[...] get rid of the power. Political power is, in fact, the source of the wealth concentrations that fund the industry lobbyists and the campaign contributions. The wealth of big business and the plutocracy is funneled to them by subsidies, protections, oligopoly markups on state-cartelized markets, scarcity rents from artificial property rights, etc., none of which would exist without the state.
Getting rid of the power seemingly involves a Catch-22: How can you dismantle the state policies underlying the political means to wealth, when you’re outspent and outgunned in the policy-making process by those who profit from it? How do you change the system to prevent their making money off it, in a system rigged in favor of the big money?
The answer: Get rid of the money. At first glance this seems to be a circular argument, since — to repeat — we can’t challenge their control of the political means to wealth.
No, we get rid of the money in politics by undermining — at the economic level — the means by which the plutocracy makes its money. For example, we destroy the proprietary content industries’ ability to make money — not by contesting their power in the political arenas where legislation like the DMCA is passed — but by combating their ability to enforce the copyright laws they make money from. We’ll probably never secure the repeal of DMCA in Congress. But we can destroy the record and movie industries’ profit economically, with weapons like torrent download, strong encryption, and proxies — and laugh ourselves silly at the blustering of clowns like Lieberman and Biden. [...]
We solve the problem of money in politics, not by contesting money’s control of the political process — but by economically destroying the political profiteers’ power to make money, and rendering their political power useless.” http://c4ss.org/content/6416
mazsa
Son of ACTA: the next secret copyright treaty: “[...] TPP (Trans-Pacific Partnership) has been in the drafting stage for some time, but the US intellectual property chapter (PDF) only leaked yesterday. Canadian law professor Michael Geist calls it “everything [the US] wanted in ACTA but didn’t get. [...]”
mazsa
“The effects of piracy on movie distributor revenues are hypothesized to be the balance of a negative effect due to substitution for theater demand and a positive effect due to network externalities and the diffusion of information (advertising effects). In this paper, I estimate the overall effect of piracy on movie industry revenues using a fixed-effects, two-stage least squares analysis of data on movie sales, admission prices, cable penetrations, and piracy rates of motion pictures, music, and business software in 20 countries over a 6 year period from 1999 to 2004. The results show that movie piracy has a positive effect on the increase of theater admissions. [...]” http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p_mla_apa_research_citation/1/7/2/9/6/pages172966/p172966-1.php
mazsa
ISCB Public Policy Statement on Open Access to Scientific and Technical Research Literature http://www.ploscompbiol.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1002014
mazsa
“Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) [...] has now arrested someone and charged him with criminal copyright infringement, such that he’s now facing five years in jail (as well as fines). This is interesting, because when that domain was seized, we had noted that channelsurfing did not appear to host any content itself, but merely embedded content from other sites (Cf. http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110202/01203012918/homeland-security-domain-seizures-raise-more-questions-is-embedding-video-criminal-infringement.shtml?cid=195 ). That raises an awful lot of serious questions: specifically, what part of copyright law is infringed here. The site does not host any of the content. It does not make any copies. It does not distribute the content. All it does is put in a snippet of code that a user’s web browser then uses to request content from another site.” http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110303/16584013356/ice-arrests-operator-seized-domain-charges-him-with-criminal-copyright-infringement.shtml
mazsa
“Over 40 organizations endorse *The Declaration and “How-to” guide to new models of sustainability in the digital era* that are released today by the Free/Libre Culture Forum after4 months work.”
Sustainable Models for Creativity in the Digital Age: http://fcforum.net/sustainable-models-for-creativity
mazsa
The End of the Copyright Trolls’ Business Model? “Thousands of unnamed “John Does” in P2P file sharing lawsuits filed in California, Washington DC, Texas, and West Virginia have been severed, effectively dismissing over 40,000 defendants. The plaintiffs in these cases must now re-file against almost all of the Does individually rather than suing them en mass. These rulings may have a significant impact on the copyright trolls’ business model, which relies on being able to sue thousands of Does at once with a minimum of administrative expense. The cost of filing suit against each Doe may prove prohibitively expensive to plaintiffs’ attorneys who are primarily interested in extracting quick, low-hassle settlements.” https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/02/over-40-000-does-dismissed-copyright-troll-cases
admin
Chilling Effects aims to help you understand the protections that the First Amendment and intellectual property laws give to your online activities. https://www.chillingeffects.org
mazsa
Don’t Make Me Steal: “I PROMISE never to illegally download a movie if there was a legal alternative following the criteria on this page”: http://www.dontmakemesteal.com/
mazsa
Identity and The Independent Web: “[...] Here’s one major architectural pattern I’ve noticed: the emergence of two distinct territories across the web landscape. One I’ll call the “Dependent Web,” the other is its converse: The “Independent Web.”
The Dependent Web is dominated by companies that deliver services, content and advertising based on who that service believes you to be: What you see on these sites “depends” on their proprietary model of your identity, including what you’ve done in the past, what you’re doing right now, what “cohorts” you might fall into based on third- or first-party data and algorithms, and any number of other robust signals.
The Independent Web, for the most part, does not shift its content or services based on who you are. However, in the past few years, a large group of these sites have begun to use Dependent Web algorithms and services to deliver advertising based on who you are. [...]
The dominant platforms of the US web – Facebook, Google, and increasingly Twitter- all have several things in common, but the one that comes first to my mind is their sophisticated ability to track your declarations of intent and interpret them in ways that execute, in the main, two things.
First, they add value to your experience of that service. [...]
Secondly, these services match their model of your identity to an extraordinary machinery of marketing dollars, serving up marketing in much the same way as the service itself. [...]
What happens when the Independent Web starts leveraging the services of the Dependent Web? [...]
If I alight on a post about a cool new mountain bike, for example, I might chose to reveal that I’m a fan of the Blur XC, a bike made by the Santa Cruz company. But I don’t necessarily want that information to presumptively pass to the owner of that site until I read the post and consider the consequences of revealing that data. [...]
Let’s take that last bike scenario and play it out in the “real world.” Instead of alighting on a post on some random web site I’ve stumbled across, let’s say I’m having a coffee at a local bakery, and I overhear a group of guys talking about a bike one of them recently purchased. I don’t know these guys, but I find their conversation (the equivalent of a “post”) engaging, and I lean in. The guys notice me listening, and given they’re talking in a public place, they don’t mind. They check me out, reading me, correctly, as a potential member of their tribe – I look like a biker (tribes can recognize potential members by sight pretty easily). At some point in the conversation – based on whether I feel the group would welcome the interjection, for example – I might decide to reveal that I’ve got a Blur XC. That might get a shrug from the leader of the conversation, or it might lead to a spirited debate about the merits of Santa Cruz bikes versus, say, Marin. That in turn may lead to an invitation to join them on a ride, and a true connection could well be made.
But until I engage, and offer new information, I’m just the dude at the next table who’s interested in what the folks next to me are talking about. In web parlance, I’m a lurker. As I lurk, I might realize the guys at the next table are sort of wankers, and I’m not interested in riding with them. I have the sense that this model of information sharing is, at its core, the way identity in what I’m calling “The Independent Web” should probably work. [...]
I think it’s worth defining a portion of the web as a place where one can visit and be part of a conversation without the data created by that conversation being presumptively sucked into a sophisticated response platform – whether that platform is Google, Blue Kai, Doubleclick, Twitter, or any other scaled web service. Now, I’m all for engaging with that platform, to be sure, but I’m also interested in the parts of society where one can wander about free of identity presumption, a place where one can chose to engage knowing that you are in control of how your identity is presented, and when it is revealed. [...]
I think how we manage these questions will define who we are at a very core level in the coming years. As Lessig has written, code becomes law. It took tens of thousands of years for homo sapiens to develop the elaborate social code which defines how we interact with each other in the real world. I’m fascinated with the question of how we translate that code online.” http://battellemedia.com/archives/2010/10/identity_and_the_independent_web_.php
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/03/good-and-bad-google-book-search-settlement