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Spanish activists issue manifesto on the rights of Internet users
,----[ Quote ]
| Javier "Barrapunto" Candeira writes, "Last
| Monday the Spanish Government sent the
| parliament the latest draft for the Ley de
| Economia Sostenible (Sustainable Economy
| Act), which contained riders modifying the
| current laws on copyright and interactive
| services. These amendments give the Spanish
| Ministy of Culture the administrative power
| to take down websites (or order ISPs to
| block those hosted overseas), all without a
| court order and in the name of
| 'safeguarding Intellectual Property Laws
| against Internet Piracy'.
`----
http://www.boingboing.net/2009/12/02/spanish-activists-is.html
My Hilarious Warner Bros. Royalty Statement
,----[ Quote ]
| I got something in the mail last week Iâd
| been wanting for years: a Too Much Joy
| royalty statement from Warner Brothers that
| finally included our digital earnings.
| Though our catalog has been out of print
| physically since the late-1990s, the three
| albums we released on Giant/WB have been
| available digitally for about five years.
| Yet the royalty statements I received every
| six months kept insisting we had zero
| income, and our unrecouped balance
| ($395,277.18!)* stubbornly remained the
| same.
`----
http://www.toomuchjoy.com/?p=1397
Author Sherman Alexie's Rants On Colbert Against Ebooks, Piracy And 'Open Source Culture'
,----[ Quote ]
| He starts out by insisting that he won't
| put his book on the Kindle or any digital
| book format because he's afraid of piracy
| -- but that makes no sense at all. By not
| giving readers what they want, he's
| actually encouraging more piracy. There are
| probably plenty of people actively willing
| to buy ebook versions of his book, and his
| response is that because of piracy, he
| won't offer it to them.
`----
http://techdirt.com/articles/20091202/0122097161.shtml
Free Content Undermines Democracy?
,----[ Quote ]
| Of course, there are so many fallacies
| wrapped up in this argument, it's difficult
| to even know where to start (though, one
| would have hoped that a journalism
| professor would have done the decent thing
| and checked into these things a bit more
| carefully before writing a silly opinion
| piece based on a variety of myths):
|
| * Newspapers need readers to pay to
| survive. Not true. Not even close to
| true. First, newspapers have almost
| never made money from subscription fees
| or newsstand purchases. Those fees
| rarely even covered the cost of the
| newsprint and delivery. Newspapers have
| always made their money on advertising
| and classifieds (a form of
| advertising).
`----
http://techdirt.com/articles/20091130/0621387128.shtml
Games Workshop Goes After Its Biggest Fans With Takedown Order
,----[ Quote ]
| Basically increasing the value of those
| games so that it's easier to play them and
| easier to keep playing them. And, in
| response, Games Workshop sends out its
| lawyers? How does that possibly make any
| sense at all?
`----
http://techdirt.com/articles/20091130/0309517103.shtml
My $62.47 Royalty Statement: How Major Labels Cook the Books with Digital Downloads
,----[ Quote ]
| I got something in the mail last week I'd
| been wanting for years: a Too Much Joy
| royalty statement from Warner Brothers that
| finally included our digital earnings.
| Though our catalog has been out of print
| physically since the late-1990s, the three
| albums we released on Giant/WB have been
| available digitally for about five years.
| Yet the royalty statements I received every
| six months kept insisting we had zero
| income, and our unrecouped balance
| ($395,277.18!)* stubbornly remained the
| same.
`----
http://gizmodo.com/5417318/my-6247-royalty-statement-how-major-labels-cook-the-books-with-digital-downloads
No Cost Too Great for Copyright
,----[ Quote ]
| Presumably courts are more willing to ping
| ISPs because they are perceived as having
| more capacity than a bus company to control
| the actions of their passengers, but this
| is an illusion. A bus company has much the
| same ability to control its passengers, as
| an ISP does its users. The difference
| however is that courts respect the rights
| of passengers, but donât respect the rights
| of users. The bus companyâs passengers
| have a right not to be subject to a
| demeaning search by the bus company and
| courts are happy to respect that right.
| However, courts do not afford the same
| respect to passengers when the fire up
| their internet browser. They ought to.
`----
http://brendanscott.wordpress.com/2009/12/02/no-cost-too-great-for-copyright/
Recent:
Should There Be Punishment For Bogus 'Pre-Settlement' Letters?
,----[ Quote ]
| We've recently seen efforts to ramp up the
| system of "pre-settlement" letters as a way to
| "profit" off of file sharing. The scheme works
| by having a company that either holds the
| copyrights to certain works or has merely
| licensed them for this purpose put those files
| online and then see who is downloading them.
| That's the simplest version (though, of
| questionable legality since if the copyright
| holder itself is putting the content online,
| you can raise questions about whether or not
| the sharing is really unauthorized). Some
| others in the space don't actually put their
| content online themselves, but try to find IP
| addresses of those who are sharing the
| content, and then sending those users "pre-
| settlement" letters, in the hopes that many
| people just pay up, rather than fighting the
| letters (or, more likely, ignoring them).
`----
http://techdirt.com/articles/20091130/0616407124.shtml
Using faulty data to demand settlements from innocent surfers
,----[ Quote ]
| A Princeton researcher finds himself bombarded
| with demands to pay up after swapping adult
| movies onlineâbut he didn't do it. It appears
| to be another case of extremely-lazy IP
| "enforcement" using bad BitTorrent data
| collection.
`----
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/11/using-faulty-data-to-demand-settlements-from-innocent-surfers.ars
Virgin Media Using Deep Packet Inspection To Spy On Your
Internet Usage For Hollywood
,----[ Quote ]
| While this is just a test, and the information
| is being aggregated in a supposedly anonymous
| way just to judge the extent of the problem,
| there are a bunch of issues with such claims.
| First, there is no such thing as an anonomyzed
| dataset. Second, there are some pretty serious
| privacy questions raised by this. In the US,
| the use of Deep Packet Inspection for looking
| at what users do has been frowned upon, but in
| the UK it's been deemed not so bad by the
| legal system (however, the wider EU doesn't
| agree with the UK on this position). No matter
| how you look at it, it does seem quite extreme
| for your ISP to carefully look at everything
| you do online. In the end, of course, this
| will only serve to drive up the demand for
| encryption technology.
`----
http://techdirt.com/articles/20091130/0316037113.shtml
Inaccurate Copyright Enforcement: Questionable "best" practices
and BitTorrent specification flaws
,----[ Quote ]
| In the past few weeks, Ed has been writing
| about targeted and inaccurate copyright
| enforcement. While it may be difficult to
| quantify the actual extent of inaccurate
| claims, we can at least try to understand
| whether copyright enforcement companies are
| making a "good faith" best effort to minimize
| any false positives. My short answer: not
| really.
`----
http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/mfreed/inaccurate-copyright-enforcement-questionable-best-practices-and-bittorrent-specificatio
Virgin Media and CView to rifle through your packets
http://crave.cnet.co.uk/software/0,39029471,49304424,00.htm
If We Don't Kick People Off The Internet For File Sharing, Football Will Die
,----[ Quote ]
| We've discussed in the past how the UK's
| Premier League's fear of the internet has been
| a case study in what not to do online. But it
| seems that the Premier League bosses still
| want to push forward with plans to make it
| more difficult and more annoying for fans to
| actually watch matches.
`----
http://techdirt.com/articles/20091125/1651027094.shtml
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