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[News] Intellectual Monopolists Take Over Spain

  • Subject: [News] Intellectual Monopolists Take Over Spain
  • From: Roy Schestowitz <newsgroups@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Thu, 03 Dec 2009 11:48:18 +0000
  • Followup-to: comp.os.linux.advocacy
  • Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.advocacy
  • User-agent: KNode/4.3.1
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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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