A host of organisations working for a reorientation of copyright laws towards the public interest have published a paper (.pdf) on Digital Restrictions Management. I don’t quite get why they insist on calling it “digital rights management” – you don’t call a prison “movement rights management”, do you? -, but the paper highlights the dangers Read more »
In Ireland, a new group working for digital civil rights has formed: Digital Rights Ireland. With members in a range of specialised legal and technical areas, Digital Rights Ireland will act as a focal point for policy makers who wish to gauge the impact of their regulation in this complicated, and sometimes esoteric, area. In Read more »
In France, big business (read: Vivendi) and politics have gotten into bed together once again, and the result of the affair is as awful a child as can be: A bill on copyright and related rights in the information society, which comes directly from the legal labs of Vivendi-Universal and the Business Software Alliance. The Read more »
The Onion clearly sees where the trend is going: RIAA Bans Telling Friends About Songs “We are merely exercising our right to defend our intellectual properties from unauthorized peer-to-peer notification of the existence of copyrighted material,” a press release signed by RIAA anti-piracy director Brad Buckles read. There you go. Be warned: The Onion has Read more »
The European Digital Rights Initiative (EDRI) just published their bi-weekly EDRIgram newsletter. Topics are: Urgent call for pledges of support for EDRI-gram 1. Final push for single EP vote on data retention 2. EDRI and PI call on EP to reject data retention 3. Polish plans for 15 years mandatory data retention 4. Urgency procedure Read more »
Some good news, if only for the moment: The EU Commission has retracted the current draft of the planned IPRED2 directive after the European Court advised that the Commission does not have the competence to decide on measures of penal law merely in co-operation with the Council of Europe This only brings temporary respite, though. Read more »
The GNU General Public License, upon which some three quarters of Free Software rely, is in the course of being updated. Community, businesses, NGOs and individual developers will participate in the process. Yesterday, the FSF in Boston released a description of the process. You can find it here, and sign up for a the GPLv3 Read more »
A number of Polish people active against software patents have been awarded (sorry, Polish only) the Polish Cross of Merit for their contribution to the national information infrastructure. Among them are members of the Polish chapter of the Internet Society (ISOC).
MashupTown, a site that hosts and distributes mashups (two or more songs ingeniously mixed together to make a third) has taken down all of its files after complaints from the RIAA to its web hoster. BoingBoing’s Cory Doctorow writes: Mashups are a really dumb target for the RIAA. There’s just no universe in which someone Read more »
The somewhat cumbersomely named 3D -> Trade – Human Rights – Equitable Economy, a think-tank NGO, has held a study session on intellectual monopoly rights, human rights and development. The report (.pdf, 10p) makes quite a nice read for an overview of this topic: “The main objective of the Study Session was to create conditions Read more »