The Register has an article on the UK government’s plans to build a vehicle surveillance network along the country’s roads: A “24×7 national vehicle movement database” that logs everything on the UK’s roads and retains the data for at least two years is now being built, according to an Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) Read more »
The last phase of the World Summit on the Information Society has hardly started, but the choice of host country already looks more questionable than ever. Markus Beckedahl has an interview (.mp3 – I hope the .ogg version is coming up) on his blog where Rikke Frank Joergenson, the coordinator of the international civil society’s Read more »
The European Consumer’s Organisation (BEUC) has launched a campaign for consumer’s digital rights. The time has come to guarantee consumers certain basic rights in the digital world, and to tell them what they can do with their digital hardware/content. This is our message in this campaign. * Right to choice, knowledge and cultural diversity * Read more »
Foreign Policy has an interview with Larry Lessig about the rift between the EU and the US about a possible restructuring of the Internet. An interesting point is Lessig’s mention of how there was an attempt to censor him at one of the WSIS preparatory conferences. He was told he could not talk about intellectual Read more »
As the final of the World summit on the Information Society’s second phase is about to take off in Tunis, there are a lot of bloggers keeping track of the events. Some of them have channeled their stuff into a WSIS blog planet. This should be a good place to keep a rough overview of Read more »
The Financial Times some days ago carried a fine article by James Boyle. On the 15th anniversary of the posting of the first web page by Tim Berners-Lee, he muses about how the web only became what it is today because it was free. And about how unlikely it was that this happened – and Read more »
The Washington Post has a story on the proposed WIPO Broadcasting Treaty. If television broadcasters and webcasters have their way in international treaty talks, they would gain new, 50-year rights to virtually any video they beam out, even if no one owns the rights to the content. So, for example, say ABC or Yahoo offers Read more »
Natali Helberger has published a paper (.pdf, 140 kB) on Digital Restrictions Management (which she calls “Digital Rights Management”) for the Council of Europe. She points out a number of issues which make DRM problematic, such as invasion of privacy, infringement of consumer’s rights and accessibility. She also highly commends the Access to Knowledge (A2K) Read more »
The European Digital Rights Initiative has released its latest bi-weekly newsletter. Contents are: 1. European Parliament: no retention of internet data 2. Article 29 WP rejects data retention once more 3. Big Brother Awards presented in 4 countries 4. French minister: copyright above privacy 5. Citizens’ Summit on the Information Society 6. Greek court will Read more »
Forbes magazine is running rather strange series of articles on how honest businesses (such as SCO suffer at the hands of bloggers, who initiate smear campaigns against them. The worrying part is not that the articles make it seem as if weblogs were invented for the sole purpose of bashing reputable corporations. If that is Read more »