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 been right on future issues more than once, not least in the case of the five-blade shaver.
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 for draft French anti-terrorism law 5. New anti-terrorism measures in Denmark 6. Launch of Digital Rights Ireland 7. Illegal video surveillance on Slovenian motorways 8. Post-WSIS civil society letter to Kofi Annan 9. NL supreme court ruling on internet anonymity 10. Results e-society conference in Macedonia 11. Advocate General European Court rejects PNR deal 12. Cryptography almost banned in the Czech Republic 13. Agenda
It’s always very informative, and an easy way to stay up-to-date on digital civil rights issues in Europe. Dive in!
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. If the planned penal measures against copyright infringement cannot be implemented within IPRED2 itself, the Commission plans to implement these measures through other avenues.
The person reporting to the EU parliament on this topic, Janelly Fourtou, has complained that she feels “technically unemployed” now and reiterated that she wants these measures implemented as soon as possible. This certainly is entirely unrelated to the fact that her husband is on the board of Vivendi Universal.
Isn’t it great that in Europe we are able to keep individual interests out of politics?
heise.de has a report on this (in German).
via netzpolitik.org
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 discussion list here.
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 who downloads a mashup of Prince’s 1999 and the Benny Goodman orchestra performing “In the Mood” thinks, Well, now I’ve heard that, I have no need to buy the CDs those songs originated on. In other words, if the RIAA genuinely only goes after its customers because it wants to keep from losing sales, attacking mashups won’t and can’t accomplish that. This action amounts to the RIAA saying, “This art is illegal because it displeases us.”
Another case of someone strangling creativity for the sake of a business model that does not work anymore. The MashupTown guys are considering to move the site to Russia and ask anyone who knows of a good web hoster there to please tell them.
via BoingBoing
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 for future collaboration and coordination between human rights advocates and advocates of a more equitable and development-oriented international IP system.”
“participants discussed how a human rights framework can provide tools to address the imbalances in the current IP system and achieve a more development-orientated outcome.”
This is an especially important point:
“A number of participants mentioned that they would prefer to refer to IP “privileges” instead of rights, as this word better reflects what they are. Participants emphasized that human rights are fundamental and inalienable rights, whilst IP rights can be bought, sold or revoked.”
The participants of the study session also worked to clarify the difference between intellectual monopoly rights and human rights. In WIPO discussions, as well as in other places, industry lobbyists have started to misappropriate human rights language to call for stronger protection of monopoly privileges.
Once you’ve got data collected, the temptation to use it for anything and everything is just too great to resist. For the German Police anyway. Since a highway toll system for lorries was recently introduced, I have been asking myself when the calls to use the data for “hunting down terrorists” will start.
They finally came this weekend. In an incident in southern Germany, a trucker had driven over a parking attendant, killed him and then fled via the autobahn. Contrary to their usual self-promotion, police claimed to be clueless as to how to locate that individual.
This time, Germany’s new government attended to their pleas. As heise.de reports, politicians are promising to review the highway toll legislation. Until now, this law explicitly forbids the collected data from being used for any purpose besides collecting road tolls.
Yet another piece of evidence in the case against ever-spreading data gathering. If the police is indeed allowed to use this data, it will not be long before it is used for much less serious crimes than this.
The Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) was supposed to protect especially the entertainment industry from the changes in the world around it. But hastily crafted legislation has a tendency to turn ugly:
While the supporters of the DMCA have claimed that abuse happens only occasionally, according to a study done at the universities of Berkeley and South Carolina, USA, , 30% of the takedown notices enabled by this piece of legislation are improper and possibly illegal.
The entertainment industry is trying to hijack the EU Data Retention directive, as ZDnet reports.
Industry lobbyists are attempting to have the directive amended, so that it would allow the data retained by ISPs to be used to prosecute all kinds of crimes, not just serious offences such as terrorism.
In combination with the proposed IPRED2 directive, which turns copyright violations into a criminal offence, this would make the data retention directive a free-for-all for the industry giants to prosecute individual users.