Topic: COPYRIGHT - on June 23, 2012 at 9:50:00 AM CEST
Law & Disorder / Civilization & Discontents ACTA on life support as key EU committee rejects it
The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) has been facing an uphill battle since protests against the treaty broke out across Europe earlier this year. Three different committees of the European Parliament recommended rejection of the treaty last month.
Now the fourth—and final—committee to consider the treaty has rejected it by a 19-12 vote, giving opponents strong momentum going into next month's decisive vote of the full European Parliament. The trade committee's vote is considered crucial because it has formal jurisdiction over trade agreements like ACTA.
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Topic: COPYRIGHT - on June 19, 2012 at 9:02:00 AM CEST
EU trade committee to vote this week on ACTA
Despite the fact that ACTA was seemingly on its deathbed just last month, the European Union’s International Trade Committee (INTA) is now set to meet this Thursday, June 21 in Brussels to give its recommendation to the European Parliament as a whole. This vote is the most significant in the run-up to what will eventually be the full vote before the European Parliament, which has slated it for a vote in July.
This, of course, is after the fact that four (count ‘em, four!) parliamentary committees have already rejected ratification of the international treaty. The controversial intellectual property treaty does not enter into force until six signatories have ratified it. So far, none have.
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Topic: COPYRIGHT - on May 21, 2012 at 10:01:00 AM CEST
European Parliament Member Marietje Schaake's Favorite Techdirt Posts Of The Week
This week's favorites post comes from Marietje Schaake, a Member of the EU Parliament, who has been called "Europe's most wired politician."
When Mike asked me to write a post about my favorite Techdirt posts of the past week, I was honored. Techdirt is one of the main blogs I read everyday to keep me informed about information law and policy developments. The Techdirt contributors focus on a number of areas of my work. That was the same this week.
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Topic: COPYRIGHT - on May 16, 2012 at 2:02:00 PM CEST
Tenenbaum To Supreme Court: Let's Get This Constitutional Debate On Statutory Rates For Copyright Infringement Rolling
You may recall that, in the case of Joel Tenenbaum -- who is in a legal battle with some major lbels for file sharing -- a jury awarded the labels $675,000 for the sharing of just a few songs. The judge, Nancy Gertner, pointed out that this seemed unconstitutionally excessive and reduced the award to $67,500 -- knocking 90% off the jury's award. The appeals court in the case reinstated the original $675,000 on procedural grounds. It said that Judge Gertner jumped the gun in leaping to the constitutional question, rather than using remittitur, as had been done in the Jammie Thomas case. Remittitur would allow the RIAA to have the case happen all over again with a new jury. In the Jammie Thomas case there have already been three trials.
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Topic: COPYRIGHT - on May 16, 2012 at 2:00:00 PM CEST
Ask Slashdot: What If Intellectual Property Expired After Five Years?
As a thought experiment, what if the constitution of the U.S. was amended so that no idea (with exceptions only for government use, like currency) could be protected from copy or use beyond January 1, 2035 for more than a five-year period. After a five-year span, any patent, software license, copyright, software NDA or other intellectual property agreement would expire. (This is not an entirely new idea, but would have had significant recent ramifications if it had been enacted in the past.) Specific terms are up for debate, but in this experiment businesses must have time to try to adjust to sell services and make the services good enough to compete with other businesses offering the same basic products. Microsoft can sell a five-year-old variant of OSX, Apple can sell Windows 2030. Cars, computers and phones would, or at least could, still be made, but manufacturers would be free to use any technology more than five years old or license new technology for a five-year competitive edge. Movie, TV and book budgets would have to adjust to the potential five-year profit span, although staggered episode or chapter releases would be legal. Play 'What if' with me. What would be the downsides? What would be the upsides?
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Topic: COPYRIGHT - on May 14, 2012 at 2:39:00 PM CEST
Microsoft-finanziertes Start-up soll File-Sharing unterbinden
Russische Firma verspricht effektive Störung von Bittorrent-"Schwärmen" - Testlauf "erfolgreich"
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Topic: COPYRIGHT - on May 9, 2012 at 11:45:00 AM CEST
Virgin Media site goes titsup in Pirate Bay payback attack
Virgin Media's main website dropped off the interwebs on Tuesday with hackivist collective Anonymous claiming responsibility for the DDoS attacks in response to the company's recent cut-off of The Pirate Bay.
The telco said it had to down its "customer-facing" website for about an hour last night, after it was hit by Distributed Denial of Service attacks yesterday evening.
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Topic: COPYRIGHT - on May 9, 2012 at 9:17:00 AM CEST
German File Sharing & Copyright Debate - 'Just Shut Them Down, Man'
In a SPIEGEL interview, German pop star Jan Delay and Christopher Lauer, a Pirate Party member of the Berlin state parliament, debate the value of art in the digital age and whether music and movies should be made available for free download on the Internet.
Jan Delay is one of Germany's most successful pop musicians. Like many fellow artists, he feels threatened by the Pirate Party's call for the legalization of online music-sharing sites like Pirate Bay. Like many, Delay worries musicians will no longer be able to make a living if their work is given away for free on the Internet. Last week, the musician met with Pirate Party politician Christopher Lauer at SPIEGEL's headquarters in Hamburg to continue a debate sparked by musician and writer Sven Regener (the author of the novels "Element of Crime" and "Herr Lehmann") four weeks ago. Regener argues that the refusal to consider music a commodity for which one should pay is "preposterous."
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Topic: COPYRIGHT - on May 5, 2012 at 10:12:00 AM CEST
Feds Seized Hip-Hop Site for a Year, Waiting for Proof of Infringement
Federal authorities who seized a popular hip-hop music site based on assertions from the Recording Industry Association of America that it was linking to four “pre-release” music tracks gave it back more than a year later without filing civil or criminal charges because of apparent recording industry delays in confirming infringement, according to court records obtained by Wired.
The Los Angeles federal court records, which were unsealed Wednesday at the joint request of Wired, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the First Amendment Coalition, highlight a secret government process in which a judge granted the government repeated time extensions to build a civil or criminal case against Dajaz1.com, one of about 750 domains the government has seized in the last two years in a program known as Operation in Our Sites.
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Topic: COPYRIGHT - on May 5, 2012 at 10:00:00 AM CEST
Pirate Bay Enjoys 12 Million Traffic Boost, Shares Unblocking Tips
Last week the UK High Court ruled that several of the country’s leading ISPs must block subscriber access to The Pirate Bay. The decision is designed to limit traffic to the world’s leading BitTorrent site but in the short-term it had the opposite effect. Yesterday, The Pirate Bay had 12 million more visitors than it has ever had, providing a golden opportunity to educate users on how to circumvent blocks. “We should write a thank you letter to the BPI,” a site insider told TorrentFreak.
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Topic: COPYRIGHT - on April 7, 2012 at 4:09:00 PM CEST
Where TPP Goes Beyond ACTA -- And How It Shows Us The Future Of IP Enforcement
ACTA and TPP have much in common. That's no coincidence, since they are both born of a common desire to move away from multilateral forums like WIPO that are relatively open to scrutiny, to invitation-only groups negotiating behind closed doors. That lack of transparency has allowed all kinds of extreme measures to be proposed without any countervailing arguments being heard about why they are neither fair nor sensible.
On "Technological Protection Measures" TPP has two nasty turns of the infringement screw:
TPP goes beyond ACTA by applying provisions on technological protection where circumvention is carried out unknowingly or without reasonable grounds to know.
and
TPP goes beyond ACTA by explicitly limiting the possible limitations and exclusions to the TPM circumvention rules, while ACTA gives a country free reign to create exceptions and limitations it finds reasonable.
The second of those is particularly troublesome, since it reduces the scope for signatories to introduce more balanced copyright laws even if they wanted to. </p>
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Topic: COPYRIGHT - on April 6, 2012 at 11:25:00 AM CEST
Video für ACTA-Aktionstag am 9. Juni
Über das erste Mobilisierungsvideo den internationalen Aktionstag gegen ACTA am 9. Juni 2012 hatten wir gestern schon berichtet. Mittlerweile gibt es den Clip dank einer internationalen Zusammenarbeit in diversen Sprachen, weitere sind in Arbeit. Alle weiteren werden in den Youtube-Kanal StopACTAeurope hochgeladen. Es gibt auch bereits eine erste Karte für die Demonstrationen.
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