France Decides Not To Use The Internet After All

Permalink: http://questioncopyright.org/france-decides-not-to-use-the-internet
Posted by kfogel | Posted in: Syndicated Articles | Comments(0) November 2007

Thanks to Jeff Ubois for bringing this one to our attention...

Internet users in France who illegally download too many times will risk having their Internet connection taken away by court order. No, I'm not making this up: read about it in The Guardian, Tech Crunch, The New York Times, and the French Pirate Party's page (with English) about it.

The French Pirate Party (PPF), at the above link and elsewhere, is doing a good job of articulating what's wrong with this — aside from the fact that the content providers don't need their own taxpayer-funded private police force anyway, that is. As the PPF points out, the new measure will result in:

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Swiss DMCA Quietly Adopted

Permalink: http://www.CopyrightReform.us/archives/19
Posted by Bryan Andrews | Posted in: External Articles | Comments(0) November 2007

“We have seen a lot of talk over the years about the Canadian DMCA. But few know about the Swiss version recently adopted by law makers … not even the Swiss people. The government and media have been very quiet, probably to avoid a referendum. Indeed, Switzerland is a direct democracy and if 50,000 citizens sign a referendum, the whole country will have a chance to vote against the new copyright law. In this version of the DMCA, sharing a file on P2P networks will land you one year in jail, even though the law mandates a levy on blank media. The history of the law is available online.”

Source: Slashdot

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Canada’s New DMCA Worse then US Copyright Law?

Permalink: http://www.CopyrightReform.us/archives/16
Posted by Bryan Andrews | Posted in: External Articles | Comments(0) November 2007

“The government of Canada is preparing to attempt to bring a new DMCA-modeled copyright law in Canada in order to comply with the WIPO treaties the country signed in 1997. (These treaties were also the base of the American DMCA.) The new Canadian law will be even more restrictive in nature than the American version and worse than the last Canadian copyright proposal, the defeated Bill C-60. Among the many restrictive clauses in this new law, as Michael Geist explains, is the total abolishment of the concept of fair use: ‘No parody exception. No time shifting exception. No device shifting exception. No expanded backup provision. Nothing.’ Geist provides a list of 30 things that can be done to address the issues.”

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Everyday Copyright Violations

Permalink: http://www.CopyrightReform.us/archives/15
Posted by Bryan Andrews | Posted in: External Articles | Comments(0) November 2007

“By the end of the day, John has infringed the copyrights of twenty emails, three legal articles, an architectural rendering, a poem, five photographs, an animated character, a musical composition, a painting, and fifty notes and drawings. All told, he has committed at least eighty-three acts of infringement and faces liability in the amount of $12.45 million (to say nothing of potential criminal charges). There is nothing particularly extraordinary about John’s activities. Yet if copyright holders were inclined to enforce their rights to the maximum extent allowed by law, he would be indisputably liable for a mind-boggling $4.544 billion in potential damages each year. And, surprisingly, he has not even committed a single act of infringement through P2P file sharing.”

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Illegal Downloaders to be Blocked By French Government?

Permalink: http://www.CopyrightReform.us/archives/5
Posted by Bryan Andrews | Posted in: External Articles | Comments(0) November 2007

“According to a recent article on the Financial Times site, ‘internet users in France who download music and films without paying for them could find their web access shut down by a government body.’ The proposal originated with FNAC, an entertainment retailer. According to the article, the proposal has a good chance of being accepted. ‘In exchange for the clampdown on illegal downloading, the music industry has agreed to make individual downloads of archive French material available on all types of players by dropping digital rights management protection. The French film industry has agreed to release DVDs more quickly after a film’s first cinema screening, reducing the delay from 7½ months to 6 months. However, consumer groups and even some of Mr Sarkozy’s own members of parliament on Thursday attacked the proposal for a new internet policeman as a threat to civil liberties.’”

Source: http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/11/23/1355220

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MPAA College Toolkit Raises Privacy, Security Concerns

Permalink: http://www.CopyrightReform.us/archives/3
Posted by Bryan Andrews | Posted in: External Articles | Comments(0) November 2007

“The Motion Picture Association of America last month sent letters to the presidents of 25 major universities (pdf), urging them to download and install a ‘university toolkit’ to help identify students who were downloading/sharing movie files. The Washington Post’s Security Fix blog reports that any university that installs the software could be placing a virtual wiretap on their networks for the MPAA (and the rest of the world) to listen in on all of the school’s traffic. From the story: ‘The MPAA also claims that using the tool on a university network presents “no privacy issues — the content of traffic is never examined or displayed.’ That statement, however, is misleading. Here’s why: The toolkit sets up an Apache Web server on the user’s machine. It also automatically configures all of the data and graphs gathered about activity on the local network to be displayed on a Web page, complete with ntop-generated graphics showing not only bandwidth usage generated by each user on the network, but also the Internet address of every Web site each user has visited. Unless a school using the tool has firewalls on the borders of its network designed to block unsolicited Internet traffic — and a great many universities do not — that Web server is going to be visible and accessible by anyone with a Web browser.”

Source: http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/11/23/150232

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Copyright Alliance Presses Presidential Candidates

Permalink: http://www.CopyrightReform.us/archives/6
Posted by Bryan Andrews | Posted in: External Articles | Comments(0) November 2007

“Not satisfied with the current copyright terms of life plus seventy years and huge financial liabilities for infringement, the Copyright Alliance is pressuring presidential candidates for stronger copyright laws. In particular, they want the candidates to promise to divert police resources to punish even non-commercial copyright infringement. After all, without copyright, what would become of the next Shakespeare, Michaelangelo, or da Vinci?”

http://politics.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/11/22/1453245

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FSF Reaches Out to RIAA Victims

Permalink: http://www.CopyrightReform.us/archives/17
Posted by Bryan Andrews | Posted in: External Articles | Comments(0) November 2007

“In what has been termed the ”RIAA’s worst nightmare’, the Free Software Foundation has announced that it is coming to the aid of the victims of RIAA lawsuits, by establishing an Expert Witness Defense Fund to assist defendants in RIAA cases. The purpose of the fund is ‘to help provide computer expert witnesses to combat RIAA’s ongoing lawsuits, and to defend against the RIAA’s attempt to redefine copyright law.’ The funds will be used to pay fees and/or expenses of technical expert witnesses, forensic examiners, and other technical consultants assisting individuals named as defendants in non-commercial, peer-to-peer file sharing cases brought by the RIAA, EMI, SONY BMG, Vivendi Universal, and Warner Bros. Records, and their affiliated companies, such as Interscope, Arista, UMG, Fonovisa, Motown, Atlantic, Priority, and others.”

Source: Slashdot

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Pimps and Ferrets: Copyright and Culture in the United States, 1831-1891

Permalink: http://questioncopyright.org/node/272
Posted by librarian | Posted in: Syndicated Articles | Comments(0) November 2007

This may be of interest to the QCO crowd. Eric Anderson has put his dissertation, "Pimps and Ferrets: Copyright and Culture in the United States, 1831-1891" online under a Creative Commons license. I notice he's at Bowling Green University, home of the Browne Popular Culture Library, an amazing repository of American popular culture (post 1876). If you ever find yourselves in Western OH, do take a trip to the library!

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Congress Pressures DoJ With PIRATE Part II

Permalink: http://www.CopyrightReform.us/archives/18
Posted by Bryan Andrews | Posted in: External Articles | Comments(0) November 2007

“Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) and Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) have re-introduced the ‘PIRATE Act’ (pdf) to Congress. According to Ars Technica, the purpose of this act is to get the DoJ to go after individual copyright infringers. It would allow the Department of Justice to bring civil lawsuits instead of criminal ones so that they would be able to prosecute copyright infringers with only a minimal burden of proof, rather than the heavier burden required for criminal prosecution.”

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