Author Archives: Hamish MacEwan

How PIPA and SOPA Violate White House Principles Supporting Free Speech and Innovation

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Corporate Right of Action

PIPA and SOPA also still allow copyright holders to get an unopposed court order to cut off foreign websites from payment processors and advertisers.

While this provision only affects foreign sites, it still affects Americans’ free speech rights. As Marvin Ammori explained, “The seminal case of Lamont v. Postmaster makes it clear that Americans have the First Amendment right to read and listen to foreign speech, even if the foreigners lack a First Amendment speech right.” If history is any guide???and we???re afraid it is???we will see specious claims to wholesale take downs of legitimate and protected speech.

[moved this para for sense]

As we have continually highlighted, copyright holders already can remove infringing material from the web under the DMCA notice-and-takedown procedure. Unfortunately, we???ve seen that power abused time and again. Yet the proponents of PIPA and SOPA want to give rightsholders even more power, allowing them to essentially shut down full sites instead of removing the specific infringing content.

via eff.org

Not enough that corporations are nigh immortal, now some are granted further Right of Action, at least those who are already granted State subsidised protection of fantastic rights.

Learning leadership from Congress

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When planning your career, avoid these pitfalls, behaviors evidenced by many elected officials:

  • In all things, look for money first. Listen to people with money, respond to people with money, justify your actions around money. Worth noting that 47% of those in Congress (House and Senate) are millionaires–an even greater percentage than those that are lawyers.
  • Embrace the fact that you don’t know what you’re talking about. Aspire to run systems you don’t understand.
  • Compromise over the important issues, but dig in and fight forever over trivia.
  • Along those lines: focus obsessively on the short run. Even though you are virtually assured of re-election, define the long term as “before the next election.”
via sethgodin.typepad.com
via Michael Wigley

Beyond SOPA: Why ‘Easy’ Solutions Don’t Stop Net Crime – Forbes

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Leslie Daigle is chief internet technology officer of the Internet Society, a non-profit founded in 1992 to promote a free and open Internet.

As Forbes reporter Andy Greenberg pointed out in his post ???SOPA Haters Are Already Finding Easy Ways To Circumvent Its Censorship,??? enterprising individuals and organizations are already finding easy ways to evade the Stop Online Piracy Act legislation now before Congress before it has even been passed. Among other things, the widely derided measure proposes using Domain Name System blocking as a solution to online piracy.

While the illegal online activities that SOPA strives to combat such as child pornography, infringement of intellectual property rights and cybercriminal activities are undoubtedly critical issues, they must be addressed in ways that do not undermine the global architecture of the Internet, curtail internationally recognized human rights or threaten e-commerce. Non-technological problems, including cybercrime and infringement of IP, cannot be resolved by using technology as a quick fix. Here???s why.

via forbes.com

SOPA is of course only “easy” for a coddled minority, for the rest of us it is costly and futile.

Tim O’Reilly – Further thoughts on SOPA, and why Congress shouldn’t listen???

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Further thoughts on SOPA, and why Congress shouldn’t listen to lobbyists

Colleen Taylor of GigaOM interviewed me yesterday by phone on the subject of why I’m opposed to SOPA. Rather than the usual comments about the potential harm to the internet, I focused on the harm to the very content industry that has proposed the law. I highlighted three issues:

Piracy is not the real problem. It’s a symptom of market failure

SOPA protects the wrong people. We need to encourage innovative businesses, not protect those who are unwilling to adapt to new technology

SOPA ignores history. Storied American publishers began as “pirates” in the eyes of the British, yet America grew up to be the largest copyright market in the world.

Read the article: http://gigaom.com/2012/01/13/tim-oreilly-why-im-fighting-sopa/

via plus.google.com

Lamar Smith Caught Infringing On Photographer’s Copyright

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Any time you have someone who is vehemently copyright maximalist, it’s really only a matter of time until someone discovers that they, too, violate copyrights. There had been some questions asked a few months ago about whether or not SOPA sponsor Lamar Smith had licenses to put up videos of news reports on his site, but that didn’t seem like a huge deal (and was likely fair use anyway). However, the latest, as a ton of you are sending in, is that some enterprising folks at Vice discovered that Lamar Smith’s campaign site was making use of a photograph in violation of its Creative Commons license.

via techdirt.com

‘Nuff said

Lana Del Rey – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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Imagine a World Without Free Knowledge

For over a decade, we have spent millions of hours building the largest encyclopedia in human history. Right now, the U.S. Congress is considering legislation that could fatally damage the free and open Internet. For 24 hours, to raise awareness, we are blacking out Wikipedia. Learn more.

via en.wikipedia.org

I don’t have to imagine, and it hurts.

Does ‘internet addiction’ change the brain?

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While this small study has found patterns in brain volume among people with IAD, it is not appropriate to assume that internet addiction causes changes to the brain, particularly as we cannot tell how their brains were structured before they began using the internet. Also, the study featured just 36 participants, meaning its results should be treated with caution.

Importantly, the changes described in this study were to the brains of adolescents with a specific, if new, disorder, and the brains of people who simply use the internet on a day-to-day basis were not assessed.

via nhs.uk

The President’s challenge – Nat Torkington

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As SOPA looks shakier, the President handed a challenge to the technical community:

“Washington needs to hear your best ideas about how to clamp down on rogue Web sites and other criminals who make money off the creative efforts of American artists and rights holders,” reads Saturday’s statement. “We should all be committed to working with all interested constituencies to develop new legal tools to protect global intellectual property rights without jeopardizing the openness of the Internet. Our hope is that you will bring enthusiasm and know-how to this important challenge.”

All I can think is: we gave you the Internet. We gave you the Web. We gave you MP3 and MP4. We gave you e-commerce, micropayments, PayPal, Netflix, iTunes, Amazon, the iPad, the iPhone, the laptop, 3G, wifi–hell, you can even get online while you’re on an AIRPLANE. What the hell more do you want from us?

Take the truck, the boat, the helicopter, that we’ve sent you. Don’t wait for the time machine, because we’re never going to invent something that returns you to 1965 when copying was hard and you could treat the customer’s convenience with contempt.

via radar.oreilly.com

Excellent.

To recap, stop asking the “technical community” to solve your niche issue, one, because there isn’t a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist, and two, “we’re never going to invent something that returns you to 1965 when copying was hard.”

NZ on Air Spooked by Political Interference

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We are jealous of our reputation as a politically neutral and impartial agency and put considerable effort into protecting that reputation. We take pains to ensure that we do not put ourselves in a position where we can be accused of political bias.

via scoop.co.nz

Tom Frewen’s dissection of NZOA’s derangement.  The irony is Jane, that this attempt to prevent broadcast of material that might upset the incumbent party is completely biased and not politically neutral, now is it?

Mistruths, Insults from the Copyright Lobby Over HR 3699

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I am staunch proponent of open access to scientific information, especially the variety that I paid for by virtue of taxation. The Research Works Act (HR3699) being proposed now will lock away taxpayer funded research from the hands of those whose hard-earned wages funded the research. It???s really a no-brainer and the NIH compromise was generous, allowing publishers to make a profit from research works for a whole year, during the crucial access time for new articles. The AAP argument that they add value by administering peer-review is disingenuous at best, but insulting to the scientists that voluntarily staff their peer reviewer army. Researchers freely add-value to for-profit institutions through providing all peer-review services and assigning copyright to publishers. As Heather Morrison writes in her thorough dissertation on scholarly communication: ???Giving exclusive copyright to any one party is arguably a disservice to all of the other parties who contributed to the research, or for whom it was conducted.??? Additionally, threats of job losses due to the NIH policy on open access are fear-mongering and taxpaying Americans should not have to bear the burden for their failure to innovate an outdated and inefficient mode of research communication.

via blogs.scientificamerican.com