[Quote]:

In an inadvertent slip, the European Commission reveals that ACTA will indeed bring censorship to the Internet. As usual, they say this in the calmest soothing tone of voice.

[Quote]:

After Helena Drnovsek Zorko, Slovenia’s ambassador to Japan, signed the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, she was deluged with emails from Slovenians criticizing her for signing onto the agreement, which encourages widespread network censorship and creates criminal penalties for copyright infringement. The ambassador read the agreement more closely and decided she agreed with the critics, and wrote an open letter of apology to her country for signing them up to the treaty.

[Quote]:

After the court case against the founders of The Pirate Bay was concluded today, the operators of the site quickly moved to change their domain name from .ORG to the Swedish .SE. A Pirate Bay insider informed TorrentFreak that this move was made to prevent the US authorities from seizing the domain, which is a serious risk now the court case has completed.

(on a map, it’s here)

[Quote]:

It might also be noted that, since I am “publishing” the entire contents of an AT&T program I am in blatant violation of AT&T’s copyright claim. I’ve pointed this out publicly on numerous occations, in various technical forums, since the early 1980′s. So far I haven’t heard a word from any AT&T lawyers. Anyone have any idea why they are ignoring such a violation?

[Quote]:

At a behind-closed-doors meeting facilitated by the UK Department for Culture, Media and Sport, copyright holders have handed out a list of demands to Google, Bing and Yahoo. To curb the growing piracy problem, Hollywood and the major music labels want the search engines to de-list popular filesharing sites such as The Pirate Bay, and give higher ranking to authorized sites.

[Quote]:

Amateur Photographer magazine has published an interesting story about a copyright infringement case of similar, but not directly copied, images. The issue of copyright is thorny, contentious and often misunderstood but this case sheds some light on the current attitude of courts in the UK. Despite significant differences between the two images there was no implication that the second image was a duplicate of the first, the court found that the second image copied substantially from the ‘intellectual creation’ of the first that is the elements that can be protected by copyright in the original image, including a consideration of the composition, lighting and processing of the image.

[Quote]:

There is no prospect of Sarah Ferguson, the Duchess of York, being extradited to Turkey to face criminal charges over her undercover reporting for a TV documentary on Turkish orphanages, a British interior ministry source said on Friday.

Turkey sought Ferguson’s extradition after a Turkish court accused her of “breaking the law in acquiring footage and violating the privacy of five children” while making the documentary in 2008, Turkey’s Anatolian news agency said.

The charges carry a maximum jail term of 22 years six months.

[..]

A ministry source said there was no question of the Duchess being extradited to Turkey. “It has to be an offence in both the countries’ laws. It’s not an offense in U.K. law, so the duchess won’t be extradited,” the source told Reuters.

Obviously, this won’t be a problem in the case of Richard O’Dwyer, who is being extradited to the US for copyright infringement for posting links – not an offense in the UK.

[Quote]:

In December of 2011, just weeks before the takedown, Digital Music News reported on something new that the creators of #Megaupload were about to unroll. Something that would rock the music industry to its core. (http://goo.gl/A7wUZ)

I present to you… MegaBox. MegaBox was going to be an alternative music store that was entirely cloud-based and offered artists a better money-making opportunity than they would get with any record label.

“UMG knows that we are going to compete with them via our own music venture called Megabox.com, a site that will soon allow artists to sell their creations directly to consumers while allowing artists to keep 90 percent of earnings,” MegaUpload founder Kim ‘Dotcom’ Schmitz told Torrentfreak

Not only did they plan on allowing artists to keep 90% of their earnings on songs that they sold, they wanted to pay them for songs they let users download for free.

“We have a solution called the Megakey that will allow artists to earn income from users who download music for free,” Dotcom outlined. “Yes that’s right, we will pay artists even for free downloads. The Megakey business model has been tested with over a million users and it works.”

[Quote]:

The former senator and now CEO of the MPAA can’t catch a break: “You’ve got an opponent who has the capacity to reach millions of people with a click of a mouse and there’s no fact-checker.” Must be terribly hard to represent the largest media empires in the world, who collectively own all the major newspapers, TV stations, radio stations, billboards, record labels and studios. How will they ever get their side of the story out?

[Quote]:

As a rough analogy, since antipiracy crusaders are fond of equating filesharing with shoplifting: suppose the CEO of Wal-Mart came to Congress demanding a $50 million program to deploy FBI agents to frisk suspicious-looking teens in towns near Wal-Marts. A lawmaker might, without for one instant doubting that shoplifiting is a bad thing, question whether this is really the optimal use of federal law enforcement resources. The CEO indignantly points out that shoplifting kills one million adorable towheaded orphans each year. The proof is right here in this study by the Wal-Mart Institute for Anti-Shoplifting Studies. The study sources this dramatic claim to a newspaper article, which quotes the CEO of Wal-Mart asserting (on the basis of private data you can’t see) that shoplifting kills hundreds of orphans annually. And as a footnote explains, it seemed prudent to round up to a million. I wish this were just a joke, but as readers of my previous post will recognize, that’s literally about the level of evidence we’re dealing with here.

In short, piracy is certainly one problem in a world filled with problems. But politicians and journalists seem to have been persuaded to take it largely on faith that it’s a uniquely dire and pressing problem that demands dramatic remedies with little time for deliberation. On the data available so far, though, reports of the death of the industry seem much exaggerated.

[Quote]:

Y Combinator, an early stage investment company, announced on its Web site that it planned to finance start-up companies that would go after Hollywood and the movie industry.

Referring to Hollywood, Y Combinator wrote: ”The people who run it are so mean and so politically connected that they could do a lot of damage to civil liberties and the world economy on the way down. It would therefore be a good thing if competitors hastened their demise.”

The blog post, which was titled “Kill Hollywood,” also offered advice to start-ups and entrepreneurs who wanted to help to hasten its demise. Suggestions included developing start-ups that created new ways to produce and distribute shows, and games that were similar to traditional shows but were more interactive.

[Quote]:

Lamar Smith, the chief sponsor of SOPA, said on Friday that he is pulling the bill “until there is wider agreement on a solution.”

“I have heard from the critics and I take seriously their concerns regarding proposed legislation to address the problem of online piracy,” Smith (R-Texas) said. “It is clear that we need to revisit the approach on how best to address the problem of foreign thieves that steal and sell American inventions and products.”

Yes, because only american thieves, like MPAA and RIAA, are allowed to steal and sell American inventions and products.

Anyway, let me translate: “we will try again once people have forgotten these silly protests”

[Quote]:

The bogus numbers Carr cites—which I’ll get to in a moment—actually represent a substantial retreat from even more ludicrous statistics the copyright industries long peddled. In my previous life as the Washington editor for the technology news site Ars Technica, I became curious about two implausible sounding claims I kept seeing made over and over—and repeated by prominent U.S. Senators!—in support of more aggressive antipiracy efforts. Intellectual property infringement was supposedly costing the U.S. economy $200–250 billion per year, and had killed 750,000 American jobs. That certainly sounded dire, but those numbers looked suspiciously high, and I was having trouble figuring out exactly where they had originated. I did finally run them down, and wrote up the results of my investigation in a long piece for Ars. Read the whole thing for the full, farcical story, but here’s the upshot: The $200–250 billion number had originated in a 1991 sidebar in Forbes, but it was not a measurement of the cost of “piracy” to the U.S. economy. It was an unsourced estimate of the total size of the global market in counterfeit goods. Beyond the obvious fact that these numbers are decades old, counterfeiting of physical goods imported in bulk and sold by domestic retail distributors is, rather obviously, a totally different phenomenon with different policy implications from the problem of illicit individual consumer downloads of movies, music, and software. The 750,000 jobs number had originated in a 1986 speech (yes, 1986) by the secretary of commerce estimating that counterfeiting could cost the United States “anywhere from 130,000 to 750,000″ jobs. Nobody in the Commerce Department was able to identify where those figures had come from.

These are the numbers that were driving U.S. copyright policy as recently as 2008—and I’m still seeing them repeated in “fact sheets” circulated by SOPA boosters. Finally, in 2010, the Government Accountability Office released a report noting that these figures “cannot be substantiated or traced back to an underlying data source or methodology.” Now, if a single journalist could discover as much with a few days work, minimal due diligence should have enabled highly paid lobbyists to arrive at the same conclusion. The only way to explain the longevity of these figures, if we charitably rule out deliberate deception, is to infer that the people repeating them simply did not care whether what they were saying was true. If I were a legislator, I would find this more than a little insulting

[Quote]:

Here’s the deal, Mr. Fucking Hollywood—don’t donate more money. Take your $9 million and shove it up your ass.

[Quote]:

INTERNETS, 18th of January 2012.
PRESS RELEASE, FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE.

Over a century ago Thomas Edison got the patent for a device which would “do for the eye what the phonograph does for
the ear”. He called it the Kinetoscope. He was not only amongst the first to record video, he was also the first person
to own the copyright to a motion picture.

Because of Edisons patents for the motion pictures it was close to financially impossible to create motion pictures
in the North american east coast. The movie studios therefor relocated to California, and founded what we today call
Hollywood. The reason was mostly because there was no patent.
There was also no copyright to speak of, so the studios could copy old stories and make movies out of them – like
Fantasia, one of Disneys biggest hits ever.

So, the whole basis of this industry, that today is screaming about losing control over immaterial rights, is that they
circumvented immaterial rights. They copied (or put in their terminology: “stole”) other peoples creative works,
without paying for it. They did it in order to make a huge profit. Today, they’re all successful and most of the
studios are on the Fortune 500 list of the richest companies in the world. Congratulations – it’s all based on being
able to re-use other peoples creative works. And today they hold the rights to what other people create.
If you want to get something released, you have to abide to their rules. The ones they created after circumventing
other peoples rules.

The reason they are always complainting about “pirates” today is simple. We’ve done what they did. We circumvented the
rules they created and created our own. We crushed their monopoly by giving people something more efficient. We allow
people to have direct communication between eachother, circumventing the profitable middle man, that in some cases take
over 107% of the profits (yes, you pay to work for them).
It’s all based on the fact that we’re competition.
We’ve proven that their existance in their current form is no longer needed. We’re just better than they are.

And the funny part is that our rules are very similar to the founding ideas of the USA. We fight for freedom of speech.
We see all people as equal. We believe that the public, not the elite, should rule the nation. We believe that laws
should be created to serve the public, not the rich corporations.

The Pirate Bay is truly an international community. The team is spread all over the globe – but we’ve stayed out of the
USA. We have Swedish roots and a swedish friend said this:
The word SOPA means “trash” in Swedish. The word PIPA means “a pipe” in Swedish. This is of course not a coincidence.
They want to make the internet inte a one way pipe, with them at the top, shoving trash through the pipe down to the
rest of us obedient consumers.
The public opinion on this matter is clear. Ask anyone on the street and you’ll learn that noone wants to be fed with
trash. Why the US government want the american people to be fed with trash is beyond our imagination but we hope that
you will stop them, before we all drown.

SOPA can’t do anything to stop TPB. Worst case we’ll change top level domain from our current .org to one of the
hundreds of other names that we already also use. In countries where TPB is blocked, China and Saudi Arabia springs to
mind, they block hundreds of our domain names. And did it work? Not really.
To fix the “problem of piracy” one should go to the source of the problem. The entertainment industry say they’re
creating “culture” but what they really do is stuff like selling overpriced plushy dolls and making 11 year old girls
become anorexic. Either from working in the factories that creates the dolls for basically no salary or by watching
movies and tv shows that make them think that they’re fat.

In the great Sid Meiers computer game Civilization you can build Wonders of the world. One of the most powerful ones
is Hollywood. With that you control all culture and media in the world. Rupert Murdoch was happy with MySpace and had
no problems with their own piracy until it failed. Now he’s complainting that Google is the biggest source of piracy
in the world – because he’s jealous. He wants to retain his mind control over people and clearly you’d get a more
honest view of things on Wikipedia and Google than on Fox News.

Some facts (years, dates) are probably wrong in this press release. The reason is that we can’t access this information
when Wikipedia is blacked out. Because of pressure from our failing competitors. We’re sorry for that.

THE PIRATE BAY, (K)2012

[Quote]:

My problem with this huge online protest against SOPA, and the reason I rarely take part in such protests, is because it doesn’t address any problems, only the symptom. The problem isn’t this shitty bill, it’s the people who sponsored it. So we protest this bill today, bang enough pots and pans to shame a few backers into not letting this bill pass, then what? Those same dipshits who wrote this legislation still have jobs.

(…)

It needs to get worse before it gets better. We need a really shitty piece of legislation like SOPA in this country to be the spark that ignites the lazy, idle tinders of protest.

███████ everything ████ ████ ██ is █ ██████ ██ fine ██████ █████ ███. ██████’█ ██ ████████. The ████ ███ █ government █████ ████ ██ knows ████ ████ best █ █████ ██.

[Wired]:

Congress may take books, musical compositions and other works out of the public domain, where they can be freely used and adapted, and grant them copyright status again, the Supreme Court ruled Wednesday.

In a 6-2 ruling, the court said that, just because material enters the public domain, it is not “territory that works may never exit.” (.pdf)

(…)

In dissent, Justices Stephen Breyer and Samuel Alito said the legislation goes against the theory of copyright and “does not encourage anyone to produce a single new work.” Copyright, they noted, was part of the Constitution to promote the arts and sciences.

[Quote]:

There is a saying in the political discussion in Sweden: “Anything you say before but in a political statement doesn’t count.” We’ve seen a lot of that practice in recent years with increasingly horrendous cultural monopoly laws.

People in corporate and political suits alike are climbing on top of one another to be the most statesmanlike in stating “We are fully committed to the copyright monopoly, but these proposed enforcement laws are just nuts,” worded in all the synonyms you can find in a thesaurus.

Why? Why do people feel forced to phrase their views on policy like that?

If the enforcement laws are nuts, but still needed for the monopoly to be effective, why is the part before the “but” there — where people say they support the copyright monopoly, but are firmly rejecting the laws needed keep it in effective existence for a few more years?

For I believe that the copyright industry is actually right that these ridiculous laws are needed to sustain the copyright monopoly. General-purpose networked computers, free and anonymous speech, and sustained civil liberties make it impossible to maintain this distribution monopoly of digitizable information. As technical progress can’t be legislated against, basic civil liberties would have to go to maintain the crumbling monopoly. And these are the laws we’re seeing on the table.

There comes a tipping point when somebody says that this entire system of cultural monopolies is absurd. A tipping point where the part before the “but” is unceremoniously and collectively dropped, the part that didn’t count anyway. A tipping point where everybody just stops pretending to support it. I think it is time to create that point on the history line.

[Quote]:

According to Senator Dodd, "technology business interests" are resorting to stunts that punish their users or turn them into corporate pawns rather than coming to the table to find solutions. "It is an irresponsible response and a disservice to people who rely on them for information and use their services," he writes. "It is also an abuse of power given the freedoms these companies enjoy in the marketplace today."

"It’s a dangerous and troubling development when the platforms that serve as gateways to information intentionally skew the facts to incite their users in order to further their corporate interests," he writes.

"A so-called ‘blackout’ is yet another gimmick, albeit a dangerous one, designed to punish elected and administration officials who are working diligently to protect American jobs from foreign criminals," the Senator continues. "It is our hope that the White House and the Congress will call on those who intend to stage this ‘blackout’ to stop the hyperbole and PR stunts and engage in meaningful efforts to combat piracy."

Shame on those evil piracy-promoting people at Wikipedia putting their business interests ahead of… wait, what? Wait, no, it’s DANGEROUS to black out those websites. Be careful out there today.

[Quote]:

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.

[Quote]:

Sisvel is a company you’ve probably never heard of, and to give you an idea of what they do just read their slogan: “We protect ideas.” Yes folks, they’re a patent troll, which is a defined as a company that buys up patents and then proceeds to bring other companies to court for infringing on said patents. They’ve just announced that they’re acquiring 47 patent families from Nokia, giving them more than 450 new patents that they can add to their arsenal. What’s surprising is that 33 of the patent families, which come in at somewhere over 350 patents, are defined by Nokia as essential to 2G, 3G, and 4G technologies.

[Quote]:

House Oversight Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) said early Saturday morning that Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) promised him the House will not vote on the controversial Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) unless there is consensus on the bill.

“While I remain concerned about Senate action on the Protect IP Act, I am confident that flawed legislation will not be taken up by this House,” Issa said in a statement. “Majority Leader Cantor has assured me that we will continue to work to address outstanding concerns and work to build consensus prior to any anti-piracy legislation coming before the House for a vote.”

The announcement comes just hours after Judiciary Chairman Lamar Smith (R-Texas), SOPA’s sponsor, made a major concession to the bill’s critics by agreeing to drop a controversial provision that would have required Internet service providers to block infringing websites.

[..]

“Right now, the focus of protecting the Internet needs to be on the Senate where Majority Leader Reid has announced his intention to try to move similar legislation in less than two weeks,” he said.

Classic trickery, we’re now between step 2 and 3.

1: Make crazy offer (SOPA)
2: People rejects crazy offer
3: Make a “reasonable” offer (PIPA)
4: People accept offer because it seems reasonable compared to crazy offer.

[Quote]:

[T]his sets a terrible precedent. If a UK citizen can be extradited to the US because of the content of their web pages hosted in the UK, why wouldn’t US citizens be able to be extradited to Thailand on charges of disrespecting the king or to China for undermining the government by being critical of it? To even press this case at all shows either a fundamental undervaluing of the freedom of speech of everyone, including US citizens, or, more likely, a belief in the most fundamental of American hypocrisies: the idea that the rules that the US applies to the rest of the world shouldn’t be applied to the US.

[Quote]:

I was pleased to see the measured tone of the White House response to the citizen petition about #SOPA and #PIPA

https://wwws.whitehouse.gov/petitions#/!/response/combating-online-piracy-while-protecting-open-and-innovative-internet

and yet I found myself profoundly disturbed by something that seems to me to go to the root of the problem in Washington: the failure to correctly diagnose the problem we are trying to solve, but instead to accept, seemingly uncritically, the claims of various interest groups. The offending paragraph is as follows:

“Let us be clear—online piracy is a real problem that harms the American economy, and threatens jobs for significant numbers of middle class workers and hurts some of our nation’s most creative and innovative companies and entrepreneurs. It harms everyone from struggling artists to production crews, and from startup social media companies to large movie studios. While we are strongly committed to the vigorous enforcement of intellectual property rights, existing tools are not strong enough to root out the worst online pirates beyond our borders.”

In the entire discussion, I’ve seen no discussion of credible evidence of this economic harm. There’s no question in my mind that piracy exists, that people around the world are enjoying creative content without paying for it, and even that some criminals are profiting by redistributing it. But is there actual economic harm?

[Quote]:

In a letter dated 12 December and obtained by Spanish newspaper El Pais, US ambassador Alan Solomont wrote to the outgoing Spanish president expressing his concern about the lack of movement on a online piracy bill, known as the Sinde law.

“The government has unfortunately failed to finish the job for political reasons, to the detriment of the reputation and economy of Spain…” In his letter, Solomont issued veiled threats, reminding its recipients that Spain is on the Special 301, the US trade representatives’ list of countries that do not provide “adequate and effective” protection of intellectual property rights. Spain risks having its position on the list “degraded”, and could join the real blacklist of “the worst violators of global intellectual property rights.”