News Links: Intellectual Monopolies and Copyrights
- Dr. Roy Schestowitz
- 2014-01-24 15:39:50 UTC
- Modified: 2014-01-25 19:48:53 UTC
-
With the New Year the corporate lobbyists and the Obama administration are stepping up their drive for passage of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), the new trade deal being negotiated in secret by the United States and eleven countries in the Pacific region. The key at the moment is Congressional approval of fast-track authority. This would give any agreement a straight up or down vote on an accelerated timetable.
-
Critics of the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement — a purported free trade deal between 11 countries, including the U.S., Canada and Japan, which has been in negotiations for some years — have noted that the deal has little to do with free trade. Rather, the TPP is about limiting regulation, helping corporate interests and imposes fiercer standards of intellectual property (to, again, largely benefit corporate interests).
-
All week we've been posting stories for Copyright Week, discussing important elements of copyright law that are at risk of getting trampled or destroyed in the effort to reform copyright. These are issues that will be squashed almost entirely if we leave it to the lobbyists to hash out what a new copyright law looks like. Today is the final day of Copyright Week, which happens to coincide with the second anniversary of Internet Freedom Day -- the day that the internet spoke up and said NO!! the last time a group of lobbyist sought to change copyright in dangerous ways, with SOPA/PIPA.
-
Anakata – Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, one of the founders of The Pirate Bay, and an early technical assistant of WikiLeaks – is still held in Danish solitary confinement without much intellectual stimulus at all. I thought we could send some books to him, and I’m starting with sending one of my own.
-
Just four months after dropping the first hints, Kim Dotcom is now openly discussing his plans for New Zealand’s political arena. The entrepreneur has just confirmed the founding of the Internet Party, a new political group preparing to shake up the 2014 elections. With information on party co-workers now leaking out, this year should be another exciting one for the charismatic German.
-
Marking the second anniversary of the raid on his New Zealand home, Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom is today enjoying the release of his brand new album, the launch of a brand new music service, the one-year anniversary of Mega.co.nz, and the eve of his 40th birthday. There’s certainly a lot going on, but that’s how this born entertainer likes it.
-
The larger-than-life tycoon behind Megaupload.com, in New Zealand facing US piracy charges, has made a dance album to distract himself from his woes. But how does he fit that in with playing Call of Duty all night?
-
Despite the growing availability of legal music services, piracy is still seen as a major threat to the industry. Today we take a look at the most pirated artists on BitTorrent in 2013, with Bruno Mars, Rihanna and Daft Punk topping the chart. Interestingly, the number of pirated downloads are a drop in the ocean compared to the plays on other free services such as YouTube, which generate millions in revenue.
-
In a first-of-its-kind case, a Spanish court has ordered a local ISP to sever the Internet connection of a copyright infringer. The case, brought by Universal, Sony, Warner and EMI, involved the unauthorized sharing of thousands of music tracks on a P2P network. An earlier decision found that no copyright infringement had occurred but that has now been overturned on appeal.
-
During a debate on the UK’s Intellectual Property Bill, the Prime Minister’s Intellectual Property Adviser has again called for a tougher approach to online file-sharing. In addition to recommending “withdrawing Internet rights from lawbreakers”, Mike Weatherley MP significantly raised the bar by stating that the government must now consider “some sort of custodial sentence for persistent offenders.” Google also got a bashing – again.
-
Several countries including the US and France have implemented so-called “strikes” systems to warn and punish P2P file-sharers. The goal of these programs is to reduce piracy, but do they have any effect on people’s downloading habits? New findings published by U.S. and French researchers show that these anti-piracy measures don’t stop or even reduce piracy.
Recent Techrights' Posts
- GitHub the Company Has, in Effect, Just Died (Time to Look for Alternatives)
- To Microsoft, what's left of GitHub after dismantling/folding it is some "training set" (people's code, without permission to "train" i.e. misuse under the guise of "GenAI" plagiarism)
- Linux Foundation Says "Housekeeping", "Hung", "Normal", "Native Feature/Support" and "Girl/Girls" Are Offensive Words
- Bombing people is OK, just use the right "terms"
- It Looks More Like Microsoft GitHub Layoffs
- GitHub is just losing loads of money
-
- Slopfarms Slopping Away at "Linux" and Spreading Microsoft Misinformation
- Slopfarms don't comprehend this as they lack actual comprehension, they're just parrots
- Links 12/08/2025: Science, Hardware, and Ukraine Excluded From Negotiations About Its Future
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 12/08/2025: Meditation, OpenStreetMap, Smolweb, and More
- Links for the day
- Google News is Dying: Most of Its Top Stories Now Are LLM Slop With Slop Images (i.e. 100% Fake 'Content')
- Google News has been drowning in this sort of stuff for quite some time
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Monday, August 11, 2025
- IRC logs for Monday, August 11, 2025
- Our Predictions Were Right: GitHub Dying as Losses Pile Up (as a Company It Cannot Continue to Exist, It's Not 'Free Hosting')
- GitHub always lost money
- Links 11/08/2025: Meritless Twitter Suspensions and Disney Scraps Deepfake Dwayne Johnson
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 11/08/2025: Upgrading Debian Bookworm and Better Quality PDFs From Gemini Pages
- Links for the day
- Currys PCWorld Lied a Decade Ago, 10 Years Later It Still Effectively Voids Your Warranty for Installing GNU/Linux Despite It Being Increasingly Mainstream
- Microsoft gatekeepers
- Team GNOME Has Libeled Me for Nearly 20 Years
- we are not dealing with sane people
- Experience With Airlines in 'Web Sites' and in 'Apps'
- In a lot of ways, Stallman Was Right about what JavaScript would turn out to be
- Open Does Not Mean Free
- wiser to ask if some program is freedom-respecting
- The Register MS Takes Money From Companies Banned by the Biden and Trump Administrations (National Security Risk)
- today's sponsor
- Sabotaging GNU/Linux PCs (and Users) is Not a 'Joke'
- maybe cruelty is the very objective
- How We Process Screenshots of Slop to Suitably Tag Them as Slop
- everything is a single command
- Links 11/08/2025: Data Breaches, Politics, and Climate
- Links for the day
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Sunday, August 10, 2025
- IRC logs for Sunday, August 10, 2025
- Gemini Links 11/08/2025: Tea Caffeine Hot and Super ZZ Zero
- Links for the day
- Slopwatch: LinuxSecurity, Brian Fagioli, and Other Serial Sloppers
- Maybe Microsoft wants to dub this "Web5"
- Gemini Links 10/08/2025: Residents Management Company, Automation, and Politics
- Links for the day
- Links 10/08/2025: AOL Ending Dial-up
- Links for the day
- Seductive Mirage or Allure of Complex, Proprietary Coffee Machines (or Similar White Elephants)
- Software is a lot like those things
- Links 10/08/2025: Webrings, “AI Sunglasses” and “AI Eyeglasses”, US Administration Intensifies Attacks on Science and Research
- Links for the day
- Sometimes Newer is Worse
- We generally need to reject this dumb notion that "old" means bad
- The Code Used to Make Techrights Fits on a Seventh of a Floppy Disk (or 100KB When Compressed)
- For the sake of comparison I've just downloaded the latest version of WordPress. The ZIP file is 27.2MB in size, or ~27,200KB.
- What They Tell Young Programmers
- Coding in 2025
- Simpler is Better When Simple is Enough
- Over-complicating things to "sell" new versions is so 1990s
- Links 10/08/2025: From Social Control Media to Prison, New Examples of Windows TCO
- Links for the day
- Sloppy Reporting About Slop, or How The Register MS Lowers Its Standards
- Maybe the management isn't even aware of this
- IBM's Strategy: Cull 'Expensive' Workers, Replace Them With Cheaper Ones
- So far we saw not even one rebuttal or challenge to the claim of Red Hat layoffs scheduled for tomorrow
- If You Attack Somebody Too Much You Legitimise and Strengthen That Somebody
- at the end those attacks add up to a "martyr" status
- The Man Who Helped Microsoft Kill Linux is Trying to Delay Our Lawsuits Against Him
- By conservative estimates, and based on court documents submitted by them, they're prepared to spend over a million dollars on lawyers, fighting against me and my wife
- Gemini Links 10/08/2025: Gen Con 2025 and Framework Laptop
- Links for the day
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Saturday, August 09, 2025
- IRC logs for Saturday, August 09, 2025