03.03.14
Posted in News Roundup at 11:38 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Today’s headlines, including Ukraine analysis, the return of drone strikes, and views from Venezuela
Assassination
-
From slavery to genocide, society has shown a terrifying ability to disregard the personhood of others.
-
According to Ms. Kustin, support for Palestinian professors and students is not welcome the school; the same is true for blog posts about the National Security Agency’s shenanigans as well as calls to end Hopkins’ involvement in the development of militarized drone technology.
-
Iran is likely to be a major topic of discussion during Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s upcoming visit to the US, and reports are that President Obama will ask Netanyahu to stop assassinating Iranian scientists.
-
At least five Iranian scientists were murdered, most of them by bombs planted on their cars as they drove to work in the morning. Remarkably, the Israeli assassins were never caught – obviously having long-established safe houses inside Iran – although several Iranians who may have helped the Mossad were arrested and executed.
-
The attack took place on Monday when the US..’s unmanned aircraft fired a missile, which hit a car and killed all the three people on board, local media reported.
-
-
Emmerson analysed 37 strikes carried out by the US, UK and Israel in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and Gaza, to arrive at a ‘sample’ of strikes that he believes those nations have a legal duty to explain.
-
Pakistan, like much of the Middle East, is a nation that has been rife with conflict for decades. Between its own internal political turmoil, the ongoing power struggle with India for dominion over Kashmir and tensions with the West resulting from nuclear sanctions and suspicions of Pakistan’s government potentially harboring terrorists, the world’s second largest Muslim population has had a rough half-century.
-
Ukraine
-
-
The last time Russian troops invaded one of its neighbors, the U.S. intelligence community was also caught off guard.
-
-
-
Just hours after last weekend’s ouster of Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych, one of Pierre Omidyar’s newest hires at national security blog “The Intercept,” was already digging for the truth.
-
With its multinational society and a long history of conquests, the Crimean Peninsula has always been a crossroads of cultures – and a hotbed of conflicts. Amid Ukrainian turmoil, every ethnic group of Crimeans has its own vision of the region’s future.
[...]
The majority of those living in Crimea today are ethnic Russians – almost 1,200,000 or around 58.3 percent of the population, according to the last national census conducted back in 2001. Some 24 percent are Ukrainians (around 500,000) and 12 percent are Crimean Tatars. However, in the Crimea’s largest city of Sevastopol, which is considered a separate region of Crimea, there are very few Crimean Tatars and around 22 percent of Ukrainians, with over 70 percent of the population being Russians.
Intervention
-
The American Congress and public are becoming used to street protests overthrowing elected governments regardless of the issue of national sovereignty. “Humanitarian intervention” in the affairs of other nations means willfully ignoring sovereignty where egregious human rights abuses are at stake and no negotiations are possible. The argument is somewhat attractive up to the point where it revives the Law of the Jungle. In the case of Venezuela, not only sovereignty but representative democracy are at stake, in a region which only recently began to shed the US-supported rule of oligarchs and generals.
-
In any case, we want to remind the owners of the business known as Zello.com that Venezuela is a sovereign and independent nation, and just as they are obliged to work with law enforcement agencies in the US when their network is used by someone to commit crimes, they should work together with the Venezuelan government to block the network of terrorists issuing messages that encourage violence and endanger the lives of Venezuelan citizens.
Why should Venezuela allow any foreign company to break our laws and promote terrorism with impunity, especially at a time that are actively destabilizing our political and economic system? What would you do if a known terrorist who lives outside the United States used the network to promote aggression against the lives of public officials and promote terrorist attacks in your country? What would the US government do, or any other country do, if a group of people used a Venezuelan company to encourage US citizens to make weapons to attack and kill others, and try to destabilize and overthrow their government?
[...]
We repudiate the negative mainstreaming efforts underway by international media against Venezuela, and we exhort them to better inform themselves about the facts. We exhort the free software, hardware, knowledge and culture community around the world to research what’s really happening in our country and urgently ask the end of violent attacks by Venezuelan right wing factions, pushed and promoted by the US government.
-
On the FX show The Americans, Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys play Philip and Elizabeth Jennings, a typical suburban couple in the 1980s. Two kids, nice house, they run a travel agency together. They’re also spies for the Soviet Union, moles sent to live among us. And their kids have no idea.
Surveillance
-
When it comes to domestic surveillance and metadata collection, Schneier firmly believes that the Federal Bureau of Investigation is the right agency to handle that data. He noted that the FBI already has domestic security capabilities and is responsible for the national fingerprint database. “The FBI is where we have laws and we have transparency,” Schenier said.
-
To pretend the NSA lacks the ability to simply tap this new cable run, nab that same data at any of a million interconnection points, or just get it handed to them by other intelligence agencies is perhaps either naive, a bit of political salesmanship for the project, or both. Still, it’s another instance of how the NSA revelations have significantly tarnished international/U.S. relations, resulting in a large number of countries making it a point of pride to avoid using U.S. technology. That’s not going to be particularly great for U.S. industry, and we’re likely only just seeing the tip of the iceberg.
-
-
Our recent history shows that we cannot rely solely on the government’s word, even if it is operating in good faith. The lack of transparency about this obvious misrepresentation is cause for concern. Was this alleged oversight confined to Section 702, one of many controversial surveillance authorities? Or is that merely the tip of the iceberg? Lawyers have an ethical obligation to speak with candor to tribunals, especially when representing the government. Amazingly, Verrilli has managed to remain silent throughout this controversy. It’s past time we heard from him directly.
-
The National Security Agency’s snooping on email traffic and phone records has prompted a cottage industry in products meant to keep spies out of their customers’ business.
Among the companies promoting devices at this year’s RSA technology-security conference in San Francisco, which attracts thousands of corporate executives, is Silent Circle. The company said its Blackphone, which is based on the Android operating system, will leave no unshielded records of calls, text messages or data storage for spies to obtain and mine.
-
The American security agency has claimed it’s not been collecting personal information of phone and internet users, but the Yahoo revelations have exposed the violation of individual privacy
-
A couple of weeks ago, it was revealed that American and Australian spy agencies had been monitoring the law firm Mayer Brown while it was representing the Indonesian government in trade talks with the United States. The revelation made it clear that those two governments, and probably many others, have not limited themselves to spying on terrorist groups and other criminal enterprises, but have extended their activities to include trade discussions.
-
Legislation in the House that would end the warrantless searches of email records is gaining steam.
Privacy advocates had grown frustrated in recent months as Senate legislation that would curtail the email powers of law enforcement was thrown off track amid revelations about National Security Agency surveillance.
Privacy
-
You can still use Dropbox for all your file storing and sharing needs while keep your legal options open, just make sure you opt-out. Otherwise you could sign your privacy away and end up not getting the compensation you deserve should your data ever get damaged or stolen due to Dropbox’s neglect.
-
-
With $250m in funding from eBay founder Pierre Omidyar and some high profile journalist hires, First Look Media has set itself the lofty task of reinventing journalism for the digital age, starting with the traditional hierarchy of newsrooms.
-
Doctors are being asked to identify patients they think may be potential terrorists.
Surgeries are being told to appoint a member of staff to inform on suspects.
Angry medics say the demand threatens doctor-patient confidentiality.
Civil Rights
-
-
British Labour Party remains the party of Internet spying and censorship. They gave us RIPA, they gave us DEA, and they want to do it again.
My Labour MP, Meg Hillier, is the architect of the plan to issue national ID cards and voted for the Digital Economy Act. She’s in a safe seat, so voting against her is a fairly meaningless act, but I plan on doing so.
With Tories and Labour both committed to a digital agenda built on ubiquitous surveillance and unaccountable censorship, we could really do with a decent alternative.
Once, I believed that might be the Libdems, but their party leadership whipped them to vote for (seriously) a system of secret courts.
Animal Rights
-
If there is one restaurant that has increasingly garnered favor with the vegetarian and animal advocacy crowds in recent years, it is undoubtedly the fast-growing, fast-casual Chipotle Mexican Grill.
Permalink
Send this to a friend
Posted in News Roundup at 8:41 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
-
Hey Linux gamers, got some good news for the AMD users . It’s pretty common knowledge Nvidia users get some good drivers at the trade-off of binary blob drivers (or not, depending on your ethics) and that AMD are often left in the dust, but how can open source drivers change that?
-
-
-
The announcement came over the Steam Community Boards, where it was announced that the Family Sharing feature is now available to the general public. Through this feature, a single user can share his/her entire Steam Library with up to five family members over ten different devices. Once the members are authorized, they can play any or all of the game through their own accounts. The achievements, saves and other related records achieved by the gamer will be tied to the gamer’s individual account using cloud saves.
-
Something to note is that it doesn’t show the lesser represented distro’s, I for example use Manjaro which isn’t shown.
So, to look back on January Linux was actually on 1.34%, not 1.11%!
-
According to the latest figures published by Valve for their “Steam Hardware Survey”, they put the percent of Linux gamers on Steam at 1.30%.
-
So Linux has a lot of games now, with plenty more still to come this year as it’s early days yet, but I have decided to list a few you really need to keep an eye on. Since we post so much news nowadays I feel that it is a good time to reflect on what we have still yet to come, so you don’t get lost in a sea of Linux games.
-
-
I have tested the game and it runs really well on Manjaro, it’s very odd, but the premise is really funny. I love how it all looks like status updates on a social networking site.
-
After a number of years of remaining woefully behind other platforms, Linux is starting to be a gaming platform to take seriously. Late last year, I covered comments from Lars Gustavsson, a creative director for EA Digital Illusions CE (DICE), the Electronic Arts studio that does the Battlefield series, on the topic of Linux games. He had told Polygon that DICE would love to delve into Linux games, and that what Linux really needs is a “killer game.” Now, as 2014 is underway, Linux gamers actually have a lot of good choices.
-
My feeling is that the answer is clearly no, and frankly it’s very refreshing for Linux gamers to have different options at all. I remember the days when it was very hard to find games for Linux and I’d never want to go back to that. Ever. It was a miserable time if you used Linux and wanted to play games.
-
Shadowrun Returns today receives its first full-length campaign expansion with Shadowrun: Dragonfall from developer Harebrained Schemes. A 12+ hour campaign set in the city of Berlin awaits with new features.
-
Today, a beta version of Portal 2, one of the most successful game titles poduced by Valve and generally one of the most successful computer games, has been released for Linux. While the first Portal has been available on Linux for a year now, Valve was working on other titles for Linux, like Left 4 Dead 2, Dota 2 or the new game consoles “Steam machines”, before releasing Portal 2 for Linux.
-
Cricket Audio allows app developers to quickly add sound to their apps with just a few lines of code. It can play sounds directly from memory with low latency, or stream them from storage media, and is designed specifically for mobile games, with highly optimized code and low, predictable memory usage. It also works on Windows, OS X, and now Linux, so it can be integrated into authoring tools.
Permalink
Send this to a friend
Posted in News Roundup at 8:39 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
-
-
It was only a bit over a week ago that I wrote an article on the Birdie Twitter application. Well, now the Birdie team is scrapping the current codebase and looks to be rebooting the application as Birdie 2.0.
-
-
-
Very much inspired by my interview with Bryan Behrenshausen, I’ve been spending a lot more time working with Markdown. Day-to-day, at work and at home, I usually work with either HTML or word processed documents. I’m fast with HTML and proficient with word processors, and I rarely need to convert one to the other, but I liked the idea of simplifying my process and using Markdown for everything, with pandoc to convert it.
-
In last article, we have discussed about WildFly-8 (New enhanced version on Jboss AS). We have gone through the new functionalities and features added/upgraded to this version. Today, in this post we are going to discuss about the CLI management using GUI and how to manage the Server using GUI version on CLI management.
Permalink
Send this to a friend
Posted in News Roundup at 8:36 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Permalink
Send this to a friend
Posted in Microsoft at 8:25 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Revelations based on hard documents, clearly stating policy and intent, remind everyone that no product of Microsoft is safe from criminal scooping
THANKS to the leaks from Edward Snowden, we now know for sure that Skype is a spy and Xbox Live is under surveillance.
As mentioned briefly in our daily links, even Kinect is now a target. To quote one article about the subject, “GCHQ identified Kinect as possible snooping tool; Microsoft denies all knowledge” (the same can be said about Skype, which the NSA spies on and seemingly stores videos from).
Coverage about it (e.g. [1,2]) is already being warped or marginalised by Microsoft boosters [3]. There are lots of denials and “damage control” from Microsoft (usually prepended or appended to articles, obviously at the request of Microsoft), which serves the NSA with bad or non-existent encryption (as other leaks showed). Xbox One makes it even worse and we can now assume that it too will be a target of surveillance, as we correctly predicted last year. The same can be said about Nokia phones and it is now confirmed by the Finnish media that Microsoft spies on users of Nokia phones. “Oddly,” says Christine Hall, “at just about the same time that Nokia’s announcing the arrival of a phone running open source Windroid, the folks in Redmond are pushing some more FUD, saying that FOSS users are nothing if not dissatisfied with their use of open source. As reported by Katherine Noyes on LinuxInsider, this latest FUD attack was mounted by Microsoft blogger Alexbuk, who wrote of the UK’s proposal to mandate the use of ODF.”
We are going to revisit that latter item later this month. In the mean time, however, let us remember that almost everything which comes out from Redmond (Microsoft and Amazon) is tainted with surveillance capabilities. Not only so-called ‘terrorists’ are targetted. Microsoft has become an espionage company. Business ties explain why. █
Related/contextual items from the news:
-
-
It’s not just the NSA that’s caught with their authoritarian pants around their legs. Apparently, the British have been up to it too. According to The Guardian, not only has the British intelligence agency GCHQ been storing massive amounts of webcam footage, but it also considered using the always-on Microsoft Kinect as well.
-
Permalink
Send this to a friend
Posted in GNU/Linux, Microsoft at 7:14 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Ford should avoid Blackberry’s QNX OS and instead go for a Linux-based OS
LAST WEEK we wrote about rumours that Ford was leaving Microsoft (the company’s key automobile partner for years). There are now some reports about it [1], which makes it look like more than a rumour. Ford was Microsoft’s biggest and perhaps only supporter when it comes to automobiles, so it must be a huge loss for Microsoft and perhaps the end of Microsoft’s escapades inside people’s cars (Microsoft has many problems others than that, even at the core business). What’s baffling, however, is the choice of Blackberry’s QNX OS; it’s proprietary, unlike Android, Linux, and all those massively-popular options for car operating systems (which can be tailored to the needs of pertinent companies large or small).
There are reports at the moment about Ford trying to appeal to the “Open-Source Community” (not necessarily software). One article said that “OpenXC, essentially an API to a car, is a combination of open-source hardware and software that lets enthusiasts extend their vehicles with custom applications and pluggable modules. It uses standard, well known tools to open up a wealth of data from the vehicle to developers.”
The problem is, unless Ford uses an Open/Free system that developers can tinker with (not just at API level), it will never attract much interest. Ford would be wise to move towards a Linux-oriented system (and not BSD-based but closed). Since we are only in the rumours stage, there is still room for change in judgment. Ford executives should explore a relationship with the Linux Foundation. █
Related/contextual items from the news:
-
Ford is reportedly set to replace the Windows-based Sync platform in its cars with an open-source based system used by several other automakers.
Permalink
Send this to a friend
Posted in GNU/Linux at 6:52 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: News about Linux devices and embedded Linux, categorised for easier digestion
Raspberry Pi
-
That “blob” is the closed source driver code that the Pi requires today. “In common with every other mobile graphics core, using the VideoCore IV 3D graphics core on the Pi requires a block of closed-source binary driver code (a ‘blob’) which talks to the hardware,” Upton wrote. “Our existing open-source graphics drivers are a thin shim running on the ARM11, which talks to that blob via a communication driver in the Linux kernel. The lack of true open-source graphics drivers and documentation is widely acknowledged to be a significant problem for Linux on ARM, as it prevents users from fixing driver bugs, adding features and generally understanding what their hardware is doing.”
-
-
Broadcom has released open-source drivers and documentation for the graphics processor that’s used in the Raspberry Pi microcomputer, among other devices.
“To date, there’s been a dearth of documentation and vendor-developed open source drivers for the graphics subsystems of mobile systems-on-a-chip (SoC),” Eben Upton, a Broadcom technical director and Raspberry Pi Foundation cofounder, wrote in a blog post. “Binary drivers prevent users from fixing bugs or otherwise improving the graphics stack, and complicate the task of porting new operating systems to a device without vendor assistance.”
-
In celebrating two years that Raspberry Pi has been around, Eben Upton has announced today that they are open-sourcing their OpenGL ES 1.1/2.0 graphics stack for the Broadcom VideoCore IV 3D graphics subsystem and it will help the Raspberry Pi with having a truly free graphics stack.
-
The community of open source mobile developers around the world are a vocal bunch – and here at Broadcom we’ve heard their call.
To date, there’s been a dearth of documentation and vendor-developed open source drivers for the graphics subsystems of mobile systems-on-a-chip (SoC). Binary drivers prevent users from fixing bugs or otherwise improving the graphics stack, and complicate the task of porting new operating systems to a device without vendor assistance.
But that’s changing, and Broadcom is taking up the cause.
-
Raspberry Pi super-computing clusters have been attempted before, but usually they don’t turn out as nice as this new one that’s comprised of 40 Raspberry Pi boards inside of an acrylic chassis.
-
Raspberry Pi director of Educational Development Clive Beale questioned whether the DfE is doing enough. He said, “I’m really worried it hasn’t been taken seriously enough.”
-
Usually there are two ways to look forward to buy a Raspberry Pi: first, think about a strange thing to make, and then go to the website; or second, buy the Raspberry Pi board having no idea of what you are going to do with it. Usually, I buy things and only after that I go through the Internet in search of inspiration and creative use cases for my new toys. That was the case with my first Raspberry Pi board: everyone seems to be able to put together his tiny PC with some parts (monitor, mouse and so on), a CPU and a lightweight Linux distribution, but what can we do that is totally crazy, mind-blowing and problem-solving?
Legato
-
Called Legato, the embedded platform runs Wind River Linux and comes with pre-integrated and validated components that provide connectivity to any cloud, any network and any peripheral.
-
Sierra Wireless recently introduced the Legato platform, an open source embedded platform built on Linux and designed to simplify the development of machine-to-machine (M2M) applications from the device to the cloud.
-
-
-
THE INTERNET OF THINGS got a shot in the arm today as Sierra Wireless announced Legato, a Linux distribution designed for Machine to Machine (M2M) communications.
-
Brooklyn based 3D printer manufacturer MakerBot has launched pre-sales for the second of three Replicator models that appear to be the world’s first commercial 3D printer based on embedded Linux. Almost all 3D printers are compatible with Linux desktops, just as they are with Windows and the Mac, and many, if not most, offer open source hardware and software designs. However, aside from some Raspberry Pi and BeagleBone hacks, the MakerBot Replicator Mini Compact appears to be the first to run embedded Linux.
-
Rikomagic
-
-
-
The folks at UK-based Cloudsto have added a new device to their range of small, ARM-based Linux computers.
The Rikomagic MK902 LE is a small box with a Rockchip quad-core processor, 2GB of RAM, and up to 16GB of storage. It ships with Ubuntu Linux, and it’s available from the Cloudsto shop for £94.99 and up, or about $159.
PicoScope
-
Pico Technology has released a beta version of the PicoScope 6 oscilloscope software for Linux.
This is intended to support the use of Linux in the scientific and educational fields.
The PicoScope 6 application runs on a PC to create oscilloscope, FFT spectrum analyser and measuring device functions.
-
Users can save captures for offline analysis, share them with other PicoScope for Windows and PicoScope for Linux users, or export them in text, CSV and Mathworks MATLAB 4 formats. The only additional hardware needed is a USB oscilloscope.
-
USB oscilloscopes are popular – only that the marketable supply is focused almost exclusively to Windows platforms. Pico Technology now redeems the growing flock of Linux users by offering such a software that runs under their preferred operating system.
Cortex
-
-
Newark Element14′s $79, Linux-ready “SAMA5D3 Xplained” SBC showcases Atmel’s SAMA5D3 processor, with features like dual LAN ports and Arduino compatibility.
-
The first is the Hachiko development board for the Renesas RZ/A microcontroller, which is an ARM Cortex-A9-based MCU. This is positioned as a low end design board for applications such as door entry phones, barcode scanners and data communication modules.
Linaro/Yocto/Enea
-
Linaro is a not-for-profit company, owned by ARM and some of its top Cortex-A licensees, yet it acts much like an open source project. In addition to its core role of developing standardized Linux and Android toolchain for ARM-based devices, the 200-engineer organization sponsors a variety of Engineering Groups (see farther below).
-
-
Enea launched a free, community-backed Open Enea Linux platform, with Yocto and Linaro contributions, and plans to target various community-backed SBCs.
Misc.
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
The trouble is, other big technology companies have been scrambling to capitalize on the so-called Internet of things. In December, Qualcomm, LG, Sharp, and other companies came together with the Linux Foundation for the new AllSeen Alliance. Now AT&T’s Digital Life business division, which focuses on home security and automation, is part of the AllSeen Alliance, too.
-
Planet unveiled a Linux-based, 16-channel network video recorder called the NVR-1620, with dual HDD bays, dual displays, and up to 2560 x 1920 resolution.
Permalink
Send this to a friend
Posted in Intellectual Monopoly at 6:20 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Corruption in the process which synthesises draconian laws whose only purpose is to protect monopolies, including the copyright monopoly
“Nice animation,” calls it Glyn Moody, “makes bias clear” (referring to this visualisation). So it seems like the BSA is now officially well inside the insidious panels that try to take everything from the public and pass everything to few plutocrats, under the guise of “free” “trade”. The Hill described the latest addition, namely Robert Holleyman, as “a former software trade group lobbyist for a top trade office.” President Obama has just nominated him, which shows what side Obama and Biden are really on. There is already interpretation of the news [1], which in many people’s views helps show (yet again) that policy around copyright, patents, etc. has nothing to do with public interests. Suffice to say, the corporate media does not cover this [2] (or hardly ever does) and only few voices of reasons do give it coverage in the corporate media [3]; they even slam the TPP, albeit too gently. Here in the UK, some shamelessly-named “Intellectual Property” Office [4] continues to distract from a policy which favours public interests, leaving it to sites that British ISPs are blocking by default (TorrentFreak, or the people’s voice, is not allowed) to speak some sanity [5-10] and also cover [11] the latest case of abuse of copyrights [12-15] (Professor Lessig has just won).
When it comes to copyrights, patents and all those other plutocrats-leaning laws, just remember that there is a war being fought against the people, ensuring that everything that’s ours if no longer ours, using some pixie dust which is draconian laws. We are never really part of making those laws; lobbyists of companies make up these laws, sometimes in secret. This massive injustice rarely receives press coverage because owners of the media have vested (multiple but aligning) interests. █
Related/contextual items from the news:
-
We recently highlighted the massive problem of the revolving door between the USTR’s office and various patent and copyright maximalist organizations. One example of this was Victoria Espinel, a former USTR official (and then IP Enforcement Coordinator — better known as the IP Czar), who went on to become the head of the Business Software Alliance (BSA), the maximalist lobbying/trade group that is basically a voice for Microsoft, IBM and Adobe’s copyright maximalist positions. Espinel’s predecessor in the job was Robert Hollyeman, who lead the BSA for two decades, during which time it became well known for its preposterous studies equating every infringing copy to a lost sale.
-
Opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership—dubbed ‘NAFTA on steroids’—is receiving unprecedented popular opposition and nearly no news coverage by major outlets
-
And you know what? That’s O.K. It’s far from clear that the T.P.P. is a good idea. It’s even less clear that it’s something on which President Obama should be spending political capital. I am in general a free trader, but I’ll be undismayed and even a bit relieved if the T.P.P. just fades away.
-
-
Popular file-hosting service RapidShare has stopped its lobbying efforts in Washington. The company invested over a million dollars in recent years to upgrade its image, an effort that initially paid off. However, just a few months after RapidShare’s lobbyists left Washington and despite huge changes to the company’s operations, the U.S. Government has now rebranded the service as a notorious market.
-
In the long-running case of the RIAA versus music-streaming service Grooveshark, the major labels have this week asked the court for summary judgment in their favor. They claim that Grooveshark’s founders instructed employees to upload as much infringing content as possible, even making that a job requirement. Evidence proving greater levels of infringement was subsequently destroyed, the labels say.
-
-
The copyright industry is amazing at pretending the copyright monopoly has always been there in its current form. But international copyright monopolies didn’t exist in practice across the Western world before 1989.
-
Google is downranking The Pirate Bay’s website in its search results for a wide variety of queries, some of which are not linked to copyright-infringing content. Interestingly, the change mostly seems to affect TPB results via the Google.com domain, not other variants such as Google.ca and Google.co.uk.
-
The two largest BitTorrent trackers on the Internet have been down for a few days, and will remain offline for another week. The tracker owners are performing maintenance and replacing hardware to cope with the billions of connection requests they get each day. Interestingly enough, most casual BitTorrent users are completely unaware of the prolonged downtime.
-
Law professor, Creative Commons co-founder and advocate for copyright reform Lawrence Lessig has agreed to receive damages from an Australian music label. Without considering fair use Liberation wrongly had some of Lessig’s work removed from YouTube and threatened to sue – it didn’t go well.
-
Last summer, we wrote about what appeared to be a suicidal Australian record label, Liberation Music, which issued a DMCA claim (after first having a disputed ContentID claim) on a classic presentation by famed professor (and copyright/fair use expert) Larry Lessig, in which he discusses fair use and creativity, using as an example, some clips that made use of the song “Lisztomania” by the band Phoenix. Liberation holds the Australian (not US) rights to that song, but still went DMCA crazy. Lessig filed a counter-notice and Liberation (again, apparently having no idea what it was doing) sent Lessig a letter saying that it would be filing a copyright infringement lawsuit against him if he didn’t retract his counter-notice. The whole thing was bizarre. It was as if whoever was doing all of this at Liberation Music was unaware of basic copyright law, the concept of fair use, how the DMCA works and (most importantly) who Larry Lessig is. In response, Lessig did the appropriate thing and filed for declaratory judgment and (more importantly) sought damages under section 512(f) of the DMCA, the nearly toothless clause of the DMCA that lets victims of bogus takedowns seek damages. As we’ve been pointing out for years 512(f) is almost entirely useless because courts almost never enforce it — and we hoped that with such a clear cut case, we might finally get a good 512(f) ruling on the books.
-
An Australian music label has agreed to pay damages to a Harvard law professor after it threatened to sue him for using a popular song in a YouTube video lecture.
-
An Australian record label that threatened to sue one of the world’s most famous copyright attorneys for infringement has reached a settlement with him.
The settlement includes an admission that Lawrence Lessig, a Harvard Law School professor, had the right to use a song by the band Phoenix.
-
LL’s video was, of course, in defense of free-use and used my video as an example (my original video that once had millions of views and is now stuck in a reuploaded YT purgatory, but I’ll get to that). My little bad-quality joke of a video spawned a life of its own in numerous live-action remakes, which is incredible. And Lessig – a Harvard copywright lawyer – was using it in speeches as an example.
Permalink
Send this to a friend
« Previous entries Next Page » Next Page »
Content is available under CC-BY-SA