Copyright News: DRM, Censorship, Megaupload, Hypocrisy, and Impact on the Internet
- Dr. Roy Schestowitz
- 2014-04-13 08:40:58 UTC
- Modified: 2014-04-13 08:40:58 UTC
DRM
Keurig's next generation of coffee machines will have a way to prevent any coffee not licensed by Keurig from brewing in the machine as early as this fall. Locking down a thing like coffee seems both trifling and difficult to accomplish—no one has yet described how Keurig can differentiate its own pods enough so that its machines would honor those pods and only those pods.
Censorship and Links
Payday lender Wonga has forced Twitter to take down a user's parody advert by making a copyright claim.
Megaupload
Just three days after the Motion Picture Association of America brought a civil lawsuit against Megaupload, the Recording Industry Association of America has jumped in with its own case.
Hypocrisy
Every month, reports condemn the general public for downloading movies and TV shows without permission, but perhaps those industries need to look a little closer to home. A new survey among film industry professionals suggests that almost 40% have downloaded movies and TV shows illegally.
Internet
There's a European Election coming up. Voting starts in about one month, with the main election days on May 22-25. We've had many victories as activists and concerned citizens in the past five years to defend the net and its liberty, but the main showdown looks like it'll come down in the next five years. Your vote is going to matter.
On April 4th, 1994, Mosaic Communications Corporation was officially incorporated as a going concern. If you don’t recognize the name, that’s because the company would eventually change its name to Netscape Communications Corporation when the University of Illinois (which owned the trademark on the name Mosaic) threatened legal action.
As the European Commission clearly stated in its Communication on Internet Policy and Governance of 12 February 2014, conflicting visions on the future of the Internet and on how to strengthen its multistakeholder governance in a sustainable manner have intensified recently. The next two years will be critical in redrawing the global map of Internet governance. Europe must contribute to finding a credible way forward for global internet governance; it must play a strong role in defining how the internet is run and ensuring it remains a single, un-fragmented network.
Recent Techrights' Posts
- Getting the European Court of Justice to Annul the Illegal and Unconstitutional Unified Patent Kangaroo Court (UPC)
- We're still working on it
-
- Links 09/02/2026: Russia Intentionally Killing Civilians, Jimmy Lai Effectively Sentenced for Life for Publishing News
- Links for the day
- Microsoft Competitions, Addictions, and Popularity Contests Are Not Going to Help Perl, They'll Waste Everybody's Time and Give Microsoft More Control Over Its Competition
- Microsoft does not like Perl
- A Can of WORMS - Part IV - They Would Even Attack RMS for Criticising Autocrats (Saying This is "Politics")
- Conforming to society's perceived expectations isn't how effective activism can ever be done or was ever done in the recent past
- Gemini Links 09/02/2026: The Exploration Myth and Making JavaScript Fun
- Links for the day
- EPO Outrage and Maintaining the Pressure
- A vending machine does not fall over after a first push
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Sunday, February 08, 2026
- IRC logs for Sunday, February 08, 2026
- "Low Performer" and "Underperformer" as Harmful Misnomers That Damage a Company's Reputation
- Misnomers need to be avoided or called out
- Expensive errors: Forbes Gold price, $44 billion Bitcoin given away by Bithumb, South Korea
- Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
- Links 08/02/2026: Microsoft OSI (Openwashing Lobby) in Europe, Raised Against Social Control Media Provocateurs in EU
- Links for the day
- The Open Source Initiative (OSI) Lobbies for Microsoft in the EU, Promoting Proprietary Lock-in
- OSI pushing and selling Microsoft and GitHub. OSI is Microsoft front group.
- Finland's Dependence on GAFAM (US) Needs to be Lessened, EU Must Follow This Path
- It's unwise to make one's entire national infrastructure (computer systems) dependent on a regime which compares its black citizens to monkeys and assassinates nonviolent dissenters
- Links 08/02/2026: Microsoft GitHub as Burden on Developers and "The Chomsky Epstein Files"
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 08/02/2026: "Doing Not Much Tweaking" and "Reclaiming Digital Agency"
- Links for the day
- Forbes: BitCoin, Cryptocurrency pages removed from investment database, links stop working
- Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
- Bitcoin warning followed immediately by network outage
- Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
- Money Funneled to Protection of Software Freedom, But Nothing Really Lost
- Crossposted from personal site
- They Tell Us Slop Replaces Workers, But the Reality Is, US Debt Has Surged 2,300 Billion Dollars in Six Months (the Economy is Collapsing)
- Oligarchy already entertains the option of running away to (or colonising) some other planet without pitchforks and "unwashed masses"
- Mozilla Firefox Sinks to Just 1.5% in the United States
- According to analytics.usa.gov
- We're Still Fast
- The site is even faster than the BBC's despite being on shoestring budget with only a small technical team
- Gemini Protocol is Not a Waste of Time of Effort
- We see more and more GNU/Linux- or BSD-focused bloggers turning to Gemini
- Our Gemini Protocol Support Turns 5 Today
- today is a rare anniversary for us
- In Today's World, One Must be Tough and Principled to Get Ahead Morally
- But not financially (sellouts)
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Saturday, February 07, 2026
- IRC logs for Saturday, February 07, 2026
- The Right Wing in the United States Does Not Support Free Speech, It Supports Its Own Speech
- Free speech is often opposed by those who also oppose Free software
- IRC is a Lot Better Than Social Control Media (They're Not the Same at All)
- A good social analogy for IRC is, there are many buildings with a party in each building
- Microsoft 'Open' 'AI' is 'Dead Meat'
- Or 0xDEADBEEF as some geeks might call it
- When Identifying "Low Performers" and "PIPs" Aren't About Improving Performance But Reinforcing a Clique in Your Company/Organisation
- It's very troubling to see once-respectable brands like IBM and institutions like the EPO resorting to this
- Slop and Flop (IBM), Slopfarms and Hybrids (Linuxiac)
- Did Bobby Borisov assume he would never get caught?
- Crowdfunding vs Bitcoins: donations are better investment than digital tulip mania
- Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
- Links 07/02/2026: Misinformation by Slop, Overrated Slop Causes Stock Market Panic
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 07/02/2026: Diode Function Generators and Panic Over Buzzwords and Slop
- Links for the day
- A Can of WORMS - Part III - Envying the Influence and Accomplishments of RMS, Socially Deleterious Attacks on Popular Movements
- the actions are deliberate and coordinated, not some 'organic' or grassroots behaviour
- Crisis teams assembled as financial regulators anticipate Bitcoin implosion
- Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
- Reddit as a Hive of Trolls, Social Control Media Curated (Many Voices Censored and Banned) by Marketing Firm of GAFAM
- Typical Reddit
- The Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) Delusion - Part III - Women Failing Women to Help Violent Americans From Microsoft
- Summed up, SRA will gladly prioritise the "legal industry" over women strangled, raped etc
- The World Gets Smaller, as Does Its Real Economy ('Human Resources') and So-called 'Natural Resources' (What Humans Call the Planet)
- Don't talk about "AI"
- Converting FOSDEM Talk on Software Patents in Europe Into Formats That Work for "FOS" and Don't Have Software Patent Traps
- transcoded version of the video
- Links 07/02/2026: More White House Racism, "Europe Accuses TikTok of Addictive Design"
- Links for the day
- Silent Mass Layoffs: It's Not the Revolution, It's the Loophole and the Hack ("Low Performers" or "Underperformers")
- Layoffs by another approach
- Mark Shuttleworth (MS) Pays Salaries to Microsoft (MS) Employees
- Canonical selling Microsoft
- Links 07/02/2026: Windows TCO Rising, Lousy Patents Invalided
- Links for the day
- Microsoft Leadership: Stop Taxing Us, Tax Only Poor People
- Does Microsoft create jobs?
- Biggest "AI Companies" (Meta, Alphabet, Microsoft) Borrowed (Additional Debt) About $100,000,000,000 in a Year
- Who will be held accountable for all this?
- In Case You've Missed It (ICYMI), Google's Debt More Than Doubled in a Year
- Wait till it "monetises" billions of GMail users with slop
- In 2009 Microsoft Was Valued at ~150 Billion Dollars, Now They Tell Us Microsoft Lost ~1,000 Billion Dollars in Value. Does That Make Sense?
- Or Microsoft lost 700 billion dollars in "value" in less than two weeks
- PIPs and Silent Layoffs at IBM (and Red Hat) Still Going on, It's "Forever Layoffs" (to Skirt the WARN Act)
- American workers out
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Friday, February 06, 2026
- IRC logs for Friday, February 06, 2026
- Stressful Times for Team Campinos ("Alicante Mafia") at Europe's Second-Largest Institution
- Keep pushing
- Growing Discrimination in the European Patent Office (EPO)
- it's a race to the bottom, basically
- Google News Drowning in (or Actively Promoting) Slopfarms Again
- LLM slop is a nuisance
- Microsoft Stock Crashed When Alleged Vista 11 Numbers Disclosed
- And last summer Microsoft indicated that it had lost 400 million Windows users
- Gemini Links 07/02/2026: "Choosing a License for Literary Work" and "Social Media Is Not Social Networking (Anymore)"
- Links for the day