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
- Links 28/03/2026: Microsoft's LinkedIn a National Security Risk, Microsoft's Slop "Ambitions Face Investor Scrutiny Amid Soaring Costs"
- Links for the day
- SLAPP Censorship - Part 26 Out of 200: Asking for Documents and Information You Already Have, Even Letters and E-mails That You Yourself Sent!
- barristers are expensive
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- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Saturday, March 28, 2026
- IRC logs for Saturday, March 28, 2026
- Open Web Destroyed by Centibillionaires, Says Anil Dash of Blogging Fame
- Blogging was going through its 'prime years' about 20 years ago
- "Linux" Slop Going Away, Microsoft et al Pay 'Linux' Foundation to Promote Slop
- It's a timely reminder that the Linux Foundation exists to promote whoever pays the Linux Foundation, even pedophiles and companies that attack the GPL
- Gemini Links 28/03/2026: "Finding My Base Tone", "Astrobotany", and BugoutBack/OFFLFIRSOCH
- Links for the day
- Links 28/03/2026: More Worldwide Bans on Social Control Media (Harms to Adolescents), Protests in US Against Dictatorship
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 28/03/2026: Echo Delay and 0x0.st
- Links for the day
- Rumours of More IBM Mass Layoffs at Beginning of April
- IBM is not doing well
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Friday, March 27, 2026
- IRC logs for Friday, March 27, 2026
- "Headcount" as Distraction From Mass Layoffs and Salary Reductions
- Things aren't looking well when one considers revenue is acquired, not earned
- "Linux" Slop Turning Rarer, New York Times Nowadays Contaminated With LLM Slop
- Another day has passed without much slop about "linux"
- Links 27/03/2026: Studying Whale Births, Apple is Cancelling Products, Cambodia Arrests Journalists Over Photographs
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 27/03/2026: GTD, Gopher Catchup, Gemini Crawlers, and "Slop Everywhere"
- Links for the day
- Mozilla Was Ruined Like Sirius Open Source Was Ruined - From the Top Down
- Mozilla will never return to its Free software roots
- Nokia Could Never Recover From Microsoft
- It's very important to remember what really happened
- Why Techrights and Many Other Sites Stopped Doing April Fools’ Day Articles
- Well before slop (made by LLMs) it was "bad optics" to have satire or humour in a site, irrespective of the day of the year
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- Please do pay attention to how the media treats these strikes in Europe's second-largest institution
- Slides From the Presentation Discussing EPO Strikes Until End of June or Until End of 2026 (Maybe Next Year Too)
- More to come soon (later today)
- IBM Cuts Are Everywhere (Global), the Aim is to Lower the Pay
- Because the revenues keep falling (IBM buys other companies' revenues using borrowed money)
- Perpetual Strikes to Begin at European Patent Office (EPO), Large Majority Votes for Strikes Any Day of the Week
- Approved industrial actions [...] Notice how none of the media or even so-called 'IP' blogs write about it
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- Would you trust a VPN they claim to be "free"?
- SLAPP Censorship - Part 25 Out of 200: That Time Matthew J. Garrett Got Temporarily Banned/Suspended From Twitter
- That he gets banned from large social control media platform is hardly surprising given his combative communications
- Ubuntu Started as Free With ShipIt, Now It Becomes Payware That Exploits Debian Volunteers (Slaves)
- "Ubuntu" the distro now replaces the GNU components inherited from Debian with a bunch of Microsoft GitHub (proprietary) things that reject reciprocal licences
- Last Night The Register MS Published a Fake Article. It Mentioned "AI" 27 Times.
- Paid-for nonsense! [...] What's left of once-respectable news sites actively harms society
- Links 27/03/2026: Google Executive (GAFAM, US, Surveillance) "Named the New BBC Head", Prominent Climate Scientist Resigns From NASA
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 27/03/2026: "Being Busy" and "Posting Again"
- Links for the day
- GNOME Has No "Real" Executive Director, Only an IBM (Perma)'Interim' One With No Openings in Sight
- GNOME is having financial problems
- Microsoft Experiencing "Leadership Exodus"
- Microsoft's current position is no better than Meta's (Facebook)
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- It's not about protecting children
- Slop Plunge
- we can already "smell the blood" of the so-called 'AI industry'
- IBM Media Puff Pieces While Layoffs Go On and On
- Has the PR industry absorbed the press?
- Media Says Microsoft Hiring Freezes, But There Are Already Microsoft Layoffs
- They want the public to talk about Microsoft as if it's just not hiring when it is actually firing
- Richard Stallman lynchings: Sruthi Chandran splitting Debian
- Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
- Over at Tux Machines...
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- IRC logs for Thursday, March 26, 2026