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
- Rust People Sabotage Stability for the Sake of a Falsely-Promised 'Security'
- Set aside severe performance issues, poor handling of "edge cases", general bugs, lack of compatibility, and even crashes
- Huge Strike at the European Patent Office (EPO) This Coming Friday (May 1st)
- International Worker’s day
- Dr. Andy Farnell on Why Calling Slop or Chaff "Hey Hi" (AI) Harm Us All, Except for "Ten or Twenty Rich Industrialists"
- "words to avoid"
- Internet Trolls Likely Trying to Distract From the Demise of IBM, Problems With Red Hat
- there seems to be trolling online aimed at suppressing discussion
- Debian Upgrade Coming Up (Soon)
- Yesterday we contacted the datacentre staff about it
- Getting Aggressive Suggestive of Loss - Part III - Threats From Burner Accounts Formally Treated as a Crime
- Countries that cannot preserve freedom from self-censorship are countries where free press ultimately cannot prevail
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- "A single witness shall not rise up against a person regarding any wrongdoing or any sin that he commits; on the testimony of two or three witnesses a matter shall be confirmed." (Deuteronomy 19-21)
- The spouse of Garrett repeatedly points out that Garrett can barely code or can only do so very poorly
- SLAPP Censorship - Part 57 Out of 200: 5RB and Brett Wilson LLP Made the Garrett and Graveley Particulars of Claims a Lot Like Photocopies!
- They seem very much irritated that I speak about this
- Links 25/04/2026: Nokia Wins Embargo in Kangaroo Court Where Judges Are Salaried Nokia Staff (UPC), Allison Pearson Defamation Case (UK) Succeeds, Smokey Robinson and "Puff Daddy" (US) Fail
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 25/04/2026: Weekly Echoes, Gemtext Tables, and Using Offpunk
- Links for the day
- Corporate Media Did Not Specify What Microsoft Means by "Buyouts" (Layoffs), It May Be Hardly Different From Severance
- Time will tell, but investigative journalism hardly exists anymore, so we won't hold our breath
- The Corrupt Lecture the Non-Corrupt - Part V - "Diversity" and "Inclusion" at EPO Means Sleeping With Sister of "Cocaine Communication Manager" and Making Them Millionaires
- Remember that top applicants or key stakeholders of the EPO are already complaining about a lack of quality
- Links 25/04/2026: Fake GAFAM Valuations (Gripping the Market Based on False Accounting), "Evidence Isn't Just for Research", and "Putin Defends Mobile Internet Outages"
- Links for the day
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Friday, April 24, 2026
- IRC logs for Friday, April 24, 2026
- Gemini Links 25/04/2026: 3.4k+ Capsules, Microsoft Layoffs, Call for Nuclear Disarmament, "Internet is Sad and Lonely"
- Links for the day
- Links 24/04/2026: Zelenskyy Says Ukraine's War Position "Most Stable", Samsung Workers on Strike Due to Pay
- Links for the day
- Recent Happenings at IBM Reaffirm Rumours About the CEO; He Might be Resigning (or Pushed Out) Soon
- If the rumours are true (no, we did not check those tax records for ourselves), it's not unthinkable that IBM is already doing what Apple did months ago
- Gemini Links 24/04/2026: Public Reticulum Gateway Node, Smol Computers, and Old E-mail
- Links for the day
- Links 24/04/2026: Intel Abandoning Computer Freedom (Even Further), Iran Reports That American Software and Hardware Remotely Sabotaged/Hijacked During War
- Links for the day
- 24/7 Wall St. Editor-In-Chief and CEO Calls IBM Is "America’s Worst Big Tech Company", Talent is Leaving, Supposedly Strategic Units Culled
- 21 hours ago by Douglas A. McIntyre
- The Great Wonders of Slop "Efficiency"
- Thankfully nothing was lost in the transmission and lots of work (datacentre emissions) got "done"
- IBM's Debt Increased Over $5 Billion in 3 Months While IBM Laid Off Many in Europe, US, Confluent, HashiCorp, and Red Hat
- An increase of $5,000,000,000+ in debt in just 3 months!
- IBMers Expect Another Giant Wave of Layoffs, Talk (and Sing) About the PIPs
- The media won't be covering the key facts
- Drama at the European Patent Office (EPO) This Week
- We'll be covering the EPO quite a lot this weekend and next week
- As We Predicted, Francophonie Countries in the EU and Outside the EU Dumping Microsoft for National Security Reasons
- We expected Belgium or some other Francophonie place to do so next
- Even to Microsoft Insiders It Seems Like XBox Has Already Died or Surrendered to the Japanese Companies
- Now the Microsoft layoffs are evident for people to see
- EPO Cocainegate Escalates - Part VI - The Strikes Go On and On (Major Strike Today)
- We'll be covering this later today in relation to what the Office dubs "ethics"
- Absolutely Terrible Journalism About Microsoft Layoffs This Week
- 7 hours ago by Leila Sheridan
- SLAPP Censorship - Part 56 Out of 200: 5RB and Brett Wilson LLP's Copy-Paste Machination for Garrett and Graveley
- Here is another straightforward example of their junior barrister overusing copy-paste on his Mac
- Getting Aggressive Suggestive of Loss - Part II - Lawyers Are Not "Hired Guns" (and Should Never Act Like Ones)
- The matter is being investigated
- Nadella is Killing Microsoft. Slop Kills It Even Faster.
- A decade from now we'll look back at slop like we look back at skateboards
- Huge Microsoft Layoffs Coming Shortly (With Financial Report)
- There will be lots of slop layoffs. Be ready. It's a bubble.
- Gemini Links 24/04/2026: Data Breaches and Unofficial Gemini Protocol Specification Archive
- Links for the day
- Microsoft Offers About 10,000 of Its Senior American (Read: Expensive) Workers to be Laid Off
- How many slopfarms and media parrots play along?
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Thursday, April 23, 2026
- IRC logs for Thursday, April 23, 2026
- SLAPP Censorship - Part 55 Out of 200: Strangled Women, Charged for Strangulation, Cannot Find a Job Now (After Microsoft)
- merits public awareness and wider scrutiny
- Gemini Links 23/04/2026: Spirituality and Detachment, Shoplifting in the UK, and "Introducing Scout, an iOS Native Gemini Client"
- Links for the day
- Links 23/04/2026: YouTube Age Limits Expanded and 'Secret' Model With Bug-Finding Hype Campaign 'Leaks'
- Links for the day
- Media Operatives of Microsoft Paint Microsoft Layoffs as Buyouts (Intentionally False Narrative)
- Those are mass layoffs disguised as something else
- IBM's Stock Has Collapsed Over 10% in One Day, Insiders Explain What's Happening
- Today, due to a lack of time, we mostly present an outline of what people say (not IBM-sponsored media hacks with LLM slop)
- Getting Aggressive Suggestive of Loss - Part I - Threats Sent From Burner Accounts Since February, Belatedly Reported to British Police
- Threats connected to Graveley or Garrett or 5RB or Brett Wilson LLP [...] We're not dealing with a law firm here; we're dealing with the underworld
- EPO Cocainegate Escalates - Part V - Where Does the António Campinos 'Family Affair' Go From Here?
- Do cocaine in public, get caught, take paid "sick leave", come back to lead Europe's second-largest organisation
- Links 23/04/2026: Legal Trouble for Microsoft, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, and DMCA Whac-a-Mole
- Links for the day
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, April 22, 2026
- IRC logs for Wednesday, April 22, 2026
- Gemini Links 23/04/2026: Sunrise Chasing Season, Going Back to Older Software, New Gemini Client for Mobile Devices
- Links for the day