Digital Economy Bill passes

The beginning of the end for three strikes?

It has been a bad week for the supporters of three strikes copyright policies in Europe. Although at some point last year the panorama looked good for them with the enactment of the Digital Economy Act, it seems like recent legal developments will make it considerably harder for a comprehensive disconnection programme to take off.

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Is it time to take Anonymous seriously?

Remember, remember….

Anyone who has ever heard me speak about Internet regulation will know of my barely contained scepticism with regards to Barlow’s Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace, and all that it represents. In fact, the Declaration speaks of a more innocent time in Internet history, and it is usually considered to be one [...]

ISPs set to fight future IP data disclosure in the UK

On the back of the ACS:Law debacle, there has been a lot of interest in the way in which firms like ACS:Law and Davenport Lyons obtained customer information from internet service providers linking IP addresses to broadband account holders. The information was obtained in English courts through what is known as a Norwich Pharmacal order [...]

Costa Rican court declares the Internet as a fundamental right

Very interesting news from the land of gallo pinto, the Costa Rican constitutional court (Sala IV) has declared that the Internet is a fundamental right in ruling 2010-012790. The case is actually a seemingly straightforward recurso the amparo (literally, writ of shelter, a measure against administrative abuses) which asks the Court to [...]

ACS:Law: This is what regulatory failure looks like

So, the ACS:Law email leak is the gift that keeps on giving as reports have come out of more unsecured sensible data included in Andrew Crossley’s emails. While I have expressed that I generally disagree with vigilante justice, for some reason the words chickens, home, and roost keep coming up in my mind. I am [...]

Digital Economy Act: Content industry to foot the bill

One of the most debated aspects during the drafting discussion of the Digital Economy Act was the question of who is going to foot the bill for all of the detection and notification of online infringement. This is one of the most problematic issues of the Act, copyright infringers have to be adequately identified, and [...]

Does Spain need to change its copyright law?

(via TechDirt) The New York Times has published an interesting article about how copyright owners are urging for a change in Spanish copyright law (as an aside, I should find another word to describe articles linked in this blog, “interesting” is seriously over-used). Allegedly, Spain is the pirate capital of Europe, in 2008 illegal movie [...]

ACTA and intermediaries

So, the text of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) has been released. Much of what I’ve read so far brings me back to an earlier comment I made regarding one of the early drafts. If you don’t feel like reading the link, the gist of what I said is that the agreement was not particularly [...]

What’s the effect of piracy to the economy? Nobody knows!

(via Ars Technica) Just a couple of weeks ago yours truly was bemoaning the preposterous abuse of statistics in order to produce a set of dodgy figures about the cost of piracy to the European economy. Now a U.S. government institution has produced a report that pretty much tells us similar points, namely, that it [...]