SOPA and network architecture

The media frenzy over the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act (SOPA and PIPA respectively) appears to be finally dying down after last week’s Internet blackout, mostly due to the shocking news regarding the shutting down of Megaupload. While I publicly expressed some misgivings about the focus of the current debate, it [...]

The implications of Megaupload

May you live in interesting times, the Chinese say. Oh my, aren’t we blessed? The file-sharing site Megaupload has been the subject of an international law enforcement operation by U.S. authorities, who have arrested six men charged with running an international criminal operation engaged in copyright infringement. A fact that has been less reported is [...]

Stop Online Piracy Act: Putting the extra in extraterritoriality

The Internet has been abuzz with the latest attempt to regulate the Internet, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). I’ve finally managed to read the proposed bill, and it really is as bad as everyone is talking about. To quote Treebeard in The Two Towers: “There is no curse in Elvish, Entish, or the tongues [...]

Dutch ruling sends intermediary liability back to the 90s

Usenet servers and clients

A civil court in Amsterdam has delivered a throwback ruling that reverses a decade of legal practice in intermediary liability. The BREIN Foundation is an anti-piracy group in the Netherlands, and it sued News-Service.com Europe (NSE), one of the largest providers of Usenet services in Europe. BREIN brought the action [...]

German court enforces Creative Commons licence

Thilo Sarrazin by Nina Gerlach / CC BY-SA

This bit of news was reported by the Creative Commons Blog some weeks ago, but it deserves as much dissemination as possible. The regional court of Berlin (Landgericht Berlin) has effectively enforced a CC Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) Unported licence against a far-right party. This is great [...]

When copyright collecting societies act against artists

The modern copyright system owes a lot to collective copyright management. Intellectual property is all about enforcement, but it tends to be expensive and time-consuming endeavour. Collecting agencies offer a system by which copyright enforcement is allocated to a society which represents its associates. When they work as intended, they are a powerful tool that [...]