SOPA and PIPA are knocked-out. ACTA is on the ropes… time to relax? Not yet, meet the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), the new front in the War on Piracy™. While there is already a trade agreement under this name, the TPP has been enhanced and in November last year the leaders Read more…
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 Read more…
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 Read more…
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 Read more…
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 Read more…
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 news because it is Read more…
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 Read more…