I was met with the news that Comcast bought NBC when I arrived home from school. It always amazes me how the halls of education can be shielded from the “important facts of the day” but I digress.
If this merger would be allowed to happen it would result in fewer choices, higher prices, and less access.
I implore you to check out FreePress’s webpage in regards to this matter.
There’s a lot of stuff going on right now that scares me.
A bill was recently passed in the Japanese Diet today that makes it illegal to download copyrighted content… but what about upload? The new law also states that search engines can now cache web pages, as it was previously illegal to do so.
This website has a better grasp of the situation than I do at the moment. Japan Copyright Law Amendment.
In other news, has anyone been keeping up with Iran? After Ahmadinejad announced he won the election, rioting took place in the streets, shots were fired, people have been killed, and now, websites have been demolished.
A group of Iranian hackers have been causing DoS attacks on a pile of Iranian government sites. I’ve been trying http://www.ahmadinejad.ir/ for a while now, and keep getting “server too busy” errors. Does anyone know what’s going on over there?
Things like this could cause wars, either a civil war, or even a world war.
Japan is planning to re-institute jury trials soon.
The way the Japanese government decided to explain to their citizens about this is something only Japan could do: They used an anime. The below linked video is only in Japanese with Japanese subtitles. When/if an English version becomes available, I’ll be sure to post it.
I would love to know how they conducted trials before, were they all bench trials?
It’s catchy and you can dance to it.
Mott Mardie created a song he calls the theme song of The Pirate Bay. He’s released it for free, though the only place you can obtain it now is via a torrent on The Pirate Bay.
In other news, the Pirate Bay guys are planning on fighting back against their loss in court last month and have already figured their appeal angle: The judge was biased against them from the start, according to Wired’s Threat Level blog.
Most people know DJ Danger Mouse as half of the duo of Gnarls Barclay and as the guy who mashed up Jay Z’s Black Album and The Beatles’ White Album to create the C&D’d upon creation Gray Album.
His latest offering, Dark Night of the Soul, may not see the light of day on store shelves as his record label, EMI, has decided not to release the album “due to legal reasons.” Given Danger Mouse’s gray past, it can be easy to see why.
But, with an album containing collaborations with some of the biggest names in music, why would they decide not to release it? What are the legal reasons mentioned? No one is saying.
But what Danger Mouse is doing is odd. On the official site for the project, he’s selling a CD-R with artwork for the album. The idea is that people will buy the CD-R and download the album from the Pirate Bay or somewhere and burn it to the CD.
I’d be up for it if it came with a box for the CD-R as well.
The Business Software Association has recently released their latest Piracy Study.
According to the study, only 44% of software is paid for, 41% is pirated, and the remaining 15% is free and open source. While piracy is down in many nations, it has increased globally.
The current economic crisis has also impacted piracy. Since more people can’t pay for the software they want/need, they resort to pirated versions more often.
Didn’t I mention this a few days ago?
Arr, me mateys.
In other news, The Pirate Bay… is still active.
In a move that surprises no one, the Pirate Bay was found guilty of helping to distribute copyrighted content. They are to spend a year in jail and pay over three million dollars in fines.
The four members of the Pirate Bay have already logged an appeal.
Personally, I don’t know how to feel about this. On one hand, it’s a win, but on the other hand, I feel that this is a lose. A win for TPB would have set an unreal precedent into the world of downloading.
As of now, TPB is still active. While I’ve not tried to download anything (material isn’t hosted by TPB, all they do is track material), the site works for the time being.
Pirate Bay says the verdict is still a win, even though they lost
In Sweden, Internet traffic fell by a third after the passing of a new anti-piracy law.
Sweden recently passed a new law, the IPRED law. This law allows copyright owners to make ISPs reveal details about files users are sharing back and forth. It is believed that as much as 8% of Sweden’s population partakes in P2P filesharing.
Also of note, The Pirate Bay, the BitTorrent tracking site that is at the center of a long trial (which culminates sometime this month) is based in Sweden.
ACTA
Posted in Commentary, Government, Intellectual Property, Piracy with tags Commentary, Intellectual Property, law, Madness on December 17, 2009 by Bradley HallApparently this has been going on for quite some time. Several countries are readying to possibly ratify the Anti-Counterfeit Trade Act worldwide next month in Mexico.
ACTA affects not just counterfeiting, it makes things international law that were mentioned in the DMCA (and some things that weren’t). One of the pieces that I do not agree with (among others) is the Anti-Circumvention section which makes it illegal to bypass region code lockouts of DVDs (among other things). This means it would now be illegal for me to legally buy a DVD from Japan or Russia and then make it playable in the US either by ripping the video or via some other method.
Please go to the following site for more information:
Michael Geist’s site
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