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 Read more…
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 Read more…
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 Read more…
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 Read more…
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 Read more…
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 Read more…
(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 Read more…
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 Read more…
(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 Read more…
So, what many suspected has come to pass, our deepest fears confirmed and one of the worst possible texts adopted. The Digital Economy Bill has gone through the wash-up process in the very last day of this Parliament. I am expecting others to go into the detail of what is Read more…