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ACTA talks – the ‘highest level of secrecy’
p2pnet news view P2P | Politics:- Last week Canadian officials travelled to Seoul for the latest round of closed-door negotiations on an international treaty called the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA). While battling commercial counterfeiting would seem like a good idea, the ACTA process has been marked by unprecedented secrecy as well as leaks revealing that the treaty is really about copyright rather than counterfeiting. From the moment the talks began last year, observers noted the approach was far different from virtually any other international treaty negotiation.
Continue reading »Twitter wants to trademark ‘tweet’
Would you agree the word “tweet” should be owned by Twitter? Didn’t think so. Nor did America’s trademark authorities.
Continue reading »Liskula Cohen vs Skanks of New York: IV
The saga of Canadian model Liskula Cohen rolls on . She was able to get a US court to persuade Google, staunch defender of user privacy, to reveal the name of a blogger she claimed had defamed her online via Skanks in NYC. Enter Rosemary Port (right), 29, creator of Skanks in NYC and a Fashion Institute of Technology student, who told the New York Daily News that Cohen has only herself to blame.
Continue reading »We all copy — all the time
Often, apologists for things like trade secrets, patent and copyright law, or the corporate media oligarchy itself, claim such structures are ‘understandable’, because ‘why help potential competitors?” It’s — supposedly — taken as axiomatic that those within a given field of endeavor inevitably regard all others in that field as adversaries … in other words, zero-sum thinking. If one of your ‘competitors’ gain (say, by having fans come to their shows, or being able to produce a comparable medication in the case of pharmaceutical companies) — they it follows logically, that *you* lose, by that same amount. The only problem with this, is that it’s completely wrong.
Continue reading »Global Gaming debts threaten Pirate Bay deal
That unpleasant gurgling sound you hear is the Good Ship Pirate Bay foundering. The supposed sale of TPB to Sweden’s Global Gaming Factory has been reported by some TPB supporters as golden, as all-but done, despite early warnings that everything in the garden wasn’t perhaps as rosy as company CEO Hans Pandeya wanted people to believe. Other people have, however, been far less sanguine.
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