politicians
Web-Lockers Next in Line on UK Politicians’ Black List
Engaged in an overwhelming battle against online piracy they are planning to win, the UK government has not been taking the best decisions lately as we already noted in a previous post this week. After the politicians’ intention to alter the Digital Economy Bill by introducing a regulation that empowered judges to block access to a specific website if suspected to promote copyright infringement caused a wave of public discontentment, the UK government tried to fix things but only managed to come up with yet another outrageous solution. In fact, the “reassessed” proposal announced by politicians may have an even more pronounced negative impact on perfectly legitimate online resources, as Cory Doctorow describes in his write up in The Guardian : “As our routine media files have increased in size – multi-megapixel images, home videos, audio recordings of meetings and so on – it's become increasingly difficult to use email to share data privately with family, friends and colleagues, because most email servers croak over really big files.
Continue reading »Freedom of Speech Censorship in Australia Coming to an End?
The state of South Australia has snatched politicians’ promise that the highly disputed election law enacted on January 6 will be revoked. The recently introduced law stipulates that anyone publishing politically oriented comments online during election periods must declare their identity or risk the prospect of paying a stinging fine. Applied only to bloggers and commenters, not to official online newspapers or magazines, the law has a pronounced discriminatory character, which is condemned by persons constricted by its terms.
Continue reading »U.K. Consumer group: For than 150 wrongfully accused of file sharing
The U.K.’s consumer rights group Which? (sort of like Consumer Reports in the U.S.) came out with a press release this week that puts some serious doubts on proposed plans to fight P2P piracy with Three Strikes. More than 150 consumers contacted the group in recent months because they have been wrongfully accused of P2P piracy by London-based law firm ACS Law.
Continue reading »Record Label Stops Signing Artists Because of Piracy
Let’s be clear from the start. People who share music on the Internet actually buy more than those who don’t. The music library of the average music fan may have expanded a bit in the last decade thanks to file-sharing, but in the same time the number of sales have also skyrocketed .
Continue reading »Britain changes 3 strikes to 2 strikes
p2pnet news view P2P | Politics:- “Legal framework for tackling copyright infringement via education and technical measure.” This innocuous looking sentence is the lead item in the BBC ’s summation of UK government plans to gain control of the Internet on behalf of Vivendi Universal, EMI, Warner Music and Sony Music, with trumped up allegations against P2P file sharers as the linchpin, and the Queen’s speech as the excuse. “Plans for tackling pirates will be a two-stage process, according to the Bill,” says the Telegraph . “Initially the Government will aim to educate and those identified as downloading unlawfully, will be sent letters.
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