You may have read that President Obama has given Queen Elizabeth an iPod with 40 show tunes on it. Well, that’s better than the set of region one DVDs he gave Gordon Brown, but yet again as the EFF have pointed out Obama has stepped right into the territory of copyright infringement, and forced UK premiers to risk their reputations by potentially breaking the law.
Well, maybe not, as nobody in their right minds takes this sort of copyright infringement seriously. Except of course lawyers who construct 9,000 word legal contracts for iTunes, and rights holders, who resist legal change as a sort of bargaining chip to extract other concessions, like online enforcement, or levies on tapes, CDs or hard drives.
[click above for more]
The Queen and Obama show up copyright for the joke it is.
UK Abuse News
Hot on the heals of the ‘Knock off nigel’ advert showing bullies abusing someone for downloading films, 6 of the biggest ISPs in the UK are now sending out letters to ‘hardcore filesharers’
I would reccommend all of you on “BT, BSkyB, Virgin Media, Orange, Tiscali and Carphone Warehouse, which sells broadband access under the AOL and Talk Talk brands.” move to bethere who are not part of this scheme. Contact me for a referal and you’ll get free connection 
The ISPs are saying that they don’t intend kicking people of and monitoring themselves, but it’s still giving too much to those that wish to restrict our freedoms – and the shambles that is the current government are threatening to implement laws for the isps to enforce the outdated copyright law.
Again, this wouldn’t be a problem if we all were part of the internet and not just connected by one piece of wire – such as would be the case if this wireless chip existed. (which it doesn’t but there’s no reason why someone shouldn’t make it!)
Couple of recent stories
Google are going to anonymise the data which it has been ordered to send to viacom – well, that’s something at least.
The EU are extending the copyright length from 50 to 90 years, but it does get a use it or lose it clause – although only after the 50 years.
Knock-Off Nigel
You must pay me $10 before reading the below words as they are mine and I therefore have copyright of them.
Click the pic for a blog about knock-off nigel(pdf)…
Nothing new but another big campaign is going on comparing breaking the archaic copyright laws as being theft.
Which is isn’t as to count as theft there has to be some denial of the “stolen” item from the orignal party.
Just imagine how they feel when they realise that, and when the copyright law is changed to end their protectionist ways.
I expect they do know it already and are just trying to guilt trip people to give them more money by telling these lies.
Here is the address to complain:
http://www.asa.org.uk/asa/how_to_complain/complaints_form/
As I said, it’s nothing new…
the vid in the blog post linked above didn’t work for me.. so here it is….
Europe Problems
Whilst not abusing the copyright law themselves, it is those in power that make and enforce the laws.
it seems that the European Parliament are planning to sneak in a law that can ban people’s internet if they are caught filesharing 3 times:
This goes beyond plain copyright issues to basic human rights and the very essence of the internet too. I won’t go into that too much here, but there is an interesting article on the latter which can be found here – The link on the right of the page appears to be a tongue in cheek imaganing of what could happen if we bypassed the ISP.
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We shall post and comment on news stories here which could be relevant.
Today’s news:
Youtube has to give away all it’s logs: ” Dismissing privacy concerns, a federal judge overseeing a $1 billion copyright-infringement lawsuit against YouTube has ordered the popular online video-sharing service to disclose who watches which video clips and when”
It seems disgraceful that they have asked for these logs and even worse that they’ve been ordered to have them. I wonder if they even have such logs. This must be stopped before the precedence is set.
Hopefully Youtube will refuse – it has to as it is owned by Google whose motto is “don’t be evil”
In the UK there is the data protection act and so I’m sure this wouldn’t be possible, although wouldn’t put them past trying and also the law being ignored and the same ruling in the end!
Talking of the UK, today Virgin media sent letters to 800 customers warning them that their bandwidth could be cut off as they had been warned by the BPI.
It’s this sort of bullying tactics that threaten creativity and make people’s lives a misery.
Thankfully there are still some ISPs who are willing to make a stand against the BPI who appear to be selfish and believe they are all powerful- for the good of the people and business. Large ISPs are just like unions who don’t care about people, just power, and I’m sure if Branson has his way he’ll tell virgin media that although they haven’t been totally evil as they aren’t cutting people off, they’re still backing down to big corporations to harass their customers.
