Slashdot Mirror

This is from the IVIR (Netherlands)'s web site:

The Institute for Information Law (IViR), officially established in 1989, is one of the largest research centers in the field of information law in the world. The Institute employs over 25 researchers who are active in an entire spectrum of information society related legal areas: intellectual property law, patents, telecommunications and broadcasting regulation, media law, Internet regulation, advertising law, domain names, freedom of expression, privacy, digital consumer issues, commercial speech, et cetera.

The institute’s mission is to further the development of information law into a balanced framework that accommodates the needs and interests of the information society. The Institute engages in cutting-edge research into fundamental and topical aspects of information law, and provides a forum for critical debate about the social, cultural and political aspects of regulating information markets.

That sounds pretty good, doesn't it? Now think a moment... the "scholars" making this statement are evidently saying that the current copyright laws and frameworks are not balanced and do not accommodate the needs and interests of the information society. If the status quo was considered to work even passably well, then

- the more than 25 scholars wouldn't have anything to do
- they wouldn't have career prospects
- nobody in their right minds would give the IVIR any funding
- nobody would pay much attention to their articles

In other words, they're a think tank with a definite point of view, like the many think tanks based in Washington, DC that teem with Ph.D's publishing "scholarly articles" complete with impressive statistics and charts about the effects of government regulation, tax laws and so forth.

Well, those darned Swedes were in a clear violation of U.S. Code Title 17, 102 and 106.

Or, perhaps, Article 8 of the Berne Convention, to which Sweden is a signatory, and Article 2 of the Swedish Copyright Legislation, which implements the treaty obligation and states that "...copyright shall include the excludive right to exploit the work by making copies of it and by making it available to the public, be it in the original or an altered manner, in translation or adaptation, in another literary or artistic form, or in another technical manner."

Setting your snark aside, extraterritorial use of U.S. law was required, and I would expect Swedes to be a ble to locate and read their own copyright law.

With my colleagues from Irish Free Software Organisation:
http://mail.fsfeurope.org/pipermail/fsfe-ie/2011-April/002981.html

===========
Dear Mr. Crowley,

Irish Free Software Organisation (IFSO) opposes the extension of copyright
which may be put to a vote in JURI today or tomorrow, and we ask that you do
the same. Further, we ask for your support in requesting a new first
reading for this proposed directive.

Software companies with dominant market positions are increasingly using the
copyright of cultural works as a barrier to block other software developers.
Due to Digital Restrictions Management (DRM), music lovers can be required
to use the software of a small group of "approved" large software companies,
or be blocked from listening to DRM'd music.

A few large companies are protected from competition, and the majority of
software developers are locked out - including all the "small artists" of
the software field.

For people who object to DRM, or who don't find any acceptable software
among the "approved" group, there is still public domain works. Extending
copyright impoverishes the public domain and our cultural heritage.

Below is a selection of links to independent studies highlighting the harms
of copyright extension.

Yours sincerely,
CiarÃn O'Riordan, +32 487 64 17 54
Irish Free Software Organisation
http://ifso.ie/

  1. 8 Universities and policy centres issued this 2-page
        statement about how the proposal would harm Europe's culture
        and economy:
        http://www.cippm.org.uk/downloads/Press%20Release%20Copyright%20Extension.pdf

  2. UK government's "Gower's review", which concluded that:

        "The European Commission should retain the length of
          protection on sound recordings and performersâ(TM) rights at 50
          years." (page "56" - which is the 60th page of the PDF document)

        http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/d/pbr06_gowers_report_755.pdf

  3. Institute for Information Law, University of Amsterdam:
        "Never Forever: Why Extending the Term of Protection for Sound
        Recordings is a Bad Idea"

        http://www.ivir.nl/publications/helberger/EIPR_2008_5.pdf
===========

Ah, so a computer program, song, or book is an "idea". OK. You don't need anything other than your head to have an idea, so you don't need a computer to share a program or song, yes?

To have an idea, no. To share an idea I might need language, or paper and pencil or even a whole movie to adequately do it.

I am supposed to believe a poll of "1,000 16- to 50-year-olds with internet access" commissioned by a politically biased group without knowing how the poll participants were chosen nor the questions asked? Would you accept a poll commissioned by RIAA with blind faith?

OK. A study by the University of Amsterdam:
http://www.ivir.nl/publications/vaneijk/Communications&Strategies_2010.pdf
By the Business School of Norway: http://www.bi.no/Content/Article____74866.aspx
By the Canadian Department of Industy:
http://strategis.ic.gc.ca/epic/site/ippd-dppi.nsf/en/h_ip01456e.html

All biased.

ZeroPaid as a source? Really? Do you have access to any non-biased sources? No? Didn't think so, you closed-minded fuck.

Zeropaid is just the guy who made an article from MPAA own number. Who could have clicked on their source, on Hollywood.com:
http://images.hollywood.com/site/HISTORICAL_AND_YTD_BOX_OFFICE_2009.pdf

You are hoisted on your own petard, dumbass.

No, Mr, I didn't. The total income is still greater. If it comes from recorded or live, I don't really care. It still means the increase on file sharing is not hurting artists.

Tell, shithead, do you still wear the clothes you did 15 years ago? Did you alter them yourself or take them to a tailor to be modified? Or, did you BUY NEW ONES? Well, what was it, asshole?

So what you are saying is that, even when people have the possibility of fixing their stuff, they buy new?
Well, then by that argument open sourcing is not that bad.

To answer your question, yes, I paid for tailors to fix my clothes, and yes I have 10+ year old clothes I still use. Not 15, since I've grew somewhat since I was 10.

Your analogy has the car as the software, not the computer. Now, if you don't know what you have already said, maybe you should shut the fuck up. Or, is it that you are trying to change your argument on the fly?

Where do you see the word computer on my analogy? Just because you're unable to apply it to software doesn't mean it wasn't my intent.

Wikipedia is software? No, it is a website whose articles are often biased and/or wrong.

Wikipedia is software, yes. You can download it here. Whether is on web format or a rich client is irrelevant.

Android and WebOS are both Linux, are operating systems, and are almost exclusively run on proprietary hardware where loading a new OS is difficult at best. The same goes for all those embedded Linux devices, in which the user almost never interacts with the OS, but are in fact appliances.

So? It's still open source being run by millions of people.

So, there are over 500,000 FLOSS FAILURES, including Linux on the desktop, for every moderate success. Tell me, where is OOo in your list? How about GNUCash? How about GIMP? Oh, wait, none of those are really successes. Most of the users for GIMP would prefer to use Photoshop. Even FLOSS supporters don't like GNUCash. All I ever hear about OOo is how slow it is and how it has crappy compatibility with MS Office.

Should I list the millions of c

They shouldn't be so surprised at Google hq.

I bet they knew it was illegal in Europe before they even started news.google.(eu country).

Several European news scrapers exist right now, perfectly legal.
There was a case in 2000 where kranten.com got sued by 6 dutch newspapers (english translation of the verdict
for deeplinking to articles. Since then, we know pretty much what we can and can't do.

You can deeplink to articles if you supply the source, and if it opens in a new window. In Denmark someone was found guilty when using frames, and 'thus made it look like the articles where from his website'.

Now consider, Europe doesn't have a "Fair Use" policy, that' the United States. By caching articles, Google went way over the line if you look at it from this perspective, doesn't it?

I'm not sure about the US, but in Europe (Netherlands), such efforts are protected by the Database Act. The information in, for example, a phone book is not copyrightable, but nevertheless the whole organised collection of names and associated addresses and phone numbers is protected.

She is from Canada so I bet she speaks English.

Lucie Guibault
Senior researcher
http://www.ivir.nl/medewerkers/fotos/guibault.JPG
http://www.ivir.nl/staff/guibault.html

Institute for
Information Law (IViR)
Rokin 84
1012 KX Amsterdam
room 4.10
tel: +31 20 - 525 39 47
fax: +31 20 - 525 30 33
e-mail: L.Guibault@uva.nl

She is from Canada so I bet she speaks English.

Lucie Guibault
Senior researcher
http://www.ivir.nl/medewerkers/fotos/guibault.JPG
http://www.ivir.nl/staff/guibault.html

Institute for
Information Law (IViR)
Rokin 84
1012 KX Amsterdam
room 4.10
tel: +31 20 - 525 39 47
fax: +31 20 - 525 30 33
e-mail: L.Guibault@uva.nl

Nice socialist thinking there. Patents are a means of encouraging the inventor to protect his or her work.

The goal is to promote science and the useful arts (which are beneficial to society, otherwise it wouldn't make any sense to hand out monopolies in the first place). Helping an inventor monopolise his work is just a means which may or may not contribute to that goal.

Patent law is a purely economic law (see page 9, numbered as page 5, of the pdf) designed to correct malfunctions in the default situation (namely the uncorrected free market).

I know of a case from the Netherlands where newspaper editors wanted to prohibit deep linking to their sites. The judge did not honor the request.

IMHO you can link to whatever you want on the Internet. There are enough ways to prevent your content being accessed by unauthorized people. The content provider is the only one responsible for its authorization management.

[i]t is impossible to set an objective standard which can be consistently applied to determine the "inventiveness height" or so. In nearly all cases, patent examiners are not skilled practitioners in the field.

I think we do have a reasonable standard here in the US (nonobvious to a skilled practitioner in the field), it's just not being applied.

We have exactly the same standard in Europe (for assessing the "inventive step". However, as Reinier Bakels (a law scholar who wrote a study on software patents for Committee of Juridical Affairs of the European Parliament) once wrote in a mail (translation from Dutch, the caps were also in the original post):

"The law clearly says that inventions must be "non-obvious to a person skilled in the art". If you take those words literally, than that is a VERY LOW threshold: this "person skilled in the art" doesn't mean anything, of course you don't go from a layman's point of view, and obvious does mean obvious! I have even once heard the reasoning: if an invention is new (another requirement for patentability), then CONSEQUENTLY it is "not obvious", otherwise it would have been invented already! The law is only a split hair away from literally stating that trivial patents are allowed. Another illustration of the fact that the directive does not change anything to a recognised weak point of the patent system."

I believe that in the US, there is no separate novelty requirement, but the end result is the same. You simply cannot say it must be "very" non-obvious, or "how skilled" in the art the person must be. You have to have a consistently applicable rule, otherwise you're going to get appeals and maybe even lawsuits to no end from applicants who feel their "person skilled in the art" was too skilled compared to the one that assessed someone else's patent.

I'm a firm believer that the patent system continues to have an overall positive effect.

But appart from anecdotical evidence, do you have any data to back this up? Even in the fifties, there were already doubts about this. You probably have heard this quote already, but if you haven't: in a study for the US Congress, Fritz Machlup said back then:

If we did not have a patent system, it would be irresponsible, on the basis of our present knowledge of its economic consequences, to recommend instituting one. But since we have had a patent system for a long time, it would be irresponsible, on the basis of our present knowledge, to recommend abolishing it.

So he's saying the overall effect was considered to be bad, but that you can't just take everyone's patents suddenly away, so you have to keep it. That's different from extending it towards new fields (such as software) though.

Furthermore, this example illustrates that patents can help protect the small guys when they go up against the big guys. I've never understood why so many people think of patents (and copyrights) solely as weapons of the megacorps.

At least here in Europe, we do not consider copyright to be a weapon of the megacorps, on the contrary.

(Maybe because of the cost of securing and defending a patent? That seems to be a general problem with the legal system here, not the patent system.) Sure, patents are often wielded by the big guys, but could little guys go against megacorps without such tools?

The cost is certainly a very important aspect. Whether it's due to the legal system or something else is not very relevant: it's the reality in which we live and how the system works. Many proponents of software patents often say "if we would have an ideal examination procedure which would get rid of all bad software patents, then they would have a good effect".

That may be so (although even that is debatable), but t

The German parliament which has just adopted DMCA-style provisions to outlaw the circumvention of technical protection measures that control and curtail the fair use of intellectual property (and only needs the other House's assent for part of the new legislation) makes Germany the third country, following Denmark and Greece, to implement the highly controversial "monstrosity" known as the European Union Copyright Directive 2001/29/EC.

This move, allegedly a "propaganda victory" dubbed "lex Bertelsmann" (after the giant media conglomerate expected to line their corporate pockets under the new laws) in furious disapproval by tech-savvy parts of the news media, makes Germany one of the early adopters setting an unfortunate precedent for further European countries like the UK and France whose citizens, and notably developers like Linux kernel guru Alan Cox, will probably not be spared from similar legislation for much longer either.

Although open-source researchers, cyber-rights activists and even the ruling Social Democrats' very own IT experts as well as hardware manufacturers underlined the severe dangers and inconsistencies of this new and doubtful philosophy extending copyright law to reduce many of the general public's rights to insignificance, in a debate focusing only on academic exemptions from the publishers' power grab, the opposition even tried to tighten the government's bill, ignoring widespread experiences of Chilling Effects such as censorship and assaults on the Freedom to Tinker during the past four years under the EUCD's U.S. counterpart of draconian "bad law and bad policy", the flawed Digital Millennium Copyright Act, another overreaching implementation of the

All hope abandon, as far as Europe is concerned...

...or could these developments still be stopped before setting a bad precedent for further countries such as the UK, which will probably not be spared from similar legislation for much longer either?

While this article assumes that Wednesday's approval by the Committee on Legal Affairs makes adoption of Germany's "DMCA" bill in plenary session on Friday "a mere formality" (as even the opposition's sole regret seems to be that fair use rights should have been curtailed even further), many of you sure wish to recount some experiences of the Chilling Effects from Four Years under the DMCA to the Members of the German Parliament about to repeat most of the DMCA's mistakes in their attempt to implement yet another overreaching implementation of the 1996 WIPO Copyright Treaty, the highly controversial "monstrosity" known as European Copyright Directive 2001/29/EC.

Since a lot of posts in this thread are about the European Copyright Directive (EUCD) I would like to give a brief summary:

The EUCD has been passed. This means that the member states must implement it in their national legislation. They should have done so by Dec 22 '02 but only Denmark and Greece made it. Status reports here. Norway's not a member of the EU.

The EUCD can be overturned in two ways:
1. In the European Court.
This means that somebody challenges the directive for being invalid under the EU treaty. It could be.
It's hard to get a case before the European Court, so this would probably need backing by one of the member states. This is being looked into, but it's not easy.

2. Through normal legislative process.
The EUCD article 12(1) states that "Not later than 22 December 2004" the Commission shall report on the application of the directive. Regarding article 6 (The bad one) "it shall examine in particular whether that Article confers a sufficient level of protection and whether acts which are permitted by law are being adversely affected by the use of effective technological measures [DRM]. Where necessary, in particular to ensure the functioning of the internal market ... it shall submit proposals for amendments to this Directive."

We definitely do intend to influence that report and have article 6 amended, but the entertainment industry is doing the same, so this isn't easy either.
On the other hand the directive was forged with very little public attention to article 6, so nearly all attention on the case would be in our favour.

The real showdown will be when Norway implements the EUCD directive. Then this verdict could be rather irrelevant as the new laws could make such actions illegal anyway.

Not neccesarily so. As representatives from EFF Norway told on their press conference today, the EUCD/Infosoc directive leaves room for interpretation, and a very loose version of the law could very well be implemented. Also, see this page.

I like the final statement he makes:

The European Court's decision raises the intriguing prospect of one or more disgruntled Member States challenging the validity of the Copyright Directive. Wouldn't that be the perfect way of getting rid of this monstrosity? I hereby offer my services to any Member State pro bono.

how about looking at the actual directive? the relevant article, below, is Article 6.

Obligations as to technological measures

1. Member States shall provide adequate legal protection against the circumvention of any effective technological measures, which the person concerned carries out in the knowledge, or with reasonable grounds to know, that he or she is pursuing that objective.
2. Member States shall provide adequate legal protection against the manufacture, import, distribution, sale, rental, advertisement for sale or rental, or possession for commercial purposes of devices, products or components or the provision of services which:
   1. are promoted, advertised or marketed for the purpose of circumvention of, or
   2. have only a limited commercially significant purpose or use other than to circumvent, or
   3. are primarily designed, produced, adapted or performed for the purpose of enabling or facilitating the circumvention of,
   any effective technological measures.
3. For the purposes of this Directive, the expression "technological measures" means any technology, device or component that, in the normal course of its operation, is designed to prevent or restrict acts, in respect of works or other subject-matter, which are not authorised by the rightholder of any copyright or any right related to copyright as provided for by law or the sui generis right provided for in Chapter III of Directive 96/9/EC. Technological measures shall be deemed "effective" where the use of a protected work or other subject-matter is controlled by the rightholders through application of an access control or protection process, such as encryption, scrambling or other transformation of the work or other subject-matter or a copy control mechanism, which achieves the protection objective.
4. Notwithstanding the legal protection provided for in paragraph 1, in the absence of voluntary measures taken by rightholders, including agreements between rightholders and other parties concerned, Member States shall take appropriate measures to ensure that rightholders make available to the beneficiary of an exception or limitation provided for in national law in accordance with Article 5(2)(a), (2)(c), (2)(d), (2)(e), (3)(a), (3)(b) or (3)(e) the means of benefiting from that exception or limitation, to the extent necessary to benefit from that exception or limitation and where that beneficiary has legal access to the protected work or subject-matter concerned.

   A Member State may also take such measures in respect of a beneficiary of an exception or limitation provided for in accordance with Article 5(2)(b), unless reproduction for private use has already been made possible by rightholders to the extent necessary to benefit from the exception or limitation concerned and in accordance with the provisions of Article 5(2)(b) and (5), without preventing rightholders from adopting adequate measures regarding the number of reproductions in accordance with these provisions.

   The technological measures applied voluntarily by rightholders, including those applied in implementation of voluntary agreements, and technological measures applied in implementation of the measures taken by Member States, shall enjoy the legal protection provided for in paragraph 1.

   The provisions of the first and second subparagraphs shall not apply to works or other subject-matter made available to the public on agreed contractual terms in such a way that members of the public may access them from a place and at a time individually chosen by them.

   When this Article is applied in the context of Directives 92/100/EEC and 96/9/EC, this paragraph shall apply mutatis mutandis.

this is much more in line with WIPO, though it still goes too far. but look at it. Dmitry would have a whole bunch of defenses under it. all he's gotta show is that his Advanced eBook Processor has more than a "limited commercially significant purpose or use other than to circumvent" the protection on Adobe eBooks. for example, if it had a purpose to force Adobe to respect Russian fair use law, that might well qualify.

or if Adobe eBooks violate any other European copyrights. the directive is very specific that rightsholders will allow certain uses to be made of their works. they won't use technological measures to extend copyright.

how effective it's gonna be remains to be seen. but this is a lot less bad than the DMCA.