ISPs routinely block traffic they don't like for whatever reason. Unless you are contracted with that ISP and you have a signed agreement with them they can start and stop whatever services they want.
The consumer is almost always contracted with the ISP. The problem is that the average consumer will accept a contract saying thay the ISP can do everything just to save a few bucks.
It is OK with me that the ISP is blocking almost everything if agreed with the customer.
But blocking competition should IMHO be illegal. Otherwise the next thing we see is that ISPs will block all access to the websites of competitors so the consumer cannot see better offers.
M$ had an OS monopoly that they could abuse to get their own browser on the desktop and keep other browsers off it. They were actually convicted in a court of law on several counts that they illegally used their OS monopoly to promote their own browser.
OTOH, Napster has nothing but a new incompatible product, and way too little financial muscle to launch a marketing campaign to convince people to abandon the defacto standard.
If your monthly payment to Napster somehow gets messed up just a single month so it doesn't reach Napster in time all your previous investment in Napster music is lost.
If Napster closes for whatever reason all your previous investment in Napster music is lost.
In both cases you loose access to all the music you have paid Napster for.
...is that these kinds of directives are impossible to fight. Look at the date for the InfoSoc directive. 2001. Yes, four years ago. Yet we have no choice but to implement it, except for a highly theoretical veto right (from not being in the EU, only EUs lap dog).
It probably doesn't help you much, but: I am from Denmark and although we are full EU members, our influence on this directive was effectively zero.
What can public pressure do? Implemented by 2005. Uproar by 2006. New proposal to EU in 2008. New directive in 2010. New law in 2015. Try keeping the public's attention for ten years while playing the ladder game with the corporations. They'll slide you right back to square one when people aren't looking.
Public pressure can do something about how the directive is implemented in your local law. There are a lot of contradictions in the directive text making it possible to do a "light" implementation in your local law implementation of it.
My revised proposal fully implemented the directive, but would make it legal to:
Talk about how copy protections can be broken.
Publicize the source code for programs that break copy protections.
Compile and use programs that break copy protections, if done non-commercially and the purpose is either:
Fair use of the protected contents.
Viewing the protected contents on computer systems not having an approved viewer, if such viewing would be legal on other computer systems.
Getting access to contents where the copyright protection has expired.
I think this proposal worried our government, because the day after I sent out the revised proposal for an amendment to the proposed law change, our government sent out a press release
saying "The law has to be interpreted so that it is legal to circumvent copy protections that makes it hard to use a legally purchased protected works on for example a Linux computer".
The law text itself was not changed, but the law notes that tell how the law must be interpreted was. The result is that I now legally can view DVDs on my PC, and that would not have been legal without this public pressure.
If you are interested in trying to change the norwegian implementation of InfoSoc, I think you will find a lot of inspiration in the two proposed amendments I have linked to above.
The citation was only from EPC Article 52.2. The "as such" clause is in EPC Article 52.3:
3) The provisions of paragraph 2 shall exclude patentability of the subject-matter or activities referred to in that provision only to the extent to which a European patent application or European patent relates to such subject-matter or activities as such.
This is not about cracking down on MP3, but about limiting free speech by making it a criminal offence to say how a copyright protection can be broken.
Recently I saw a Forrester study on the TCO of J2EE/Linux compared to M$ products. One reason for the TCO of J2EE/Linux being higher was the high cost of commercial J2EE servers.
The study did not mention that Open Source J2EE servers exists.
Then I saw another Forrester study on the TCO of commercial support services for JBoss, a high quality Open Source J2EE server.
It is sad how big money can make "independent" research companies distort their findings.
The preample to the directive talks about support for legalizing software patents: "Thus although the responses in this category were numerically much fewer that those supporting the open source approach, there seems little doubt that the balance of economic weight taking into account total jobs and investment involved is in favour of harmonisation along the lines suggested in the paper."
So the proposed directive text admits that it is hard to find a normal majority and instead tries to invent an "economic majority".
This really tells what the drafters of this directive think about democracy: Fuck the voters and let big business have it like they want.
I feel sorry for the people of the United States of America. It really looks like your government is determined to realize the society envisioned by George Orwell.
Most people here seem to falsely believe that the european patent system is administered or governed by the EU. That is incorrect.
The EU patent system is governed by a multilateral treaty called the European Patent Convention (EPC). Both EU and non-EU countries have signed and ratified EPC.
In 1973 when EPC was signed, all the countries harmonized their patent laws to conform to the text of EPC. At the same time the European Patent Office (EPO) was created as the administrative body to issue patents in Europe.
The big problem with EPO is that they are outside any political or judicial influence and can do pretty much what they want to.
EPC Article 52.2 clearly states that software "as such" is not patentable.
But over the years EPO has changed their "interpretation" of this. First to say that software is not software "as such" if loaded in a computer and having some useful effect (what they call "further technical effect"). Later to say that even software residing on a media without being loaded into a computer may not be considered software "as such". Their arguments for these "interpretations" are really convoluted, and it takes weeks of study to understand them.
This means that EPO illegally has issued a large number of software patents. Most estimates say at least 30,000. Fortunately these software patents cannot currently be enforced in court because they are illegal.
To fix the problem that the software patents cannot be enforced in court they have twice called for a diplomatic conference with the goal of changing EPC to legalize software patents. On both diplomatic conferences the request of EPO was denied.
Only after the second failed attempt by EPO to have EPC changed did EU propose a directive attempting to legalize software patents.
With a directive the EU can force the EU countries to change their national law. If that happens the illegally issued software patents can be legally enforced in court.
While Karl Wagenfuehr limited himself to comment on the current US law, I think his unstated message is political (ie. more about how laws should be than about how laws are).
When somebody creates an illegal copy nobody has any indirect loss from it. Copyright holders may argue of an indirect loss due to lost sales, but that argument is contradicted by a lot of scientific research on the correlation between people's illegal copying and their purchases of copyrighted goods. It looks like people doing illegal copies are bying more copyrighted goods - even it they already own illegal copies of what they buy.
OTOH when somebody does shoplifting of a copyrighted good, the shop has a direct loss.
So the basic political argument is: Why should something illegal have a harsher penalty when there is no direct loss compared to when there is a direct loss.
Given the reply speed of wikipedia servers I guess a lot of users just use Google's cache instead. Given the number of users it is probably more effective for them to help improve response times by hosting servers than to have to serve this extra load to their cache.
And the PR effect of this helps them too, of course.
Slashdot Mirror
It is OK with me that the ISP is blocking almost everything if agreed with the customer.
But blocking competition should IMHO be illegal. Otherwise the next thing we see is that ISPs will block all access to the websites of competitors so the consumer cannot see better offers.
So SSL is not really an option. IPSec might be an option.
New port numbers or IP addresses may be simpler, but can also more easily be blocked.
M$ had an OS monopoly that they could abuse to get their own browser on the desktop and keep other browsers off it. They were actually convicted in a court of law on several counts that they illegally used their OS monopoly to promote their own browser.
OTOH, Napster has nothing but a new incompatible product, and way too little financial muscle to launch a marketing campaign to convince people to abandon the defacto standard.
If Napster closes for whatever reason all your previous investment in Napster music is lost.
In both cases you loose access to all the music you have paid Napster for.
When the directive was about to be implemented in Denmark, I spent some time studying the directive and the proposed danish law change. After I proposed an amendment to the proposed law change (in danish). There was some critique of this, and after some discussion I sent out a revised proposal for an amendment to the proposed law change (in danish).
My revised proposal fully implemented the directive, but would make it legal to:
I think this proposal worried our government, because the day after I sent out the revised proposal for an amendment to the proposed law change, our government sent out a press release saying "The law has to be interpreted so that it is legal to circumvent copy protections that makes it hard to use a legally purchased protected works on for example a Linux computer".
The law text itself was not changed, but the law notes that tell how the law must be interpreted was. The result is that I now legally can view DVDs on my PC, and that would not have been legal without this public pressure.
If you are interested in trying to change the norwegian implementation of InfoSoc, I think you will find a lot of inspiration in the two proposed amendments I have linked to above.
This is not about cracking down on MP3, but about limiting free speech by making it a criminal offence to say how a copyright protection can be broken.
And if you wonder what the InfoSoc directive is: It is basically EUs copy of the DMCA, only a bit worse.
Then I saw another Forrester study on the TCO of commercial support services for JBoss, a high quality Open Source J2EE server.
It is sad how big money can make "independent" research companies distort their findings.
So if their software is so secure, why do they have to recommend antivirus software to stop their systems from being infected?
The preample to the directive talks about support for legalizing software patents: "Thus although the responses in this category were numerically much fewer that those supporting the open source approach, there seems little doubt that the balance of economic weight taking into account total jobs and investment involved is in favour of harmonisation along the lines suggested in the paper."
So the proposed directive text admits that it is hard to find a normal majority and instead tries to invent an "economic majority".
This really tells what the drafters of this directive think about democracy: Fuck the voters and let big business have it like they want.
But then, it turns out that the directive was really drafted by BSA.
This is just another step in that direction.
The EU patent system is governed by a multilateral treaty called the European Patent Convention (EPC). Both EU and non-EU countries have signed and ratified EPC.
In 1973 when EPC was signed, all the countries harmonized their patent laws to conform to the text of EPC. At the same time the European Patent Office (EPO) was created as the administrative body to issue patents in Europe.
The big problem with EPO is that they are outside any political or judicial influence and can do pretty much what they want to.
EPC Article 52.2 clearly states that software "as such" is not patentable.
But over the years EPO has changed their "interpretation" of this. First to say that software is not software "as such" if loaded in a computer and having some useful effect (what they call "further technical effect"). Later to say that even software residing on a media without being loaded into a computer may not be considered software "as such". Their arguments for these "interpretations" are really convoluted, and it takes weeks of study to understand them.
This means that EPO illegally has issued a large number of software patents. Most estimates say at least 30,000. Fortunately these software patents cannot currently be enforced in court because they are illegal.
To fix the problem that the software patents cannot be enforced in court they have twice called for a diplomatic conference with the goal of changing EPC to legalize software patents. On both diplomatic conferences the request of EPO was denied.
Only after the second failed attempt by EPO to have EPC changed did EU propose a directive attempting to legalize software patents.
With a directive the EU can force the EU countries to change their national law. If that happens the illegally issued software patents can be legally enforced in court.
While Karl Wagenfuehr limited himself to comment on the current US law, I think his unstated message is political (ie. more about how laws should be than about how laws are).
When somebody creates an illegal copy nobody has any indirect loss from it. Copyright holders may argue of an indirect loss due to lost sales, but that argument is contradicted by a lot of scientific research on the correlation between people's illegal copying and their purchases of copyrighted goods. It looks like people doing illegal copies are bying more copyrighted goods - even it they already own illegal copies of what they buy.
OTOH when somebody does shoplifting of a copyrighted good, the shop has a direct loss.
So the basic political argument is: Why should something illegal have a harsher penalty when there is no direct loss compared to when there is a direct loss.
Yeah, now Google is going to be slashdotted...
Given the reply speed of wikipedia servers I guess a lot of users just use Google's cache instead. Given the number of users it is probably more effective for them to help improve response times by hosting servers than to have to serve this extra load to their cache.
And the PR effect of this helps them too, of course.