[video] ACTA: Get Informed & Take Action! On the occasion of the Free Culture Forum in Barcelona, La Quadrature du Net releases three films to inform citizens and urge them to take action against ACTA, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. ACTA is a threat to Internet users' fundamental freedoms and to EU Internet companies' competitiveness and free competition. The European Parliament will soon decide whether to give its consent to ACTA, or to reject it once and for all. Every citizen can help defeat ACTA by spreading this video across the Internet, urging their fellow citizens to mobilize, and contacting their elected representatives.
Learn more about this dangerous agreement at Many thanks to Benoît Musereau for directing these films. For how to act against ACTA, right now, please refer to our wiki. You can add this video to your website, just copy/paste the following HTML snippet : You can also see share this video on YouTube : NO to ACTA (Threat to the Internet edit.) Open Access, Open Internet Google boss: anti-piracy laws would be disaster for free speech | Technology.
Google's executive chairman, Eric Schmidt, warned on Wednesday that government plans to block access to illicit filesharing websites could set a "disastrous precedent" for freedom of speech. Speaking to journalists after his keynote speech at Google's Big Tent conference in London, Schmidt said the online search giant would challenge attempts to restrict access to the Pirate Bay and other so-called "cyberlocker" sites that encourage illegal downloading – part of government plans to fight online piracy through controversial measures included in the Digital Economy Act. "If there is a law that requires DNSs [domain name systems, the protocol that allows users to connect to websites] to do X and it's passed by both houses of congress and signed by the president of the United States and we disagree with it then we would still fight it," he added.
"If it's a request the answer is we wouldn't do it, if it's a discussion we wouldn't do it. " "It doesn't seem right. Main Page - CFPWiki. Could Twitter be censored? The recent media obsession over superinjunctions could lead to the unthinkable: censorship of web content here in the UK. The story goes like this. If there is information about you that could reach the public domain and may harm you as a result, British courts may grant you an injunction. This power was designed to protect individuals from harassment, abuse or violence as a result of the information becoming public. A recent development is the superinjunction: a ruling that prevents even the existence of the injunction being made public. It costs between £50,000 and £100,000 to take out a superinjunction, and so far only men have done so. The upshot is that rich people have a way to protect their wholesome public image through the use of superinjunctions preventing media reporting, even if journalists consider the information to be in the public interest.
Putting the free speech argument aside, I'd like to examine to impact on social media, and Twitter in particular. Who pays for copyright enforcement? From David Hansen, JD, Scholarly Communications intern at Duke University Libraries: Kevin’s last blog post on champerty got me thinking about another ancient legal doctrine, also dimly remembered from law school, which has some application to recent copyright cases: “adverse possession.” Adverse possession is a common law doctrine, dating back over eight hundred years, that was developed to settle disputes over real property when one person had legal title to the land, but another actually possessed the property. Adverse possession works to give rights in the land to the possessor of the land if the original title holder has sufficiently failed to police and assert her rights over the property in question.
Now sometimes referred to as “squatters rights,” one of the underlying purposes of the doctrine is to force landowners with legal title to vigorously assert and defend their own property rights. In the university context the question of control or inducement becomes more difficult. Mozilla Firefox. On 10 December 1948, the adoption by the General Assembly of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights launched a new era. Lebanese scholar Charles Habib Malik described it to the assembled delegates as follows: Every member of the United Nations has solemnly pledged itself to achieve respect for and observance of human rights.
But, precisely what these rights are we were never told before, either in the Charter or in any other national instrument. This is the first time the principles of human rights and fundamental freedoms are spelled out authoritatively and in precise detail. I now know what my government pledged itself to promote, achieve, and observe. … I can agitate against my government, and if she does not fulfill her pledge, I shall have and feel the moral support of the entire world. One of the fundamental rights the Universal Declaration described, in Article 19, was the right to freedom of speech: More information in more places than ever imagined Filtering leads to monitoring. A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace. By John Perry Barlow <barlow@eff.org> Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind.
On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather. We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. You have not engaged in our great and gathering conversation, nor did you create the wealth of our marketplaces. You claim there are problems among us that you need to solve. Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships, and thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our communications. We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth. Davos, Switzerland. G8 vs INTERNET.
Introduction. ACTA | An information service from the FFII e.V. working group on ACTA. How To Stop Domain Names Being Seized By The US Government. This week, an ever more familiar picture started to emerge, the third such situation in well under a year. US authorities had begun another round of domain name seizures, this time against sites connected with sports streaming. The domains seized included HQ-streams.com, HQ-streams.net, Atdhe.net, Firstrow.net, Ilemi.com, Iilemi.com, Iilemii.com, Channelsurfing.net, Rojadirecta.net and Rojadirecta.com. These latest seizures were the final straw for one angry TorrentFreak reader.
“First they came for the Napsters, and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a Napster. Then they came for the Torrents, and I didn’t speak out because I didn’t use Torrents. Then they came for the file-sharers, and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a file-sharer,” the email began. “And then they came for me and for my sites, and there was no one left to speak out for me.” These words come from SearchFreak, an internet engineer and chief executive of an Internet business that provides services to millions of users. The 10 Tools of Online Oppressors - Reports. SAN FRANCISCO In reporting news from the world’s most troubled nations, journalists have made a seismic shift this year in their reliance on the Internet and other digital tools. Blogging, video sharing, text messaging, and live-streaming from cellphones brought images of popular unrest from the central square of Cairo and the main boulevard of Tunis to the rest of the world.
In Other Languages • Español • Português • Français • Русский • العربية • Multimedia • Audio Report: Offenders and TacticsIn Print • Download the pdfMore on This Issue • CPJ Internet Channel: Danny O'Brien's blog • Blogging in Egypt: Virtual network, virtual oppression • Burmese exile news site endures hacking, DDoS attacks Yet the technology used to report the news has been matched in many ways by the tools used to suppress information. In two nations we cite, Egypt and Tunisia, the regimes have changed, but their successors have not categorically broken with past repressive practices.
Key country: Iran.