We've discussed, a few times, the issues with border patrol/customs officials in the US searching laptops at the border. The reason it doesn't make much sense is that the purpose of border patrol is to make sure nothing bad gets into a country, but the content on your laptop can easily get into the country via the internet, rather than at the border. And even bigger concern, of course, is that people store everything on their laptops. If you're packing your suitcase for a trip somewhere, you pack only the things you want to take. Everything you bring is effectively "opt-in." However, on your laptop, you already have everything. If anything, you might (though I doubt many people do) delete some stuff to avoid having it searched. In other words, unlike your suitcase, the data on your laptop is more of an "opt-out" situation.
Well, it appears that down in Australia, they've taken border laptop concerns to a new and ridiculous level. Slashdot points us to claims for Australian officials that travelers entering Australia should have to declare all porn on their laptops. After some public outcry, that original claim was downgraded to "all illegal porn," but as some people are still pointing out, it's not at all clear what constitutes "illegal porn" in Australia, and it's a violation of privacy to demand that travelers reveal their laptop porn. Again, I'm at a loss as to how this actually helps with anything. It's not like having people declare it at the border will do anything to stop "illegal" porn. It just seems like an easy way to have something else to hold over people.
We've already covered how the EU Parliament is skeptical of ACTA. Ditto the Mexican Senate. In the US, which will undoubtedly sign the agreement, at least some politicians are asking questions about the document. Now news is coming out in a few other countries as well. Down in Australia, unlike in the US, they're planning to go through a full scrutiny process involving the Parliament and the public. On the flipside, it sounds like Singapore can't sign the document fast enough.
Of course, what may be most interesting is how countries who are not a part of the negotiations feel about this. Many people feel that the whole ACTA process was set up outside of WIPO and the WTO in order to avoid having to deal with the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China), which are all developing rapidly, and have a very different viewpoint on intellectual property than the countries involved in the negotiations. So, it's interesting to see that Brazil has already slammed the agreement (Google translation from the original Portuguese). A Brazilian official said that the agreement was not legitimate, negotiated by a closed group without considering all of the issues at play.
ACTA negotiators have said that they hoped, after their own countries agreed to sign onto ACTA, that the BRIC countries would follow down the road. Of course, if they wanted that to happen, perhaps they should have asked them to join the discussions. But, what would that accomplish, since the goal appears to have been to keep many stakeholders out of the negotiations, rather than being inclusive.
We've been covering the legal fight over the patenting of genes for quite some time, and there's been an interesting (if odd) development, concerning the BRCA patents, held by Myriad Genetics, that have been the key patents in the legal battle. Back in March, a district court judge famously held that genes were unpatentable, and said that the BRCA patents (covering genes related to breast cancer) were invalid. A few months later, it was interesting to see a very similar case filed in Australia, also against Myrida and over BRCA patents.
"Myriad wishes to gift Australian Patent No 686004 [the '004 Patent] to the people of Australia."
This is, certainly, an odd turn of events, and no one's quite sure why. Some have suggested that it's to help with the US case by avoiding another ruling against such patents in Australia -- but as the article notes, that makes little sense. The patent systems are different in the US and Australia and have little, if any, impact on one another. My guess (and it's a guess) is that Myriad realized that this one particular patent is weak, and doesn't want it to be a part of any lawsuit that could impact its other patents or the wider ability to patent genes, and is thus offering it up to get it out of the lawsuit. That's an admittedly cynical take, but I'm having trouble coming up with other possibilities that make sense. Perhaps any readers more familiar with the Australian patent system can fill us in on why they think this is happening.
US courts figured this out a while ago, but it's nice to see that an Australian court has now ruled that newspaper headlines don't deserve copyright protection. The specific lawsuit was over the use of Australian Financial Review headlines in LexisNexis, which also summarized the articles in question. It appears the judge also said that the use of the headlines constitutes "fair dealing," but I'm a bit confused about the combination here. If the headlines aren't copyrightable... then fair dealing shouldn't even come into play. Not surprisingly, the publisher of AFR, Fairfax Media, is not at all happy about the ruling, making the totally laughable argument that copyrights on headlines is necessary:
Gill described the judgment as "disappointing", adding: "It is not consistent with what is necessary to protect intellectual property in the digital media environment... We are considering our appeal opportunities."
Seriously. If you're relying on copyright protection of your news headlines as a part of your business model, you've got the wrong business model.
While Spain and France have taken a more lenient approach to letting people modify hardware they (thought they had) bought, the Australian courts apparently are not fans of letting people modify their own equipment. Back in February, we noted that an Australian court ruled against the distributor of some mod chips for the Nintendo DS, and now (as a bunch of you have sent in), an Australian court has sided with Sony in (at least temporarily) banning the PS3Jailbreak dongle, which lets people play homemade games. Of course, the complaint from the console makers is that these products also let people play unauthorized copies of games, but it seems like quite a leap from "this might be used for things we don't like" to "you can't actually modify the hardware you thought you purchased."
As you may recall, a bunch of movie studios sued popular ISP iiNet for failing to somehow wave a magic wand and stop file sharing. Thankfully, the Australian court quickly realized this was ridiculous and issued a thorough and convincing ruling that it made no sense to consider iiNet liable for copyright infringement done by its users. The judge pointed out that there's no evidence that iiNet "approved infringement." The judge also made it clear why it's nonsensical to think that ISPs should serve as copyright cops, since a determination on whether or not something is infringing takes place in a court, not by random ISP employees.
Not surprisingly, the movie studios and AFACT (the "anti-piracy" organization representing them) appealed the ruling, claiming that somehow the lack of stopping copyright infringement was effectively "authorizing" copyright infringement. That seems like a huge stretch, but the appeal has begun and AFACT is now trying to make the case that not blocking users or kicking them off is the equivalent of authorization. Hopefully the appeals court recognizes the wisdom of the lower court ruling.
As the Australian government pushes forward with plans to have ISPs spy on users as part of its effort to control and censor the internet, some have made a freedom of information request to see the details of the plan... and the government provided the documents with 90% of the content blacked out. Yes, the government is censoring its plans about censorship. Even better is the "reasoning" for this. Government officials defended the move by saying it:
"may lead to premature unnecessary debate and could potentially prejudice and impede government decision making".
Yes, how dare the people make their views known in a way that lets the government know they don't approve. That would be a representative government, and apparently Australia doesn't believe in such things.
If you happen to keep up with the latest internet memes (you know who you are), you almost certainly have heard about the whole "ya dun goofed"/Jessi Slaughter saga. If you (lucky you) aren't aware of this, and wish to find out (and, I warn you, you may be better off not knowing about this), all the details are at that link. Frankly, after watching the key videos, embedded below, the whole thing really feels faked for the sake of attention. The whole thing is so over the top that it feels like a calculated attempt to get viral YouTube fame.
Either way, whether it's real or not, what's fascinating is how different people have reacted to it. Over at NewTeeVee, there's an interview with Kenyatta Cheese, where he notes that the most fascinating thing about it is that after the video above happened, there was another video chat (via Stickam), where a bunch of the folks who had supposedly been egging Jessi on, really are incredibly nasty to her in a chat, and she totally ignores it. I mean totally ignores all sorts of angry insults. For whatever reason, YouTube has taken that video down due to a "terms of use" violation, so you can't see it, but you can imagine it (I saw it before it was taken down). Basically, a few folks were chatting by video, and in the text chat, people were hurling all of the worst kinds of slurs at Jessi, and she acts in the complete opposite way as in the video above: no crying, no anger. She just focuses on other folks.
As Kenyatta notes:
What's more interesting to me is the fact that just after her very public breakdown, she went back on Stickam a few hours later, completely unfazed by the insults being hurled at her.... The chat is filled with the kind of stuff that parents would call 'bullying,' however, she's totally ignoring it all. Clearly the internet has created a new kind of teenager, able to filter out the kind of noise that would "ruin" the life of folks like Star Wars Kid just years before.
That seemed interesting to me, though, I'm not sure I buy that. First of all, it's a single anecdote involving a single person and (again), I'm still not convinced this is real.
After reading that interview earlier, I had considered doing a post about that claim of the "new kind of teenager," but figured that the "evidence" was so weak, it wasn't worth it. However, I was then amused to look at the submissions for Techdirt, and find a note from reader athe pointing to a professor in Australia who is using the saga as evidence of why the internet should be censored. In other words, he looks at the same videos and comes to the exact opposite conclusion as Kenyatta did.
Where Kenyatta sees a teenager who can filter out bullying and get on with her life, Professor Matt Warren, looks at it and sees a horrible, out of control internet that needs to be censored.
Professor Matt Warren, the head of Deakin University's School of Information Systems, said as long as parents who don't understand the internet kept giving their children access to it, there needed to be ways to control its use.
"You simply can't have free access to the internet," he said.
"It has to be controlled, censored and people have to be held accountable for their actions on it.
"We punish people who drink, we punish people who speed and we have to implement laws to that effect when it comes to the internet."
Thankfully, people are taking professor Warren to task in the comments on that article, noting that censoring Jessi wouldn't have helped. The Australian internet filters certainly wouldn't have stopped the ability of a girl to go online and make some videos. The real issue (if this story is actually real -- but it would apply to others as well), is that this is yet another example of where better parenting, rather than Big Brother governing, would probably help out. And, no, that doesn't mean spying on everything a kid does, but getting parents to at least talk to their kids about what happens online, and what their kids are doing online, along with the risks associated with being online.
Last summer we were among those amazed at the claim from a music publisher that the popular 80's song, "Down Under," by the band, Men at Work, supposedly infringed on a popular Australian folk tune, Kookaburra, that was written back in the 1930s. The publisher who sued, Larrikin, had only taken possession of the copyright on the folk tune in 2000, and didn't even notice the similarity until a TV quiz show pointed it out. You would think that this, alone, should make any copyright claim null and void. But... not to the Australian courts, who first ruled that the song infringed earlier this year and now (thanks to sinsi for pointing this out) have said that the band needs to pay Larrikin 5% of its royalties from 2002 onward. The only "good" news is that Larrikin had asked for 60%, even though the use of Kookaburra is limited to a little flute solo, and is clearly an homage to the song. Also, since the royalties only start in 2002, well after the song has faded from popularity, it may limit what Larrikin gets. Still, the whole lawsuit, and the fact that this was found to be infringing, is a bit of a travesty.
This is certainly not the first time we've seen cases like this, but reader LM alerts us to a case down in Australia, where a guy is upset that the Yahoo search results on his name make him look like a criminal. So, he's now suing the company for defamation. Similar cases in the US and the UK have been tossed out, with courts properly recognizing that you can't blame a search engine company for "defamation" because its algorithms summarize other people's content in confusing ways. However, a ruling on a similar case in the Netherlands went the other way. Already, in Australia, the court has refused to grant summary judgment to Yahoo, so a full trial will soon be underway to take on this issue, but Australian courts apparently often look to similar UK rulings for guidance -- so last year's ruling, finding that automatically generated summary snippets in search engines were not defamatory, hopefully is a good sign.
