The long-term solution to this quackmire is that companies set up legally separate entities (i.e. split). That way, the line of defense would become: yes, we notice this and that company in the US does something you don't like, but that isn't us and we have no control over what that company does, because we are separate, and even if you totally destroy us, that will not bother the US party at all or resolve your issue.
The case involving Microsoft and data stored in Ireland is different in that the US court order would force Microsoft employees in Ireland to break Irish (EU) laws. Those employees are thus required to disobey any Microsoft order to do so, and Microsoft can rightly claim to be unable to comply. Again, the US court can still punish Microsoft for that, but that will not resolve the issue and will not enable Microsoft to comply.
With regard to Google: it not against US law to remove certain results from search results, so it could comply to the order without getting in legal trouble.
It would be nice though if there was a law that would require parties to disclose foreign censorship attempts, and a site with strong US backing where such reports must be published, as to make the foreign censorship attempts moot (and force foreign governments to use blocking at the ISP level; thereby giving up the pretence of supporting an uncensored internet).
Google is actually fighting this because it has significant interests in the EU, and thus is within reach of EU courts.
If the EU Court of Justice grants itself extra-territorial jurisdiction in this case, Google will probably comply, but that will open up a strong business-case for splitting up companies along national borders, such that companies can serve their own public without undue interference from foreign courts.
An example: I regularly download public domain books using Google, but in the EU books published after 1868 are blocked. Many of these are PD in the EU as well, but since it is significantly harder to establish death dates instead of publication dates, Google can't be bothered. Even PD books scanned by Google in European libraries are blocked!
The Internet Archive, which has no European interests does not block those same books, and helpful people have been busy copying books from Google books to The Internet Archive in bulk. Furthermore, when books are not so copied, it also isn't very hard to use Tor or a VPN to get to the data on Google.
Similarly, since the GDPR, I am encountering more and more sites that maintain a complete block of visitors from the EU. Again, Tor or VPN are normally enough to bypass those restrictions.
The likely result of this war against the internet is that it teaches people to use those tools to get to information, making heavily encrypted and obfuscated connections the default, until such time countries are willing to disconnect themselves from the internet completely, with all the economic repercussions that will have.
Norway indeed has to swallow much of the EU rules -- without having a say in it -- for access to the single market.
Case law is not binding in civil law, but it is very important to inform a judge of precedents, and can significantly shape the outcome of cases. If this is indeed an ex-parte decision, I hope it will be reverted when handled on appeal; if not, I hope the public outcry will be such that the Norwegian government will take its responsibility and publish all those cases itself on a government site, where they do belong.
We should praise Haakon Wium Lie for his contributions to CSS!
Let's hope the old saying still holds true: "The best way to get a bad law repealed is to enforce it strictly" Let those bad actors try to enforce their claims until they become such a PITA that the law will be changed. The more ridiculous copyright becomes, the quicker bad actors will be tempted to abuse it.
Preferably new laws will be following the philosophy that since copyright is a trade regulation, nothing that happens within the privacy of the home or within the circle of relatives and friends, including postings on personal websites and social media, is relevant to it.
We already see some courts in some countries take the position that the copyright interest in private copying using torrent sites, etc., does not balance against the privacy rights of the person involved in such copying, and it would be good to have that encoded in law.
It has always been a pet theory of me that publishers want such outrageous copyright terms just to do this: avoid competition, so they can keep milking in a world of artificial scarcity. It is the first time I see this crazy idea so brazenly advertised.
The exact problem Project Gutenberg is trying to resolve is preservation of historical and cultural artifacts: keeping culture alive, and offering a fertile field on which new artists and authors can build. Of course, we won't be teaching electronics from books published in the 50's. That is not the point. Preserving is more than just keeping a few copies in an archive never to be touched. Preserving means that it is accessible, can be used and reused by whoever wants it, so it can stay culturally relevant (if that is what the current or future public wants).
Re: Re: All books still easily available in Germany....
A very legalistic approach, depending on the fiction that international treaties are cast in stone. Such an hard-handed approach will have to break somewhere. Brexit was unthinkable, and legally it still is impossible: to leave the European customs union, the UK will have to introduce a hard border in N. Ireland, which it cannot do under the Good Friday agreements, an international treaty: doing so may also reignite a civil war; to leave the border open without staying in the customs union will require the UK to rescind the WTO agreements. Let's see what happens. (PS. I think the entire brexit is the summit of stupidity)
Similarly, when enough people had enough of the current copyright rules, a democratic society will change them. Note also that the WTO TRIPS agreement are extremely one-sided: they call for free-trade, but as long as free movement of people is not included, that free-trade is a total fiction, leading to such absuses as forcing Chinese workers to work for redicilously low salaries, or allowing African mining companies to totally destroy the environment. A revision of those agreements is much overdue to make them sustainable.
The problem is that determining copyright status under a life+XX regime is extremely hard. For common authors and illustrators, it may be easy to find relevant dates, but for lesser known authors, translators, writers of smaller articles , etc. such information is simply not available, meaning you may always be confronted with some claims, and the only safe course of action is to add about 150 years (100 years life expectancy, assuming an age of 20 at publication + 70 years copyright after death) to the publication date, which severly limits the appeal of the collection. (This is the approach Google follows with its scanned book archives.)
It is my opinion that copyrights are far too long. The proper response is not to attack the publisher in question (they are just using the legal system for their profit), but to steer towards more reasonable copyright terms (say at most 30 years from first publication), that is push for political change. With this in mind, the total block also helps putting this issue on the map.
For the affected works, they are all still easily available on the Internet Archive (https://archive.org/search.php?query=Thomas%20mann), as are many, many more. I wonder when they will be hit by a German court case. Of course, The Internet Archive foundation is much better funded, which may be the reason they first attacked Project Gutenberg to establish a precedent.
I am not a lawyer, but wouldn't it be an idea to counter-sue in the US (where the German plaintiff clearly has a business presence) for willful obstruction of a fully legal US operation (by trying to force Project Gutenberg to pay for IP blocking services and maintaining a foreign lawyer, all things not required by US law), and claim automatic reimbursement of all costs and possible fines the foreign court my attempt to impose.
Although innocent, they are liable. I do not consider that strange: similar things happen if you cause a road accident. I consider this a very reasonable outcome. The company has control over who it hires to supervise the data, what data it collects, and so on, so if something goes wrong with the data, the company is the one who put the data in that position that it could go wrong, so they are the ones who will have to pay if things do go wrong (and take out insurance if that would cost them too much).
They could of course try to get that ex-employee to reimburse them, but it is doubtful his assets will cover that in full.
Who has ever trekked to Preikestolen, a overhanging cliff in Norway sticking out 604 meters above a fjord might wonder why nobody thought about putting a fence on top of it. -- My own guess is: they thought about it, and concluded it would actually be less safe that way. It would require maintenance, might get damaged, and give a false sense of security. Just seeing the steep drop and the small boats that are actually passenger ships deep down below will make people realize there is an real danger to fall to one's death, and act accordingly.
Since there is no reasonable relationship between the value of a medium (CD-Roms, HDs, USB sticks), there can be no reasonable levy that will do justice to all; following the reasoning of this court, suppliers of such hardware can demand evidence of no harm caused by introducing such a levy, and have it scrapped by this very same court.
The only way out of this quagmire is to disallow the private copying exception, and return to the existing status quo that it is technically illegal but everybody ignores it, making a mockery of this bad law. You could start enforcing it ruthlessly, such that it really starts hurting, and people start caring enough to change their voting behavior, and get this madness out of the law-books.
I think the important social media providers should provide some counter-measures against this.
1. A way to put your account in "away" mode, such that no logging-in is possible for a certain period of time, or after a number of verification steps that involve more than just a password (similar to what facebook already does when you log-in from a foreign location).
2. A way to lock your account to a certain computer or location, or the availability of a certain file.
3. A separate distress password, that would put your account in a special state, such that certain information would be withheld or falsified, and information of people using that account will be tracked in more detail, and made available to the account holder; and finally, that any changes made using the distress password can be reverted in an easy way. Locations that use such distress passwords regularly should be tracked and logged more intensively. (The number of distress passwords should be unlimited, such that it is not possible to demand both the real and the distress password, and distinguish the two)
Note that these types of precautions also helps against criminal and school type of bullying, it is best to justify them for this purpose.
The number one problem with security for consumer level products is that most users either don't care or don't know about security. I've been able to send PGP encrypted email for years, but nobody to receive it, except for a few.
The second problem is to make a system that is secure, even in the face of gross end-user negligence and ignorance. It should be much simpler than the products currently available, without the need to educate end-user more than the obsolute minimum.
The third problem is how to make your product stand out, and guaranty it is really secure, as opposed to just security snake-oil, and robust against skilled and determined counterparts...
These requirements are quite conflicting, and will make it really hard to get something off the ground that really works. Now only if the copyright trolls would become far more aggressive than they are today, we would have some better feedback on the effectiveness of privacy tools...
Typically, that phone will be linked to your son within a few days, because of the movement and call patterns. The top five dialed numbers are typically used as a fingerprint to identify phone users, also for purposes of fraud detection.
A quick look at the Arrest Warrant learns that it has been anonymized by overlaying black bars; however, copy and paste the text will reveal the anonymized details... When will they ever learn?
The travesty here is of course that the court completely ignores the "necessary for a democratic society" clause, and automatically assumes that, since copyright is in the books, it meets that standard. However, that is not how basic rights are supposed to work. This means that if copyright (or some aspect of it) clashes with freedom expression, the burden is on the supporters of copyright to show that it (or the specific aspect) is necessary for a democratic society. This requires some positive evidence that without copyright, democratic society will suffer considerable harm. The matter of fact here is that cannot be show. On the contrary, while there might be some strong arguments for a fairly limited copyright, current copyright is extremely harmful to society -- and its current terms and reach cannot be justified at all with rational arguments. It is this argumentation that the court conveniently wishes to ignore.
For many, the Pirate Bay may be just a convenient way to get that latest blockbuster movie without dropping a few bucks in the cash-register of the local store, but for many, it has helped to obtain access to many types of very essential information that for one or another reason is not accessible in any other way. This might be because of lack of commercial viability of making older works available using the traditional channels (95% percent of all works in-copyright are not commercially available); irrational pricing policies that place material completely out-of-reach of poorer groups (think study books at western prices in developing countries that do not impose compulsory licensing schemes); monopoly abuse creating artificial scarcity, by purposely keeping materials off the market (Disney's infamous release scheme for its 'classic' animated movies), or outright attempts at censorship (key works that would help understand the rise of national-socialism). In bypassing all of this, the pirate bay can be considered freedom-fighters of the 21st century.
For this service, people will continue to turn to TPB or its successors, which will evolve to counter whatever strategy will be used to suppress it, as the service they provide is often a key to access to better education and information than any of the traditional channels can (is willing to) provide.--That is, until copyright law is reformed to remove its total disconnect from the current digital reality from the law.
Sounds very much like bonded labor (debt bondage) practices in some developing countries (such as India).
Debt bondage has been defined by the United Nations as a form of "modern day slavery" and is prohibited by international law. It is specifically dealt with by article 1(a) of the United Nations 1956 Supplementary Convention on the Abolition of Slavery.
Jeroen Hellingman (profile), 19 Feb 2013 @ 12:51am
Gross National Happiness in Bhutan....? Considering the treatment of various minorities, particularly the ethnic Nepalese in this country, I wouldn't take the "GNH" index of the worlds largest open-air museum that serious. I was glad this country wasn't mentioned in the previous installment, as it makes a complete mockery of the concept, but I smiled to early.
To get rid of the surpluses at the EPO, just introduce product liability. If they issue a patent against the rules, and this is found out later, they will need to pay all the damages it caused on society, including but not limited to license fees paid.
Of course this is intended as a stop-gap measure until we can find enough people with courage to abolish to utterly broken patent system altogether.
The database right is one of the few areas where we have empirical evidence of the negative impact of this kind of regulations. The evidence is clear, based on a comparison of the market for databases in the EU and the US, the conclusion was that the market in the US (without database rights) was 7 times as large as in the EU (with such rights).
I don't have a citation ready, but might be able to look up the relevant study.
I am just working through "A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin" in preparation for Project Gutenberg, and find of the struggle for the abolition of slavery having some interesting parallels with the ongoing copyright fight... Slavery is of course the bigger evil of the two, but you can see that increasingly ridiculous laws to keep the system intact. Laws forbidding people from teaching slaves to read and write, laws forbidding people to emancipate their slaves, from buying slaves to liberate them, and so on..., yes, even laws forbidding to discuss abolition altogether. So wait and see what the coming years will bring. It may become a crime to argue that copyright is something bad.
All it shows to me is that current copyright system is slowly breaking apart.
On the post: Google Fights In EU Court Against Ability Of One Country To Censor The Global Internet
The case involving Microsoft and data stored in Ireland is different in that the US court order would force Microsoft employees in Ireland to break Irish (EU) laws. Those employees are thus required to disobey any Microsoft order to do so, and Microsoft can rightly claim to be unable to comply. Again, the US court can still punish Microsoft for that, but that will not resolve the issue and will not enable Microsoft to comply.
With regard to Google: it not against US law to remove certain results from search results, so it could comply to the order without getting in legal trouble.
It would be nice though if there was a law that would require parties to disclose foreign censorship attempts, and a site with strong US backing where such reports must be published, as to make the foreign censorship attempts moot (and force foreign governments to use blocking at the ISP level; thereby giving up the pretence of supporting an uncensored internet).
On the post: Google Fights In EU Court Against Ability Of One Country To Censor The Global Internet
Right to Remember
If the EU Court of Justice grants itself extra-territorial jurisdiction in this case, Google will probably comply, but that will open up a strong business-case for splitting up companies along national borders, such that companies can serve their own public without undue interference from foreign courts.
An example: I regularly download public domain books using Google, but in the EU books published after 1868 are blocked. Many of these are PD in the EU as well, but since it is significantly harder to establish death dates instead of publication dates, Google can't be bothered. Even PD books scanned by Google in European libraries are blocked!
The Internet Archive, which has no European interests does not block those same books, and helpful people have been busy copying books from Google books to The Internet Archive in bulk. Furthermore, when books are not so copied, it also isn't very hard to use Tor or a VPN to get to the data on Google.
Similarly, since the GDPR, I am encountering more and more sites that maintain a complete block of visitors from the EU. Again, Tor or VPN are normally enough to bypass those restrictions.
The likely result of this war against the internet is that it teaches people to use those tools to get to information, making heavily encrypted and obfuscated connections the default, until such time countries are willing to disconnect themselves from the internet completely, with all the economic repercussions that will have.
On the post: Norwegian Court Orders Website Of Public Domain Court Decisions Shut Down With No Due Process
Case law is not binding in civil law, but it is very important to inform a judge of precedents, and can significantly shape the outcome of cases. If this is indeed an ex-parte decision, I hope it will be reverted when handled on appeal; if not, I hope the public outcry will be such that the Norwegian government will take its responsibility and publish all those cases itself on a government site, where they do belong.
We should praise Haakon Wium Lie for his contributions to CSS!
On the post: The Demise Of Copyright Toleration
Preferably new laws will be following the philosophy that since copyright is a trade regulation, nothing that happens within the privacy of the home or within the circle of relatives and friends, including postings on personal websites and social media, is relevant to it.
We already see some courts in some countries take the position that the copyright interest in private copying using torrent sites, etc., does not balance against the privacy rights of the person involved in such copying, and it would be good to have that encoded in law.
On the post: Project Gutenberg Blocks Access In Germany To All Its Public Domain Books Because Of Local Copyright Claim On 18 Of Them
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Web to blame
The exact problem Project Gutenberg is trying to resolve is preservation of historical and cultural artifacts: keeping culture alive, and offering a fertile field on which new artists and authors can build. Of course, we won't be teaching electronics from books published in the 50's. That is not the point. Preserving is more than just keeping a few copies in an archive never to be touched. Preserving means that it is accessible, can be used and reused by whoever wants it, so it can stay culturally relevant (if that is what the current or future public wants).
On the post: Project Gutenberg Blocks Access In Germany To All Its Public Domain Books Because Of Local Copyright Claim On 18 Of Them
Re: Re: All books still easily available in Germany....
Similarly, when enough people had enough of the current copyright rules, a democratic society will change them. Note also that the WTO TRIPS agreement are extremely one-sided: they call for free-trade, but as long as free movement of people is not included, that free-trade is a total fiction, leading to such absuses as forcing Chinese workers to work for redicilously low salaries, or allowing African mining companies to totally destroy the environment. A revision of those agreements is much overdue to make them sustainable.
On the post: Project Gutenberg Blocks Access In Germany To All Its Public Domain Books Because Of Local Copyright Claim On 18 Of Them
All books still easily available in Germany....
It is my opinion that copyrights are far too long. The proper response is not to attack the publisher in question (they are just using the legal system for their profit), but to steer towards more reasonable copyright terms (say at most 30 years from first publication), that is push for political change. With this in mind, the total block also helps putting this issue on the map.
For the affected works, they are all still easily available on the Internet Archive (https://archive.org/search.php?query=Thomas%20mann), as are many, many more. I wonder when they will be hit by a German court case. Of course, The Internet Archive foundation is much better funded, which may be the reason they first attacked Project Gutenberg to establish a precedent.
I am not a lawyer, but wouldn't it be an idea to counter-sue in the US (where the German plaintiff clearly has a business presence) for willful obstruction of a fully legal US operation (by trying to force Project Gutenberg to pay for IP blocking services and maintaining a foreign lawyer, all things not required by US law), and claim automatic reimbursement of all costs and possible fines the foreign court my attempt to impose.
On the post: UK Court Says Company Is Innocent In Massive Data Breach Caused By Vindictive Employee, But Must Nonetheless Pay Compensation
They could of course try to get that ex-employee to reimburse them, but it is doubtful his assets will cover that in full.
On the post: Techdirt Reading List: Foolproof: Why Safety Can Be Dangerous And How Danger Makes Us Safe
On the post: UK High Court Strips Away Short-Lived Private Copying Right, Buying Recording Industry's Demented Assertions
The only way out of this quagmire is to disallow the private copying exception, and return to the existing status quo that it is technically illegal but everybody ignores it, making a mockery of this bad law. You could start enforcing it ruthlessly, such that it really starts hurting, and people start caring enough to change their voting behavior, and get this madness out of the law-books.
On the post: UK Law Enforcement Told Miranda He'd Go To Jail If He Didn't Reveal His Email, Social Media Passwords
1. A way to put your account in "away" mode, such that no logging-in is possible for a certain period of time, or after a number of verification steps that involve more than just a password (similar to what facebook already does when you log-in from a foreign location).
2. A way to lock your account to a certain computer or location, or the availability of a certain file.
3. A separate distress password, that would put your account in a special state, such that certain information would be withheld or falsified, and information of people using that account will be tracked in more detail, and made available to the account holder; and finally, that any changes made using the distress password can be reverted in an easy way. Locations that use such distress passwords regularly should be tracked and logged more intensively. (The number of distress passwords should be unlimited, such that it is not possible to demand both the real and the distress password, and distinguish the two)
Note that these types of precautions also helps against criminal and school type of bullying, it is best to justify them for this purpose.
On the post: Kim Dotcom Planning To Invest In Privacy Startups
The second problem is to make a system that is secure, even in the face of gross end-user negligence and ignorance. It should be much simpler than the products currently available, without the need to educate end-user more than the obsolute minimum.
The third problem is how to make your product stand out, and guaranty it is really secure, as opposed to just security snake-oil, and robust against skilled and determined counterparts...
These requirements are quite conflicting, and will make it really hard to get something off the ground that really works. Now only if the copyright trolls would become far more aggressive than they are today, we would have some better feedback on the effectiveness of privacy tools...
On the post: Shallow Surveillance Efforts Like PRISM Will Only Catch The 'Stupidest, Lowest-Ranking Of Terrorists'
Response to: Ima Fish on Jun 25th, 2013 @ 7:53am
On the post: Teri Buhl -- 'Jurno,' Private Tweeter And Lawsuit Enthusiast -- Sentenced To 30 Days In Jail For Harassment
Anonymized PDF? No Way!
On the post: Rejection Of The Pirate Bay Founders' Appeal Sets Dangerous Precedent On Liability & Free Expression
For many, the Pirate Bay may be just a convenient way to get that latest blockbuster movie without dropping a few bucks in the cash-register of the local store, but for many, it has helped to obtain access to many types of very essential information that for one or another reason is not accessible in any other way. This might be because of lack of commercial viability of making older works available using the traditional channels (95% percent of all works in-copyright are not commercially available); irrational pricing policies that place material completely out-of-reach of poorer groups (think study books at western prices in developing countries that do not impose compulsory licensing schemes); monopoly abuse creating artificial scarcity, by purposely keeping materials off the market (Disney's infamous release scheme for its 'classic' animated movies), or outright attempts at censorship (key works that would help understand the rise of national-socialism). In bypassing all of this, the pirate bay can be considered freedom-fighters of the 21st century.
For this service, people will continue to turn to TPB or its successors, which will evolve to counter whatever strategy will be used to suppress it, as the service they provide is often a key to access to better education and information than any of the traditional channels can (is willing to) provide.--That is, until copyright law is reformed to remove its total disconnect from the current digital reality from the law.
On the post: EMI/Virgin Records Sues Platinum Selling Band For $30 Million... Despite Not Paying Them A Dime In Royalties
Bonded labor
Debt bondage has been defined by the United Nations as a form of "modern day slavery" and is prohibited by international law. It is specifically dealt with by article 1(a) of the United Nations 1956 Supplementary Convention on the Abolition of Slavery.
Maybe time to countersue...
On the post: Bhutan's Government: Gross National Happiness, Yes; Sense Of Humor, Not So Much
On the post: European Patent Office Gives Staff Bonus For Issuing Bumper Crop Of Patents: What Could Possibly Go Wrong?
Of course this is intended as a stop-gap measure until we can find enough people with courage to abolish to utterly broken patent system altogether.
On the post: Europe's 'Database Right' Could Throttle Open Data Moves There
I don't have a citation ready, but might be able to look up the relevant study.
On the post: Copyright Maximalists Attempt To Downplay Significance Of RSC Report By Chanting Their Mantra: Copyright Is Property
Re: Mental Substitution
All it shows to me is that current copyright system is slowly breaking apart.
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