copyright

Patrick Gower asks if Kim Dotcom should be extradited. I prefer rendition. Nevertheless this is not a matter for public opinion it is a simple matter of international law but 3News are trying to run the public opinion angle hard:

3 News can reveal the United States’ most powerful lawyer, Attorney-General Eric Holder, will visit New Zealand next week.

He’s responsible for trying to extradite Kim Dotcom to face copyright charges, and will attack that issue head on while here.

Mr Holder is in charge of the Department of Justice. The buck stops with him when it comes to Dotcom’s extradition to the United States.

He’ll be here next week, speaking at the University of Auckland on a highly relevant topic: cyber crime and international cooperation.

Obviously, Mr Holder wants Dotcom back in the US to face copyright charges.

But 3 News asked 1000 Kiwi voters what they thought, and, while 48 percent said Dotcom should stay, almost as many – 42 percent – said he should go, extradite him. The rest didn’t know.  Read more »

via: Mashable

Rick Falkvinge reports

The European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg is no dismissible small player. It is the court that oversees the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), which is part of the Constitution of the European Union and of most European states. When this court makes a decision, that decision gets constitutional status in all of Europe … it declared that the copyright monopoly stands in direct conflict with fundamental Human Rights, as defined in the European Union and elsewhere

Those pesky Europeans have been a thorn in the American record.  movie and software industries’ sides for decades, once forcing Microsoft to unbundle Internet Explorer from Windows as it was deemed anti-competitive.  So the decision that sharing is a Human Right will have far reaching consequences.    Read more »

The man who touts for the man who faces copyright violation charges complains to Twitter using copyright to try and shut down a parody account….

Public health warning – imposter now at @fisherjourno using personal pic for profile. Copyright complaint laid with Twitter #spikethatfake

— David Fisher (@DFisherJourno) January 19, 2013

I wonder what Gareth Hughes thinks about this?

“At the moment, if a company says ‘you’re breaching my copyright, you’re commenting on our activities or views’, [satirists] just don’t have a legal leg to stand-on,” Hughes said.

“I think it’s a big hole because it’s legitimate public commentary. Parody and satire have been used for literally thousands of years to make public and political commentary.”

Read more »

Little boy Gareth Hughes has a Member’s Bill in the Ballot called the Copyright (Parody and Satire) Amendment Bill. Understandably no one has paid much attention to it. But they should.

Hughes wants to allow [Greenpeace] to have the legitimate authority to use other peoples’ copyright [Sealord, Cottonsoft, Shell, McDonalds etc, etc] in order to allow [Greenpeace] to take the piss out of them.

Under the guise of saying we should allow this because some other country allows this, Little Boy Gareth Hughes is forgetting New Zealand actually endeavours to respect the intellectual property and copyrights. And that respect is actually why companies invest in little old New Zealand.

To supposedly “promote an issue freely under our understanding of freedom of speech” Greenpeace has obviously had a little chat to Hughes and instructed him to put this Bill in the ballot. Of course the bill has the full support of Sinn Fein the Green party, the political wing of Greenpeace.

Clearly Greenpeace is worried that their continued mocking of New Zealand companies and little concern for New Zealand employees, might come back and bite them in the arse in the form of a multi-million lawsuit that would clean out their coffers.

Perhaps this is a devious effort by Greenpeace to legitimise their actions to support their lobbying to achieve charitable status again.

Make no mistake, the Greens’ Greenpeace puppet masters want the legal right to abuse businesses they don’t like. How Little boy Gareth Hughes thinks that “the Bill has the potential to increase public respect of copyright as an institution” is anyone’s guess.

ᔥ Boing Boing

With all the fuss over our Fat Jolly German friend this is amusing:

This anonymously funded movie satirizing the corruption of the copyright system in the USA has been viewed more than 10,000,000 times. The creators, who maintain the website political-prostitution.com, explain that “the U.S. Government is making a major push to enforce its laws abroad with complete disregard for sovereignty of other nations in order to extradite so-called ‘criminals’ to the US where they will be tried for their ‘crimes’ in American court.”

Are Your Politicians For Sale? from Political Prostitution on Vimeo.

ᔥ Boing Boing

↬ StatsChat

The record company fat cats would have you think so, the movie barons likewise. They say that file-sharing is like shop-lifting. If they want to use the comparison then let’s extend it. Julian Sanchez from Ars Technica does exactly that in his article on the dodgy accounting and lies that the movie barons and record company executives and their lobbyist like to spout when they cry about  the harms that piracy causes and why they support draconian laws like SOPA and PIPA:

As a rough analogy, since antipiracy crusaders are fond of equating filesharing with shoplifting: suppose the CEO of Wal-Mart came to Congress demanding a $50 million program to deploy FBI agents to frisk suspicious-looking teens in towns near Wal-Marts. A lawmaker might, without for one instant doubting that shoplifiting is a bad thing, question whether this is really the optimal use of federal law enforcement resources. The CEO indignantly points out that shoplifting kills one million adorable towheaded orphans each year. The proof is right here in this study by the Wal-Mart Institute for Anti-Shoplifting Studies. The study sources this dramatic claim to a newspaper article, which quotes the CEO of Wal-Mart asserting (on the basis of private data you can’t see) that shoplifting kills hundreds of orphans annually. And as a footnote explains, it seemed prudent to round up to a million. I wish this were just a joke, but as readers of my previous post will recognize, that’s literally about the level of evidence we’re dealing with here.

In short, piracy is certainly one problem in a world filled with problems. But politicians and journalists seem to have been persuaded to take it largely on faith that it’s a uniquely dire and pressing problem that demands dramatic remedies with little time for deliberation. On the data available so far, though, reports of the death of the industry seem much exaggerated.

Interesting video and commentary on remix provisions of copyright law.

Remember all the good old Disney movies? Yeah, all of them came from works no longer under copyright protection at the time. The whole of the Disney Empire and all the childhood magic that it produces only exist because there was copyright free work for Walt Disney – you know the guy who actually started the whole company – to rework and update. But the corporate, Waltless Disney was the big pusher of the 1998 life +70 years copyright extension. It made sure that no one could make more popular versions of their movies in the same way they made a more popular version of Alice in Wonderland.

Check out the stupid process for disconnection under New Zealand’s copyright legislation our inept lawmakers passed….and we should trust them on Electoral reform? …I think not.

Juha writes at Boing Boing:

New Zealand’s new copyright law provides for Internet disconnection for anyone whose Internet connection has been used by someone (or several someoneones) who are accused of three acts of copyright infringement. While the UN has condemned this law as disproportionate and disrespectful of human rights, its proponents often talk of its “simplicity” as a virtue (as in, “well, anyone who thinks about infringing copyright will be able to understand this: you download, you lose your network connection”).

But as this three-page flowchart from the Telecommunications Carriers’ Forum demonstrates, the process of disconnection is so ramified and baroque that it requires deep study just to get your head around, and easily answering questions like, “How do I appeal this?” is anything but simple.

This is just one image of three.

Rick Shera has posted all of them.