The European Court rules to balance the rights of copyright holders against citizenship rights. Finally some sense from the courts. The SABAM vs Scarlet case from Belgium has finally reached the end of the road. The European Court of Justice has ruled that EU Law prohibits national courts from forcing Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to filter and block all users, including alleged and proven copyright infringers. …
What am I saying
Sometime, you just have to use a Wordle, here’s mine of this blog, as at today.
Software Migration
I had reason to revist some of the thinking behind my book on Software Migration, the key lesson of which is that the drivers and hence the tactics for software migrations vary. I worked with colleagues at Sun Microsystems in writing a book, which while called “Migrating to the Solaris Operating System”, and thus maybe past its best, it had a tag line of “The discipline of UNIX-to-UNIX Migrations”. It’s available to buy on Amazon, or possibly available on the.net, the link I published in 2011, seems to have gone. The rest of this blog, highlights the super strategies and lists two gotchas. …
And for our next trick, we’ll make the Pirate Bay disappear
The Guardian ran a story yesterday which states that a coalition of music publishing corporations have threatened BT with court action to get them to “block” the Pirate Bay since they feel they have a legal precedent in the newzbin2 judgements. …
More on the Newzbin2 affair
Last week, BT and the Movie Studios returned to court to discuss the terms of the newzbin2 injunction. The judgement is a pretty much a victory for the Studios. BT must use Cleanfeed to block notified sites, they must use it to block all addresses notified by the applicants, the proposal that only sites that ‘predominantly’ induce copyright infringement should be blocked was rejected, they can’t turn the blocking off for operational reasons without the permission of the applicants, they can’t terminate the injunction in circumstances where the applicants don’t injunct BT’s competitors in a reasonable time frame, BT have to pay for the enforcement, BT have no right to claim damages against the studios for consequential liability, BT have to pay the studio’s court costs to the point of the initial newzbin2 injunction, costs incurred after the injunction are born be each side. …
Three Wise Men, caption competition
The London Evening Standard ran this picture, with some rubbish about how Cameron brought his intellectual friend along to get Obama to lean on Merkel and Sarkozy to rescue the Euro (and lets face it, the Pound). Perhaps you can do better…
Please comment… …
A Free Digital Society, with Richard Stallman
So I went to hear Richard Stallman speak at an ORG meeting. He was late, and couldn’t be contacted because he doesn’t use a mobile phone, or not one that you can make calls to.
He started with the recording rules and distribution rules. Any films must be open format friendly, and published under CC-ND terms. There are to be no pictures posted to Facebook, of him presumably, anyway his advice is to “Unfriend Facebook Today”. …
Royal Equality and Digital Freedom
So the #CONDEM government plans to introduce a “Royal Equality Act” before the next General Election. What do you suppose that’ll do then. Make the Royals equal to the rest of us? Levy taxes on their private income, Remove the Prince of Wales veto on UK politics? Nah! It’s about who succeeds King William!
I suppose that @Nick_Clegg will have to let the Tories bang on about this and agree to the use of parliamentary time, but I remember his promise to Repeal the Digital Economy Act, so in my mind and that of many others, I can think of much better things our politicians should be doing. The “Great Freedom Bill”, this ain’t. …