Yesterday, I read and commented on Judge Purdy’s judgement as to why Richard O’Dwyer had committed a serious crime in the this country and hence was liable to extradition to the USA. Here’s the source of my outrage,
he is due to face charges of copyright infringement while no-one claims he has copied anything
Not right! …
It seems the Liberal Democrats are gearing up to oppose the extradition of Richard O’Dwyer. Good. He shouldn’t be extradited; it’s not the asynchronous nature of the Anglo US extradition treaty which is the problem here. In order to be extradited, you need to have a case to answer that you have broken a serious law in both jurisdictions. …
Wired reports that, three days ago, the US 2nd Circuit Court of Appeal has declared that code is not property and cannot therefore be stolen; there is no intent to deprive the owner of the object’s use. They also ruled that the perpetrator, there is no doubt that the code was removed from Goldman Sachs network, could not be prosecuted under the US Economic Espionage Act since the code in question was not used in commerce. I don’t actually know what the code did, but we can be sure that it was used in commerce, or it was a regulatory compliance program. If it didn’t have one of these two purposes, Goldman Sachs wouldn’t be doing it, and wouldn’t have wanted to keep it secret.
Does this mean that only traded software can be the object of the espionage act? If so I am not sure this is where we want to be.
Part of Goldman Sachs’ problem is that they wanted to keep the code secret and there are many reasons to want to do so. However patent and copyright protection require the intellectual property owner to publish their ideas, or the expression of their ideas. Another part of the problem is that people wanted to see Aleynikov go to prison and breach of employee confidentiality wasn’t sufficient to get him there.
As techdirt.com reports in their article,
Still, the overall ruling here is good, though it could have been more complete.
I wonder if there will be further appeals, but it’s an important stake in the ground. Copyright infringement is not theft.
This was also covered at engadget.com. …
I am standing for election to the Open Rights Group (ORG) Board. I hope to offer experience, knowledge and commitment.
I work in the information technology business and came to ORG via the Open Source and Software Freedom campaigns. I submitted personal evidence to the Government consultation on peer to peer file sharing in 2009, started following the ORG shortly after. …
In Feburary, TechDirt discovered that one of it’s key anti-SOPA polemics had been deleted from Google’s index as a result of a bogus DMCA takedown notice. The article goes onto detail similar dirty tricks on Torrentfreak.
In my article, “More on the Newzbin2 affair”, I comment on BT’s attempt to clarify the initial injunction and the issue of false notifications and liability for acting on them. The judge said there was no evidence that false notification would be significant. Despite the well documented existence of speculative invoicing scams, this would seem to add to the evidence that while accusing innocent infringers is free of consequence, some at least will do it. …
The queue to get into Parliament last week was a bit long, so long I missed the first presentation at Pictfor’s Consumer’s and Creators in the 21st Century Copyright World, although I did take some good pictures. Saskia Wetzel was the first person on, and it’s a shame I missed it; she was the only speaker designated as a consumer representative. … …
I was going to polish my notes from the #Pictor meeting last week, which has published its own precis of events, but the Wall Street Journal and the BBC are both carrying a story sourced from Boston Consulting that the UK’s internet industry is now over 8% of GDP, and grew at over 10% during the period of the study. This is while the UK GDP grew by 0.7% over the last year and there remain fears of a return to recession.
James Firth, at his blog, “Slightly Right of Centre”, tries to evaluate the contribution of the Internet industry vs. the “creative” industry and makes the point that the Digital Economy Act was passed to help and support a very important wealth creator in our economy. It’s a shame, well, more truthfully a point of design, that it almost certainly discriminates against an even more important one. The figure bandied about by BIS at the time the time the act was passed was that creative industries were about 7% of GDP; the internet has overtaken it.
No matter how one does the sums, maybe its time to back a winner! …
I attended the PICTFOR meeting on Tuesday, having prepared for it by researching the state of politics in relation to “Orphan Works”. I have been pointed at this issue by Dr James Boyle in his Orgcon 2010 speech and more recently by this paper, called “Orphan Works: Mapping the Possible Solution Spaces” by David Hansen. …
Red Sin Censura, published an Internet in Danger page the other day, which pointed me at Le Monde’s “What’s wrong with ACTA”. This has been worrying me, since much of the opposition has been based solely on secrecy, although this bleeds into democratic oversight. Since the treaty has been negotiated primarily between democracies and their politicians and public servants, to me secrecy alone is not sufficient to win broad support to opposition to the proposed treaty; there’s a lot of people that trust their politicians. …
The UK’s Serious Organised Crime Agency, part of the UK’s small national police force and a Home Office QUANGO, undertook a US Government style raid on the web site of rnbxclusive.com, which was reported by Techdirt in an article called “UK Now Seizing Music Blogs (With American Domains) Over Copy Right Claims”. The most startling part of this, for Brits, is the amazing splash screen factoids that greeted visitors to the site, which among other things states that the people behind the site have been arrested under suspicion of fraud, they know who you are (or more accurately, who your ISP is), the penalties for conspiracy to commit fraud and the quote below. The most startling part of this for Yanks and their law enforcement officers is that a foreign law enforcement agency can take down a .com i.e. a US site.
Glyn Moody in a an article called “Serious Organised Crime Agency Takes Down Music Site”, after talking to SOCA states that SOCA are pursuing enquiries to prove, to the point of arrest, that some, their notice said most, of the sound tracks previously available had been obtained pre-release by hacking. This is a crime under UK law and the copyright owners and licensees deserve the protection of the law, as the accused deserve a fair trial.
Arstechnia also comments in an article, entitled “Police: download a file, go to jail for 10 years and pay an “unlimited fine”. They clearly examine the notice and deconstruct the lies and disinformation. The notice includes statements about theft and the economic impact of the downloaders actions. i.e.
“As a result of illegal downloads young, emerging artists may have had their careers damaged. If you have illegally downloaded music from this site, you will have damaged the future of the music industry.”
It’s a disgrace that a law enforcement agency is publishing the BPI’s propaganda. The interests of a copyright licensors and the interests of artists are not synonymous!
Why are the police using our taxes to fund such bullshit? Why use British taxes to fund a free advert pointing at an american registered web site for so-called legal music? How much would that cost on google?
Innocent until proven guilty means that even the most egregious, industrial scale pirates are innocent until proven guilty.
Others have made the point that this notice may well prejudice any trial. I am also informed that the scary spyware doesn’t work with Mac or Chrome. Also IP addresses are private data under UK and European law, the use of the program code that displays the IP address requires a number of compliance actions. Perhaps I’ll check if SOCA registered this use of private data under the Data Protection Act. …