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• The OSI Categorically Rejects IIPA’s special pleadings against Open Source
  Official statement from OSI denouncing the IIPA’s warped view of the world that says developing nations should not be mandating open source while the US states and federal agencies get right along with the same thing. Very welcome statement that I know we’ll see Open Source For America reacting to – I hope other countries will also flag the issue with their US diplomatic contacts.
  (tags: OSI OpenSource Trade USA IIPA Special301 FOSS Freedom)
• Unintended Consequences: Twelve Years under the DMCA
  Excellent paper from the EFF provides us with the lessons of history as the UK considers implementing similar bad legislation. It’s not so much the primary objectives of the law that are the problem (although those are pretty obnoxious). It’s the fact that, through careless drafting (or rather drafting with the assistance of the wrong lobbyists), a whole range of loopholes are created which lead to unintended consequences like censorship, anticompetitive litigation and early monopolisation. This really is a document I want my representatives to read.
  (tags: UK DigitalEconomyBill debill EFF Rights DMCA Fredom Abuse Censorship History ACTA)
• New amendment gives copyright owners a blank cheque for web censorship
  “Imagine that, in the Summer of last year, you had been following the MP’s expenses scandal and heard that The Telegraph was publishing a rather less redacted version that MP’s were prepared to give us. Interested, you navigated your way to http://www.telegraph.co.uk only to find it was not responding. After some searching around and asking friends you discover that the website has been blocked by most major UK ISP’s. It seems a junior official in Parliament had asked them to block The Telegraph for copyright violation.”
  (tags: DigitalEconomyBill Freedom Censorship UK Parliament Internet Rights DMCA)
• Free Software is about Freedom
  Wading into the “Special 301 list” debate I explored at great length last weekend, this posting introduces the great analogy of asking if the same complaints would apply if they related to an own vs rent model on cars instead of software: “But one argument that doesn’t make sense is to say that government would be ‘distorting the market’ if it decided to buy cars rather than leasing them.”
  (tags: rights FOSS OpenSource Freedom Government Policy Trade Embargo Special301)
• Let The Riverrun: Carly Simon
  If you’re a Carly Simon fan then this free track is a great gift from Amazon, assuming you have a US account with them.
  (tags: Amazon Music)

Filed under: Links | Tagged: Digital Economy Bill, DMCA, IIPA, Open Source, OSI | 3 Comments »