Twitter has suspended the account of Sci-Hub, a site that provides access to paywalled academic journal articles. The suspension comes in the midst of a court case in India between publishers and the site.
Despite ringing denunciations from small EU tech businesses, giant EU entertainment companies, artists' groups, technical experts, and human rights experts, and the largest body of concerned citizens in EU history, the EU has concluded its "trilogues" on the new Copyright Directive, striking a deal...
Researchers taking a stand against Elsevier. Academics have protested against Elsevier's business practices for years with little effect. The key to all these issues is the right of authors to achieve easily-accessible distribution of their work. If you would like to declare publicly that you will not support any Elsevier journal unless they radically change how they operate, then you can do so by filling in your details in the box below.
The last 20 years of Internet policy have been dominated by the copyright war, but the war turns out only to have been a skirmish. The coming century will be dominated by war against the general purpose computer, and the stakes are the freedom, fortune and privacy of the entire human race.
I wrote a short reply piece to an essay by the German politician Ansgar Heveling about the SOPA/PIPA war. I hadn’t realized they would translate the piece. Here is the...
This week started with a terrifying bang, when German and French negotiators announced a deal to revive the worst parts of the new EU Copyright Directive though a compromise on "Article 13," which requires copyright filters for any online service that allows the public to communicate.The Franco-...
Die Abkürzung ACTA steht für das plurilaterale Handelsabkommen «Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement». Die teilnehmenden Nationen und Staatenbünde geben an, damit den Kampf gegen Produktpiraterie verbessern zu wollen.
“I want journalists, publishers and authors to be paid fairly for their work, whether it is made in studios or living rooms, whether it is disseminated offline or online, whether it is published via a copying machine or commercially hyperlinked on the web.” – President Juncker, State of the Union 2016
Since their release in 1978, hit albums like Bruce Springsteen’s “Darkness on the Edge of Town,” Billy Joel’s “52nd Street,” the Doobie Brothers’ “Minute by Minute,” Kenny Rogers’s “Gambler” and Funkadelic’s “One Nation Under a Groove” have generated tens of millions of dollars for record companies. But thanks to a little-noted provision in United States copyright law, those artists — and thousands more — now have the right to reclaim ownership of their recordings, potentially leaving the labels out in the cold.
Es kann der Frömmste nicht in Frieden verlinken, wenn es dem bösen Medienmogul nicht gefällt. Wenige Tage nach dem offiziellen Launch der Kommentar-Plattform Commentarist haben die Verlagshäuser SZ und FAZ dem kleinen Startup-Unternehmen durch Abmahnungen und Androhung „massiver rechtlicher Schritte“ den Stecker gezogen.
Sie glauben, die geplanten Internetgesetze in den USA gingen Sie persönlich nichts an? Irrtum: SOPA und PIPA könnten auch Ihre Online-Partizipation behindern
SOMETIMES it takes but a single pebble to start an avalanche. On January 21st Timothy Gowers, a mathematician at Cambridge University, wrote a blog post outlining the reasons for his longstanding boycott of research journals published by Elsevier. This firm, which is based in the Netherlands, owns more than 2,000 journals, including such top-ranking titles as Cell and the Lancet. However Dr Gowers, who won the Fields medal, mathematics’s equivalent of a Nobel prize, in 1998, is not happy with it, and he hoped his post might embolden others to do something similar.
A recent proposal recommending the deployment of surveillance software in order to monitor those accessing academic material has drawn fire from digital rights advocates and scientists.
It has become fashionable to toss copyright, patents, and trademarks – three separate and different entities involving three separate and different sets of laws – plus a dozen other laws into one pot and call it “intellectual property”. The distorting and confusing term did not become common by accident. Companies that gain from the confusion promoted it. The clearest way out of the confusion is to reject the term entirely.
Der Doyen der Freien-Software-Szene hat sich dafür ausgesprochen, Urheberrechte nach fünf Jahren auslaufen zu lassen, und während dieser Frist abgestufte Nutzungsfreiheiten für unterschiedliche Werksgattungen einzuführen.
Die EU-Kommission hat eine Auswertung der Eingaben zur Konsultation über die Richtlinie zur Durchsetzung der Rechte an geistigem Eigentum veröffentlicht, wonach Produzenten und Verwerter unter anderem eine Vorratsdatenspeicherung fordern. (Stefan Krempl)
Prime Minister Stephen Harper and the leaders of G8 countries closed their recent summit in Hokkaido, Japan by encouraging “the acceleration of negotiations to establish a new international legal framework, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), and seek to complete the negotiation by the end of this year.” (By Michael Geist)