3 April 2019 — Open Rights Group
Open Rights Group has announced ORGCon is back on 13 July 2019 with Edward Snowden as our keynote speaker! From the use of data in the democratic process to the impact of algorithms on free expression, we’ll be covering all things digital at our London conference. Early bird tickets are on sale now.
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27 March 2019 — OpenMedia
Yesterday, the European Parliament held the final vote on the controversial EU Copyright Directive, which is one of the most unpopular pieces of legislation in European history.1 The final vote approved Articles 11 (Link Tax) and 13 (mandatory content filtering) of the Copyright Directive, in a vote of 348 to 274.2
13 January 2019 — Electronic Frontier Foundation
The new EU Copyright Directive is progressing at an alarming rate. This week, the EU is asking its member-states to approve new negotiating positions for the final language. Once they get it, they’re planning to hold a final vote before pushing this drastic, radical new law into 28 countries and 500,000,000 people.
24 May 2018 — Savethelink
The message is clear: The Copyright in the Digital Single Market Directive is a broken disastrous proposal. It contains a plan for licensing fees for sharing news links which would result in weakening the foundation of the Web, a loss of media diversity and harm acess to information across Europe.
19 January 2018 — OpenMedia
Since the 1700s, a form of copyright law has ensured creators could profit from their original work before it passed into the public domain. In the 20th century that began to change, as ‘rights holders’ more aggressively expanded the scope of these laws, profiting handsomely – often at the expense of the creators – and turning aggressive litigation, with tenuous connection to original work, into just another revenue stream.
21 September 2017 — OpenMedia
Today we have good news for free speech!
A leak from the European Council1 has revealed that Germany, the largest and most powerful member of the EU, is adding its voice to criticism of the controversial mass content filtering proposal we’ve been fighting together.
6 May 2017 — FAIR
Janine Jackson interviewed Kyle Wiens about copyright overreaching for the April 28, 2017, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
31 October 2016 — TRNN
Professor Peter Drahos says a global effort will be needed to keep knowledge in the public domain
28 October 2016 — TRNN
Professor Peter Drahos explains the TRIPS Agreement gave multinational corporate owners of intellectual property rights a global form of private taxing power (inc. transcript)
30 October 2016 — TRNN
Professor Peter Drahos says the story of the trade agreement is not just a story of power, it’s also a story of clever psychology
27 October 2016 — TRNN
The globalization of intellectual property rights will not improve trade, competition, or the livelihood of workers; it leads to underdevelopment, says professor Peter Drahos (inc. transcript)
25 October 2016 —TRNN
The architects of this trade agreement saw great profit from controlling the building blocks of the biological and digital technologies of the future, says professor Peter Drahos (inc. transcript)
24 October 2016 — TRNN
In this 7 part series, Professor Peter Drahos explains how multinationals from US, Europe, and Japan collaborated to create a global platform for multinationals to privatize knowledge
14 September 2016 — OpenMedia
It’s official.
The EU Commission has officially released some of the worst copyright laws in the world, including unprecedented new Link Tax powers for publishing giants.1, 2
Earlier today, the Commission presented these new rules to the world. Over the past few weeks, leaks suggested the rules were worse than originally feared,3 and today’s announcement proved it. We have to stop this now.
26 August 2016 — OpenMedia
Documents leaked this morning1 prove that the EU Commission misled the public earlier this week when it tweeted, “The @EU_Commission does not have any plans to tax hyperlinks.”2
You were lied to. We were lied to. The public was lied to.
These out-of-touch unelected bureaucrats think that if they call the link tax something else – like “neighbouring rights”3,4 – they can trick people like you and me, and slip this terrible legislation past us when they think nobody’s watching. Well they’re wrong. Dead wrong.
10 June 2016 — FAIR
Politico (6/9/16) reports that the New York Times is under fire for demanding that two media critics—Daniel Hallin and Charles Briggs—pay the newspaper a total of $1,884 for using three brief quotes from Times articles in their new book Making Health Public.
Critics do not generally need to seek permission nor pay royalties for quotations from the works they criticize—the “fair use” provision in copyright law authorizes such quotes for the purposes of commentary and criticism. But the Times, it seems, has a very restrictive view of fair use when it comes to its own material. As the authors write in a Kickstarter trying to cover the costs incurred by the Times‘ demands:
14 February 2014 — RT
Managing a site with links to freely available copyrighted content does not amount to online piracy, an EU court has ruled. The justices advised their Swedish colleagues, who are reviewing a journalists’ lawsuit against a link-hosting website.
26 November 2013 — Falkvinge on Infopolicy
Copyright maximalists want all sorts of new laws to “help authors get paid”. Well, I’m a published author, and all their efforts to “help” cost me money. Even if we strictly limit the argument to printed books, copyright maximalists still only succeed in harming authors and publishers. This is how.
22 November 2013 — Electronic Frontier Foundation
The abuse of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s notice-and-takedown process to silence lawful speech is well-documented and all too common. Far less common, though, is a service provider that is willing to team up with its users to challenge that abuse in court.
The New Dark Age 