Please, I challenge you to raise some moral support for the general attack on innovation by these lobbyists. Just give me one moral argument that has not already been completely refuted. Those of us who have paid close attention to these issues just can’t spend any more time explaining why file-sharing does not equal theft.
http://torrentfreak.com/the-moral-battle-between-pirates-and-lobbyists-120128/
It is undeniably true that the Dutch Republic maintained strict, emphatic laws defining “piracy” and calling for its severe punishment. It is also true that many convicted zeerovers and stroomrovers did pay a heavy price for their transgressions, earning sentences of extreme corporal punishment and execution by decree of the Dutch courts.
What is also indisputable, however, is that many of those seamen who were suspected, accused, or even convicted of piracy walked away with a much more mild reproach, or no reproach at all. Curiously enough, these individuals received much gentler penalties than
Dutch law stipulated, or they were pardoned and permitted to rejoin the ranks of respectable seventeenth-century Dutch society.
Sometimes, the authorities neglected even to charge these marauders at all, with the result that behavior which was officially “piratical” according to the letter of the law was allowed to continue unabated and uncondemned.
How can it be that the same society which crafted such exacting and specific legislation concerning piracy and its punishment could, at the same time, turn a blind eye to egregious examples of the very conduct it denounced?
The Dutch deplored “piracy” when their people suffered as a result of maritime marauding—when valuable trade goods and fellow Dutchmen were seized by the Dunkirkers, the Barbary corsairs, and other foreigners. Such miscreants were easy to hold up as examples of “godless” moral degeneration.
At the same time, however, the Dutch could not always recognize “piracy,” or did not always chose to name it as such, when members of their own society committed the crime. Copious and shrill Dutch laws tried to insist that “privateering” and “piracy” were altogether different practices and accorded the two trades separate spheres of action and identity. But while such pronouncements may have been legally valid, they were culturally untrue, thus accounting for inconsistencies in the prosecution of justice and ostensible lapses in societal judgment. Pervasive cultural values born of special economic, military, and political exigencies and fired in the kiln of deeply embedded maritime traditions engendered a context in which the differences between kaapvaart and zeeroverij were actually just the differences inherent in a Janus-like opposition, superficial dissimilarities that, at a deeper level, dissolved into a seamless continuum of maritime predation.
At a fundamental cultural level, then, the Golden Age privateer and pirate was one person, an ambiguous, symbolically charged figure who simultaneously incarnated both the glorified hero and the reviled criminal in the eyes of his home culture. And like so many other ironic dualities born of the Netherlands’ relationship with the sea, this figure—this liminal freebooter— was simultaneously both a blessing and a curse, two facets of one force. His identity was ambiguous and complex, allowing him to be simultaneously the patriotic Sea Beggar champion, the untamed reprobate of the high seas, and everything in between.
The Spanish may have thought that they were insulting the Dutch when they tarred them as rebel pirates, but their description was more accurate than they could have realized. For in very important ways, the maritime predator was profoundly important to the Dutch cultural psyche. Whether he be the pious mariner or the godless scoundrel, the Dutch freebooter was a character whose identity and activities were fundamentally entwined with the national spirit—indeed, with the very conception of the “imagined community”—of the Golden Age Dutch Republic.
Much more:
http://www.amazon.com/Piracy-Privateering-Golden-Age-Netherlands/dp/1403966923
Carpathia does have clauses in their contracts and terms of use referring to the obligations of their clients not to post infringing content on their servers. Is that enough to shield them?
http://www.talkleft.com/story/2012/1/23/53625/5333
See also:
Schmidt forwarded Job’s email onto other, undisclosed recipients.
“Can you get this stopped and let me know why this is happening?” Schmidt wrote.
Google’s staffing director responded that the employee who contacted the Apple engineer “will be terminated within the hour.”
He added: “Please extend my apologies as appropriate to Steve Jobs.”
More:
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/01/27/us-apple-lawsuit-idUSTRE80Q27420120127
Goldman Sachs Group Inc was sued for fraud by Dutch pension fund ABP over residential mortgage-backed securities that the Wall Street bank sold to the fund.
Goldman facilitated the “systematic abandonment” of underwriting guidelines and appraisal standards to package and sell securities to investors like ABP that were far riskier than represented, according to the lawsuit, which was filed Friday in New York state Supreme Court in Manhattan.
The size of the lawsuit brought by ABP, the pension fund for Dutch public employees, was not immediately clear.
The case is Stichting Pensioenfonds ABP v. The Goldman Sachs Group, 650264/2012, New York state Supreme Court.
Dutch language news article:
http://webwereld.nl/nieuws/109348/hacker-kraakt-bewijs-voor-onveiligheid-havengebied.html
More than half of the suppliers audited by Apple have violated at least one aspect of the code of conduct every year since 2007, according to Apple’s reports, and in some instances have violated the law. While many violations involve working conditions, rather than safety hazards, troubling patterns persist.
“Apple never cared about anything other than increasing product quality and decreasing production cost,” said Li Mingqi, who until April worked in management at Foxconn Technology, one of Apple’s most important manufacturing partners. Mr. Li, who is suing Foxconn over his dismissal, helped manage the Chengdu factory where the explosion occurred.
“Workers’ welfare has nothing to do with their interests,” he said.
Some former Apple executives say there is an unresolved tension within the company: executives want to improve conditions within factories, but that dedication falters when it conflicts with crucial supplier relationships or the fast delivery of new products. Tuesday, Apple reported one of the most lucrative quarters of any corporation in history, with $13.06 billion in profits on $46.3 billion in sales. Its sales would have been even higher, executives said, if overseas factories had been able to produce more.
Executives at other corporations report similar internal pressures. This system may not be pretty, they argue, but a radical overhaul would slow innovation. Customers want amazing new electronics delivered every year.
This is what happens when artists raise more money through levies than they would by performing, and when massive illegal downloading obliterates chances of getting your money back by selling music legitimately
A private copying levy (also known as blank media tax or levy) is a government-mandated scheme in which a special tax or levy(additional to any general sales tax) is charged on purchases of recordable media. Such taxes are in place in various countries and the income is typically allocated to the developers of “content”. (A distinction is sometimes made between “tax” and “levy” based on the recipient of the accumulated funds; taxes are received by a government, while levies are received by a private body, such as a copyright collective.)
Levy system may operate in principle as a system of collectivisation, partially replacing a property approach of sale of individual units.
Phorm’s service, which was initially trialled without customers consent by BT Retail, controversially used Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) technology in a way that many likened to Spyware. The firm was eventually forced to abandon its UK plans after a swathe of negative publicity made the service too hot for ISPs to handle.
“I’m trying to think of everything I did possibly wrong in the last 3 years and worrying about that and the next 3 years also, if we even have that long.”
For more than half a decade Hollywood and the recording industry have spent millions of dollars not so much on actually eliminating illegal content, but getting rid of links to content such as those found on BitTorrent.
But this week, without a single cease and desist being sent, cyberlockers across the globe not only self-deleted vast quantities of files, but in doing so made millions of links across thousands of ‘linking sites’ completely useless too.
For the operators of these linking sites and their uploaders, this week has been very hard work indeed. For some sites it was all too much and the shutters have simply come down.
The problem, it seems, is money. While there is money to be made in torrent sites, the content sharers there are largely altruistic. The cyberlocker scene is more complex and incestuous, with revenue being generated in a handful of basic ways on both legal and illegal content.
Much more:
http://torrentfreak.com/mega-aftermath-upheaval-in-pirate-warez-land-120128/
Newzbin is leaving the American Internet. In a couple of weeks we will cease to use the newzbin.com domain and move to newzbin2.es,” says the site’s Mr White.
“We regret the need to do this but, thanks to the retards in the US Government and the MPA, a ‘.com’ address is no longer viable. Really, any domain controlled by the US government proxy Verisign isn’t viable.”
http://torrentfreak.com/newzbin-dumps-com-promises-vpn-cyberlocker-services-120127/
Internet companies have been urged to establish a final standardised system that will allow users to control their privacy settings across websites.
Neelie Kroes, EU Commissioner responsible for the Digital Agenda, reiterated her demand that the technology be agreed upon by June in a speech at a meeting of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), according to a report by ZDNet.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/01/27/time_running_out_for_do_not_track_system/
Seemingly overnight, the country had made up its mind — the mere mention of “Hollywood” elicited boos from the audience during a debate among GOP candidates. MPAA members, who believed they had carefully laid the groundwork with the White House and Congress and that they had already made major concessions to placate their adversaries in the tech community, felt bitterly betrayed.
The legislation is in limbo now, though a source says there is movement — however incremental — toward a compromise. The MPAA says it’s in the midst of a major reset on how to approach the issue. And the blame game has begun, with many wondering how Hollywood allowed itself to be beaten so decisively.
“The MPAA and the different lobbying organizations are trying to do it old-school and by the book. They ran into new technologies, new strategies, new techniques. I imagine they’re sitting around discussing how they got beat.”
Much more:
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/sopa-jeffrey-katzenberg-chris-dodd-piracy-battle-284869
Dutch language news article:
http://webwereld.nl/nieuws/109345/cbp-onderzoekt-nieuw-privacybeleid-google.html
”I want to denounce in the strongest possible manner the entire process that led to the signature of this agreement: no inclusion of civil society organisations, a lack of transparency from the start of the negotiations, repeated postponing of the signature of the text without an explanation being ever given, exclusion of the EU Parliament’s demands that were expressed on several occasions in our assembly.”
“As rapporteur of this text, I have faced never-before-seen manoeuvres from the right wing of this Parliament to impose a rushed calendar before public opinion could be alerted, thus depriving the Parliament of its right to expression and of the tools at its disposal to convey citizens’ legitimate demands.”
“Everyone knows the ACTA agreement is problematic, whether it is its impact on civil liberties, the way it makes Internet access providers liable, its consequences on generic drugs manufacturing, or how little protection it gives to our geographical indications.”
“This agreement might have major consequences on citizens’ lives, and still, everything is being done to prevent the European Parliament from having its say in this matter. That is why today, as I release this report for which I was in charge, I want to send a strong signal and alert the public opinion about this unacceptable situation. I will not take part in this masquerade.”
https://www.laquadrature.net/wiki/ACTA_rapporteur_denounces_ACTA_mascarade
Some differ so much from our ideas that we will not be able to exist there. Others are similar but, for historical or cultural reasons, restrict certain types of content, such as France or Germany, which ban pro-Nazi content.
Until now, the only way we could take account of those countries’ limits was to remove content globally. Starting today, we give ourselves the ability to reactively withhold content from users in a specific country — while keeping it available in the rest of the world. We have also built in a way to communicate transparently to users when content is withheld, and why.
More:
Which is sort of awkward because the Dutch government did provide verbal approval to the European Union in December last year
Dutch language news article:
http://webwereld.nl/nieuws/109330/nederland-mist-ondertekening-acta-verdrag—update.html
Or people disappearing,
…and a ban on the use of the characters D, I and S because they are part of the DISNEY brand.
Dutch language news article:
http://webwereld.nl/column/109325/column-bert-brussen-geschrapt-door-censuurteam.html
