In most reports following the MegaUpload shutdown, the site is exclusively portrayed as a piracy haven.
However, hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of people used the site to share research data, work documents, personal video collections.
As of today, these people are still unsure whether they will ever get their personal belongings back.
In a response, Pirate Parties worldwide have started to make a list of all the people affected by the raids, and they are planning to file an official complaint against the US authorities — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Channel 19 in Akron, Ohio was disappointed that it wouldn’t be allowed to take cameras into the corruption trial of Jimmy Dimora, a former county commissioner. But when life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla: they bring the courtroom proceeding to their viewers’ TV sets by re-enacting them with puppets — via Boing Boing
ACTA, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, is the notorious, unprecedented secret copyright treaty that was negotiated by industry representatives and government trade reps, without any access by elected representatives, independent business, the press, public interest groups, legal scholars, independent economists and so on. Time and again, the world’s richest governmental administrations (only rich countries were in the negotiation) told their own parliaments and congresses that they could not see what was in the treaty, nor know the details of the discussion.
Denmark’s EGE Carpets sells a line of carpeting inspired by HP Lovecraft illustrations called Dark Water. They were created by Kirill Rozhkov, who has a nice gallery of them on Behance — via Boing Boing
The Canberra Wikileaks cables revealed the US Embassy sanctioned a conspiracy by Hollywood studios to target Australian communications company iiNet through the local court-system, with the aim of establishing a binding common-law precedent which would make ISPs responsible for the unauthorised file-sharing of their customers.
Both the location, Australia, and the target, iiNet, were carefully selected. A precedent set in Australia would be influential in countries with comparable legal systems such as Canada, India, New Zealand and Great Britain. Australian telecommunications giant Telstra was judged too large for the purposes of the attack. Owing to its smaller size and more limited resources, iiNet was gauged the perfect candidate.
The involvement of major American studios in the offensive was suppressed. The case was filed by … the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and its international affiliate, the Motion Picture Association (MPA), but does not want that fact to be broadcasted,
the US Embassy, Canberra wrote. We will monitor this case … to see whether or not the ‘AFACT vs the local ISP’ featured attraction spawns a ‘giant American bullies vs little Aussie battlers’ sequel
— via redwolf.newsvine.com
PIPA and SOPA may be dead in the water for now, but it’s worth remembering that the most controversial part of the legislation is something the Australian Government has been thinking about for years.
One of the provisions in the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) that raised the most amount of anger, and was also one of the first to be quickly removed, was that the US Government would be able to force US-based internet service providers (ISPs) to block overseas websites found to contain copyright-infringing material.
Outrage ensued, the provision was removed, Wikipedia blacked out and the legislation was ultimately shelved.
In Australia, the Attorney-General’s Department has reassured us that the government currently has no plans of bringing in any new SOPA-style laws, instead preferring an industry-based model for dealing with piracy.
But website blocking has been on the cards for the Australian Government for many years, in the form of the mandatory internet filter — via redwolf.newsvine.com
The only thing cuter than this Game Master asking TeX gurus for help making his RPG notes look like they were scrawled by a gibbering madman, unhinged by the horrors he has witnessed
is the serious responses, with examples of output. He even got an answer saying how to typeset an Elder Sign! Truly, there is nothing more awesome than typesetting geeks helping gaming geeks — via Boing Boing
A TARDIS purse to carry with you time and space wherever you want and bigger on the inside — via Etsy
What initially sounded like a somewhat gormless idea — blacking out websites to draw users’ attention to the Stop Online Piracy and Protect IP acts before US Congress — has turned out to be dramatic intervention in the battle against SOPA and PIPA.
In particular, Wikipedia blacking out (easily circumvented by turning off javascript, but that’s beyond a lot of users) appears to have acted as a mass distribution mechanism for information on the draconian bills. Plainly it’s not just journalists who rely on the crowd-sourced banalities of Wikipedia; tens of thousands of people took to Twitter to alternately complain, bitch and cheer the removal of what is evidently a key resource for most of the Anglophone world’s students.
Timing is everything, however: the blackout coincided with a tipping point against the bills, with the DNS provisions crashing and burning, the Obama administration rejecting the bill and even Congressional supporters sniffing the wind and backing away from them. Doubtless they’ll try again — they receive too much in the way of bribes donations from movie and music companies not too — but SOPA has suffered a remarkable turnaround in fortunes over the holiday break.
This has plainly made the copyright industry deeply unhappy. And the unhappiness has rippled all the way to Australia, with Dan Rosen, of one of the local branches of the copyright industry, ARIA, writing for The Australian today to attack piracy. Rosen was clever enough not to outright back SOPA, but he backed Rupert Murdoch’s bizarre, straight-out-wrong attack on Google last week, and lamented Google’s lax attitude to intellectual property rights
and the need for a properly functioning market
for content rather than chaos — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Six Daleks, labeled as Pratt Whitney Rocketdyne engines
from the space shuttles Endeavour and Atlantis are invading being shipped to Stennis Space Centre in Mississippi to be refurbished for use in NASA’s new project, the Space Launch System (SLS) — via Neatorama
Believe it or not, to legally watch that famous Martin Luther King I Have a Dream
speech — arguably one of the most hallowed moments in American history — costs $10 thanks to the twisted state of United States copyright law. In related news, happy Martin Luther King Day!
The news of how MLK’s most famous moment costs money to watch is not a new one. But given the dramatic rise of the issue of digital rights, thanks largely in part to the dramatic controversy surrounding the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), the story seems unusually prescient this year. Alex Pasternack, the editor of Vice‘s tech site, Motherboard, blogged about the issue on a few months back:
If you weren’t alive to witness Martin Luther King’s
I Have a Dreamspeech on the Washington Mall 48 years ago this week, you might try to switch on the old YouTube and dial it up. But you won’t find it there or anywhere else; rights to its usage remain with King and his family…At the family’s Web site, videotapes and audiotapes of the speech can be purchased for $10 a piece. The family controls the copyright of the speech for 70 years after King’s death, in 2038
— via redwolf.newsvine.com
Weight loss brand Jenny Craig has pulled its sponsorship of the Kyle & Jackie O Show after just one day, admitting that it badly misjudged public perception of Kyle Sandilands
.
The company did so in the face of a growing international backlash. By last night Jenny Craig’s US Facebook page had been overrun by Australian consumers attacking the sponsorship. Many of them pointed out that a previous target of the show was former Jenny Craig ambassador Magda Szubanski who Sandilands had said would lose more weight in a concentration camp. That incident two years ago saw him temporarily taken off the air — via redwolf.newsvine.com
On the publication of the 21st Dalziel and Pascoe novel in 2007, an interviewer asked Reginald Hill if this was his 48th published novel to date. Hill replied: That sounds very reasonable. I counted religiously till I got to 10, then in a more secular fashion till I got to 20, and after that I lost interest in keeping a tally. I mean, if 20 doesn’t mean you’re a real writer, then what number does?
Such a self-effacing reply was typical of the modest and softly spoken Hill, who has died aged 75 after suffering from a brain tumour. One of Britain’s most consistently successful crime writers, he could easily have been mistaken for an absent-minded academic or a country parson — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Make Cthulhu a part of your every day life with this stylish fleece hat — via Etsy
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