Swedish courts will soon be able to force the country’s Internet providers to produce information on suspected file-sharers in a move to crackdown on piracy
Kentucky Representative Tim Couch filed a bill this week to make anonymous posting online illegal. The bill would require anyone who contributes to a website to register their real name, address and e-mail address with that site. Their full name would be used anytime a comment is posted
On 22 June 2007, Defence Secretary Robert Gates acknowledged that the Pentagon’s network had been successfully attacked the previous Wednesday, and that this attack was responsible for a disruption in email service to some 1,500 Pentagon employees. At the time, Gates downplayed the attack, saying that it affected only the Office of the Secretary of Defence’s non-classified e-mail service and that there was no anticipated adverse impact on ongoing operations
. It seems that the adverse impact of the June attack may have been much greater than Gates’ early guidance implied. According to a top DoD technology official quoted at GovernmentExecutive.com, the thieves behind that attack seized an amazing amount
of data
The British Government is considering a proposal to end the automatic right of Commonwealth nationals to live in the UK using ancestry visas
The European Union Commissioner for the Internal Market has today proposed extending the copyright term for musical recordings to 95 years. He also wishes to investigate options for new levies on blank discs, data storage and music and video players to compensate artists and copyright holders for legal copying when listeners burn an extra version of an album to play one at home and one in the car — via Slashdot
Last week a Danish court ordered the ISP Tele2 to block its customers access to The Pirate Bay. The decision heated the debate on ISPs Internet filtering, and it now turns out that filtering traffic to The Pirate Bay is actually illegal according to European law
The Italian parliament may have unwittingly legalised sharing music over P2P networks. A new copyright law, passed by both houses of parliament, would allow Italians to freely share music over the Internet as long as it was noncommercial and the music degraded
The Australian Attorney-General’s department is inviting submissions from the public on copying of movies and images in different formats for private use. These were sections of the Copyright Amendment Act introduced in December 2006 that made it legal for Australians to do things they’d been doing for decades, such as recording a tv broadcast to tape or disc, but illegal to watch such recordings more than once. The Minister is required by the Act to review these exceptions after two years — via Boing Boing
Canadians can breathe a sigh of relief as the Canadian Federal Court of Appeal quashed a proposed levy on digital music players late last week. The proposed levies weren’t cheap: CA$5 on each Memory Stick or SD card between 1GB and 4GB of memory, and digital audio recorder
levies which top out at CA$75 for players with 30GB+ of space
Last week, seven Swedish MPs wrote to a prominent Swedish tabloid newspaper Expressen
to express their dissatisfaction with proposals for dealing with copyright infringers. Now, that number has increased to 13, and the issue seems to keep growing
Telephone companies have cut off FBI wiretaps used to eavesdrop on suspected criminals because of the bureau’s repeated failures to pay phone bills on time. More than half of 990 bills to pay for telecommunication surveillance in five unidentified FBI field offices were not paid on time, the report shows. In one office alone, unpaid costs for wiretaps from one phone company totaled $66,000
The UK government has published guidelines for the application of a law that makes it illegal to create or distribute so-called hacking tools
Complaints about online directory assistance sites that reveal extensive personal data have prompted Governor M Jodi Rell to start developing a legislative package to help. In a news release, Rell said Monday that she’s received complaints about online search engines that list not only names, addresses, and telephone numbers but also people’s ages, places of work, and other personal information. Rell said she plans to propose restrictions that would likely be in the form of an opt-out
registry that’s an electronic version of the state and federal Do Not Call
list, which blocks telemarketing calls to citizens whose phone numbers are on the list
The WTO’s recent ruling on Antigua’s complaint against the US over the banning of online gambling resulted in a payment to the island nation much less than they asked for. It appears, though, that this payment was just part of the WTO’s compensation package for Antigua/Barbuda. Via Kotaku, the Hollywood Reporter notes that the Caribbean country can now freely ignore US copyright laws — legally. This dispensation is apparently limited to some $21 million a year — via Slashdot
From 20 January 2008 new content laws introduced by the Federal Government will force sites to verify the age of users before accessing content intended for mature audiences. The laws bring internet classification into line with Film and Book classification laws and completely prohibits X18+ and RC content from the internet. ACMA (The Australian Communications and Media Authority) claims that adults will not be affected by the new laws, yet user-generated and even chatrooms are required to be assessed for classification and powers are granted to ACMA to send take down
notices to offending sites — via Slashdot
Former FBI director J Edgar Hoover had a plan to arrest 12,000 Americans he deemed a possible threat to national security, declassified papers reveal. The FBI chief sent his proposal to US President Harry Truman just after the start of the Korean War in 1950. He asked the president to declare the mass arrest necessary to counter treason, espionage and sabotage
. There is no evidence any part of the plan was ever approved
An English court has banned a teenage boy from posting abusive or insulting comments on a social networking web site after judging his participation in the network to be anti-social. Norwich Youth Court in eastern England issued an Anti-Social Behavior Order (Asbo) against a local 17-year-old implicated in petty criminal boasting on the online community Bebo
You know you’ve really made it as an online entity when an entire country bans your site. In terms of a rite of passage, it’s just after the wide-spread adoption and critical mass stages (which of course is followed by random companies banning you, and mainstream newspapers writing about studies on how inefficient the economy has become since your company’s existence). Twitter now joins the lauded halls of the sites banned for presumably speaking too freely; the United Arab Emirates has decided that its residents shall tweet no more
Federal prosecutors tried unsuccessfully to force Amazon.com to identify thousands of innocent customers who bought books online, then abandoned the idea after a judge rebuked them. In an order that was sealed but has now become public, US District Judge Stephen Crocker rejected the Justice Department’s subpoena for details on Amazon’s customers and their purchasing habits. Prosecutors had claimed the details would help them prove their case against a former Madison, Wisconsin, city official charged with tax evasion related to selling used books through Amazon
Five Australian-based journalists were deliberately killed by Indonesian troops in East Timor in 1975, an Australian coroner’s court has ruled. Dorelle Pinch, deputy coroner of New South Wales, said the killings could constitute a war crime. The two Australians, two Britons and a New Zealander, known as the Balibo Five, were killed to stop them exposing the invasion of East Timor
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