The Pirate Bay has successfully appealed the decision of an Italian judge who had ordered ISPs to block access to the popular BitTorrent tracker last month. The Court of Bergamo decided that this block was unlawful, and that Italian users should regain access to the site
It will soon be easier to switch your business to another bank, with the Australian Payments Clearing Association confirming financial institutions will be able to supply customers’ direct debit and credit arrangements by 1 November. The listing and switching
service is part of a Labor Government reform package aimed at promoting competition announced in February
Two leading dissident Burmese websites have been shut down by a sophisticated cyber attack believed to have been initiated by the military junta a day before the first anniversary of Burma’s so-called Saffron Revolution. The web sites, run by the Democratic Voice of Burma and The Irrawaddy news magazine, are operated by exiles in Norway and Thailand respectively. Both were disabled on Wednesday. Inside Burma, internet services were reportedly running slowly, suggesting an attempt by the regime to stem the flow of information in and out of the country at such a sensitive time
Two digital rights advocacy groups have filed a lawsuit against the Office of the US Trade Representative in an attempt to get the office to turn over information about a secret international treaty being negotiated to step up cross-border enforcement of copyright and piracy laws. The Electronic Frontier Foundation and Public Knowledge filed the lawsuit Wednesday after USTR ignored their repeated requests to turn over information about the proposed Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement
A court has ruled that a site providing links to P2P downloads is operating legally. The Provincial Court of Madrid ruled that Sharemula.com, a site offering eDonkey links to movies, music, software and games does not break the law. The court’s decision is final and cannot be appealed
The Electronic Frontier Foundation filed a lawsuit against the National Security Agency and other government agencies today on behalf of AT&T customers to stop the illegal, unconstitutional and ongoing dragnet surveillance of their communications and communications records. The five individual plaintiffs are also suing President George W Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Cheney’s chief of staff David Addington, former Attorney General and White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales and other individuals who ordered or participated in the warrantless domestic surveillance
Can a city stop people from posting a link to its Web site? That’s the question at the centre of a federal lawsuit brought by a Sheboygan woman against the mayor and other officials there, in what appears to be a first-of-its-kind case, according to an Internet law expert
The federal Government’s plan to implement content filters at the internet service provider level is one step closer to reality with live trials set to commence after next month. The Government will seek expressions of interest in the second half of October for ISPs to participate in live trials
Google this week said it would anonymise user data received through search requests entered in its search engine and Chrome browser. In response to concerns over privacy, the company announced on Monday in the UK that it would anonymise the data within 24 hours of it being gathered. Writing on the official Google blog, senior vice president of operations Urs Holzle also noted that the data was, in any case, of limited potential use
to Google
Google is to halve the amount of time it stores users’ personal search data in response to continued pressure from the EU over its privacy policy. The search giant has said it will anonymise identifiable IP addresses on its server logs after nine months
Over a period of twelve hours, between this Thursday night and Friday morning, American Rights Counsel LLC sent out over 4000 bogus DMCA takedown notices to YouTube, all making copyright infringement claims against videos with content critical of the Church of Scientology. Clips included footage of Australian and German news reports about Scientology, A Message to Anonymous/Scientology, and footage from a Clearwater City Commission meeting. Many accounts were suspended by YouTube in response to multiple allegations of copyright infringement. YouTube has yet to comment on the issue, and many of the accounts and videos pulled over the weekend have now been restored after those affected filed counter claims. However, the guilty-until-proven innocent method of dealing with notices like this may have to be re-evaluated. While filing a false DMCA notice is a criminal offense, prosecution in these cases rarely comes about
California claims copyright to its laws, and warns people not to share them. And that’s not sitting right with Internet gadfly, and open-access hero, Carl Malamud. He has spent the last couple months scanning tens of thousands of pages containing city, county and state laws — think building codes, banking laws, etc. Malamud wants California to sue him, which is almost a given if the state wants to continue claiming copyright. He thinks a federal court will rule in his favor: It is illegal to copyright the law since people are required to know it. Malamud helped force the SEC to put corporate filings online in 1994, and did the same with the patent office. He got the Smithsonian to loosen its claim of copyright, CSPAN to stop forbidding people from sharing its videos, and most recently Oregon to quit claiming copyright on state laws — via Slashdot
A well-known web site owner in one of Russia’s most restive regions was shot to death after he was arrested by authorities on Sunday, according to Russian news reports. Magomed Yevloyev was whisked away by Russian Interior Ministry officials in Nazran, Ingushetia, shortly after he returned from a trip to Moscow. He was shot in the temple. Yevloyev ran a web site, focused on news from Ingushetia, an area sandwiched between Georgia’s North Ossetia region to the west and Chechnya to the east. A court banned his Web site in August, calling it extremist
Civil libertarians are up in arms over moves to give Queensland Police and the Crime and Misconduct Commission (CMC) police phone-tapping powers
An investigation is under way into how a computer containing bank customers’ personal data was sold on eBay
A judge in New Zealand has banned the press from reporting online the names of two men accused of murder. The names of the men will be allowed to be reported in print as well as through Television and Radio broadcast. It would seem he has taken this step to prevent someone googling
these peoples names in the future and finding them linked to a crime if found innocent — Slashdot
The National Centre for State Courts, a nonprofit organisation, has sent file-sharing propaganda [PDF] to thousands of students. The supposedly educational
materials, presented in the form of a comic strip, are intended to frighten students with gross exaggerations of the legal consequences of sharing music online (lose your scholarship to college, go to jail for two years, and more) — via Slashdot
Pool is a social media project developed by ABC Radio National. It’s a place to share your creative work with the Pool community and ABC producers — upload music, photos, videos, documentaries, interviews, animations and more. It’s a collaborative space where audiences become makers — via Boing Boing
Critics of the Harper government’s proposed changes to the Copyright Act have launched a cyber crusade to fight the controversial bill. They’re using everything from Facebook to YouTube to Wikipedia to blogs to get their message out. They want the government to either scrap or make serious amendments to Bill C-61 when Parliament resumes next month. At the helm of the digital movement is Michael Geist, a professor at the University of Ottawa who specialises in Internet and e-commerce law. In addition to his own blog, Geist runs a Facebook group called Fair Copyright for Canada that boasts 90,000 members
Well, Phase I of the RIAA’s misguided pursuit of an innocent, disabled Oregon woman, Atlantic vs Andersen, has finally drawn to a close, as the RIAA was forced to pay Ms Andersen $107,951, representing the amount of her attorneys fee judgment plus interest. But as some have pointed out, reimbursement for legal fees doesn’t compensate Ms Andersen for the other damages she’s sustained. And that’s where Phase II comes in, Andersen vs Atlantic. There the shoe is on the other foot, and Tanya is one doing the hunting, as she pursues the record companies and their running dogs for malicious prosecution — via Slashdot
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