Wow, this is turning out to be one crazy week. Lets just take it one item at a time

Canada has introduced a DMCA-like copyright law.

The Blizzard v. BnetD battle before 8th Circuit Court of Appeals in St. Louis continues (mp3 of argument). This is a very important case, because it will determine to what extent reverse engineering is legal under the DMCA. BnetD (See background) is a GPL’ed software package that provides a complete emulation of battle.net, a proprietary set of servers for games produced by Blizzard Entertainment. The EFF is helping the developers to fight to keep this right of R.engineering. Groklaw reports on how it went:

The gist of his [Blizzard's representative] presentation was “Piracy, Piracy, Piracy”. Through the emphasis in his voice, and the timing of his words, he wanted this court to understand that this was all about stealing. This was about the Defendant/Appellants taking something that did not belong to them. The overall sense of it was that he was trying to scare the judges and paint the Defendants/Appellants as being in the same group as the hackers and scam artists taking over people’s machines with viruses and worms. He pointedly observed that Defendants/Appellants had used fifty icons from the Plaintiff/Respondents server application to make their own product.

The Broadcast Flag (see Cory’s speach on the BF), which we all thought was dead after the EFF whupped them in the courts, is back! Via deeplinks:

Rumor is afoot that Hollywood is taking another crack at the Broadcast Flag on Capitol Hill, this time by sneaking a Flag provision into an appropriations bill before the Senate.

If what we hear is true, the provision will be introduced before a subcommittee tomorrow and before the full appropriations committee on Thursday. That gives us 48 hours to stop it.

This has been posted just about everywhere, so hopefully those crazy americans will be able to tell their Senators to stop this. Once this goes through in America, you can be sure it will go through in Europe (see cory’s talk).

Finally, opponents of European software patents have experienced a major setback. The FFII has a good report:

The Legal Affairs Committee today voted on amendments to the Rocard report on the software patents directive and approved a number of amendments. A few of these have a little symbolic value, such as definition of “technology” as “applied natural science” and, in some instances, renaming of “computer-implemented invention” to “computer-aided invention”. However, the result overall leaves the key loopholes of the Council’s text wide open, and in some cases even widened further. The directive will now be voted on by the full Parliament, in two weeks’ time.

See also this article by Richard Stallman in the guardian on why he thinks software patents are absurd. Scrivener’s Error has an interesting (and harsh) critique of Stallman’s essay (Time is of the Essence).

See also, Lessig on remix culture. At the end there’s a dialogue between Lessig and Cory Doctorow.

In Nederland: Brein eist klantgegevens internetaanbieders:

Auteursrechtorganisatie Brein heeft donderdag in een kort geding voor de rechtbank in Utrecht van vijf internetaanbieders de gegevens geeïst van 41 klanten die veel illegale muziekbestanden aanbieden op internet. Namens de Nederlandse platenmaatschappijen probeert de stichting bij de illegale muziekverspreiders een schadevergoeding te halen.

Uiteindelijk gaat het dus maar om 41 klanten. Ik denk dat het waarschijnlijk wel om zeer ernstige gevallen zal gaan. De vraag natuurlijk is of Brein het potentiele success van dit kort geding op zal volgen met een schadeclaim tegen duizenden gebruikers.

De Eerste Kamer heeft op 28 juni een publiek toegankelijk overleg met minister Donner over de voorgestelde bewaarplicht van verkeersgegevens. Voor meer info zie Bits of Freedom.