John Palfry:

We at the OpenNet Initiative released our study on Iran today. Of the states that we have studied, Iran has one of the world’s most sophisticated Internet censorship regimes. Iran has demonstrated its commitment to extensive Internet filtering through the targeting of weblogs, particularly those written in Farsi, the local language. The state blocks political, religious, and cultural statements on a range of topics from being written and seen online.

Update: /. has an article up about this

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.

Against European software patents? Add your face to this mosaic. Shortly before the decision in the European Parliament they will print this picture on a huge banner and show it in front of the European Parliament in Strasbourg.

Robert Boynton has written an in-depth look at four books on the contemporary movement to restore consitutional balance to copyright, entitled Righting Copyright: Fair Use and “Digital Environmentalism”. Worth the read!.

Regarding the Grokster vs. MGM case, Edward Felten has written an analysis of the solicitor general’s brief and the various anti-porn coalitions’ and police organizations’ brief. As he suggests, this case is not simply about controlling P2P narrowly, but about regulating the Internet itself. Susan Crawford has also been hammering away at this point. There are many other briefs available, look at the EFF page.

The Creative Commons is launching a new initiative, the Science Commons:

Science Commons is a new project of Creative Commons and will launch on January 1, 2005.

The mission of Science Commons is to encourage scientific innovation by making it easier for scientists, universities, and industries to use literature, data, and other scientific intellectual property and to share their knowledge with others. Science Commons works within current copyright and patent law to promote legal and technical mechanisms that remove barriers to sharing.

There’s an interview with Science Commons director John Wilbanks on Open Access Now.

Lawrence Lessig is going to be updating his book Code and other laws of Cyberspace:

Beginning in February, we’ll be posting Version 1 of Code to a Wiki. “Chapter Captains” will then supervise updates and corrections. Depending upon the progress, sometime near June, I will take the product and edit and rewrite it to produce Code, v2. The Wiki will stay live forever (under a Creative Commons license). The edited book will be published in the fall. I have donated my advance for Code, v2 to Creative Commons. All royalties beyond the advance will be donated as well.

I’m guessing the site will go online at the current homepage. Lessig’s newest book, Free Culture is currently also available in wiki form, although this has been done with his cooperation.

Also there’s a nice video about the Creative Commons going to Brazil. Features interviews with Gilberto Gil and others in Brazil as well as Creative Commons executives.

Finally, the launch ceremony of the Belgian CC Licences took place in the Bibliotheque Royale in Brussels on 10 December as part of the electronic music and free software festival Jonctions 8.

Ross Rader writes a passionate response to the ITU “Beyond Internet Governance” paper (DOC / HTML). This is the struggle/debate that we face today and good for Ross for articulating the position many people have but are either not in a position to say or are not informed enough to say. I would be very interested to hear the ITU’s response to Ross. The Internet Governance section @ CircleID has good stuff in general.

The Future of Digital Media is a two-month series, sponsored by Orb, that explores how the empowerment of the consumer over his or her media experience, coupled with the technological innovation that’s broadly democratizing media creation, is leading to a revolution in the way people access, consume, share and remake content.

Through interviews with leading commentators and cutting edge practioners, The Future of Digital Media examines the social, legal and economic impacts of this disruptive and revolutionary change.

(more…)

Via the Creative Commons weblog, a new service from Torrentocracy — Prodigem, free BitTorrent hosting for CC-licensed material:

Prodigem can only be used for the distribution of legally licensed material cleared for distribution via p2p filesharing. So, if you are an artist, creator, author, blogger, podcaster, amateur mogul, lead guitarist, independent movie director or person, and you have material which has been licensed openly, such as with a Creative Commons license, the sky is now the limit.

The flipside of the coin: Findlaw’s collection of legal complaints against people allegedly running BitTorrent servers indexing illegal copies of TV programs and movies.

Cyber Divide has an interesting take on the issue of Bittorrent and secondary copyright infringement.

Reason magazine interviews FCC Chairman Michael Powell. Lawrence Lessig recently also wrote an article about Powell. Liberals tend to hate him because the FCC is cracking down on “indecency” in the Media (remember Janet Jackson and Nipplegate) but I feel he is one of the bright spots in the Bush administration. He has allowed things like WiFi to exist in an unregulated spectrum. From the interview:

Reason: Let’s turn that around. Can you have enough piracy to get big content promoters to give people the things they want?

Powell: Well, I think the music industry is a beautiful case in point. They might kill me for saying so, but I think [Napster inventor] Shawn Fanning did America a service. If Napster hadn’t woken them up, I don’t think you would have had MP3 players. I don’t think you would’ve had iTunes. I don’t think you would’ve had the iPod. I don’t think you would’ve had the idea of the single-song transaction.

There’s a long tradition of that in communication technology. If you didn’t have Bill McGowan breaking the law, you would’ve never had MCI. You would’ve never had a competitive long-distance industry. If you didn’t have [Dish Network founder] Charlie Ergen, who dared to say “I’m going to pop up a few satellites and challenge broadcasters in a different way.…”

What’s bright about this future is there’s so much more power in radical innovators and their work that there’ll be constant new challenges to innovate or die.