EU Parliament: No Commercial Availability Or Compensation In Marrakesh Implementation 23/03/2017 by Catherine Saez, Intellectual Property Watch 2 Comments The European Parliament announced today that its Legal Affairs Committee approved new draft legislation to bring European Union law into line with an international treaty providing copyright exceptions for special format books for visually impaired people. Limitations to the scope of the treaty, such as commercial availability or compensation, were disregarded by Parliament members.
EU High Court Ruling’s Implications For Content Streaming In Europe And Worldwide 20/03/2017 by Bruce Gain for Intellectual Property Watch 1 Comment A recent Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) ruling relating to TV internet broadcasts from the UK underscores tight restrictions in place for content streaming in the European Union (EU), legal scholars say.
Social Media Providers Could Face Stiff Punishment For Hate Speech, Fake News In Germany 14/03/2017 by Monika Ermert for Intellectual Property Watch Leave a Comment German Justice Minister Heiko Maas today presented draft legislation to whack social media providers for what the minister described as reluctance to take down hate speech and fake news.
Inertia Slows Evolution For Open Scientists 10/03/2017 by Intellectual Property Watch 3 Comments It is still a long way to a new generation of “open scientists”, German open data researcher Christian Heise found out in his just-published PhD thesis. Heise not only investigated drivers and barriers for what he expects to be an evolution from open access to open science by theory and a survey of over 1100 scientists. He tried the concept open science the hard way, opening up the writing of his thesis paper on the net.
EC Copyright Reform Proposal Encounters Resistance In European Parliament 09/03/2017 by Dugie Standeford for Intellectual Property Watch 1 Comment European Commission plans to modernise copyright rules have run into opposition in European Parliament committees, with lawmakers particularly pushing back against the proposal for a publishers’ right to licence snippets of news content.
Revelations Illustrate Aggressive CIA Hacking, Sloppy Security Of Smart Services 08/03/2017 by Monika Ermert for Intellectual Property Watch Leave a Comment Thought about buying a smart phone, smart TV, smart car? – think twice. Wikileaks today (7 March) released over 8,000 documents illustrating hacking activities of the Central Intelligence Agency, CIA. In what has been described by some commentators as a bigger leak than the Snowden revelations about the National Security Agency in 2013, the whistleblower platform allowed a glimpse into the CIA hacking into smart TVs and smartphones and presented a list of zero day vulnerabilities found, bought and sometimes shared with colleagues in other agencies, including British colleagues. Wikileaks announced that today’s leak was the “Year Zero” tranche of the much bigger “Vault 7” project: more redacted details from the documents and much more documents will be published.
Switzerland Next In Line To Gamble With Net Blocking 03/03/2017 by Monika Ermert for Intellectual Property Watch 9 Comments The Swiss Parliament this week adopted new legislation to regulate offline and online gambling by limiting it to a fixed number of Swiss-based operators only. While heavily criticised by opponents inside and outside the Parliament in Bern, the main goal was to harvest revenue streams for the general public and enforce a number of obligation. A number of opponents in the Parliament sided with activists in their call for caution against the ‘slippery slope’ of net filtering. A look at other countries illustrates that filtering on an IP or domain name basis is on the rise.
Unauthorised Streaming Of TV Broadcasts Breaches Copyright, EU High Court Rules 02/03/2017 by Intellectual Property Watch 1 Comment Internet television broadcasting service TVCatchup (TVC) may not offer live streams of free-to-air TV broadcasts without permission, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) said in a 1 March judgment.
Split Over DMCA Safe Harbour Continues To Roil US Copyright Office Reform Efforts 23/02/2017 by Dugie Standeford for Intellectual Property Watch 1 Comment Internet service providers and copyright owners remain deeply divided over the effectiveness of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act safe harbour provisions, they said in additional submissions to a US Copyright Office inquiry.
Dismantling Of LiMux On Eve Of Pirate Party Security Conference 20/02/2017 by Monika Ermert for Intellectual Property Watch 1 Comment MUNICH — For the Pirate Party gathered at the Pirate Security Conference (PirateSecon) in Munich this is bad news. On the eve of the PirateSecon, held alongside the big Munich Security Conference, the city council of Munich decided to reverse the once-celebrated migration to LiMux, its much reported about Linux platform. For the German Pirate Party, the dismantling of “LiMux” is a step in the wrong direction. At the third edition of the Pirate Security Conference Pirate Party members from Luxembourg, Iceland, Switzerland and the Czech Republic discussed how to take back data and even algorithms – and how to win elections.