An injunction issued by an Indian court in a copyright infringement case has forced Indian Internet service providers to block access to the video-sharing sites Vimeo and DailyMotion, Bittorrent-tracker The Pirate Bay, text-sharing site Pastebin and a number of other websites.
via Indian court orders Pirate Bay, Pastebin blocks, Supreme Court gets DDoSed | Ars Technica.
Exporting copyright: Inside the secretive Trans-Pacific Partnership
Meet “ACTA plus,” and the people trying to stop it.
via Exporting copyright: Inside the secretive Trans-Pacific Partnership | Ars Technica.
Some much needed skeptical talk about the current state of Internet innovation. -RB
That’s the microversion of the state of affairs. Here’s the macro version. Thousands of startups are doing almost exactly the same thing, minor variations on a theme. Tech journalists report endlessly on the same handful of well-established companies. Apple, Amazon, Google, Facebook, and Microsoft’s dominate pieces of the web, and they don’t appear to be in shaky positions. Good, long-time tech journalists like Om Malik are exhausted. He recently posted this to his blog after much ink was spilled over who Twitter hired as a public relations person:
Sure, these are some great people and everyone including me is happy for their new gigs and future success. But when I read these posts [I] often wonder to myself, have we run out of things to say and write that actually are about technology and the companies behind them? Or do we feel compelled to fill the white space between what matters? Sort of like talk radio?
via The Jig Is Up: Time to Get Past Facebook and Invent a New Future.
Rumor, Lies, and Weibo: How Social Media is Changing the Nature of Truth in China
Stop the Great Firewall of America
via Firewall Law Could Infringe on Free Speech – NYTimes.com.
This Op-Ed makes an explicit connection between censorship and the SOPA and PIPA bills that were recently defeated. But as we know from the similar provisions being inserted into the TPP Pacific Trade treaty, the goals of those bills are certainly not dead.
Mentions several proposals for more formal government management of the Internet, “codes of conduct,” and other moves.
India’s proposal for government control of Internet to be discussed in Geneva
A common statement is that the US does not censor web sites, but rather polices “crime.” The definition of crime, however, depends on the government doing the defining. In this case, a site was shut down based on linking to news stories about piracy.
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