Tag: slacktivism
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Furious freetards blitz the wrong SOPA
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Angry copyfighters barraged a small Scottish food certification agency with abuse last week – in the belief they were protesting against hated US anti-piracy legislation.
The Scottish Organic Producers Association – whose website is at sopa.org.uk – was perplexed when it found itself on the receiving of dozens of nasty and illiterate emails.
Remarkably, nothing about the site’s design – including pictures of sheep, vegetables, Angus cattle and fruit – did anything to suggest to the furious freetards that they’d … Read More
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“Immense wealth awaits. Email Ian Hargreaves with bank details, statute book”
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Now we know why what was widely called the “Google Review” into intellectual property came to the conclusions it did. And we have it from the horse’s mouth: not Google, but Professor Ian Hargreaves and his team at the IPO, who “guided” him.
If you recall, a year ago the Prime Minister David Cameron revealed that the Google founders that they could never have founded Google in the UK, because of its copyright law. Even Google could never substantiate the … Read More
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Citizen Killock misleads MPs
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Parliament’s Business Select Committee heard some interesting news today, as they mulled the Hargreaves Report’s recommendations. Executive director of the Open Rights Group Jim Killock told MPs that the UK’s copyright laws were deterring investors and new businesses. Alas, he could have picked a better example.Killock said Netflix had looked at the UK market and spurned it for South America instead.
“Our digital market in film is falling behind Colombia,” he told MPs.
This is mystifying, since 10 days … Read More
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Wolfie of the IPO
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Britain could have invented the iPod – if it wasn’t for a copyright law that everyone ignores. So says the UK government in a remarkable economic justification of the so-called “Google Review”, the Review of IP and Growth led by Ian Hargreaves. The document was written for the government by civil servants at the IPO, part of the business department BIS.… Read More
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Free Ride: Disney, Fela Kuti and Google’s war on copyright
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Wars over creators’ rights are pretty old – much older than copyright law. In one of the first “copyfights”, in 561AD, about 3,000 people died, writes Robert Levine in his new book Free Ride. St Colmcille and St Finnian clashed over the right to make copies of the Bible, with the King castigating Colmcille for his “fancy new ideas about people’s property”.Levine’s book is a story of the digital copyright wars.
“I tried to write in an analytical way … Read More