Tag: slacktivists

  • Julian Huppert’s “One-Speed Internet”

    Julian Huppert’s “One-Speed Internet”

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    Lib Dems are appealing to the vital online pirate vote at this year’s party conference, putting the membership on collision course with LibDem ministers in the coalition government. In a new IT policy paper called “Preparing The Ground”, a team of party activists led by Cambridge MP Julian Huppert calls for the Digital Economy Act…

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  • Google hands millions to ‘independent’ watchdogs

    Google hands millions to ‘independent’ watchdogs

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    What do you do when a global corporation pays out millions to the watchdogs that we expect to protect us against it? It’s a fair question to ask in light of the Chocolate Factory’s legal settlement this week, over Google Buzz. The privacy class action suit has landed a windfall of millions of dollars to…

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  • RIP: The copyright quango that wanted to terminate your rights

    RIP: The copyright quango that wanted to terminate your rights

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    The Strategic Advisory Board for Intellectual Property is to be abolished. The Coalition has decided that dismantling copyright is a task that the Intellectual Property Office is quite capable of performing without assistance, and has folded SABIP’s duties back into the IPO. SABIP was founded in 2008 in the wake of the Gowers Report, as…

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  • Open Rights Group musters Flash Mob… of 7

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    Music House — HQ for a number of the UK music industry’s trade groups — was in a lock-down situation this lunchtime as an Open Rights Group Flash Mob descended, protesting against the Digital Economy Bill. As many as seven protesters could be seen outside the Berners Street offices, according to staff who phoned us…

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  • Pirates and the politics of spite

    Pirates and the politics of spite

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    If “digital rights” becomes reduced to gesture politics, only one group can win: the one with the biggest, boldest, daftest gesture A clear winner is emerging from the Digital Economy Bill – and it’s the UK Pirate Party. The penny only really dropped for me yesterday, after the Open Rights Group’s big demonstration at Westminster.…

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  • The problem with ‘substitution’ studies…

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    A study for the international chamber of commerce reckons 2.7 million jobs have been lost since 2004 in Europe because of unlicensed internet downloads, and warns economic losses could treble to €32bn by 2015. The report is backed by trade unions, including the TUC. The work was led by Patrice Geffon, an economist at Paris…

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