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Comment: Re:Video of the voting (Score 5, Informative) 297

The agenda papers for the committee meeting can be found here.

It includes the following documents for this dossier:

* Text proposed by the EU Commission
* Committee rapporteur's draft report, with her proposed amendments (1 to 48)
* Amendments proposed by other members of the committee (49 to 170)
* Opinion of the Culture committee (CULT), and their proposed amendments (CULT 1 to CULT 55)
* Opinion of the committee on the Internal Market (IMCO), and their proposed amendments (IMCO 1 to 41).

Unfortunately there does not appear to be a copy of the "Compromise Amendments", including the disputed amendment in question, "Compromise 20". One of the MEPs complains in the video at the end of the agenda item (10:51) that the text of these were only circulated on the night before the meeting.

It's not unusual for new texts to appear as heads get bashed together in the days immediately before the actual voting (in fact, it is an essential part of the system); but in this case they don't appear to have been placed on the website, or at any rate I didn't know where to find them.

The amended report from JURI, consolidating the results of these votes, appears now to have been formally prepared with the document reference A7-0055/2012, though I couldn't find the text of it yet on the Parliament website. This will now go forward for a short debate before the whole parliament, before voting on the amendments proposed by JURI, the amendments proposed by the other two committees, and any other amendments to the Commission text proposed by a sufficient number of MEPs.

Comment: Video of the voting (Score 5, Informative) 297

Video of the voting is available on the EP website. The agenda item starts at 10:27, and the voting runs from 10:31 to 10:51. The amendment in question appears to be "Compromise 20", voted on at 10:39, which is indeed rejected by 12 votes to 14. This was an all-party amendment that the centre-right EPP party then withdrew support from, because they were not entirely happy with the wording, according to one of their MEPs at the start of the meeting. (10:29). As the video shows, the EP tends to machine-gun through amendment votes, which are held in one swoop after months of discussion. You really need the papers for the meeting and your preferred faction's voting guide to turn them into an acceptable spectator sport. One of the extra votes could perhaps have been the chairman's casting vote; but it's not clear how there could have been two.

Comment: Re:Analysis (Score 2) 310

by JPMH (#39040233) Attached to: UK Law Enforcement Starts Seizing Music Blogs
Wrong. The owner is Rackspace.com of San Antonio, but the server itself is located in the UK, which is why SOCA could indeed have been able to get to it.

inetnum: 83.138.166.64 - 83.138.166.127
netname: RSPC-UK-RACKSPACE-INTERNAL
remarks:
descr: Rackspace Managed Hosting
country: GB
admin-c: IA247-RIPE
tech-c: IA247-RIPE
remarks: rev-srv attribute deprecated by RIPE NCC on 02/09/2009

person: IP Admin
address: Rackspace Managed Hosting
112 E. Pecan St. Suite 600
San Antonio, Texas 78205
phone: +1 210 892 4000
fax-no: +1 210 892 4329
e-mail: ipadmin@rackspace.com
nic-hdl: IA247-RIPE
remarks: ### Rackspace Abuse Department
remarks: ### Please send any complaints to the following:
remarks: ### abuse@rackspace.com
mnt-by: RSPC-MNT
source: RIPE # Filtered

Comment: The judge got it wrong: not "making available" (Score 1) 409

by JPMH (#38693674) Attached to: US Government Seeks Extradition of UK Student For File-Sharing
The judge got it wrong. In fact he admits he's going against case law. To quote from the judgment:

HHJ Ticehurst (@ para 71) in Rock & Overton held "make available should bear its ordinary and natural meaning". He distinguished between providing money "directly to" another as opposed to a financial adviser who may "point" another to a bank meaning the bank alone "makes available the money".

I have endeavoured to weigh these subtle distinctions. The diagrams of how as a matter of electronic mechanics (if I may term it) the TVShack websites actually operated favour HHJ Ticehurstâ(TM)s restrictive construction. To my mind there is much in the distinction factually...

In copyright law terms, O'Dwyer wasn't making the films "available". The person that made them available was the person who uploaded them to a download site. What O'Dwyer was doing was pointing to those sites, and (allegedly) thus encouraging people to download from them. In civil law, that is known as indirect or contributory infringement, as opposed to direct infringement which is the actual making available of copies. It is "making available" that can be a criminal offence under s.107(2A), not the encouragement or inducement of people to go ahead and download from such sites. Thus, for example, a briefing for UK Trading Standards officers, compiled by the Federation Against Copyright Theft, and hosted on the UK Intellectual Property Office's website, advises them that:

The offence in s107(2A) is now available as a tool to trading standards officers to prosecute uploading file sharers of digital product, such as film and music, whether or not they do so in the course of a business. [Emphasis added].

Interestingly, this may also be the position in the United States, where the law on contributory infringement is said to be civil law that has been developed by judges, but not reflected in any provisions of the criminal law. However this point appears not to have been argued by O'Dwyer's lawyers. What should have happened here is that the extradition proceedings should have been thrown out, on the basis that O'Dwyer's actions are not in fact covered by s.107(2A). But he should then have faced a full-on civil action in the UK courts from a consortium of content owners for the alleged indirect infringement. It is also about time that UK judges in extradition cases were directed to consider where a case should best be heard under conflict-of-laws provisions: the so-called "forum clause". In this case, with the alleged infringer being UK-based, and the alleged infringement being worldwide in scope, if this is supposed to be a crime under UK law it should have been tried under UK law.

Censorship

Google Stops Ads For "Cougar" Sites 319

Posted by samzenpus
from the here's-to-you-mrs-robinson dept.
teh31337one writes "Google is refusing to advertise CougarLife, a dating site for mature women looking for younger men. However, they continue to accept sites for mature men seeking young women. According to the New York Times, CougarLife.com had been paying Google $100,000 a month since October. The Mountain View company has now cancelled the contract, saying that the dating site is 'nonfamily safe.'"
Google

Google Wins European Trademark Victory 39

Posted by timothy
from the kleenex-runs-scared dept.
adeelarshad82 writes "A European court has ruled in Google's favor, saying that allowing advertising customers to use the names of other companies as search keywords does not represent a trademark violation. The court also went on to say that Google's AdWords program is protected by a European law governing Internet hosting services. Google's main line of defense was claiming that companies that want to extend trademark law to keywords are really interested in 'controlling and restricting the amount of information that users may see in response to their searches.' The decision is the first in a series of decisions from the court about how trademark rights can be used to restrict information available to users. Google is currently battling several trademark keyword cases in the US, including a case against Rosetta Stone, Inc."
Power

LHC offline until April 2009 (or longer) 1

Submitted by rufey
rufey writes "The recent problems at the Large Hadron Collider will now keep it idle until spring 2009. The official press release is here. The LHC went offline due to a suspected failure in a superconducting connection, which overheated and caused around 100 of the LHC's super-cooled magnets to heat up by as much as 100 degrees. This resulted in the accidental release of a ton of liquid helium. The process required to repair the failed superconducting connection involves weeks of warming up the affected area from -456 degrees Fahrenheit to room temperature, and then several more weeks to cool it back down after the repair is made. The total amount of time to do this will spill over into CERN's scheduled winter maintenance/shutdown period, which is partly done to save money on electricity during the period of peak demand."
Earth

Chimneys of methane observed in Arctic (rewritten)

Submitted by JPMH
JPMH writes "A Swedish-Russian expedition in the Arctic ocean has observed "chimneys" of methane rising from holes in the permafrost lid which covers the seabed. (See also translations from the expedition blog here and here). Methane is a greenhouse gas twenty times more effective than CO2, and runaway methane hydrate breakdown has sometimes been connected with the Permian-Triassic mass-extinction event 251 million years ago.If the Siberian permafrost-seal thaws completely, a release of 10% of the methane hydrates in Siberia would be enough to increase the methane content of the planet's atmosphere by a factor of twelve. So far, the undersea melting has been concentrated where greatly increased volumes of meltwater have been discharged from Siberian rivers flowing north, releasing methane and methane hydrates trapped on the seabed under an ice layer. The observations tally with increasing numbers of methane hotspots that have appeared since 2003, which are now estimated to match the total organic methane release from the whole of the rest of the world's oceans combined."
Earth

Chimneys of escaping methane observed in Arctic

Submitted by JPMH
JPMH writes "A Swedish-Russian expedition in the Arctic ocean has observed "chimneys" of methane rising from holes in the permafrost lid which covers the seabed. The undersea melting appears to be concentrated where greatly increased volumes of meltwater have been discharged from Siberian rivers flowing north, releasing methane and methane hydrates trapped on the seabed under an ice layer. The observations tally with increasing numbers of methane hotspots that have appeared since 2003, which are now estimated to match the total organic methane release from the whole of the rest of the world's oceans combined. (See also translations from the expedition blog here and here). If the Siberian permafrost-seal thaws completely, a release of 10% of the methane hydrates in Siberia would be enough to increase the methane content of the planet's atmosphere by a factor of twelve. Methane is a greenhouse gas twenty times more effective than CO2, and runaway methane hydrate breakdown has sometimes been connected with the Permian-Triassic mass-extinction event 251 million years ago."
The Courts

FTC asked to investigate copyright warnings

Submitted by JPMH
JPMH writes "A formal Federal Trade Commission complaint has been filed by the Computer & Communications Industry Association — a group which includes Google, Microsoft, and Red Hat, among others. According to Ars Technica's report, "the CCIA's complaint fingers the NFL, Major League Baseball, NBC Universal, Morgan Creek, DreamWorks, Harcourt Inc., and Penguin Group (USA) for deceptive trade practices, accusing them of systematically misrepresenting the rights of consumers to use copyrighted material. 'These warnings that we have been seeing for decades are false,' CCIA spokesperson Jake Ward told Ars Technica in a Monday interview. 'They are a misrepresentation of the law and a violation of consumers' rights.'""

Nothing in progression can rest on its original plan. We may as well think of rocking a grown man in the cradle of an infant. -- Edmund Burke