What basis do you have to state this supposed "fact"? Last year UNESCO strongly warned about Internet filtering, and in the same year the UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression has did the same. There is no need for control to be moved to the UN in order to restrict access to content. Countries around the world are doing a fine job of that on their own (and not just the most repressive ones - France, Germany, South Korea and others are amongst them). The only reason to move an issue to the UN is because it has border-crossing implications. National censorship or content regulation policies generally don't.

DNS is the smallest part of what this is about. It is about privacy, intellectual property, consumer protection online, spam, security, freedom of expression, multilingualism, ecommerce, and half a dozen other issues just off the top of my head. The misconception that this is just about what ICANN and the IETF do is probably the biggest reason why people react badly to the idea of the UN stepping in. Granted, the UN would suck at stuff like that. Its value add would be in providing a more open and inclusive forum (than what we have now) for other Internet policy issues to be worked out.

Also, the fact that India was first to put this proposal forward is not that relevant. Brazil and South Africa are amongst the other countries that have been talking along the same lines.

The spin on this story is engineered to make you stop questionning the way that the Internet is run currently. And despite what you may have heard, it is not still run by Slashdot-friendly geeks. Sure, some of the underlying nuts and bolts are, and things are working at that level. But at the public policy level, geeks have no say. That level of Internet governance is controlled by big corporations and rich governments. The hardest thing is, they like to pretend that they are on our side. But they are not. These are the powers that brought forth SOPA/PIPA and ACTA. To put it simply, US and EU policies bought by big business now are the way that the Internet is controlled. This proposal aims for nothing more but to change that.

Don't believe the FUD about the United Nations. Most of the things that Slashdotters hate about the US, are things on which the UN agrees with you about. ACTA could never have happened within the UN intellectual body, WIPO - why do you think that it was deliberately negotiated elsewhere? It is because at WIPO, civil society and developing countries actually have a reasonably good voice. We will speak out against unjust laws and enforcement practices (not always successfully - the WIPO Copyright Treaties still passed - but their US implementation is far worse than the much more reasonable WIPO baseline.) The UN is more reasonable precisely because rich governments and multinationals can't push through their agendas, as they can at the closed-door US trade meetings. They have to reach a compromise with developing country governments and civil society groups.

Make no mistake. To move this level of Internet policy making outside of US control and into a multilateral forum in which the door is open to civil society (which, remember, means you and me) would not make things any worse, it could only make things much better, because it would have to become more transparent, more globally democratic and more inclusive of other viewpoints besides those paid for by big business. That's not to say that there aren't things that could be improved in India's proposal. There are, absolutely. But that's why we should welcome the opportunity to engage with them on it, rather than closing the door on future improvements to the unfair way in which Internet public poilcy is now made. For more reading...

25 years later, your first thought about Australia is still Crocodile Dundee? Kinda offensive. Next time there's a story on an American patent owner, should my first post say "What's next? Uncle Sam going to whistle Yankee Doodle Dandy while eating a Big Mac?"

I'm surprised that nobody has mentioned Digital Personal Property, which the IEEE P1817 [ieee.org] working group has been developing for the last couple of years.

One of the main problems with DRM for consumers is that it offends the deeply-ingrained notion that when we purchase a book, album or movie – whether as a physical product or a download – we should own it, and use it however we wish within our social and family circles, without the oversight of the copyright owner. We feel this way while at the same time respecting the right of the copyright owner of a protected work to control its distribution outside our circle of family and friends.

This insight underlies the IEEE Standard for Consumer-ownable Digital Personal Property (DPP), that will allow consumers complete freedom to lend, copy, sell or give away the digital works that they have purchased, whilst inhibiting them from sharing with strangers. In order to achieve this, the work is encrypted – which is just what DRM does.

But unlike with DRM, the encryption does not prevent the work from being copied, nor allow its usage to be tracked or controlled by the copyright owner. It simply enforces two simple functions of every DPP-protected work: a “give” button and a “take” button. The “give” button ensures that every DPP-protected work can be shared, both by the original purchaser and by everyone with whom it has already been shared. The “take” button ensures that each and any of those individuals can take the work back from all the others, “collapsing” it, if you will, into the single unit that it was when purchased.

The main difference between DPP and Ultraviolet is that there are literally no limits to how many copies you can make or what you can do with them. In fact, the copyright owner has no way of even knowing how many times the work has been shared, with whom, or who currently owns the work. The concept of ownership and who gets to receive copies are determined by social constraints, not technological ones - who do you trust not to use the "Take" button on you?

The main problem that the Working Group faces at the moment, apart from buy-in from the major studios, is that it needs an experienced technical expert to take leadership of actually finalising the specification. If someone from Slashdot has any contacts who might be interested, please contact the Working Group.

Disclaimer: I am a member of the P1817 Working Group, representing consumers' interests.

From the article, "The beauty quark is also known as the bottom quark." Now I can't stop thinking about beautiful bottoms.

There is a Unison backend for Sparkleshare in development. This will combine the best of both worlds. Sparkle has been criticised for using git as a back-end, which is not very efficient for storing large files and can waste large amounts of space. Unison is lighter-weight for those who don't need the ability to roll back to previous revisions of files. So soon you'll be able to take your pick.

The best page to link to is hosted on Tor, where Sony won't be able to discover where it is located or by whom. Also, this link is the only one that contains Geohot's source code, as well as his binary: http://wdnqg3ehh3hvalpe.onion/ (obviously this only works if you're connected to the Tor network), otherwise: https://wdnqg3ehh3hvalpe.tor2web.org/

If only it were true that this makes Ireland "the first in the world". In fact there are already three-strikes laws in France, South Korea, New Zealand, Taiwan, and (though not yet fully implemented) the United Kingdom. In a sense Ireland doesn't even rate a mention against these countries, because its "three strikes" system is not law, but just the policy of a single (admittedly large) ISP.

France's law is the first and most draconian. In its original form, which did not require a court judgment before the user was disconnected it failed a constitutional challenge, but it has since been re-introduced and remains on the books.

A favourite quote of mine comes from the judgment of an Australian Federal Court judge in a case decided earlier this year, in which he said:

One need only consider the lengthy, complex and necessary deliberations of the Court upon the question of primary infringement to appreciate that the nature of copyright infringements within the BitTorrent system, and the concept of “repeat infringer”, are not self-evident. It is highly problematic to conclude that such issues ought to be decided by a party, such as the [ISP], rather than a court. Copyright infringement is not a simple issue.

No. I'm here at the IGF in Sharm el Sheikh, and this book launch was a scheduled event in a separate room dedicated for the launch at this time. Your theory might have been correct if the poster had been erected in the main session room where other discussions were going on, but this was not so.

The Consumers International IP Watch List is a counter-USTR 301 Report, released simultaneously, which lists countries according to our friendly their IP laws are to consumers, rather than how strongly those laws benefit creators. On this list, interestingly, the US is listed in the same company as China and India, countries which it strongly criticises in its 301 Report! The worst of all countries in the Consumers International list is the United Kingdom.