Apparently, Microsoft thought the cost of licenses for all the code on GitHub was included in the price.

Last week, Caspar Bowden testified at a hearing in the European Parliament, and presented a report on the NSA surveillance to the European Parliament's Committee for Fundamental Rights LIBE.

Link to the report: http://www.europarl.europa.eu/meetdocs/2009_2014/documents/libe/dv/briefingnote_/briefingnote_en.pdf

Link to the Youtube-video with Bowden's statement and the following Q&A (63 min): http://youtu.be/qa83l2_ZzEo

Yes, of course!

This is guaranteed to work almost as good as the Evil Bit, an extra field in IPv4 headers where senders of packets indicate malicious intent, so that people administering firewalls can discard such packets if desired.

(The problem in the first place was that the people wiretapping didn't give a shit about rules, etiquette, and being decent. More rules and etiquette aren't the solution to that problem.)

Rick

No, we're a party of civil rights.

We think it's wrong for private companies to spy on your Internet traffic and that copyright infringement should not render prison sentences. From this follows that it becomes impossible to enforce the copyright monopoly unless of course someone starts copying to sell - it's always much easier to follow the money. The obvious corollary to this is of course that it becomes legal to download songs and movies off the Internet. Like it already is in Spain, for example. And somehow, the Spanish movie industry flourishes. Coincidentally, a continued rise in file-sharing happens to correspond to increased sales of music and film in Sweden while movie theatres scored yet another record year. Obviously, they still get paid so your basic premise is flawed.

So, please tell me why we would give up our civil liberties because Hollywood wants to control how and when we watch movies?

No, it's true. Two seats.

We used to have human rights. Now we just have...

Well, quite a lot of snow. And reality shows on TV. And snow. Yeah, that's about it.

We're not hosting TPB, we're just routing traffic to them. Just like an ISP. Serious Tubes routes traffic to the Pirate Party, so they're even more removed. But, last night, Portlane, one of the ISPs that routes traffic to Serious Tubes, was pressured into cutting their transit to ST, even if they were just a provider to a provider to a provider to TPB.

No, it was the payment service providers Visa, MasterCard and PayPal who took the decisions to block, not the Swedish banks.

As a Member of the European Parliament for the Swedish Pirate Party, I have just published a short book (108 pages) on copyright reform together with Rick Falkvinge, who is the founder of the first and Swedish Pirate party.

The studies mentioned here seem to paint exactly the same picture as a number of studies that we refer to in that book. File sharing is not hurting revenues for the cultural sector. When we look at statistics for the last decade, with rampant file sharing on the internet, we see that more money is going into film, music, books, games and other culture than ever before, and that a larger portion of it is going to the artists and other creative people involved (as opposed to middle men such as the big record companies).

Two weeks ago we had a book launch for "The Case for Copyright Reform" in the European Parliament, and I have distributed a paper copy of it to each of the 754 MEPs (Members of the European Parliament).

Now all that remains to be seen is how many of my colleagues in the parliament will actually read it, but that's another story. ;)

If you are interested in checking out the book, you can download "The Case for Copyright Reform" (for free, obviously) from http://www.copyrightreform.eu/ You can also order a paper copy at cost price via print-on-demand, if you prefer that.

It is time that we start looking at copyright legislation in a fact-based manner, as opposed to the IPR fundamentalist way that has been dominant in this policy area so far on both sides of the Atlantic.

There is a better way.

I took part in the vote as a Member of the JURI Committee in the European Parliament, and I can correct you on a few points. The amendments to a report can change its meaning completely, and the amendment that we lost was a rather important one. Therefore it is wrong to say that it was and "obscure" amendment, and imply that it was not important. The report is a legislative report that will turn into a binding directive and then national law once it is adopted, so it is not the question of a non-binding (or "own initiative") report this time.

It's not misleading in the slightest to call it non-copied for the simple reason that it was not a copy, and that the copyright monopoly only covers direct copies, nothing else.

Yes, they used similar inspiration and similar techniques. But that is specifically not covered by the copyright monopoly, which has always been about protecting a specific expression of a creative idea, and never the idea itself.

For more, see this article on Falkvinge on Infopolicy.

Yes, the images are arguably similar. But there is absolutely no merit whatsoever to the claim that one would be a copy of the other, thus violating the copyright monopoly. What the judge has done here is to set a precedent that states that the monopoly does not just cover the creative work, but extends to a general creative idea, which completely shatters the traditional notion that the copyright monopoly only covers a specific expression of an idea, and never the idea itself.

So what’s the big deal, then? In this case, they sought to recreate the image and took a similar one. Why is that not a violation of the copyright monopoly?

Because that’s exactly how you do it if you don’t want to pay a license fee on the original terms. You create a similar work yourself, entirely by yourself, and compete. It’s the whole damned idea.

Article by Falkvinge on this verdict.

Actually, the copyright monopoly is a balance between the public's interest in availability of culture, and the SAME public's interest in having new culture created.

Individuals and creators and the copyright industry are not stakeholders in that balance, but beneficiaries of the monopoly (just like Blackwater Security or whatever their name is this week is a beneficiary of United States foreign policy, without that meaning that they get a seat at the drafting table).

Thank you, good sir. Those are very kind words.

Although, I prefer the swarm as an organization rather than a hierarchical structure, so "stand behind a leader" isn't really what happens when I work. When I "lead", in quotes, I say out loud that I'm going to do something to accomplish a goal, and that others are welcome to follow me in that action if they like. Usually, a couple of hundred or thousand do.

Othertimes, other people in the swarm -- or the group as a whole -- decides on a course of action that I take part in.

I don't command military style. (Despite holding officer's rank in the Swedish Army, for trivia.)

Cheers,
Rick

"Useful Arts" actually refers to patentable handicraft; the consitution's motivation for the patent monopolies. This is the same word as you see in "artisan".

"Progress of Science" refers to knowledge subject to the copyright monopolies.