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John Lemke

Revisiting The Purpose Of The Copyright Monopoly: Science And The Useful Arts | Torrent... - 0 views

torrentfreak.com/nce-and-the-useful-arts-121202

2012 indienationnews legal law government politics IN TNN intelectualProperty IP copyright constitution USA

shared by John Lemke on 04 Dec 12 - No Cached
  • If there’s one thing that needs constant reminding, it’s the explicit purpose of the copyright monopoly. Its purpose is to promote the progress of human knowledge. Nothing less. Nothing more.
  • [Congress has the power] to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.
  • has the power, and not the obligation
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • two kinds of monopolies: copyright monopolies and patent monopolies, respectively. Science and the useful arts. The “science” part refers to the copyright monopoly, and the “useful arts” has nothing to do with creative works – it is “arts” in the same sense as “artisan”, that is, craftsmanship.
  • the purpose of the copyright monopoly isn’t to enable somebody to make money, and never was. Its sole purpose was and is to advance humanity as a whole. The monopoly begins and ends with the public interest; it does not exist for the benefit of the author and inventor.
  • The second thing we note is the “science” part. The US Constitution only gives Congress the right to protect works of knowledge – educational works, if you like – with a copyright monopoly. “Creative works” such as movies and music are nowhere to be found whatsoever in this empowerment of Congress to create temporary government-sanctioned monopolies.
  • Which brings us to the third notable item: “the exclusive right”. This is what we would refer to colloquially as a “monopoly”. The copyright industry has been tenacious in trying to portray the copyright monopoly as “property”, when in reality, the exclusive rights created are limitations of property rights (it prohibits me from storing the bitpatterns of my choosing on my own hardware). Further, it should be noted that this monopoly is not a guarantee to make money. It is a legal right to prevent others from attempting to do so. There’s a world of difference. You can have all the monopolies you like and still not make a cent.
  • The fourth notable item is the “for limited times”. This can be twisted and turned in many ways, obviously; it has been argued that “forever less a day” is still “limited” in the technical sense. But from my personal perspective – and I’ll have to argue, from the perspective of everybody reading this text – anything that extends past our time of death is not limited in time.
John Lemke

Mega Goes Legal, Issues Ultimatum Over Cyberlocker Report | TorrentFreak - 0 views

torrentfreak.com/over-cyberlocker-report-140925

2014.09.29-TNN indienationnews news report mega law legal P2P filesharing

shared by John Lemke on 25 Sep 14 - No Cached
  • Mega was founded by Kim Dotcom but the site bears little resemblance to his now defunct Megaupload. Perhaps most importantly, Mega was the most-scrutinized file-hosting startup ever, so every single detail simply had to be squeaky clean. As a result the site took extensive legal advice to ensure that it complies with every single facet of the law. Nevertheless, NetNames took the decision to put Mega in its report anyway, bundling the site in with what are described as some of the market’s most dubious players. This was not received well by Mega CEO Graham Gaylard. In a TorrentFreak article he demanded a full apology from NetNames and Digital Citizens Alliance and for his company to be withdrawn from the report. Failure to do so would result in “further action”, he said.
  • “Mega’s legal counsel has written to NetNames, Digital Citizens Alliance and The Internet Technology & Innovation Foundation (ITIF) stating that the report is clearly defamatory,” Mega CEO Graham Gaylard told TorrentFreak this morning.
  • Firstly, Mega’s legal team are now demanding the removal of the report, and all references to it, from all channels under the respondents’ control. They also demand that further circulation of the report must be discontinued and no additional references to it should be made in public.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • also demanding a list of everyone who has had a copy of the report made available to them along with details of all locations where the report has been published.
  • Finally, Mega is demanding a full public apology “to its satisfaction” to be published on the homepages of the respondents’ websites.
  • Mega has given the companies seven days to comply with the above requests.
John Lemke

September 11, 2012: Opus audio codec is now RFC6716, Opus 1.0.1 reference source released - 0 views

www.xiph.org/rfc-6716

2012 audio rfc codec technology codecs slashdot news standard INN

shared by John Lemke on 12 Sep 12 - No Cached
  • Free and Open Another reason there are so many audio codecs: silly licensing restrictions. Would you base a business on technology a competitor controls? That's why the Opus specification and complete source are Free, Open, and available for any use whatsoever without IP restrictions, explicit licensing or royalties. Opus was developed and tested in a public, fully transparent process within the IETF, proof that open collaboration can produce a better audio codec than proprietary, secretive, patent-encumbered systems. Open standards benefit-- and benefit from-- open source organizations and traditional commercial software companies alike. Opus itself is the result of a collaboration including Broadcom, Google, the IETF, Microsoft (through Skype), Mozilla, Octasic and Xiph.Org.
John Lemke

Spy court renews NSA metadata program | TheHill - 0 views

thehill.com/...8-spy-court-renews-nsa-program

2014 spy nsa metadata law legal indienationnews tech technology

shared by John Lemke on 14 Sep 14 - No Cached
  • With a surveillance reform bill stuck in the Senate, the federal court overseeing spy agencies on Friday reauthorized the National Security Agency’s controversial bulk collection of Americans' phone records.
  • Given that legislation has not yet been enacted, and given the importance of maintaining the capabilities of the Section 215 telephony metadata program, the government has sought a 90-day reauthorization of the existing program,” the Justice Department and Office of the Director of National Intelligence said in a joint statement, referring to the section of the Patriot Act that authorizes the program.
  • The NSA’s phone records program needs to be reauthorized by the FISC every 90 days. The current authority expires on Dec. 5.
John Lemke

New Zealand Launched Mass Surveillance Project While Publicly Denying It - The Intercept - 0 views

firstlook.org/...csb-speargun-mass-surveillance

2014 indienationnews law legal tech technology spying surveillance

shared by John Lemke on 15 Sep 14 - No Cached
  • Documents provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden show that the government worked in secret to exploit a new internet surveillance law enacted in the wake of revelations of illegal domestic spying to initiate a new metadata collection program that appeared designed to collect information about the communications of New Zealanders.
  • Those actions are in direct conflict with the assurances given to the public by Prime Minister John Key (pictured above), who said the law was merely designed to fix “an ambiguous legal framework” by expressly allowing the agency to do what it had done for years, that it “isn’t and will never be wholesale spying on New Zealanders,” and the law “isn’t a revolution in the way New Zealand conducts its intelligence operations.”
  • Snowden explained that “at the NSA, I routinely came across the communications of New Zealanders in my work with a mass surveillance tool we share with GCSB, called ‘X KEYSCORE.”" He further detailed that “the GCSB provides mass surveillance data into XKEYSCORE. They also provide access to the communications of millions of New Zealanders to the NSA at facilities such as the GCSB facility in Waihopai, and the Prime Minister is personally aware of this fact.”
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Top secret documents provided by the whistleblower demonstrate that the GCSB, with ongoing NSA cooperation, implemented Phase I of the mass surveillance program code-named “Speargun” at some point in 2012
  • Over the weekend, in anticipation of this report, Key admitted for the first time that the GCSB did plan a program of mass surveillance aimed at his own citizens, but claimed that he ultimately rejected the program before implementation. Yesterday, after The Intercept sought comment from the NSA, the Prime Minister told reporters in Auckland that this reporting was referring merely to “a proposed widespread cyber protection programme that never got off the ground.” He vowed to declassify documents confirming his decision.
  • That legislation arose after it was revealed in 2012 that the GCSB illegally surveilled the communications of Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom, a legal resident of New Zealand. New Zealand law at the time forbade the GCSB from using its surveillance apparatus against citizens or legal residents. That illegal GCSB surveillance of Dotcom was followed by a massive military-style police raid by New Zealand authorities on his home in connection with Dotcom’s criminal prosecution in the United States for copyright violations. A subsequent government investigation found that the GCSB not only illegally spied on Dotcom but also dozens of other citizens and legal residents. The deputy director of GCSB resigned. The government’s response to these revelations was to refuse to prosecute those who ordered the illegal spying and, instead, to propose a new law that would allow domestic electronic surveillance.
    • John Lemke
      John Lemke on 15 Sep 14
       
      The Dotcom raid was ruled illegal.  Yet the Dotcom spying was exactly the type of activity of this plan.
  • n high-level discussions between the Key government and the NSA, the new law was clearly viewed as the crucial means to empower the GCSB to engage in metadata surveillance. On more than one occasion, the NSA noted internally that Project Speargun, in the process of being implemented, could not and would not be completed until the new law was enacted.
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