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Blog from the New Internationalist about the movement taking place in the UK to donate votes for the upcoming elections, called "Give Your Vote". The idea is for UK citizens to donate their vote to someone in Bangladesh, Afghanistan and Ghana. These countries were chosen due to the involvement of the UK in all these countries through various ways (ie troops, legislation that has an impact on climate change, trade). In each country they have a sister campaign called "Use a UK Vote". Effectively it is a means for citizens of these nations to voice their opinions. The movement demonstrates global democracy in a sense. A word of warning - if you want to visit the site http://www.giveyourvote.org/ it's not particularly user friendly. Under the heading there are subheadings (however they are invisible).

A really interesting piece from Matt Yglesias, who points out that a bunch of private corporations are advising on a policy agency, which could possibly be behind the Gizmodo raid. Fascinating to see the way public governance can be shaped by private corporations- and rather scary!

If you are going to look at copyright on the internet, you really can't go past this settlement. This is Google's next step at world domination: control of our intellectual property. No one likes it, but everyone is going ahead with it because Google has them over a barrel ... The basic deal is that Google wants to digitise every book ever written and make them all searchable online by google customer. On the surface this is all shiny; it seems commonsense that all material should be digitised - we have to keep up with technology. The problem arises when you get to the sticky situation of copyright - generally with books, owners get royalties every time someone buys a copy. With the digitisation, Google wasn't too keen on the idea of pay-per-view. Ideally, they would have loved to present all that information free and just reap the benefit ... well, however Google reaps benefits. There was litigation all round - publishers were against it, yahoo and other internet giants were against it (because it wasn't their idea) and it went to the doors of the US Supreme Court, but not quite to trial. Google's rivals were not too sure that they wanted to go to trial, because the outcome was a little on the uncertain side. So the Google book settlement was drawn up, objected to, fought, signed up to, taken to the US Supreme Court for approval, rejected, modified, fought over a bit more, and sent back to the judge. The last move was in Feb 2010; we're still waiting for Critics argue that the deal gives Google too much power over digital books and will not benefit customers in terms of cost, possible censorship issues, privacy. Copyright owners will also lose out, as Google's royalty policy cuts them out of the system and reduces their royalty - and they are automatically included in the agreement unless they 'opt out' (even if they have not 'opted in'). Really, Google is the only party that seems to benefit, and yet for all of the fighting, the settlement seems

Report released in the United States which says that it is almost impossible to quantify the economic wide impacts of piracy, figures which have been given in the past are likely to have grossly overestimate the actual losses made in reality, It discusses how much of infringing copyright should be counted as a lost sale. i.e. Counting one illegal download as one lost sale is unrealistic in terms of real world economics.

The Computer and Communications Industry Association disclosed a report revealing the value of industries dependent on copyright limitations. The report claims that it accounts for US$4.7 trillion and 23% of the US' real economic growth from 2002-2007.

First topic: « Early Adolescents' Use of Social Networking Sites to Maintain Friendship and Explore Identity: Implications for Policy »

The increasing use of 'free' webmail services, and indeed full office suites, from online providers by business and governments means an increasing amount of funding for encryption and ad free internets. This potentially leads to a new digital divide. The corporate or private internet of the wealthy, and the hyper surveilled commercial internet of the many.

Verizon has imposed a version of the controversial graduated response policy which was recently uncovered in the US- in which ISP's basically disconnect repeat copyright infringement offenders from the internet. Verizon is terminating internet service to an undisclosed number of repeat offenders.

Increasing "probes" on US military networks has led to the appointment of a senior general to Cyber Command operations and approximately 30,000 troops have been re-assigned from IT support to "the frontlines of cyberwarfare". The US is increasingly anxious about the vulnerability of its networks to attack. Chinese, Russian and Korean hackers have been targeted as alleged attackers so far. There is concern that cyberwarfare techniques being used by the US are outpacing the ability to develop policy surrounding their use.