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‘law’ Stories

Wikipedia joining Wednesday’s anti-SOPA blackout

Rue Liu, Jan 16th 2012 Discuss [5]

Wikipedia has decided to join the protest against the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act by shutting down its English site for 24 hours on Wednesday, January 18. It will be joining companies like Reddit, which had announced last week that it would go offline for 12 hours on Wednesday. Both sites will temporarily shutdown and display only a message urging against the SOPA and PIPA legislation. Read The Full Story

SOPA shelved after Obama announcement

Chris Burns, Jan 16th 2012 Discuss [24]

Opponent of the Stop Online Piracy Act, California congressman Darrell Issa noted today that he’d been told by House majority leader Eric Cantor that there would be no vote on SOPA “unless there is consensus on the bill,” this essentially shelving the project until further notice. This move “effectively scuppers” SOPA, as the Guardian notes, and puts pressure on the next most notorious bill regarding these matters, the e-Parasite act, as it comes to a vote on January 24th. This is the victory we’ve been waiting for, folks, unless you’re a big media company that hoped to mis-use the bill, of course.

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Reddit anti-SOPA blackout on January 18

Chris Davies, Jan 10th 2012 Discuss [4]

Reddit has announced that it will be staging a twelve hour blackout in protest of SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act, with visitors to the crowd-curated site on January 18 presented with a call to arms against the proposed legislation. From 8am to 8pm EST next wednesday, Reddit will be showing a message pointing out how the site could be affected should SOPA be passed into law, along with links to resources and possible ways to take action. Read The Full Story

Vint Cerf contends Internet not a human right

Chris Burns, Jan 5th 2012 Discuss [2]

Computer scientist Vinton Gray "Vint" Cerf, recognized the world over as one of two "fathers of the internet," has this week contended that it's not technology or even the internet that should be considered a human right, instead simply categorizing them as tools to work with such basic rights as communication. "Technology is an enabler of rights, not a right itself," he noted, taking the position that if we continue to broaden what it means to have a human right as including technology, that we'll not put enough faith and/or pressure on the technology industry and the engineers responsible for ensuring universal, safe internet access for us all to do so. Read The Full Story

Google grabs IBM patents including “Computer phone”

Chris Burns, Jan 3rd 2012 Discuss [4]

This week its become apparent that Google is continuing to work with IBM to build up their patent portfolio so that they can avoid as many 2011-esque litigations as possible through the new year. As SEO by the Sea notes, IBM worked with Google this past September and July to move patents from one portfolio to the other, while this past week (the last one in 2011) showed Google acquiring another 188 granted patents and 29 published pending patent applications from IBM. Patents in this deal contain such names as blade servers, data caching, server load balancing, instant messaging applications, video conferencing, and a whole lot more. Read The Full Story

SOPA vote rescheduled for this week, attempts silent passage

Chris Burns, Dec 19th 2011 Discuss [9]

Despite what you may have heard at the end of last week, the vote for the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) is not delayed until 2012 nor is it delayed "indefinitely" - instead members of Congress hoping to run the act through a vote without any more internet-based campaigns to stop it have secretly rescheduled for the middle of this week. This blacklist legislation is also known as the PROTECT IP act in the Senate, and what today's news means is that the Judiciary Committee that was said to have convened until the end of January to re-work the act so that it better fit with the wants and needs of the VAST majority of free internet users is now going to vote this week instead. Opponents of the act will not be pleased. Read The Full Story

Pirates of game Witcher 2 charged $1,230 each for their efforts

Chris Burns, Dec 16th 2011 Discuss [15]

This week it's become clear that those users who have pirated the game Witcher 2 from game developer CD Projekt were not alone in receiving a $1,230 bill in damages for illegally downloading the game - thousands, apparently, of these pirates have been given the throw down signal. I should mention here that the alternate title for this post is "Game you never heard of is pirated, developers mad about it," since it's not the most likely event that you've played this game before, and it's certainly not the first time that a developer group has grumbled about their games being stolen on a mass level. It is a significant event, on the other hand, because of the awesomely simple solution CD Projekt has initiated here: bill them! Read The Full Story

SOPA and PROTECT IP rallied against by top-tier internet founders

Chris Burns, Dec 16th 2011 Discuss [4]

When it comes to something so very important as the two proposed pieces of legislation PROTECT IP Act and Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), you'd be surprised how little the vast majority of the people voting on whether or not they are passed into law know what their actions may do to the internet and the greater world at large - thats why when "An open letter to Washington" came across our desk, it came as no surprise. What this letter contains is a very brief and to the point set of paragraphs and bullet points rallying against the two acts in question, signed at the bottom by a set of internet-based business heads that would make Al Gore shake in his shoes. Everyone from founders of eBay to Google to the Internet Archive are listed here, and we'd suggest that the recipients of this letter lend an open ear. Read The Full Story

LightSquared CEO denies GPS disruption, touts job creation with US government

Chris Burns, Dec 15th 2011 Discuss [2]

Earlier this week week there were some pretty harsh accusations passed down regarding LightSquared and their GPS disruption in government tests - what we're hearing from the CEO of LightSquared today is that they're both baffled by the accusations and have done nothing but nice things for bunnies and kitties since they were born, basically. What mister Sanjiv Ahuja, CEO of LightSquared, notes today is that not only have they had the legal and regulatory right to use their spectrum "for eight years over two administrations," they've found that the testing mentioned in the reports from earlier this month did not come from their own spectrum, but from from GPS devices looking into spectrum also licensed to LightSquared. Read The Full Story

SMU 100 Laser Rifle tested by UK Police

Chris Burns, Dec 13th 2011 Discuss [4]

Clearly the times have gotten as strange and terrifying as they're going to get over in the UK and police forces are testing laser rifles that are capable of firing a three meter "wall of light" that temporarily blind anyone who glances upon it. While this may bring up images in your mind of everything from your favorite first person shooter to Magic: The Gathering cards, you should know that this is being reported to be completely non-lethal. This weapon will cost £25,000 per unit and was designed by a former Royal Marine Commando who intended it for use against Somalian pirates. The image you see below this paragraph is not an accurate representation of what the rifle will look like, but a rendering of it's current iteration IS inside this post a bit lower down. Read The Full Story

XXX domain name blocking begins with schools

Chris Burns, Dec 13th 2011 Discuss [3]

It's not tough to imagine why schools across the country would be blocking out student access to the newly minted .XXX domain name environment, especially since such a set of three letters defines only one thing: sex -- imagine our surprise then when these same schools started purchasing domain names with the triple-X title attached to their own names and sports teams! It's not nefarious at all though, as it turns out, as groups like the University of Kansas have picked up kansas.xxx and rockchalkjayhawk.xxx and jayhawks.xxx in order to deflect porn-minded individuals from owning them themselves. This all started two months ago with ICM Registry offering trademark holders the opportunity to pay $200 per URL for a one-time block that would assure these owners that their names would not be used to promote pornography. Read The Full Story