Action on the ACTA front.

At Michael Geist’s excellent blog, a post with a round-up of the news coverage following the last round of ACTA negotiations in Seoul. Apparently the chapter on Internet enforcement goes far beyong even the draconian limits of the DMCA and the present TRIPS agreement.

Abolishing the safe-harbor provisions of the DMCA or similar laws would be obligatory.  The plan of those who favor the ACTA seems to be: negotiate a secret deal that gives those who favor an extreme IP regime, then explain the need to enact that regime as “harmonization.” Will it work? I don’t think so.  The ACTA is increasingly looking to be DOA.  But that doesn’t mean we can be complacent! Exactly the opposite, now is the time to criticize it and bring this process to a halt.

The Obama administration has continued the Bush policy of trying to keep the provisions of the ACTA secret on grounds of “national security”    The criticism of the ACTA has expanded beyond the blogosphere and is now being reported in the press:

Ever once in a while, something at wikileaks gets hard to download. Why do you think that could be?

https://secure.wikileaks.org/wiki/US_Special_Forces_Tracking_and_Counter-Tracking,_TC_31-34-4,_Sep_2009

Don’t worry though, I am getting a copy on a P2P service and will post sometime over the weekend.

The difference between Europe and America:

Rich Germans Demand Higher Taxes

A group of rich Germans has launched a petition calling for the government to make wealthy people pay higher taxes.

The group say they have more money than they need, and the extra revenue could fund economic and social programmes to aid Germany’s economic recovery.

Germany could raise 100bn euros (£91bn) if the richest people paid a 5% wealth tax for two years, they say.

The petition has 44 signatories so far, and will be presented to newly re-elected Chancellor Angela Merkel.

The group say the financial crisis is leading to an increase in unemployment, poverty and social inequality.

Simply donating money to deal with the problems is not enough, they want a change in the whole approach.

“The path out of the crisis must be paved with massive investment in ecology, education and social justice,” they say in the petition.

Those who had “made a fortune through inheritance, hard work, hard-working, successful entrepreneurship, or investment” should contribute by paying more to alleviate the crisis.

The man behind the petition, Dieter Lehmkuhl, told Berlin’s Tagesspiegel that there were 2.2 million people in Germany with a fortune of more than 500,000 euros.

It appears  the conviction of the SHAC 7 has been upheld.  Not a good day if you advocate any kind of civil disobedience, as it now appears that advocating civil disobedience=terrorism. Yes, you can be branded a terrorist.  As covered at Green is the New Red:

http://www.greenisthenewred.com/blog/shac-7-conviction-upheld-on-appeal/2307/

This was really a foregone conclusion, but it is still nice to hear that the RIAA lost again:

Judge Refuses to Punish Lawyer for Anti-RIAA Blogging

An attorney defending against a music-piracy lawsuit didn’t cross ethical bounds by filing motions broadly attacking the recording industry and posting them on his blog, a magistrate judge has ruled, rejecting demands from the RIAA for monetary sanctions.

Do you suppose that the RIAA feels at all guilty about trying to suppress someone’s freedom of speech? Probably not, but it is a sign of how accustomed we have become to corporate oppression that there isn’t more outrage over this obvious SLAPP lawsuit….

Methinks the Register has been given some bad information, or in the more interesting alternative, Google has regrown its spine and will fight this silliness:

Google strips Pirate Bay homepage from search results
by Kelly Fiveash

The Pirate Bay’s homepage and seven other pages relating to the BitTorrent tracker website have been removed from Google’s search engine, following a DMCA complaint.

Anyone attempting to locate thepiratebay.org via Google will be greeted with some results to access the website, but none that point directly at its homepage.

…

Interestingly, Microsoft’s Bing returns the correct result on its search engine, so it’s clearly not been slapped with a similar DMCA notice yet.

But, checking with the primary sources being covered, I note that when I search for piratebay on Google:

Do the folks who keep trying to repress information never learn? Are they really, really that stupid?

We will see another example of the “09 F9″ effect: when information is suppressed, a community will quickly form to fight that suppression.

This means something.  A uber-cool netbook aimed at the overcompensated.  At it runs SuSE Linux.  As covered at the New York Times:

Dell Laptop Aims to Impress Impression Makers

By Ashlee Vance

Your pay grade is just that high. It says, “I’m better than this clunky laptop docking station. I’m better than sticking a power cord into my computer. And I’m better than waiting for Windows to check my e-mail.”

…

The software fires up the moment you open the laptop and connects right to a wireless network without Windows.

(Under the hood, it’s Linux running on top of an ARM chip on a mini-motherboard that provides this quick access feature. You’re basically talking about most of the components needed to run an iPhone being hitched to a large battery. So, the computer can run in instant-on mode for days.)

Some users Dell surveyed spent 70 percent of their time working in the instant-on mode. Microsoft is sure to take note of that figure. Windows has turned into a clunky cup holder.

[Oh, and note MSWindows won't run on ARM chip architecture--there ain't no plan b, Linux (R) is plan a...]

Let’s just keep medicine out of the hands of the poor for the sake of higher Pharma profits, says Obama, as covered at Knowledge Ecology:

http://keionline.org/node/602

Today the U.S. government confirmed it was supporting Tom Bombelles for WIPO Director of Global Challenges. From 1991 to December 2008, Bombelles was a lobbyist for PhRMA, and then Merck, where he often designed strategies to oppose compulsory licensing of patents on medicines in developing countries. In early 2009 the Obama Administration pushed the WHO to hire Bombelles as a consultant on influenza preparedness, and asked that WIPO offer him a consultancy in the Global Challenges programs. Since then, the USPTO has pushed his candidacy for this key WIPO job, which among other things, deals with access to medicine

Here’s some raw video of the protests against the G20 summit.  Apparently the USA has repealed the First Amendment:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SzJD5Psy5o0

Note that youtube is closing the comments, which were overwhelming positive.

Here’s the organization supporting the protests:

http://resistg20.org/

Great visualization of the shrinking market capitalization of the financial industry in the wake of the current financial crisis, at the NYT.  Another example of a newspaper doing the web right:

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/09/12/business/financial-markets-graphic.html