Shades of the US's SOPA (anti-anti-piracy legislation) debate in eastern Europe, quite literally (see this Associated Press story): Street and online protests in Poland, the Czech Republic, and Slovenia against the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, or ACTA, remind me of a killer TED Talk by copyright legal expert and Harvard University law professor Lawrence Lessig: "Reexamining the Remix." Do … [Read more...] about Revisiting copyright law – worldwide
SOPA
SOPA & citizenship in a digital age
You could call Internet users "citizen lobbyists." This week, in a post-Arab Spring sign of how participatory media – and its participants – are powerfully changing things, they successfully went head-to-head with some powerful forces and won. Christopher Dodd, the head of the film industry trade group that lobbied and failed to push through the Stop Online Piracy Act (along with the US Chamber of … [Read more...] about SOPA & citizenship in a digital age
Pirates get religion in Sweden
Kopimis' (pronounced "copy me's") spiritual practice can get a little repetitive but, hey, that's the whole idea. Sweden's copyleftists have united to form an official religion called Kopimism. Founded and led by philosophy student Isak Gerson way back in 2010, the religion is also a community of file-sharers "which claims it considers CTRL+C and CTRL+V (keyboard shortcuts for copy and paste) to … [Read more...] about Pirates get religion in Sweden