This weekend there will be street protests in Europe against ACTA, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. I want to put on record ESET North America’s opposition to ratification of this agreement while applauding the actions of countries such as Poland, Slovakia, Latvia, the Czech Republic and Germany in withholding or delaying ratification. I would encourage anyone
Yesterday’s announcement by the US Department of Justice that the operators of file-sharing site Megaupload had been indicted for operating a criminal enterprise that generated over $175 million by trafficking in over half a billion dollars of pirated copyrighted material has sent shockwaves across the Internet. The accuracy of those figures may be questionable, but
Tomorrow, on January 18, 2012, dozens of popular websites covering a diverse range of subjects will be blacking out their home pages in protest of the U.S. Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). Some of these websites are well-known, such as the English language web site for the encyclopedic Wikipedia and quirky news site Boing Boing,
SOPA as currently constructed can never work as intended. I'm not going to get into the reasons we don't like it because of its oppressive implications or because it is against our first amendment rights nor for any other reason (there's been so much other commentary on those issues that it would be superfluous). I
SOPA: Homeland Security weighs in, MPAA is reticent. Clearly, the House Judiciary Committee needs some authoritative, neutral advice on the mechanics and implications of DNS filtering.
We all have our concerns about piracy and violations of intellectual property, but the discussion taking place at the moment behind closed doors seems pretty one-sided.