Fried Eggs

Bloggers, Twitter users, Website Owners, Text Message senders, FB users ---- that probably includes everyone one of us, if you haven't heard about the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and you are, at all, interested in protecting your rights.

Whether those be to continue blogging, or keeping text messages private, too government access to Google and Yahoo records, then --- at least from what I can tell -- it is pretty important for us to get behind EFF and do whatever we can to protect our privacy and freedom of speech rights. I briefly scanned a copyright suit against YouTube that could have major implications on how user generated sites are operated. It ties into the secret meetings that the US has been having in Europe to establish much stricter liabilities on ISPs when copyrights are violated. The result is that ISP could and would shut down sites much faster.

With the explosion of user generated content, we should be wary of these kinds of agreements as it means a few bad apples could spoil the freedom we currently have to upload our own works to websites. Currently, when a copyright violation occurs, a hosting company will send a publisher a notice of violation and the publisher has a certain period of time to comply. This is reasonable.

However, from what I understand the new rules are a 3 strikes you're out type policy. Since ISPs won't want the burden, it will mean they will be forced to shut down sites. The public will be harmed. Interestingly, these agreements are strongly supported by the major music labels and film industry. They're trying to hold on to their old rights and protect themselves from their demise.

In fact, just last week some music bloggers had their blogs shut down by blogger due to copy right complaints see http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/02/musicblogocide

We are all busy, though we shouldn't ignore the fact that our privacy and freedom of speech rights can be, and are being challenged on a daily basis, in court and in legislatures.

EEF's website has some really great articles about the different law suits that affect our rights. They also have summaries about issues that are of particular relevance to bloggers and other articles about privacy issues.

I'm really interested in learning anything more about these issues because these are areas of law that can have significant impact on us.

4/17/10

2 people like this.

askcherlock We need to know just what the rules are and the implications for all of us.

4/18/10

tonyberkman definitely

4/20/10