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Archive for August 20th, 2002

2002-08-20

elucidating the eucd

The Campaign for Digital Rights has released their first look at the British implementation of the European Copyright Directive, which I will insist on calling “The European DMCA” until I’m physically restrained from doing so. Close up, it has some important differences – but that doesn’t make it any better. CD-R’s step-by-step demolition of it is a corker.

The writing exercise today, then, was pretty clear cut. STAND now has a potted description of just some of the problems with the new statutes, and what you can do about it – and why this may be even harder than the Blunkett RIP provisions to fix.

Oh Christ, that’s such an Anchordesk way to plug it, isn’t it? I’m getting far too into this pro journalism business. Talking of which, I haven’t cross-checked all of the STAND piece with CD-R yet, so there may be some errors of interpretation I’ve fallen into there. I did spend a week staring at the legislation so I’m pretty sure they’re not too egregious. I’m waiting on sending out the message to the few thousand STANDees though; some things you can’t undo.

it worked!

Well, I must be doing something right. I just got a prominent cyberrights activist to accuse me of misrepresenting the facts. Yesss! I’ve sold out, and I haven’t even bought in yet!

[ correction: said activist (who will not be named but it is Cory) pointed out that I misrepresent the facts by saying that he said that I misrepresent the facts. I have no defence here except my usual one: I was joking! Joking! Just a joke, m’lud! Ahaha. ha. damn. ]

Reuters beat me to it – their story ran at 9:45 EST. Curse you, Elinor Abreu. Wired News’s piece was longer than I thought it’d be: it explained filters and their effects far more carefully, and covered the angle of publishers having their work blocked as spam, rather than going into the detail of how Habeas’ scheme worked. Anti-spam filter’s false positives do seem to be a big deal at the moment: Dan Gillmor covered that today too. (We occasionally get hit by this at NTK, but I don’t try to re-edit for it. The only way for these dumb filters to learn is to have people lose the occasional mail. Much worse are all the prudish corporate filters, which constantly bounce NTK on the basis that it contains “sexual content”, “unsuitable language”, and on a couple of occasions “joke”.)

The one story I don’t think any of the proper media covered adequately was how the haiku infringement blackhole list will work, and just how controversial blackholes are in general. And that’s where the blogs pick up the baton.