Courts Unfit for Digital Society

France passed a law on digital piracy. FT reports:

Internet users who download films and music without paying for them would get three warnings before being cut off for up to a year. Until now action against illegal file sharing has been a matter for the French courts.

The debate in Europe is not if Internet piracy is legal or not, but whether we uphold the rule of law and make sure that a court has to decide to block a person off the internet, or this can be done by some other authority. Imagine that the highway toll collectors could ban people from using the highways if they though they are transporting fake Gucci bags:

Lawyers say France’s move to cut the courts out of the issue of internet access may contravene the European Convention of Human Rights and could spark conflict with Brussels. Long awaited reform of EU telecoms regulation has been held up by disagreements over whether the courts should be involved.

The bigger issue at stake here is are courts fit for the speed of the digital economy? The French obviously are not. And they are no exception. But the solution to circumvent them goes against more importnat principles of human rights and the rule of law. Besides, it would not hurt the economy if the courts would be more efficient on other matters as well. 

Popular posts from this blog

Updated! Synchronizing Moon+ Books on Android

Image
I do a lot of reading on my Android devices, phones and tablets. After a long search I selected  Moon+ Reader , the  Pro  version. The killer feature was the way bookmarks and underlining is handled. I mostly read non-fiction and like to mark important passages. And I want to be sure my marks are available forever. After I am done with a book, I create an Evernote clip from my marks and comments. With Moon+ this is done with a single click. I did most of my reading on my Nexus 7 tablet, but when my phone was getting bigger I realized it would be nice to do some reading there as well. And it would be even nicer if I could synchronize the books, notes etc. Synchronizing book files Moon+ provides functionality to sync books (.epub, .pdf ...) to cloud, but they are just pushed to cloud and this is the end of the story. They will not end up on your other device. So you need to do it like this:  Create a backup of the Moon+ main folder. Just in case. Many android f...
Read more

Rescue Operation

Image
I noticed two outlets I was publishing at, the Blogactiv and the DigitalPost went 404 . Thanks to the Internet Wayback Machine and my email archive I was able to save the content and move it here - with original dates. Blogactiv (2007-2020) DigitalPost (2015-2017).
Read more

Council on Scientific Information in the Digital Age: Too Little Too Late

I have been involved in publishing on the World-Wide-Web since 1992 and with scholarly publishing since 1995, also as a co-editor of a peer-reviewed journal ITcon and a coordinator of a framework program SciX, that was studying the topic in depth. The bottom line is that in the scientific publishing process there is a decreasing value added by the publishers. The research is funded by the governments or the industry, performed by the researchers, papers are written and reviewed by them for free, only at the very end a publisher comes along that takes over the copyright, publishes the work and sells the journal at great expense to the community that created and edited the content for free. At the Competitiveness (Internal market, Industry and Research) Council meeting in Brussels, on 22 and 23 November 2007 a conclusion has been reached on scientific information in the digital age: access, dissemination and preservation . It recognizes: the major contribution of universities, internati...
Read more