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Aber die von der SPD-Fraktion erzwungene Zeitaufschiebung könnte der Bildung einer außerparlamentarischen Opposition gegen die Drohnen-Aufrüstung nützen
Senator Thom Tillis has released a discussion draft of the “Digital Copyright Act of 2021,” a potential successor to the current DMCA. The draft proposes a takedown-and-stay down requirement for online service providers, which indirectly suggests the use of piracy filters. That’s just one of the many elements that will be fiercely debated in the coming months.
From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more. We have some good VPN deals here for the holidays.
It is a busy week for copyright proposals in the United States, one that will resound far into the year ahead.
A few hours after the ‘CASE Act’ and the ‘Protecting Lawful Streaming Act’ were approved as part of the spending bill, a discussion draft for a new and improved version of the DMCA was revealed.
The draft (pdf) was published by Senator Thom Tillis, who started a thorough review of the copyright law last year. After hearing dozens of experts and stakeholders, the Senator released what he considers to be a more modern version of the 20-year old DMCA.
“The Digital Millennium Copyright Act was passed in 1998, and while it was revolutionary at the time, the law simply hasn’t kept pace with changes in technology. The DMCA is now antiquated and is past-due for modernization,” Senator Tillis said.
“This discussion draft is the result of a year-long series of hearings and months of feedback from creators, user groups, and technology companies.”
Titled the “Digital Copyright Act of 2021,” the proposal suggests various updates and changes that have ignited instant opposition from digital rights groups. We will provide a summary of some key proposals but there will be more to unpack in the future.
The current DMCA requires online services to remove copyright-infringing links or files when they are alerted by copyright holders. This won’t change in the new proposal but simply taking down content is no longer sufficient.
When copyright holders inform services that ‘complete or near complete’ copies of their works are being shared online without permission, these platforms have to ensure that this content stays offline.
While the draft doesn’t mention filters specifically, the ‘staydown’ language indirectly requires online sites and services to monitor and filter uploaded content. This would be similar to Article 17 of the EU Copyright Directive.
Copyright holders have argued in favor of a staydown requirement for years. They argue that this is essential to end the piracy ‘whack-a-mole’ where they have to send hundreds of takedown requests for the same content.
The existing DMCA already requires ISPs to disconnect repeat infringers, but it’s not clear when this should happen, and if notifications from rightsholders are sufficient as evidence.
This ambiguity has led to a series of lawsuits where ISPs are accused of failing to adhere to the DMCA. The new Digital Copyright Act should bring an end to this uncertainty.
The discussion draft proposes to get rid of the “repeat infringer” and replace it with “persons that, on multiple occasions, were the subject of notifications (…) that were not successfully challenged.”
More importantly, it requires the Copyright Office, together with the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, to develop a policy model that specifies what a frequent offender is and how these persons should be handled.
This suggestion is in line with the Copyright Office’s own assessment from earlier this year, which called on Congress to clarify when a user’s account should be terminated.
The discussion draft also proposes using a small claims tribunal for smaller copyright offenses. This pretty much means incorporating the CASE Act in the new law but that seems unnecessary now that the proposal has already been passed.
A more novel suggestion in the ‘DMCA 2.0’ is to keep a list of companies and copyright holders that repeatedly send false takedown notices. These ‘flagged’ abusers are placed on a list maintained by the Copyright Office.
When online services receive takedown notices from blacklisted senders they are not required to act. In other words, they can ignore these takedowns without losing their safe harbor.
As mentioned earlier, the above is just an initial rundown of the proposal, which by itself is merely a discussion draft. And based on the early responses, there is plenty to discuss, or not.
“There’s nothing to discuss,” The Electronic Frontier Foundation notes in an early response adding that “the bill, if passed, would absolutely devastate the Internet.”
Re:Create is equally offended by the draft stating that the proposed Digital Copyright Act “would fundamentally end online creativity as we know it.”
Public Knowledge, meanwhile, notes that the draft text “would significantly curtail online speech, subjecting every upload to mandatory content filtering while effectively eliminating fair use on the internet.”
As is often the case with copyright law proposals, the responses are mixed. Rightsholders are pleased with most of the suggestions, which is reflected in an early response from 22 music groups.
“Through a thoughtful, deliberative process, Senator Tillis has developed an important proposal. By digging deep into the substance, engaging a broad universe of stakeholders and experts, and confronting the issues, Senator Tillis and his team have started an important discussion about how best to provide incentives for success,” they say.
From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more. We have some good VPN deals here for the holidays.
Wie man in Rheinland-Pfalz Stellvertretender Landesmediendirektor wird
Klage vom Umweltverbänden gegen Erdölsuche in der südöstlichen Berentsee vor dem Obersten Gerichtshof gescheitert. Mögliche Auswirkung auf Parlamentswahl
When you haven’t been updated since 2016, expiring certificates are a problem.
Enlarge / Pictured: An alternate future for many Android phones in 2021. (credit: Jan Kaláb CC BY-SA 2.0 / Flickr)
Things were touch-and-go for a while, but it looks like Let's Encrypt's transition to a standalone certificate authority (CA) isn't going to break a ton of old Android phones. This was a serious concern earlier due to an expiring root certificate, but Let's Encrypt has come up with a workaround.
Let's Encrypt is a fairly new certificate authority, but it's also one of the world's leading. The service was a major player in the push to make the entire Web run over HTTPS, and as a free, open issuing authority, it went from zero certs to one billion certs in just four years. For regular users, the list of trusted CAs is usually issued by your operating system or browser vendor, so any new CA has a long rollout that involves getting added to the list of trusted CAs by every OS and browser on Earth as well as getting updates to very user. To get up and running quickly, Let's Encrypt got a cross-signature from an established CA, IdenTrust, so any browser or OS that trusted IdenTrust could now trust Let's Encrypt, and the service could start issuing useful certs.
When it launched in 2016, Let's Encrypt also issued its own root certificate ("ISRG Root X1") and applied for it to be trusted by the major software platforms, most of which accepted it sometime that year. Now, several years later, with IdenTrust's "DST Root X3" certificate set to expire in September 2021, the time has come for Let's Encrypt to stand on its own and rely on its own root certificate. Since this was submitted four years ago, surely every Web-capable OS currently in use has gotten an update with Let's Encrypt's cert, right?
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Research could help slow down deterioration of aging artwork, unmask counterfeits
Enlarge / Sampling microbes from Leonardo da Vinci's Portrait of a Man in Red Chalk (1512). (credit: Guadalupe Piñar et al.)
Microbiomes are all the scientific rage, even in art conservation, where studying the microbial species that congregate on works of art may lead to new ways to slow down the deterioration of priceless aging artwork, as well as potentially unmask counterfeits. For instance, scientists have analyzed the microbes found on seven of Leonardo da Vinci's drawings, according to a recent paper published in the journal Frontiers in Microbiology. And back in March, scientists at the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI) collected and analyzed swabs taken from centuries-old art in a private collection housed in Florence, Italy, and published their findings in the journal Microbial Ecology.
The researchers behind the earlier March paper were JCVI geneticists who collaborated with the Leonardo da Vinci DNA Project in France. The work built on a prior study looking for microbial signatures and possible geographic patterns in hairs collected from people in the District of Columbia and San Diego, California. They concluded from that analysis that microbes could be a useful geographic signature.
For the March study, the JCVI geneticists took swabs of microbes from Renaissance-style pieces and confirmed the presence of so-called "oxidase positive" microbes on painted wood and canvas surfaces. These microbes munch on the compounds found in paint, glue, and cellulose (found in paper, canvas, and wood), in turn producing water or hydrogen peroxide as byproducts.
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Congress also made streaming pirated works a felony.
Enlarge / Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) was the lead sponsor of the CASE Act. (credit: Alex Wong/Getty Images)
Members of Congress were given just a few hours to read the massive 5,600-page spending bill that passed both legislative chambers on Monday evening. In addition to authorizing $900 billion in COVID relief spending and $1.4 trillion in other spending, the package also included a number of smaller bills that would not have otherwise become law this legislative session.
These included two significant changes to copyright law. One was the Protecting Lawful Streaming Act of 2020, legislation that Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) introduced two weeks ago. The act makes it a felony, punishable by up to 10 years in prison, to run a pirate streaming service.
The omnibus also included the CASE Act, a proposal to create a new "small claims court" for copyright infringement. Instead of filing a conventional lawsuit, copyright holders will be able to file a complaint with a new agency called the Copyright Claims Board. The CCB will function much like a court, hearing evidence from both sides and then deciding whether to award damages. But it will develop an informal, streamlined process in an effort to keep the costs of litigation down.
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Mozilla follows Apple’s and Google’s leads on partitioning, then one-ups them.
Enlarge / Breaking the browser cache up into separate pools prevents sophisticated timing probes that let one site know whether you're logged into another. (credit: Mozilla / Jim Salter)
Firefox version 85 will be released in January 2021, and one of its features is increased user privacy via improvements in client-side storage (cache) partitioning. This has been widely and incorrectly reported elsewhere as network partitioning, likely due to confusion around the privacy.partition.network_state flag in Firefox, which allows advanced users to enable or disable cache partitioning as desired.
In a nutshell, cache partitioning is the process of keeping separate cache pools for separate websites, based on the site requesting the resources loaded, rather than simply on the site providing the resources.
With a traditional, globally scoped browser cache, you might see behavior like this:
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The law doesn’t love it when competitors promise to cooperate in certain ways.
Enlarge / Signage in front of a building on the Google campus in Mountain View, California, on Wednesday, Dec. 16, 2020. (credit: David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images)
More than three dozen state attorneys general last week filed an antitrust suit against Google, accusing the tech behemoth of a slew of anticompetitive behaviors. Among those behaviors, a new report finds, is an explicit agreement from Google to work with Facebook not only to divide the online advertising marketplace, but also to fend off antitrust investigations.
Facebook and Google agreed in a contract to "cooperate and assist each other in responding to any Antitrust Action" and "promptly and fully inform the Other Party of any Governmental Communication Related to the Agreement," according to an unredacted draft copy of the lawsuit obtained by The Wall Street Journal.
The final version of the suit made public last week (PDF) alleged that Google and Facebook signed a secret agreement in 2018 that "fixes prices and allocates markets between Google and Facebook as competing bidders in the auctions for publishers' Web display and in-app advertising inventory."
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Intel is expected to launch its “Panther Canyon” NUC mini PCs with Intel Tiger Lake chips any day now. But while we’re waiting for an official announcement, detailed specs have been leaked by @9550pro. In a nutshell, expect a compute…
Intel is expected to launch its “Panther Canyon” NUC mini PCs with Intel Tiger Lake chips any day now. But while we’re waiting for an official announcement, detailed specs have been leaked by @9550pro. In a nutshell, expect a computer that measures as little as 4.6″ x 4.4″ x 1.5″, but which supports up to […]
The post Intel Panther Canyon NUC specs leaked (up to 28W Core i7-1165G7) appeared first on Liliputing.
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