I’m pleased to announce that I can now reveal the location for our live collage of the hundreds of surveillance state photos you’ve been taking this week for the Freedom Not Fear, Big Picture event.
On 11 October, we’ll gather underneath the statue of Winston Churchill on Parliament Square in London to build an image showing [...]

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Happy-snappers unite! We need as many people as possible to take photos of stuff that embodies the database state, and the UK’s world-famous surveillance society (wake up! You’ve just walked into it).
On 11 October, No2ID and the Open Rights Group will make a live collage of the images you’ve taken in a prominent location in [...]

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Update (24/09/08): The votes are in. The bad news is that amendment 133 was rejected (watch this space for a link to a list of the MEPs who rejected it). But the good news is that amendment 138 was passed, with a last minute oral amendment. The European Parliament voted to adopt it in [...]

Read the rest of "To do this weekend: ask your MEPs to vote for Telecom package amendments 133 and 138"

Last month, the Government announced it would be consulting with the public on ways to curb illicit filesharing. ORG will be developing a response to the consultation over the next two months and we’d like your help.
We’ve put the Executive Summary of the consultation document online. Please use our interactive consultation tool to tell us [...]

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Only 3 months late, the Government has finally released a consultation into potential legislation aimed at curbing illicit filesharing on the net. Several of the legislative options on the table are worrying, and mirror schemes being discussed in various national and international fora. They include streamlining the legal process to require ISPs to provide personal [...]

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In a letter to the Times today Europe’s leading professionals in the field of intellectual property have explained why the proposal for copyright term extension would harm Europe’s creators and consumers:

Read the rest of "Copyright extension: what you can do."

Disregarding the evidence-based findings of their own advisors, the UK government’s independent analysis, and those of Europe’s leading intellectual property research centres, the EU Commission has formally accepted DG Internal Market’s proposal to extend the duration of copyright protection for sound recordings.
Copyright term is a quid pro quo, designed to balance the interests of consumers [...]

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Could Europe be drafting a new law to disconnect suspected filesharers from the internet? MEPs have already signalled their condemnation of this approach. But last-minute amendments to telecommunications legislation could bring the so-called “3 strikes” approach in by the backdoor. If you want your MEP to stick to their guns on 3 strikes, write to [...]

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Today, the leading European centres for intellectual property research have released a joint letter to EU Commission President José Manuel Barroso, enclosing an impact assessment detailing the far-reaching and negative effects of the proposal to extend the term of copyright in sound recordings. With the confusion and disillusionment of Ireland’s rejection of the Lisbon Treaty [...]

Read the rest of "Term Extension “will damage Commission’s reputation”, top legal advisers tell Barroso"

Will consumer pressure for a safer net mean the end of open platforms and rapid innovation? And should the geeks who “get” the net care if the rest of the world prefer TiVos and iPhones?
On Wednesday of this week we co-hosted an event at the British Computer Society to discuss the problems raised by Jonathan [...]

Read the rest of "The Future of the Internet in Focus"