Showing posts with label open government. Show all posts
Showing posts with label open government. Show all posts

Friday, March 1, 2013

Educate Yourself: The Video Of Map Updates Is Awesome! Looked Like Lightning! Tim Berners-Lee: The Year Open Data Went Worldwide - One Of The Most Important People Of The Past Decades Is So Unknown To The World - True Heroes Stand For Free Internet

direct democracy, free access, international politics, public policy

Tim Berners-Lee

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Sir Tim Berners-Lee

Berners-Lee in 2010
Born Timothy John Berners-Lee
8 June 1955 (age 57)[1]
London, England
United Kingdom[1]
Residence United States and United Kingdom[2]
Nationality British
Alma mater Queen's College, Oxford
Occupation Computer scientist
Employer
Known for
  • Inventing the World Wide Web
  • Holder of the 3Com Founders Chair at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
Title Professor
Religion Unitarian Universalism
Parents Conway Berners-Lee
Mary Lee Woods
Website
www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/
Sir Timothy John "Tim" Berners-Lee, OM, KBE, FRS, FREng, FRSA (born 8 June 1955),[1] also known as "TimBL," is a British computer scientist, best known as the inventor of the World Wide Web. He made a proposal for an information management system in March 1989,[3] and he implemented the first successful communication between a Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) client and server via the Internet sometime around mid November.[4]
Berners-Lee is the director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which oversees the Web's continued development. He is also the founder of the World Wide Web Foundation, and is a senior researcher and holder of the Founders Chair at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL).[5] He is a director of the Web Science Research Initiative (WSRI),[6] and a member of the advisory board of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence.[7][8]
In 2004, Berners-Lee was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II for his pioneering work.[9] In April 2009, he was elected a foreign associate of the United States National Academy of Sciences.[10][11] He was honoured as the "Inventor of the World Wide Web" during the 2012 Summer Olympics opening ceremony, in which he appeared in person, working at a NeXT Computer at the London Olympic Stadium.[12] He tweeted "This is for everyone",[13] which was instantly spelled out in LCD lights attached to the chairs of the 80,000 people in the audience.[12]

Contents

Early life

Berners-Lee was born in southwest London, England, on 8 June 1955, one of four children born to Conway Berners-Lee and Mary Lee Woods. His parents worked on the first commercially-built computer, the Ferranti Mark 1. He attended Sheen Mount Primary School, and then went on to attend south west London's independent Emanuel School from 1969 to 1973.[9] A keen trainspotter as a child, he learnt about electronics from tinkering with a model railway.[14] He studied at Queen's College, Oxford, from 1973 to 1976, where he received a first-class degree in physics.[1]

Career


Berners-Lee, 2005
After graduation he worked as an engineer at the telecommunications company Plessey in Poole.[1] In 1978 he joined D. G. Nash in Dorset where he helped create type-setting software for printers.[1]
Berners-Lee worked as an independent contractor at CERN from June to December 1980. While there, he proposed a project based on the concept of hypertext, to facilitate sharing and updating information among researchers.[15] To demonstrate, he built a prototype system named ENQUIRE.[16]
After leaving CERN in late 1980, he went to work at John Poole's Image Computer Systems, Ltd, in Bournemouth, England.[17] He ran the company's technical side for three years.[18] The project he worked on was a real-time remote procedure call which gave him experience in computer networking.[17] In 1984, he returned to CERN as a fellow.[16]
In 1989, CERN was the largest Internet node in Europe, and Berners-Lee saw an opportunity to join hypertext with the Internet: "I just had to take the hypertext idea and connect it to the Transmission Control Protocol and domain name system ideas and—ta-da!—the World Wide Web[19] ... Creating the web was really an act of desperation, because the situation without it was very difficult when I was working at CERN later. Most of the technology involved in the web, like the hypertext, like the Internet, multifont text objects, had all been designed already. I just had to put them together. It was a step of generalising, going to a higher level of abstraction, thinking about all the documentation systems out there as being possibly part of a larger imaginary documentation system.”[20]
Berners-Lee wrote his initial proposal in March 1989, and in 1990, with the help of Robert Cailliau (with whom he shared the 1995 ACM Software System Award), produced a revision which was accepted by his manager, Mike Sendall.[21] He used similar ideas to those underlying the ENQUIRE system to create the World Wide Web, for which he designed and built the first Web browser. This also functioned as an editor (WorldWideWeb, running on the NeXTSTEP operating system), and the first Web server, CERN HTTPd (short for Hypertext Transfer Protocol daemon).
" Mike Sendall buys a NeXT cube for evaluation, and gives it to Tim [Berners-Lee]. Tim's prototype implementation on NeXTStep is made in the space of a few months, thanks to the qualities of the NeXTStep software development system. This prototype offers WYSIWYG browsing/authoring! Current Web browsers used in "surfing the Internet" are mere passive windows, depriving the user of the possibility to contribute. During some sessions in the CERN cafeteria, Tim and I try to find a catching name for the system. I was determined that the name should not yet again be taken from Greek mythology. Tim proposes "World-Wide Web". I like this very much, except that it is difficult to pronounce in French..." by Robert Cailliau, 2 November 1995.[22]
The first website built was at CERN within the border of France,[23] and was first put online on 6 August 1991:
Info.cern.ch was the address of the world's first-ever web site and web server, running on a NeXT computer at CERN. The first web page address was http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html, which centred on information regarding the WWW project. Visitors could learn more about hypertext, technical details for creating their own webpage, and even an explanation on how to search the Web for information. There are no screenshots of this original page and, in any case, changes were made daily to the information available on the page as the WWW project developed. You may find a later copy (1992) on the World Wide Web Consortium website. [24]
It provided an explanation of what the World Wide Web was, and how one could use a browser and set up a web server.[25][26][27][28]
In 1994, Berners-Lee founded the W3C at MIT. It comprised various companies that were willing to create standards and recommendations to improve the quality of the Web. Berners-Lee made his idea available freely, with no patent and no royalties due. The World Wide Web Consortium decided that its standards should be based on royalty-free technology, so that they could easily be adopted by anyone.[29]
In 2001, Berners-Lee became a patron of the East Dorset Heritage Trust, having previously lived in Colehill in Wimborne, East Dorset, England.[30]
In December 2004, he accepted a chair in Computer Science at the School of Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton, England, to work on the Semantic Web.[31][32]
In a Times article in October 2009, Berners-Lee admitted that the initial pair of slashes ("//") in a web address were actually "unnecessary". He told the newspaper that he could easily have designed URLs not to have the slashes. "There you go, it seemed like a good idea at the time," he said in his lighthearted apology.[33]

Current work


Tim Berners-Lee at the Home Office, London, on 11 March 2010
In June 2009 then British Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced Berners-Lee would work with the UK Government to help make data more open and accessible on the Web, building on the work of the Power of Information Task Force.[34] Berners-Lee and Professor Nigel Shadbolt are the two key figures behind data.gov.uk, a UK Government project to open up almost all data acquired for official purposes for free re-use. Commenting on the opening up of Ordnance Survey data in April 2010 Berners-Lee said that: "The changes signal a wider cultural change in Government based on an assumption that information should be in the public domain unless there is a good reason not to—not the other way around." He went on to say "Greater openness, accountability and transparency in Government will give people greater choice and make it easier for individuals to get more directly involved in issues that matter to them."[35]
In November 2009, Berners-Lee launched the World Wide Web Foundation in order to "Advance the Web to empower humanity by launching transformative programs that build local capacity to leverage the Web as a medium for positive change."[36]
Berners-Lee is one of the pioneer voices in favour of Net Neutrality,[37] and has expressed the view that ISPs should supply "connectivity with no strings attached," and should neither control nor monitor customers' browsing activities without their expressed consent.[38][39] He advocates the idea that net neutrality is a kind of human network right: "Threats to the Internet, such as companies or governments that interfere with or snoop on Internet traffic, compromise basic human network rights."[40]
Berners-Lee is President of the Open Data Institute.[41]

Recognition


This NeXT Computer was used by Berners-Lee at CERN and became the world's first web server
  • In 2003 he was awarded The Royal Photographic Society's Progress Medal and Honorary Fellowship (HonFRPS) in recognition of any invention, research, publication or other contribution which has resulted in an important advance in the scientific or technological development of photography or imaging in the widest sense.[50]
  • In 2003, he received the Computer History Museum's Fellow Award, for his seminal contributions to the development of the World Wide Web.[51]
  • On 15 April 2004, he was named as the first recipient of Finland's Millennium Technology Prize, for inventing the World Wide Web. The cash prize, worth one million euros (about £892,000, or US$1.3 million, as of Sept 2011), was awarded on 15 June, in Helsinki, Finland, by the President of the Republic of Finland, Tarja Halonen.[52]
  • He received a knighthood in 2004 when he was promoted to Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire (KBE) in the New Year Honours "for services to the global development of the Internet", and was formally invested on 16 July 2004.[9][53]
  • On 21 July 2004, he was presented with an honorary Doctor of Science degree from Lancaster University.[54]
  • On 27 January 2005, he was named Greatest Briton of 2004, both for his achievements and for displaying the key British characteristics of "diffidence, determination, a sharp sense of humour and adaptability", as put by David Hempleman-Adams, a panel member.[55]
  • In 2007, Berners-Lee received the Academy of Achievement's Golden Plate Award.
  • In 2007, he was ranked Joint First, alongside Albert Hofmann, in The Telegraph's list of 100 greatest living geniuses.[56]
  • On 13 June 2007, he received the Order of Merit, becoming one of only 24 living members entitled to hold the honour, and to use the post-nominals 'O.M.' after their name.[57] (The Order of Merit is within the personal bestowal of The Queen, and does not require recommendation by ministers or the Prime Minister)
  • He was awarded the 2008 IEEE/RSE Wolfson James Clerk Maxwell Award, for "conceiving and further developing the World Wide Web".[58]
  • On 2 December 2008, Berners-Lee was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Manchester. His parents worked on the Manchester Mark 1 in the 1940s and 50s.[59]

Berners-Lee's tweet, "This is for everyone",[13] at the 2012 Summer Olympic Games in London

See also

Publications

Notes

  1. ^ a b c d e f g "Berners-Lee Longer Biography". World Wide Web Consortium. Retrieved 18 January 2011.
  2. ^ "Lunch with the FT: Tim Berners Lee". Financial Times.
  3. ^ "cern.info.ch – Tim Berners-Lee's proposal". Info.cern.ch. Retrieved 21 December 2011.
  4. ^ Tim Berners Lee's own reference. The exact date is unknown.
  5. ^ "Draper Prize". Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Retrieved 25 May 2008.
  6. ^ "People". The Web Science Research Initiative. Archived from the original on 28 June 2008. Retrieved 17 January 2011.
  7. ^ "MIT Center for Collective Intelligence (homepage)". Cci.mit.edu. Retrieved 15 August 2010.
  8. ^ "MIT Center for Collective Intelligence (people)". Cci.mit.edu. Retrieved 15 August 2010.
  9. ^ a b c "Web's inventor gets a knighthood". BBC. 31 December 2003. Retrieved 25 May 2008.
  10. ^ "Timothy Berners-Lee Elected to National Academy of Sciences". Dr. Dobb's Journal. Retrieved 9 June 2009.
  11. ^ "72 New Members Chosen By Academy" (Press release). United States National Academy of Sciences. 28 April 2009. Retrieved 17 January 2011.
  12. ^ a b c Friar, Karen (28 July 2012). "Sir Tim Berners-Lee stars in Olympics opening ceremony". ZDNet. Retrieved 28 July 2012.
  13. ^ a b Berners-Lee, Tim (27 July 2012). "This is for everyone". Twitter. Retrieved 28 July 2012.
  14. ^ Lunch with the FT: Tim Berners-Lee - FT.com
  15. ^ "Berners-Lee's original proposal to CERN". World Wide Web Consortium. March 1989. Retrieved 25 May 2008.
  16. ^ a b Stewart, Bill. "Tim Berners-Lee, Robert Cailliau, and the World Wide Web". Retrieved 22 July 2010.
  17. ^ a b Tim Berners-Lee. "Frequently asked questions". World Wide Web Consortium. Retrieved 22 July 2010.
  18. ^ Grossman, Wendy (15 July 1996). "All you never knew about the Net ...". The Independent.
  19. ^ Tim Berners-Lee. "Answers for Young People". World Wide Web Consortium. Retrieved 25 May 2008.
  20. ^ "Biography and Video Interview of Timothy Berners-Lee at Academy of Achievement". Achievement.org. Retrieved 21 December 2011.
  21. ^ "Ten Years Public Domain for the Original Web Software". CERN. Retrieved 21 July 2010.
  22. ^ Roads and Crossroads of Internet History Chapter 4: Birth of the Web
  23. ^ "Tim Berners-Lee. Confirming The Exact Location Where the Web Was Invented".
  24. ^ -CERN[citation needed]
  25. ^ "Welcome to info.cern.ch, the website of the world's first-ever web server". CERN. Retrieved 25 May 2008.
  26. ^ "World Wide Web—Archive of world's first website". World Wide Web Consortium. Retrieved 25 May 2008.
  27. ^ "World Wide Web—First mentioned on USENET". Google. 6 August 1991. Retrieved 25 May 2008.
  28. ^ "The original post to alt.hypertalk describing the WorldWideWeb Project". Google Groups. Google. 9 August 1991. Retrieved 25 May 2008.
  29. ^ "Patent Policy—5 February 2004". World Wide Web Consortium. 5 February 2004. Retrieved 25 May 2008.
  30. ^ John W. Klooster (2009) Icons of invention: the makers of the modern world from Gutenberg to Gates p.611. ABC-CLIO, 2009
  31. ^ Berners-Lee, T.; Hendler, J.; Lassila, O. (2001). "The Semantic Web". Scientific American 284 (5): 34. doi:10.1038/scientificamerican0501-34. edit
  32. ^ "Tim Berners-Lee, World Wide Web inventor, to join ECS". World Wide Web Consortium. 2 December 2004. Retrieved 25 May 2008.
  33. ^ "Berners-Lee 'sorry' for slashes". BBC. 14 October 2009. Retrieved 14 October 2009.
  34. ^ "Tim Berners-Lee". World Wide Web Consortium. 10 June 2009. Retrieved 10 July 2009.
  35. ^ "Ordnance Survey offers free data access". BBC News. 1 April 2010. Retrieved 3 April 2009.
  36. ^ FAQ—World Wide Web Foundation Retrieved 18 January 2011
  37. ^ Ghosh, Pallab (15 September 2008). "Web creator rejects net tracking". BBC. Retrieved 15 September 2008. "Warning sounded on web's future."
  38. ^ Cellan-Jones, Rory (March 2008). "Web creator rejects net tracking". BBC. Retrieved 25 May 2008. "Sir Tim rejects net tracking like Phorm."
  39. ^ Adams, Stephen (March 2008). "Web inventor's warning on spy software". The Daily Telegraph (London). Retrieved 25 May 2008. "Sir Tim rejects net tracking like Phorm."
  40. ^ Berners, Tim (4 May 2011). "Tim Berners-Lee, Long Live the Web: A Call for Continued Open Standards and Neutrality, Scientific American Magazine, December 2010". Scientific American. Retrieved 21 December 2011.
  41. ^ Computing, Government (23 May 2012). "Government commits £10m to Open Data Institute". The Guardian.
  42. ^ "The World-Wide Web Hall of Fame". Best of the Web Directory.
  43. ^ "Software System Award". ACM Awards. Association for Computing Machinery. Retrieved 25 October 2011.
  44. ^ The London Gazette: (Supplement) no. 54794. pp. 24–25. 13 June 1997. Retrieved 28 July 2012.
  45. ^ "Honorary Graduates of University of Essex". Retrieved 15 December 2011.
  46. ^ Quittner, Joshua (29 March 1999). "Tim Berners Lee—Time 100 People of the Century". Time Magazine. "He wove the World Wide Web and created a mass medium for the 21st century. The World Wide Web is Berners-Lee's alone. He designed it. He loosed it on the world. And he more than anyone else has fought to keep it open, nonproprietary and free."
  47. ^ "Open University's online graduation". BBC NEWS. 31. March 2000. Retrieved 22 September 2010.
  48. ^ "Book of Members, 1780–2010: Chapter B". American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Retrieved 24 June 2011.
  49. ^ "100 great Britons – A complete list". Daily Mail. 21 August 2002. Retrieved 2 August 2012.
  50. ^ Royal Photographic Society's Centenary Award Retrieved 13 August 2012
  51. ^ "Fellow Awards | Fellows Home". Computerhistory.org. 11 January 2010. Retrieved 15 August 2010.
  52. ^ "Millennium Technology Prize 2004 awarded to inventor of World Wide Web". Millennium Technology Prize. Archived from the original on 30 August 2007. Retrieved 25 May 2008.
  53. ^ "Creator of the web turns knight". BBC. 16 July 2004. Retrieved 25 May 2008.
  54. ^ "Lancaster University Honorary Degrees, July 2004". Lancaster University. Retrieved 25 May 2008.
  55. ^ "Three loud cheers for the father of the web". The Daily Telegraph (London). 28 January 2005. Retrieved 25 May 2008.
  56. ^ ""Top 100 living geniuses" ''The Daily Telegraph'' 28 October 2007". The Daily Telegraph. 30 October 2007. Retrieved 21 December 2011.
  57. ^ "Web inventor gets Queen's honour". BBC. 13 June 2007. Retrieved 25 May 2008.
  58. ^ "IEEE/RSE Wolfson James Clerk Maxwell Award Recipients". IEEE. Retrieved 4 October 2011.
  59. ^ "Scientific pioneers honoured by The University of Manchester". manchester.ac.uk. 2 December 2008. Retrieved 10 October 2011.
  60. ^ "Universidad Politécnica de Madrid: Berners-Lee y Vinton G. Cerf—Doctores Honoris Causa por la UPM". Retrieved 15 August 2010.
  61. ^ Press Release: Sir Tim Berners Lee, Inventor of the World Wide Web, to receive Webby Lifetime Award At the 13th Annual Webby Awards Webby Awards.com Retrieved 21 January 2011
  62. ^ Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (22 July 2008). "Uitvinder World Wide Web krijgt eredoctoraat Vrije Universiteit" (in Dutch). Retrieved 22 July 2009.
  63. ^ NU.nl (22 July 2008). "'Bedenker' wereldwijd web krijgt eredoctoraat VU" (in Dutch). Retrieved 22 July 2009.
  64. ^ "Gorbachev honours 'world changers'". Press Association. 31 March 2011. Retrieved 11 August 2012.
  65. ^ Harvard awards 9 honorary degrees news.harvard.edu Retrieved 11 June 2011
  66. ^ "AI's Hall of Fame". IEEE Intelligent Systems (IEEE Computer Society) 26 (4): 5–15. 2011. doi:10.1109/MIS.2011.64. edit
  67. ^ "IEEE Computer Society Magazine Honors Artificial Intelligence Leaders". DigitalJournal.com. 24 August 2011. Retrieved 18 September 2011. Press release source: PRWeb (Vocus).
  68. ^ 2012 Inductees, Internet Hall of Fame website. Retrieved 24 April 2012
  69. ^ Times of Oman. "HM order for Web inventor". Retrieved 9 December 2012.
  70. ^ Al Shabiba Newspaper. "جلالته يمنح وسام السلطان قابوس للثقافة والعلوم والفنون للسير تيم بيرنيرز لي [ARABIC"]. Retrieved 9 December 2012.

Further reading

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Tim Berners-Lee
Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Tim Berners-Lee
Preceded by
First recipient		 Millennium Technology Prize winner
2004 (for the World Wide Web)		 Succeeded by
Shuji Nakamura

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Berners-Lee
http://www.ted.com At TED2009, Tim Berners-Lee called for "raw data now" -- for governments, scientists and institutions to make their data openly available on the web. At TED University in 2010, he shows a few of the interesting results when the data gets linked up.

TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world's leading thinkers and doers give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes. Featured speakers have included Al Gore on climate change, Philippe Starck on design, Jill Bolte Taylor on observing her own stroke, Nicholas Negroponte on One Laptop per Child, Jane Goodall on chimpanzees, Bill Gates on malaria and mosquitoes, Pattie Maes on the "Sixth Sense" wearable tech, and "Lost" producer JJ Abrams on the allure of mystery. TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design, and TEDTalks cover these topics as well as science, business, development and the arts. Closed captions and translated subtitles in a variety of languages are now available on TED.com, at http://www.ted.com/translate. Watch a highlight reel of the Top 10 TEDTalks at http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/top10


"This guy" is considered to be the father of the internet, for developing html and giving it away for free and is also the founder of W3-Consortium...
No one would call Bill Gates "this guy"... and he did actually invent nothing, and give away for free even less...
It's a pity, that one of the most important people of the past decades is so unknown to the world...
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Tuesday, February 26, 2013

Educate Yourself - Privatization Of Knowledge Exposed - France Corrupt Government Is Listening More To The Corporations Lobby Monopoly Instead Of The People By Shutting Down Free Content - The Pirate Bay Will Never Die Cause There Are Countries That Understand That Piracy Improves Quality Of Life, Education And Makes Us Happy

the free open source movement, no more monopoly, demise of close source corporations

The Pirate Bay Departs Sweden And Sets Sail For Norway and Spain

Following threats of legal action in its traditional home of Sweden, a few hours ago The Pirate Bay set sail for pastures new. Sweden’s Pirate Party had been providing bandwidth to the site for the last three years but came under intense pressure last week when a local anti-piracy group threatened to sue. The Swedish pirates have now stepped aside and handed the responsibilities to pirate parties in Norway and Spain.
When it comes to hosting a website there are thousands of companies and organizations around the world open for business. However, the options reduce massively when your site is internationally infamous.

For this reason The Pirate Bay has been hosted in many countries over the years, hopping across borders when one country or another became intolerant to its activities. As legal and political pressure mounted on the site its options narrowed further, with the threat of police raids eventually forcing even more drastic countermeasures.

For a while now the site’s true location has been unknown, hidden away in a far-off cloud and identifiable only by the connections it makes with the outside world. However, the site has to come up for air somewhere and for the last three years the site has received its Internet connectivity from Scandinavia, courtesy of the Swedish Pirate Party.

With the actual site located who-knows-where, last week the Pirate Party received the call they had been expecting. Local anti-piracy group Rights Alliance told the pirates and other Internet companies further up the chain that continuing to work with The Pirate Bay beyond Tuesday 26 would result in legal action.

Rights Alliance have the backing of the world’s largest movie and music companies and fighting them in court would be a huge burden for the Swedish Pirate Party, one that would sap their resources and divert them from their mission. So, reluctantly, the Swedish pirates have now stopped hosting The Pirate Bay, but not before a new plan was put into action.

Sometime earlier today the ropes connecting the Pirate Bay galleon to the shores of Sweden were cut and the ship sailed away into the sunset. And then, as if by magic, it split into two parts and docked in two brand new ports.
Hydrabay
With a seamless transition The Pirate Bay is now being serviced by the pirate parties of Norway and Catalunya.

“TPB did of course have lots of backup transit lined up for ages. This is however the first time we are going to show two at the same time,” The Pirate Bay’s Winona told TorrentFreak.

“It will be interesting to see who is now blamed for hosting TPB. In the end, maybe the anti-interneterians will understand that they can’t win a fight when they have the people against them.”

The decision to choose Norway and Spain as locations for The Pirate Bay is perhaps best viewed through the prism of recent court action in the former and a complete lack of action in the latter.

Following initial pressure and a court case in 2009, the IFPI and several movie studios failed to force local ISP Telenor to block The Pirate Bay. Their 2010 appeal was also rejected when the court found that there was no legal basis to force Telenor to block the site. While that ruling on ISP liability will be of some comfort to the Norwegian pirates, the position could change if the law is amended.
But of course there’s a backup – Spain.

Despite introducing new legislation after the US threatened to place it on a trade blacklist, Spain currently offers a favorable environment for file-sharing sites.

Last April and just a month after the so-called Sinde Law went live, the Spanish Ministry of Culture revealed that the Comisión de Propiedad Intelectual (Copyright Commission) had received dozens of site closure requests from rightsholders. However, according to the Intellectual Property Alliance, little has been done in response.

“To date, only two websites have closed in response to complaints submitted to the IP Commission by IIPA’s member affiliates, and those websites closed voluntarily,” the IIPA wrote in a recent submission to the USTR.

“As of yet the IP Commission has not once made use of its authority to request a judicial writ from the Administrative Court to order the closure of a single infringing website or service. Meanwhile, IIPA is aware of at least 80 complaints that remain outstanding. More than ever, websites providing or linking to illegal content can be secure in the knowledge that takedown measures are nonexistent and result in no consequences,” they add.

Spain also offers other benefits to a site like The Pirate Bay since under current law file-sharing linking sites are not explicitly illegal. Also of interest is an IIPA complaint that Spain’s e-commerce laws do not make it clear that infringement notices are an effective means of providing ISPs with knowledge that infringement is occurring on their services.

Which is just as well, since The Pirate Bay may well attract quite a few of those.

Update: Comment from Swedish Pirate Party Leader Anna Troberg

“It is wonderful to be able to pass on the baton to two sister parties. It is testament to the pirate movement’s maturity and strength. We help each other and work with our sight set firmly on the future. Today, there are more than sixty different Pirate Parties all around the world. Every cut connection to The Pirate Bay will generate two new connections.

“You always have to chose your battles wisely,” Troberg adds. “It would be crazy to enter a game where the rules are decided by the other team. The Pirate Party’s mission is not to produce martyrs for the copyright industry. Our mission is to create longterm political change that ensures that the copyright industry in the future will not be allowed to threaten companies, organisations and individuals into silence with our common judicial system as a weapon.”

Update 2: The party may issue a police complaint.
“The Pirate Party has a board meeting in a few days. I will recommend the board to file a police report against the Rights Alliance for unlawful coercion,” Troberg says. “It is important to determine precisely how forgiving the system is to those who try to abuse the judicial system to silence others.”

Source: https://torrentfreak.com/the-pirate-bay-departs-sweden-and-sets-sail-for-norway-and-spain-130225/


French Government Mulls Next Generation Anti-Piracy Measures

After pioneering one of the world’s first “three strikes” anti-piracy schemes the French are now turning their attention to other methods of obtaining unauthorized media. A new report just published by the Hadopi agency tackles the issue of streaming and direct download sites, which currently the organization is doing little about. No surprise that filtering, site blocking and domain seizures are being touted as possible solutions to this growing element of online piracy.
France’s graduated response system for dealing with online file-sharing is not only famous around the world but also popular with rightsholders. Those who are repeatedly monitored sharing copyrighted material via peer-to-peer networks can expect a short series of warning messages followed by a punishment.

Since the system only covers BitTorrent-like public transfers, streaming and direct download sites are an attractive option for Internet users wishing to avoid its clutches. But despite the Hadopi anti-piracy agency declaring last year that there had been “a clear downward trend in illegal P2P downloads” but no “massive transfer in forms of use to streaming technologies or direct downloads”, there is still interest in these mechanisms.

French news outlet PCInpact has directed TorrentFreak to a new report published by Hadopi which proposes draconian messages to force streaming and Direct Download (DDL) sites to comply with the law.
“Some Internet sites, streaming services and direct download sites are specialized in the massive exploitation of illegal content from which they make profits for their own benefit,” the Hadopi writes. “This report, showing the state of the ecosystem of illegal streaming and direct downloads, explores different ways to fight against the massive exploitation of illegal content.”

The report, put together by Mireille Imbert-Quaretta, President at the Commission for the Protection of Rights (Commission de Protection des Droits), covers a wide range of anti-piracy techniques, some well-trodden and others more fresh.

Hadopi has always claimed that “three strikes” is primarily an educational effort and in combating streaming and direct downloads the agency begins with the same approach. Internet users should be educated about the “dangers” of obtaining media via these mechanisms through warning messages sent by Hadopi.

Aiming to push the sites themselves towards YouTube-levels of copyright compliance, Hadopi would like them to implement content recognition and filtering technologies utilizing fingerprints supplied by rightsholders. These systems could be used to completely remove content or restrict user access based on location.
However, the report goes much further by suggesting that if site operators refuse to sign filtering agreements with rightsholders and illicit content repeatedly appears, they could be subjected to a strikes-style system of their own.

“In the event that it would not be possible to reach an agreement because of the apparent unwillingness of the platform hosting the reported content [to comply with the law], the public authority may decide to correct the behavior of the platform through an alert procedure,” Numerama reports.

Suggested punishments for sites are varied, including reporting them to search engines for delisting. Google has already taken steps to remove French sites including AlloStreaming from its index in the past.
In addition, sites could be reported to a judge in order to begin a domain blocking process. Once blocked by IP and DNS, Hadopi wants to have the power to ensure that domains (and any subsequent mirrors) remain blocked. Outright domain seizures are also a possibility.

Also, in a move that mirrors more recent anti-piracy activity involving PayPal and certain credit cards, Hadopi wants to hit operators in the pocket by targeting the financial intermediaries of sites subjected to the copyright alerts procedure. This could include suspension or termination of payments but if financial partners refuse to cooperate, Hadopi suggests it could take the matter to court.

Finally, and adding momentum to initiatives underway in the United States, Hadopi wants to strangle advertising to sites subjected to the alerts procedure.

Source: https://torrentfreak.com/french-government-mulls-next-generation-anti-piracy-measures-130226/ 
 
July 2008, Eremo, Italy

Guerilla Open Access Manifesto

Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for
themselves. The world's entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries
in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of
private corporations. Want to read the papers featuring the most famous results of the
sciences? You'll need to send enormous amounts to publishers like Reed Elsevier.

There are those struggling to change this. The Open Access Movement has fought
valiantly to ensure that scientists do not sign their copyrights away but instead ensure
their work is published on the Internet, under terms that allow anyone to access it. But
even under the best scenarios, their work will only apply to things published in the future.
Everything up until now will have been lost.

That is too high a price to pay. Forcing academics to pay money to read the work of their
colleagues? Scanning entire libraries but only allowing the folks at Google to read them?
Providing scientific articles to those at elite universities in the First World, but not to
children in the Global South? It's outrageous and unacceptable.

"I agree," many say, "but what can we do? The companies hold the copyrights, they
make enormous amounts of money by charging for access, and it's perfectly legal —
there's nothing we can do to stop them." But there is something we can, something that's
already being done: we can fight back.

Those with access to these resources — students, librarians, scientists — you have been
given a privilege. You get to feed at this banquet of knowledge while the rest of the world
is locked out. But you need not — indeed, morally, you cannot — keep this privilege for
yourselves. You have a duty to share it with the world. And you have: trading passwords
with colleagues, filling download requests for friends.

Meanwhile, those who have been locked out are not standing idly by. You have been
sneaking through holes and climbing over fences, liberating the information locked up by
the publishers and sharing them with your friends.

But all of this action goes on in the dark, hidden underground. It's called stealing or
piracy, as if sharing a wealth of knowledge were the moral equivalent of plundering a
ship and murdering its crew. But sharing isn't immoral — it's a moral imperative. Only
those blinded by greed would refuse to let a friend make a copy.

Large corporations, of course, are blinded by greed. The laws under which they operate
require it — their shareholders would revolt at anything less. And the politicians they
have bought off back them, passing laws giving them the exclusive power to decide who
can make copies.

There is no justice in following unjust laws. It's time to come into the light and, in the
grand tradition of civil disobedience, declare our opposition to this private theft of public
culture.

We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with
the world. We need to take stuff that's out of copyright and add it to the archive. We need
to buy secret databases and put them on the Web. We need to download scientific
journals and upload them to file sharing networks. We need to fight for Guerilla Open
Access.

With enough of us, around the world, we'll not just send a strong message opposing the
privatization of knowledge — we'll make it a thing of the past. Will you join us?


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