Copyright Battle in Europe Pits Media Companies Against Tech Giants; Wall Street Journal, September 10, 2018

Daniel Michaels, Wall Street Journal;

Copyright Battle in Europe Pits Media Companies Against Tech Giants

Not in our name: Why European creators must oppose the EU's proposal to limit linking and censor the internet; BoingBoing, September 10, 2018

Cory Doctorow, BoingBoing;

Not in our name: Why European creators must oppose the EU's proposal to limit linking and censor the internet

"The European Copyright Directive vote is in three days and it will be a doozy: what was once a largely uncontroversial grab bag of fixes to copyright is now a political firestorm, thanks to the actions of Axel Voss, the German MEP who changed the Directive at the last minute, sneaking in two widely rejected proposals on the same day the GDPR came into effect, forming a perfect distraction (you can contact your MEP about these at Save Your Internet).

These two proposals are:

1. "Censorship Machines": Article 13, which forces online providers to create databases of text, images, videos, code, games, mods, etc that anyone can add anything to -- if a user tries to post something that may match a "copyrighted work," in the database, the system has to censor them

2. "Link Tax": Article 11, which will only allow internet users to post links to news sites if the service they're using has bought a "linking license" from the news-source they're linking to; under a current proposal, links that contain more than two consecutive words from an article's headline will be illegal without a license."

Wikipedia's warning: EU copyright changes threaten the internet itself; BoingBoing, September 5, 2018

Cory Doctorow, BoingBoing; Wikipedia's warning: EU copyright changes threaten the internet itself

"In just one week, Members of the European Parliament will debate and vote on the new EU Copyright Directive, which contains two of the worst, most dangerous internet proposals in living memory.

One proposal, the Link Tax (Article 11), bans linking to news sites (but doesn't define "linking" or "news sites") unless the service you're using has paid for a license with all the "news sites" you might possibly link to.

The other, Censorship Machines (Article 13), forces online services to check everything a user wishes to publish against a database of "copyrighted works" (except anyone can add anything to these databases, regardless of whether they are copyrighted) and to censor anything that is a match or near-match for anything in the database."

Computer Programmers Get New Tech Ethics Code; The Conversation via Scientific American, August 11, 2018

Cherri M. Pancake, The Conversation via Scientific American; Computer Programmers Get New Tech Ethics Code: The guidelines come from the Association for Computing Machinery

"That’s why the world’s largest organization of computer scientists and engineers, the Association for Computing Machinery, of which I am president, has issued a new code of ethics for computing professionals. And it’s why ACM is taking other steps to help technologists engage with ethical questions...

ACM’s last code of ethics was adopted in 1992, when many people saw computing work as purely technical. The internet was in its infancy and people were just beginning to understand the value of being able to aggregate and distribute information widely. It would still be years before artificial intelligence and machine learning had applications outside research labs.

Today, technologists’ work can affect the lives and livelihoods of people in ways that may be unintended, even unpredictable. I’m not an ethicist by training, but it’s clear to me that anyone in today’s computing field can benefit from guidance on ethical thinking and behavior."

This Music Theory Professor Just Showed How Stupid and Broken Copyright Filters Are; Motherboard, August 30, 2018

Karl Bode, Motherboard; This Music Theory Professor Just Showed How Stupid and Broken Copyright Filters Are

"German music professor Ulrich Kaiser this week wrote about a troubling experiment he ran on YouTube. As a music theory teacher, Kaiser routinely works to catalog a collection of public domain recordings he maintains online in order to teach his students about Beethoven and other classical music composers."

Why Protecting Recipes Under Intellectual Property Law May Leave a Bad Taste in Your Mouth; Above The Law, August 27, 2018

Tom Kulik, Above The Law; Why Protecting Recipes Under Intellectual Property Law May Leave a Bad Taste in Your Mouth

[Kip Currier: Interesting and useful information--in case you're thinking about monetizing your own BBQ rub...or marketing Grandma's secret recipe for fill-in-the-blank.] 

"What may be pleasing to the palate, however, is not always acceptable under intellectual property law."

Print Is Dead? Not Here; The New York Times, September 2, 2018

Ted Geltner, The New York Times; Print Is Dead? Not Here

[Kip Currier: Timely New York Times article, given my Letter to the Editor that I emailed to The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette on September 1, 2018.]

"Practically every morning begins with a thud on the driveways of the roughly 50,000 homes here. The newspaper has arrived.

That newspaper, The Villages Daily Sun, which exhaustively covers this rapidly growing retirement community in Central Florida, is in the midst of a boom that few other papers can even imagine. According to the Alliance for Audited Media, the Sun’s weekday circulation of 55,700 is up 169 percent since 2003. Over the same time, weekday newspaper circulation across the United States has dropped 43 percent. (The Orlando Sentinel, the region’s largest newspaper, is down 53 percent.)...

Elsewhere around the country, the industry continues to cough and wheeze its way from print to digital, with layoffs and closings in its wake. Just this week, Pittsburgh became the largest city in the United States without a daily print paper when the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette announced it was cutting its print distribution to five days a week, ending a nearly 100-year history of seven-day-a-week publication."