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The black outs of Dark Wednesday are over and the United States Congress has listened, shelving the contentious anti-piracy bills SOPA and PIPA indefinitely. Now, you would think that the internet was finally safe from corporate control. Huzzah! Bring on the cat gifs!

You would be wrong. Sort of.

That's the problem with the ownership mentality of modern copyright: few people bother to think about purpose because they are too busy thinking about control, operating from a default "cover-all-our-bases" mentality without bothering to ask why. At some point during the drafting of this sign, somebody should have stopped and said "Wait, why do we care?" — but instead they said "Have we forgotten anything? Better throw tripods on there just to be safe."

Yesterday I noted that the anti-SOPA/PIPA crowd seemed to have just discovered ACTA. And while I'm pleased that they're taking interest in something as problematic as ACTA, there was a lot of misinformation flowing around, so I figured that, similar to my "definitive" explainer posts on why SOPA/PIPA were bad bills (and the followup for the amended versions), I thought I'd do a short post on ACTA to hopefully clarify some of what's been floating around.

Yesterday I wrote up a first reaction to the Megaupload case. Having spent some more time going through the indictment in much greater detail, I have some more thoughts and concerns.

I recently was able to attend an interesting Cato/Techfreedom/CEI debate on the unintended consequences of the rogue website crackdown. The specific focus (not surprisingly) was the debate over SOPA/PIPA, but thankfully some of the debate went further back, to discuss how the government and private actors were already using existing law to do questionable things to sites they declared "rogue." This became even more timely with the Megaupload takedown... which happened about the same time that this panel ended. It was especially nice to see some discussion over the problematic seizures around Dajaz1 and Rojadirecta, as well as the fact that Veoh went bankrupt defending a bogus copyright lawsuit under existing law. These are not "hypotheticals".

The Megaupload takedown, and the arrest of its key employees, might seem to vindicate late 1990s worries about the Internet and jurisdiction. Does putting a site on the 'Net, though it might be hosted anywhere in the world, subject you simultaneously to the laws of every country on earth? Why would Megaupload, based in Hong Kong, be subject to US copyright laws and to the Digital Millenium Copyright Act?

Yesterday the server company that hosts The Tyee had a major outage caused by a small electrical explosion in downtown Vancouver...

... While we're sympathetic to the SOPA protest, which involved high-profile sites like Wikipedia "going dark" for 24 hours yesterday, we categorically deny blowing anything up in support of the cause.

Earlier this month, I detailed at some length why claims about the purported economic harms of piracy, offered by supporters of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and PROTECT-IP Act (PIPA), ought to be treated with much more skepticism than they generally get from journalists and policymakers.

Friday's ruling isn't yet the final word from the ITC, and the panel doesn't always rule the same way as the ALJ. Still, the decision is an indicator that Apple's IP fight against Android may not be as easy as former Apple CEO Steve Jobs might have hoped when he said he hoped to "go thermonuclear war" against the platform. Though Apple has not commented publicly on the initial ITC ruling, Motorola was quick to send out a victorious statement for its early win.

Microsoft has published the hardware requirements that manufacturers must follow if they want to slap a "Designed for Windows 8" sticker onto their systems. In among many innocuous requirements—multitouch systems must support at least five points of touch, there must be at least 10 GB of free space available to the user, and more—are a set of requirements for Windows 8 systems' firmware. These requirements have reignited Linux users' fears that they will be locked out of Windows 8 hardware.

Today is Martin Luther King Jr. Day -- and there are many reasons to celebrate his legacy. But one thing that should not be celebrated is what his heirs have done with his words ever since. In the past, we've discussed how his heirs have done everything they can to try to use intellectual property laws to lock up MLK Jr.'s legacy -- and set up a toll booth to charge anyone for making use of them in any way, shape or form. The most recent episode of On The Media explored this...

Seeking to "send Washington a BIG message," Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has announced that the English version of Wikipedia will go dark on Wednesday to protest the Stop Online Piracy Act and Protect IP Act, anti-piracy bills now being considered by Congress.

And what I find most darkly amusing is that they weren’t content to stop there. The one place in the book distribution ecosystem where piracy is most efficiently defeated, where users have access to content for free but under carefully controlled circumstances, have been libraries. Libraries have always been the best counter to piracy. And instead of cementing a relationship with libraries that works to the benefit of all parties, publishers have steadfastly withdrawn the ability of libraries to provide free content, even when it is available for only limited borrowing periods, or only a restricted number of titles, with severe constraints on sharing and copying. Instead, they have indicated an interest in the commercialization of libraries by encouraging rental models.

For two industries that are so dependent on each other, the relationship between the gadget industry and content creators is an awfully strained one, bordering on domestic violence. On my last day at CES, I spoke briefly with CEA President Gary Shapiro and listened to his invective about how the content industry was trying to kill the Internet. The tension between the content and consumer technology communities has been around for decades—since the creation of the cassette tape, at least—and it doesn't seem to be getting any more amicable.

Which is ironic, because the tech business has never sucked up to Big Content quite as much as it seemed to be this year at CES. After all, it's content that makes people use all the gear that was being peddled at CES, whether it be software or video or music or text. And some of the companies at CES were showing the level of desperation they had reached in trying to get exclusive content to help power their shiny Internet-connected toys.

Want to understand just how insane things may get under SOPA/PIPA? Just take a look at what's already happening under today's laws. Back in 2010, one of the first websites that Homeland Security's ICE (Immigrations & Customs Enforcement) group seized was TVShack.net. TVShack was a site that collected links to TV shows. Certainly, many of those shows were likely to be infringing -- but TVShack did not host the content at all, it merely linked to it. Richard O'Dwyer, the guy who ran the site, was a student building an interesting project over in the UK. However, the US Department of Justice decided that he was not only a hardened criminal, but one who needed to be tried on US soil. Thus, it began extradition procedures. Even worse, nearly identical sites in the UK had already been found legal multiple times -- with the court noting that having links to some infringing content was certainly not criminal copyright infringement. That makes things even more ridiculous, because extradition is only supposed to be allowed for activities that are criminal in both the US and the UK.

Richard O'Dwyer, the 23-year-old British college student who operated the TVShack link site, can be extradited to the United States, ruled Judge Quentin Purdy of the Westminster Magistrates Court today. O'Dwyer's attorney says he will appeal the ruling.

As we first reported in July, Richard O'Dwyer operated a popular "link site," which provided users with access to content hosted elsewhere on the Internet. Many of the links were to infringing copies of copyrighted material.

Neither O'Dwyer nor his servers were located in the United States during the time he operated TVShack. But the US government is nevertheless seeking to have him extradited to the United States to face criminal copyright infringement charges.

LG has become the latest in a long line of Android handset vendors to sign a patent licensing agreement with Microsoft.

Microsoft said the deal with LG means that 70% of Android-based smartphones sold in the U.S. are now covered by its licensing program. "We are proud of the continued success of our program in resolving the IP issues surrounding Android and Chrome OS," said Gutierrez.

A century ago, one of the world’s first hackers used Morse code insults to disrupt a public demo of Marconi's wireless telegraph

Apple has worked out a way in which the power cords for computers or smartphones can help people recover their forgotten login passwords - or the answers to secret questions (like "what was the name of your first pet?") that are often used to recover them. But crucially, Apple's system does this in a way that's designed to prevent anybody who steals the laptop or smartphone from recovering the password. The technology is predicated on the fact that when you lose a laptop, or have it stolen, you don't tend to lose the power adapter as well. So it makes the power adapter a critical part of the recovery routine for forgotten passwords.