brave new texts
Whereby ”content” comprises the movie, music, and publishing industries: the Gangs of the New World.
It’s these industries that bankroll armies of lobbyists who relentlessly push their insane control & suveillance agenda complete with draconian punishment fantasies on the tables of lawmaking bodies all over the world. The master problem with these agendas is that, once signed into law, they can only be enforced by way of abolishing every last crap of online or offline privacy, by breaking the internet as-we-know-it, and by killing our budding information age in the crib before it has even learned to stand on its own feet.
While much has been written about the dreadful German Leistungsschutzrecht, which I like to call the Reichsleistungsschutzgesetz, a law built on shameful lies and brazen disinformation that had been booked well in advance by German publishers at the governing coalition’s lobbying desk, the following piece of news has somewhow managed to fly under our radars:
“2012: The Year Irish Newspapers Tried to Destroy the Web”:
This year the Irish newspaper industry asserted, first tentatively and then without any equivocation, that links belonged to them. They said that they had the right to be paid to be linked to. They said they had the right to set the rates for those links, as they had set rates in the past for other forms of licensing of their intellectual property. And then they started a campaign to lobby for unauthorised linking to be outlawed. […]
The Newspaper Industry (all these newspapers) had its agent write out demanding money. They wrote to Women’s Aid, (amongst others) who became our clients when they received letters, emails and phone calls asserting that they needed to buy a licence because they had linked to articles in newspapers carrying positive stories about their fundraising efforts.
They even supplied a price list. Go and read the whole piece.
And here’s the clincher:
”It is the view of NNI that a link to copyright material does constitute infringement of copyright”. (Section 7 National Newspapers of Ireland Further Submission to the Copyright Review Committee)
That’s what the 15 national Irish newspapers, among them The Irish Times and The Irish Independent, submitted to the Copyright Review Committee in July 2012.
Happy New Year. Bring Cocktails.
If you have something valuable to add or some interesting point to discuss, I’ll be looking forward to meeting you at Mastodon!