Compare And Contrast: How GPL Enforces Violations vs. How RIAA/MPAA/BSA Enforce Violations

from the it's-a-bit-different dept

While we've discussed how extreme views in the open source community can, at times, rival the way the entertainment industry acts towards those who violate licenses, reader Nick Coghlan writes in to point to an article that highlights how different they are in many cases, with Bradley Kuhn, the technical director of the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC), putting forth new guidelines that encourage people not to jump to conclusions when they see potential violations, and to give the benefit of the doubt to anyone they suspect of violating the license. Compare that to the tens of thousands of threat letters sent out by the RIAA, at times with little real evidence.

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White House Gives Banks One Year To Stop Online Gambling Transactions, Despite Protests

from the pushing-through-bad-rules dept

Despite significant questions from other elected officials about the plan, the White House has, in fact, approved new regulations requiring banks to stop any financial transactions dealing with online gambling. They've given banks one year to figure out a way to deal with it -- which hopefully gives Congress enough time to change the law.

The regulations make little sense for a variety of reasons:

1. It's still not clear why online gambling should be made totally illegal, rather than simply regulated, like in many countries.
2. It makes no sense to put the burden and liability on financial institutions to figure out what transactions involve online gambling.
3. It makes even less sense to dump this on banks right now, especially as many are struggling merely to survive in this financial climate. Adding an extra burden of making them figure out if every transaction involves online gambling seems unnecessary (and perhaps unusual).
4. Congress had asked the White House for more time to explore the impact of these regulations, but the White House used a lobbyist to aggressively push for these regulations to be put in place as quickly as possible.

Congress and the new administration will hopefully take up this issue next year, and remove this unnecessary burden from banks before it was set to go into effect.

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Feds Admit They Have No Clue How To Enforce Anti-Online Gambling Legislation

from the please-clarify dept

In the fall of 2006, Congress (for reasons that have never been explained) put a clause banning online gambling into a bill supposedly about protecting our ports (so no one would vote against it). Since then there's been an ongoing legal effort to get that part of the law overturned. It's particularly upset financial institutions who are told they need to stop gambling operations from accepting money -- though, they're not quite sure how to do that. To top it all off, even the federal officials who are charged with enforcing this law are now admitting that they have absolutely no clue how to enforce it, noting that the legislation itself is incredibly broad and unclear. In other words, we have a law that almost no one wants and which those in charge of enforcing have no idea how to enforce (or even why they should enforce it). So why did it get passed in the first place? Well, at least our ports are safe.

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Bipartisan PRO IP Bill Turns White House Into Hollywood's Private Enforcement Agency

from the please-explain-why? dept

Every time you think that the tide is turning and people are beginning to realize the ridiculousness of overly burdensome IP laws, some politicians start doing the dirty work of Hollywood's worst lobbyists. The latest may be the most ridiculous yet -- though, it certainly wasn't unexpected. Remember how NBC Universal execs started whining about how law enforcement's priorities were all screwed up, since they were focused on pointless things like burglary and bankrobbing rather than copyright violations? That was merely the starting point in a lobbying campaign for the new PRO IP (Prioritizing Resources and Organization for Intellectual Property Act) bill that has been introduced with backing of both top Republicans and Democrats. As the bill's not particularly subtle name makes clear, this law is all about giving Hollywood much of what it has been asking for. Rather than decreasing the ridiculous fines that can be handed out for copyright infringement, this law would increase them. But, more importantly, it sets up a brand new gov't agency within the executive branch to help crack down on "piracy." This despite increasing evidence that "piracy" isn't a problem for the economy at all -- but rather a problem for a few big companies with obsolete business models (who just happen to have tremendous lobbying clout) who are too lazy to even bother trying to adapt to a changing market place. This bill isn't just corporate welfare. It would be creating an entire government agency whose sole job it would be to protect the unnecessary and obsolete business model of a few dying companies while stifling innovative tools and services at every turn. It would help to kill off our creative industries by falsely assuming that creativity needs to be funneled through a few big companies. It's a disgusting travesty of the political process.

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