Via Mathew Ingram we learn of a ridiculous situation in Ireland, where the organization "Newspaper Licensing Ireland" has sent an email to the Women's Aid charity, telling it that linking to newspaper websites without a license is copyright infringement:

"a licence is required to link directly to an online article even without uploading any of the content directly onto your own website"

The lawyer representing Women's Aid smartly posted its own reply publicly asking NLI to "specify the statutory basis of this claim." It also notes the pricelist, including the fact that NLI seems to think that linking to between one and five articles requires €300 annually. Furthermore, the letter notes the terms of service on various news websites that allow linking -- even though this is really besides the point, since copyright law does not forbid linking in the first place.

Here's the latest excerpt from our Techdirt Book Club selection for May, Reclaiming Fair Use by Patricia Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi. We're running a bit late with these, and will have one more excerpt next week. If you want to see the first excerpt and the second excerpt, go check them out.

Also, Patricia will be joining us for a live Q&A discussion session about the book on Friday, June 8th at 1pm PT/4pm ET. If you have some initial questions, you can post them below or on the Step 2 discussion page, and we'll try to incorporate them into the Q&A.

This particular excerpt discusses the differences between fair use, the public domain and Creative Commons

People who are well aware of how copyright ownership weighs on new creators often confuse fair use with efforts to recover and recreate the public domain, or material not (or no longer) bound by copyright ownership. Sometimes they even think these efforts are in competition. In fact, they are complementary ways to address the same general problem, as David Bollier has noted. Furthermore, enthusiasm for public domain work sometimes leads people to believe that fair use is not as useful as it is. This is because they have been drawn to public domain work by their frustration with copyright ownership restrictions, and have associated all of copyright with copyright ownership. They have not yet become aware of the flexibility and power of the fair use doctrine, and they see one side of copyright as the only side. Sometimes they simply do not have faith that copyright imbalance can be righted.

Creative Commons (CC) is possibly the best-publicized of the efforts to create an artificial public domain to compensate for the badly eroded zone of copyright-free work. It was launched by legal scholar Lawrence Lessig, who indeed was dismissive, even contemptuous, of the potential of fair use to address copyright imbalance. However, CC was not an attempt to supplant or be better than fair use. Rather it was an attempt to solve a different problem: how to allow people to give away or condition their long and strong copyright. CC licenses use the strength of owners’ rights to allow owners the leeway to release their works into an artificial public domain.

So CC creates a zone inside copyright ownership for owners who want to be generous and give their works away. All CC licenses impose some conditions, and some impose more than others. (Some people ignore this; owners of CC licenses sometimes complain that people do not honor the conditions.) This makes CC a copyright-light zone rather than copyright-free zone, and of course it does nothing (and doesn’t pretend to) to loosen long and strong copyright policy—rather, it depends upon it.

A CC license, intended to promote circulation of work, may limit it to the alternative CC world it was born into. This is precisely because it is designed to be an alternative to rather than a feature of the copyrighted environment. Many CC licenses forbid the use of digital rights management (DRM), which is standard to all commercial DVD contracts. Thus, a CC license may kill a distribution deal. Even people who depend upon CC licenses, such as the makers of open educational resources—scholarly materials of all kinds, available free on the web—still sometimes need fair use. That is because most new work refers to existing culture. When that happens, people need to exercise their right of fair use, because most work is not in the copyright-light, fenced-in zone.

SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket has recently demonstrated its capabilities by successfully docking with the International Space Station. It's the first example of a private company achieving this feat, and it's paving the way for more private space ventures. Cheaper space missions are becoming more commonplace, and here are just a few more experimental projects that are aiming to change the space race by creating a multitude of mini space missions.

• Nanoracks reportedly has the first commercial cargo flown in a SpaceX Dragon capsule. One of the commercial experiments includes components of Ardbeg whisky to determine how whisky ages in zero gravity. Maybe there are faster ways to produce aged whisky... in space? [url]
• Interplanetary CubeSats could dramatically lower the costs of space exploration in our solar system. Low Earth orbit CubeSats have already made affordable satellite experiments possible for universities as well as government space agencies, so floating a few of these satellites out beyond Earth's reach could open up even more possibilities. [url]
• The CleanSpace One project is planning to launch satellites that can clear out space debris in the Earth's orbit. Around 16,000 objects (>10 cm in diameter) are currently cluttering up space right above the Earth, and finding a good way to clean up this space pollution could make other space missions less risky. [url]
• To discover more links on space exploration, check out what's floating around in StumbleUpon universe. [url]  

By the way, StumbleUpon can also recommend some good Techdirt articles, too.

Remember Paul Chambers? He's the UK accountant who was arrested for tweeting:

"Robin Hood airport is closed. You've got a week and a bit to get your shit together, otherwise I'm blowing the airport sky high!!"

Overly serious law enforcement officials saw that as a terrorist threat. It's worth noting that airport officials didn't seem to think it was a serious threat, but understood that it was just a frustrated passenger venting. Still, the case went forward and he not only lost but then lost again on appeal. The case seems to get more farcical each level up the chain it goes. The latest is that, when the case got to the UK High Court, it was heard by two judges who couldn't come to agreement, so the whole appeal needs to be reheard with a three judge panel. Why they didn't do that the first time around is not explained.

Either way, it seems bizarre that tweeting an obvious joke should not only lead to convictions, but such a long and extended judicial process. Talk about creating chilling effects. The case has taken on lots of publicity in the UK, with a number of celebrities pledging support. The BBC article has a quote from Chambers' supporter comedian Al Murray, who found the whole situation laughably ridiculous:

"Paul's tweet has gone the full distance from joke to tragedy to farce via the High Court. We've all got our fingers crossed and will carry on fundraising."

For a few years now we've covered how the Thai government's ridiculous "lese majeste" laws that forbid insulting the monarchy have been used repeatedly to censor open forums and arrest or intimidate critics. In one case, which we wrote about a few years ago, the webmaster for the popular Thai site Prachatai was arrested for failing to delete comments of users on the site (not written or approved by her) that were deemed offensive to the monarchy fast enough. The post and the comments happened in 2008... but the woman, Chiranuch Premchaiporn (and better known as Jiew), wasn't arrested until 2010, right after she returned from a trip abroad where she was speaking about the importance of internet freedom.

With an awful lot of public attention on the trial -- and just as the World Economic Forum was about to meet in Bangkok -- the court found her guilty -- but also gave her a suspended sentence and a small fine. While that beats the 20 years in prison she could have faced, plenty of people are still pointing to the massive chilling effects such a conviction has on a free and open internet. Certainly, webmasters will have tremendous incentive to limit interaction and comments from the public.

At a time when countries who want to thrive and flourish should be encouraging greater and more widespread use of the internet, convicting a webmaster because the government doesn't like some comments that others left on a website is exactly the wrong approach. It goes against basic principles of free speech and properly applying liability. Yes, lots of countries (including the US at times) have been chipping away at such basic and fundamental ideas online, but it's still disappointing to see countries effectively guaranteeing a lack of openness and innovation within their own borders thanks to moves like this one.

We recently wrote about how both Amanda Palmer and Steve Albini think that file sharing is great for musicians. In the comments to that post, dwg pointed us to a new interview with musician Regina Spektor. The whole interview is interesting, but at the end there's a tidbit on how she feels about file sharing:

"I grew up poor, and there are a lot of people that grew up a lot poorer than I am," Spektor says. "Though, to me, I think that if somebody doesn't have an easy life, they should at least have access to free books and film and music. I think that I feel very lucky to live in this time where people can go online and get everything I've ever made, whether they have a lot of money or not.

"So much of the music that I found out about — whether it was late, it's better than never — was through people burning CDs for me and people making cassette mixes for me and people giving it to me for free. I feel really grateful that people can just type in my name and listen to things that I made. I feel so lucky for that."

Of course, I would imagine that her music label, Sire Records, a subsidiary of Warner Music, might not appreciate her saying that. Still, it's good to see more artists speaking out on this topic and combating the silly "sharing is theft" argument that the RIAA wants everyone to believe.

Following the unfortunately-timed sampling lawsuit against the Beastie Boys, I expressed hope that the high-publicity situation would call more attention to serious issues in copyright law as it pertains to sampling and other forms of art that directly build on what came before—though I haven't exactly been holding my breath. To my surprise, though, it seems like the story has had an even more profound effect over at the New York Times: a recent piece uses the Beastie Boys lawsuit as a starting point to talk about oppressive copyright laws, tech patent trolls, and the fact that more intellectual property does not automatically mean more innovation.

Most of the article won't be anything new to Techdirt readers, but it's great to see these essential topics getting more attention in mainstream news sources—especially coming from a journalist who has previously espoused the RIAA/MPAA's bogus piracy stats:

Patents on inventions, like copyrights on songs, are not granted to be fair to their creators. Their purpose is to encourage innovation, a broad social good, by granting creators a limited monopoly to profit from their creations. While companies like Apple may believe they are insufficiently compensated for their inventions, the evidence often suggests otherwise. The belief that stronger intellectual property protection inevitably leads to more innovation appears to be broadly wrong.

...

Like “Paul’s Boutique,” the software that drives smartphones is composed of a vast array of ideas from multiple sources. Everybody infringes to some extent on everybody else. Overly strong intellectual property laws that stop creators from using earlier innovations could slow creation over all and become a barrier for new technologies to reach the market.

There are a few oddities to the piece—it's not always clear on the distinction between copyright and patents, and it also makes the assertion that "software patents will never be banned, of course"—despite the very real possibility that software patents will be massively restricted in the future. But what's really great to see is the understanding from NYTimes that these issues are connected: an anti-competitive attitude and the "ownership mentality" are endemic to intellectual property as a whole, not just the specifics of certain areas of law, and the problem really does need to be addressed at that basic level, starting with the incorrect assumption that more IP equals more innovation. Now if only lawmakers would start listening.

A guy named Charles Syrus apparently wrote a song that had the phrases "Go Thunder" and "Let's Go Thunder" in it, cheering on the Oklahoma City Thunder NBA team. Syrus then got a copyright on the song. And then... he claimed that the copyright for the song gave him the copyright in those two phrases, and demanded 20 to 30% of the teams' "net gross" (um...) for using those phrases in promotional campaigns. Not surprisingly, the district court and the appeals court rejected his lawsuit, noting that "we easily conclude that the phrases ‘Go Thunder’ and ‘Let’s Go Thunder’ do not reflect the minimal creativity required for copyright protection." And, finally (though to the surprise of pretty much no one, Syrus excepted), the Supreme Court has said it has no interest in hearing his appeal. Some will claim that this is no big deal, since the courts got it right and this clear overreach of copyright law went nowhere legally. However, it does seem like yet another sign of the insanity of our culture today and the suggestion that everything and every phrase is "ownable" thanks to modern IP laws. You wouldn't even have a case like this if people didn't think it was possible to abuse copyright in this manner -- and given the headlines we see of crazy sounding copyright cases all the time, it shouldn't be any surprise at all that people are tying up courts with ridiculous claims like this one.

Google's decision to be much more transparent about DMCA takedowns for search has revealed a swathe of absolutely ridiculously stupid DMCA notices. We've covered some already, but TorrentFreak has found some more -- including multiple cases of DMCA notices by copyright holders that aren't just against their own best interests, but are often against content they, themselves, put up. This isn't even a situation like Viacom suing YouTube over clips that Viacom's employees had uploaded. In those cases, at least, it involved attempts to make the clips look unauthorized.

Here, however, it appears to just be ridiculous bad processes in place to make sure DMCA takedowns are legit. There is, for example, the case of Warner Bros. sending a DMCA takedown for the IMDB page of its own movie, Wrath of the Titans. It also demanded that the Guardian newspaper's showing of the official trailer of the movie be removed from Google search. Ditto the official trailer on Apple's site and Hulu's site. And, let's not forget the BBC America news article about how the film might be "critic proof" as well as a page from Charleston South Carolina's newspaper, The Post & Courier about the film and telling people where to go see it. Though, I guess Warner Bros. lawyers didn't want you to see it at all, because all of those were DMCA'd for being in Google's search.

It's almost as if the lawyers at Warner Bros. are so clueless that they were actively trying to hide any legitimate marketing for the movie. I'm sure their colleagues in the marketing department must have been just thrilled about these efforts.

The TorrentFreak article lists out a bunch more takedowns, directed at news sites, often promoting the works in question:

In addition to the Warner instance mentioned above, the RIAA asked Google to delist a review of the album Own The Night published on The Guardian. The artist behind the album is Lady Antebellum, signed to RIAA-member Capitol Records.

Even more worrying, the RIAA asked Google to delist Last.fm’s entire Electro Pop section because they thought it carried a pirate copy of All About Tonight by Pixie Lott.

Warner also reappeared later on, asking Google to delist a page on news site NME which lists information on the latest movies, which at the time included information on the movie Hall Pass. The same page on NME was targeted on several other occasions, including by anti-piracy company DtecNet on behalf of Lionsgate, who had info on The Hunger Games delisted.

Hollywood Reporter didn’t fare much better either. Sony Pictures asked Google to swing the banhammer against the popular news site after it published an article called “Trent Reznor Releases Six Free Tracks From ‘Girl With the Dragon Tattoo’ Soundtrack” and Sony mistook it for a DVDRIP.

But as soon as Sony’s piracy fears on the first ‘Dragon Tattoo’ movie had subsided they were back as strong as ever with the sequel. This time the sinner was Wikipedia who dared to put up an information page on the movie The Girl Who Played With Fire. Luckily Sony were on hand to ask Google to delist the page.

The more you play around, the more examples like this you can find. Zuffa, the notoriously litigious folks behind UFC, demanded a Hulu link be disappeared from Google search, despite Hulu only posting authorized content.

Sony Music and the Estate of Michael Jackson tried to get a page on Last.fm for Slave to the Rhythm removed as infringing.

Let's see... we've got Universal Music/Interscope (by way of Web Sheriff) demanding that Google delete a link to Wall Street Journal post (reprinted from Mashable) embedding an official Lady Gaga video from last year. Oh, and that wasn't all. They also went after an MTV news article about the video shoot -- which did contain some footage that someone had shot from a distance, but that seems extreme to kill the whole article. Ditto for a NY Post article.

Sony Music Nashville was so worried about a Carrie Underwood leak that it tried to erase a Reuters archive page from 2008 that just lists a bunch of headlines -- none of which has anything to do with Carrie Underwood.

TorrentFreak noted above that the RIAA asked the Guardian to takedown its review of the Lady Antebellum album Own the Night, but that wasn't the only target. The RIAA demanded that Google remove a link to a review of Lady Antebellum songs on AOL's music site. Lady Antebellum was clearly so upset by AOL breaching its copyright that the band posed for a photo at AOL studios.

For most musicians, getting onto Pitchfork is a goal. For the RIAA? Well, apparently Pitchfork must be stopped. That's why it DMCA'd the tastemaker website for daring to post an article about Coldplay, in which they embedded a song directly from Coldplay's own YouTube account. The article even notes that the band had released the song to Pitchfork. Nice going RIAA, trying to stop your own bands from getting the publicity they seek.

Anyway, that's just after a little bit of searching... I'm sure we'll have more examples going forward... Thanks to the folks at Torrentfreak for their initial research which inspired some of these other findings as well.

Apple has certainly been quite the aggressor over the last few years when it comes to patents, so it's interesting to hear that, at the latest All Things D Conference, CEO Tim Cook appears to have a bit of a double standard. You see, when others infringe upon Apple's patents, he insists that they're somehow copying all of Apple's hard work, and that's unfair. Cook uses a ridiculous plagiarism analogy:

He compared patent infringement to signing one's name on a painting that someone else put energy into finishing. Cook stressed the importance of companies building their own stuff so that Apple would not be "the developer for the rest of the world."

Kinda like, you know, how Apple "signed its name" to the graphical user interface developed at Xerox PARC? Or the mouse developed at SRI? Or multitouch browsing, developed by a bunch of other folks prior to the iPhone? Sure, Apple improved on all of these things, and many other things as well, but Apple is famous for taking the developments done elsewhere and merely putting a nice final consumer-friendly coat of paint on it. No doubt, this is an important step, but it's ridiculous to pretend that Apple has come up with the various ideas it has and no one else could have possibly developed the same things. And, of course, plagiarism (claiming credit for something you didn't do) is an entirely separate issue from infringement (using an invention/creative work without authorization). So it seems silly to even use that analogy.

Of course, then Walt Mossberg brings up the fact that Apple is, in fact, the target of many patent lawsuits as well... and suddenly Cook's tone changes, insisting that those cases are different:

“The vast majority of those are on standards-essential patents,” he said, adding that it's an area where today's patent system is "broken."

Now, to some extent he's correct that patent battles over "standards-essential" patents are particularly nefarious, but it still seems like quite the double standard to insist that the patents that Apple has asserted against various makers of Android tablets and smartphones aren't equally silly and destructive to basic market competition. Apple makes great products that people love. If only it would let those products compete fairly in the market, it could save money on the bruising legal fights it's involved in around the globe. Cook admitted that patent battles are "overhead" and he wished the fights weren't so costly. Of course, that would be a lot more convincing if the company hadn't launched so many patent battles itself.

Once again, it appears that the US prosecution of Kim Dotcom and the other Megaupload folks suggests that US federal prosecutors have been acting like they have a slam dunk case, whereas every time anyone digs into the details, all of the important infrastructure is missing. The latest is that the US seemed to assume that as long as they kept going on and on about the "mega conspiracy" and the "money laundering" involved (even if that "laundering" appeared to be normal payments to service providers), that New Zealand would rubber stamp the extradition request without reviewing any of the evidence.

No such luck.

The New Zealand judge is raising significant questions about the US's case while also ordering the US government to provide copies of the evidence it is using to Dotcom's lawyers -- something the US insisted was not necessary. What's clear is that the US really thought that New Zealand would just roll over and hand over Dotcom because they sprinkled the indictment with scary phrases like money laundering and conspiracy. But, as the judge notes, the US seems to be taking a somewhat extraordinary interpretation of copyright infringement -- using civil copyright infringement as the basis for a criminal copyright charge... and then pumping up that criminal copyright charge into conspiracy and money laundering charges. And that's important, because New Zealand won't extradite someone if the case is really just about copyright infringement.

The distinction between civil and criminal copyright infringement is an important one -- and confusion over this point is one that the US government has been relying on in seizing various domain names for the past couple of years. It's good to see that the judge here was not at all confused by this, and seemed to get to the heart of the matter pretty quickly.

As I have already observed this is a case that is more complex than many. There is a complex factual matrix and the justiciable issues are complicated by the fact that the United States is attempting to utilise concepts from the civil copyright context as a basis for application of criminal copyright liability which necessitates a consideration of principles such as the dual use of technology or what they be described as significant non infringing uses.

The existence of criminal copyright charges is a keystone to providing the unlawful conduct element of the racketeering, money laundering and wire fraud charges...

Separately, the judge was not at all persuaded that it would be too difficult to do discovery for the extradition phase of this case, because the evidence is all in electronic form. Yes, the US argued that going through a discovery process to share evidence with Dotcom and his lawyers would be too difficult. But the judge is having none of that:

During the course of arguments the issue was raised as to the difficulty of effecting disclosure given that so much material is in electronic format. During the course of argument I reminded counsel of recent amendments to the High Court Rules relating to electronic disclosure and what is a widespread and growing practice of the use of computer equipment and specialised search techniques to swiftly recover relevant material, to eliminate irrelevant or repetitive material and to utilise a number of search techniques including keynote searching, concept searching, clustering technology, predictive coding or document prioritising technology, email threading and near duplicate identification. It may not be necessary under the circumstances to engage, at this stage of the process, in native file review but there are procedures available and that are utilised within the civil arena that will enable the prompt disclosure of relevant information.

Perhaps I'm mis-translating my New Zealand, but I sense a certain hint of sarcasm in that statement. The US government is really claiming that finding the relevant documents for disclosure is too difficult because it's in electronic format? Really? Thankfully, it appears that the judge in New Zealand isn't as technologically clueless as US prosecutors expected him to be.

The Washington Post is running a rather bizarre op-ed piece from a guy who runs an "internet marketing"/SEO business in which he argues that we need SOPA and CISPA because someone once set up a parody page mocking his business -- something that this guy, Kenneth Wisnefski claims is "an attack":

But after enduring two online attacks to my companies' reputation and databases, I've come to the conclusion that the protection businesses would get from the legislation is worth sacrificing privacy.

About a year ago, my company WebiMax was attacked by a person who stole our logo, created a mock Web site and misappropriated our tagline — Experience, Integrity, Results. He changed it to: "No experience, lack of integrity, no results." He posted commentary about WebiMax that was false and painted a negative image of us.

We got a preliminary injunction and the hosting company pulled it down. Three months later it popped back up on a hosting company in Ireland that works beyond the boundaries of the law. We believe we would not be going through this if the SOPA measure were in effect.

First of all, a parody page is not "an attack." Second, setting up a parody page is not "stealing" your logo. It's just making a copy of it. Most importantly, it's hard to see how there's a trademark issue here, because no one would see that page and get confused. Many, many such "sucks sites" have been deemed perfectly legal when it comes to trademark infringement. Now, there may possibly have been a defamation issue -- depending on what was stated on the website -- but neither SOPA nor CISPA deal with defamation. So, no, the laws would not have helped at all.

From there, he goes on to talk about how in a different company, someone hacked into the company's database and retrieved credit card info. Because of that, he thinks CISPA makes perfect sense, even if it means that the government might get to read his email:

Opponents of the measures raise the privacy concerns stemming from the government’s proposed authority to monitor online activity and shut down Web sites that violate copyright laws.

I agree with that sentiment. I’d hate to have someone from the government reading my e-mails, too. But the reality is the protection the measures could offer businesses are worth the sacrifice in privacy to prevent another worst-case scenario.

Except... having credit card info your company stored exposed has little to do with CISPA. At the very least, it sounds like someone should have followed much better payment database security techniques... such as encrypting the information. That kind of info is widely available to anyone and has absolutely nothing to do with CISPA. If CISPA was in effect when he had that same database setup, it would have done nothing to have prevented the hacking or to help anyone track down who did it.

I fail to see how "the protection measures" are "worth the sacrifice to privacy" when they wouldn't have actually helped in either of the cases he mentioned. And, of course, anyone who thinks privacy and security are "trade-offs" doesn't seem to know enough about either thing. As the slight paraphrase to the old Ben Franklin quote says, "those who sacrifice liberty for security deserve neither."

Via Rob Hyndman, we discover that at least one chef believes that taking photos of food he cooks, and then posting them on the internet, is "taking" his "intellectual property." We've discussed in the past how restaurants are yet another area where a lack of copyright protection has actually helped innovation thrive. But, that doesn't mean that some chefs don't still feel excessive levels of ownership over certain aspects of what they do. We've occasionally seen lawsuits between similar restaurants, but could you take it even further?

The article linked above, from Eater, talks to a number of different chefs to get their opinion on diners photographing the food that they're served. Most seem to have a grudging acceptance of the practice. The first chef, Sean Brock (from Husk and McCrady's in Charleston, South Carolina) appears to be the most enthusiastic, saying that he actually loves it when diners photograph the menu, because it even helps remind him what they made and also puts more pressure on the cooking staff to make sure the plates look good. However, a couple chefs down, there's RJ Cooper (from Rogue 24 in DC). He admits that they allow (non-flash) photography, mainly because he can't really stop it. But he's certainly not happy about it. After being asked if his opinion about people photographing dinner had changed, he said:

No, I still have the feeling. You're there for the dining experience with your companion, not to take photos of food. They publish food photos without your consent, which is taking intellectual property away from the restaurant. And also, generally, the photographs are terrible.

I'm curious how this is "taking intellectual property away from the restaurant." Unfortunately, it seems like yet another sign of the kind of "ownership culture" that is being spread by copyright maximalists these days -- encouraging the world to think they have "ownership" over things they have absolutely no rights to. The restaurant can legally refuse to serve someone, or kick someone out of their restaurant for taking a photograph if they wanted (though, that would likely hurt the restaurant's reputation), but there simply is no serious intellectual property issue in having someone take a photograph of the dinner they were served. Is there a lawyer crazy enough to make an argument that the cooking and plating process creates enough creativity in a "fixed" manner that it deserves copyright? Perhaps, but even then I'd have a hard time believing the photograph was not perfectly legitimate fair use.

All in all, I think it's unfortunate that we keep seeing more and more examples of people believing they "own" aspects of culture and can prevent others from sharing them, and regret that this is what our culture has become in an era where kids are being (incorrectly) taught that copyright is just like "property" for things you create. It leads people into thinking they "own" anything they do.

A few years ago, we noted the slight trend of people suing mobile operators over car crashes with drivers who were on their phones. Those lawsuits haven't gone very far, but with the rise of "texting while driving" as a big issue these days, someone apparently tried to blame a woman who texted her boyfriend for a car accident, because as he attempted to reply, he plowed into a couple on a motorcycle. The lawyer for the couple argued that the woman should have known that her boyfriend was driving at the time they were texting. Even if that was true, that hardly means she's to blame for the accident in any legal sense. Thankfully, the judge readily agreed, dismissing the case against her, and noting that the responsibility is on the recipient. Otherwise there would be some perverse results:

Rand said it's reasonable for text message senders to assume the recipients will behave responsibly, and he also noted drivers are bombarded with many forms of distraction, whether they be text messages, notifications from smartphones, GPS devices or signs along the road.

"Were I to extend this duty to this case, in my judgment, any form of distraction could potentially serve as the basis of a liability case," Rand said.

With critical votes in the EU Parliament on ACTA quickly approaching, the Dutch House of Representatives decided to take a pre-emptive strike, and unanimously accept a motion that urged the Cabinet to reject ACTA, while also rejecting "any future treaty that may harm a free and open Internet." Of course, this is the same Netherlands whose courts are currently censoring a local political party for setting up an internet proxy, so it appears there's at least some confusion in that country. Either way, it's nice to see this pre-emptive strike, though it's not clear how much power the Dutch government would have to reject ACTA if the EU Parliament accepted it...