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It's important to note that this is not a law as such, but a report, as Engström explains:

This means that it does not automatically become law even if it is adopted, but is just a way for the European parliament to express its opinion.

But the purpose of these own initiative reports are to serve as the basis for the Commission when it decides to present legislative proposals to the parliament. If this own initiative report is adopted by the parliament, it will strengthen the Commission's position if and when it wants to propose various"self-regulation" schemes in the future.

Discussions have been taking place on Twitter around the hashtag #mepblock (disclosure: I've been part of these), and an e-petition has been created, calling on European politicians to drop their censorship and to listen to their constituents as they are supposed to, instead of just ignoring them. There are still a few days before the vote next week, so there's plenty of time for further developments in what looks like becoming an increasingly heated debate.

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SEC staff informed us yesterday that they are recommending that the SEC bring a civil action against us for my July 1 billion hour public post, asserting we violated “Reg FD”. This rule is designed to ensure that individual investors have equal access to information as large institutional investors, by prohibiting selective disclosure of material information. The SEC staff believes that I gave you all “material” investor information in my post and that we needed to instead release the June viewing fact “publicly” with an 8-K filing or press release.

“Reg FD was about protecting me from telling Carl Icahn something special, the big investor, that not everyone else got,” Hastings said. “This was me talking to 200,000 Facebook followers; it is letting the small guy in on the information.”

Not a scam: If you've committed a burglary in the #Leicester area within the last week - come to our #police station & claim a FREE iPad.

— Leicester Police (@CityCentreLPU) January 6, 2013

"Not a scam: If you've committed a burglary in the #Leicester area within the last week - come to our #police station & claim a FREE iPad."

.@citycentrelpu – we need to talk to you about a tweet theft earlier today, “You do not have to say anything, but it may harm your....

— Solihull Police (@SolihullPolice) January 6, 2013

.@CityCentreLPU – we need to talk to you about a tweet theft earlier today, “You do not have to say anything, but it may harm your....

"All of these services are essentially in the same business: vying for the opportunity to sell you/your clickstream to advertisers. … I have no interest in completely opting out of the social Web. But please, I want a real alternative to advertising hell. I would gladly pay for a service that treats me better."

"Wilson maintains that a free model is the only way to get the kind of network effects necessary for a large consumer business. He also argues that charging users is contrary to the rationale behind such services, since the content being monetized is coming from those same users:

'When scale matters, when network effects matter, when your users are creating the content and the value, free is the business model of choice. And I don’t think anything has changed to make that less true today. If anything, it is more true.'"

As the article's author, Ben Walters, writes, beyond the surface humor, there's something interesting happening here:

sweded movies are a form of talking back to Hollywood. Along with recut trailers and "supercuts" of familiar tropes, they represent a fledgling digital moving-image culture that presents a radical challenge to the mainstream movie industry. They are created as fun for fans but the ideas of entitlement and agency underpinning these videos will shape how we all consume -- and produce -- moving images in the 21st century. They are a taste of what comes after Hollywood.

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"I was in my green room checking on my Twitter," he said. "During the show, someone tweeted something negative about Richie. And I don't have a problem with stuff like this. I get made fun of and called all sorts of name every day. But if someone messes with my friend I have this weird reaction that happens, and I do things that probably are kind of not normal, abnormal. I just become extremely protective.

"I marched onstage, and in between songs with Richie, I grabbed the microphone and I said 'Who is this person's name,' he came up, and I said, 'You're going to have to go off with somebody with the venue and tell them to escort you off for talking shit on Twitter.'"

My daughter, Maya, will turn four in May and she can’t speak. The only word that she can consistently say with 100% clarity is “done”—which, while helpful, isn’t really enough to functionally communicate. When Maya was two and a half we introduced her to the iPad, and we’ve danced with AAC (augmentative and alternative communication) ever since. We experimented with a few communication apps, but nothing was a perfect fit. After an extensive search for the perfect app, we found it: Speak for Yourself. Simple and brilliant, we saw that it had the potential to serve Maya into adulthood, but was also simple enough for her to start using immediately.

And she liked it. And it worked. And I started to have little flashes of the future, in which she could rapidly tap out phrases and ideas and tell me more and more of the secret thoughts that fill her head—the ones that I’m hungry to hear and she’s dying to share but her uncooperative mouth just can’t get out.

My kid is learning how to “talk.” It’s breathtaking.

But now Speak for Yourself in under fire, and from a surprising (to an AAC outsider) or not-so-surprising (to an AAC insider) source. They’re being sued by Semantic Compaction Systems and Prentke Romich Company, big names in the AAC world. SCS and PRC allege that Speak for Yourself is infringing on their patents. I’m going to be honest: I don’t know about patents and infringement, and I’m not going to get into debates about the legal merits of the case, because that’s a conversation in which I would quickly drown.

Dana explains that her defense of the app isn't arbitrary. Before discovering Speak For Yourself, she explored dedicated speech devices from the big AAC companies, including Prentke Romich. None of their options were suited to her daughter, and they all carried hefty price tags—as in $7,000+ hefty. She began asking around to see if PRC or any of the other big companies were planning on releasing an iPad app, and learned that although many customers were clamoring for one, the companies had no intention of meeting their demands. They didn't want an affordable option out there reducing sales of their expensive systems.

Whenever the incumbents of any industry are ignoring the demands of their customers, you can bet that someone else is paying attention. In this case, it was speech-language pathologists Heidi LoStracco and Renee Collender, the pair behind Speak For Yourself. The app's website explains how it came about:

Mrs. LoStracco and Mrs. Collender began to see a shift in the field when the iPad was released. Mrs. Collender says, "Districts and parents were buying an iPad with an 'AAC' app on it and saying, 'Make this work.' We would try to reprogram the applications with the language that the children needed, but it took forever and it was never really 'right.'" Heidi and Renee say that it got to the point that someone was asking them about iPad applications for AAC every day, and they decided that they needed a better answer. Heidi says, "We would tell them, there's not really an effective AAC app out there yet, but when there, is, we'll be the first to tell you about it.” Then we started thinking that we could create something that followed motor learning principles and gave individuals access to the language they needed to communicate effectively, and that's when we designed Speak for Yourself." Renee says, "We've always believed that communication is a basic human right, and the only AAC pre-requisite skill that a nonverbal person needs is a pulse."

Dana points out that PRC's mission statement begins "We Believe Everyone Deserves A Voice" and that their refusal to create an affordable iPad app, and now their attempts to crush a competitor who did, clearly runs counter to that mission. For her, that's basically where the discussion ends: a company is trying to take away the only thing that has been able to give her daughter a voice, and she couldn't care less whether or not they have the legal right to do so.

It's hard not to sympathize with her position, even though the lawsuit and the patent in question, #5,920,303, both appear to be solid. As Dana's story gains traction, we can only hope that it will increase social pressure on PRC and possibly shame them into allowing Speak For Yourself to survive by offering them an affordable license, or at least releasing their own iPad app at a similar price point—but as we've seen with pharmaceutical companies, the holders of life-saving and life-changing patents often don't seem too bothered about withholding them no matter what it does to their public image.

Ultimately, this is more evidence that in today's world of rapid innovation, tech monopolies are increasingly untenable. Big companies that have dominated niche markets for years—and have long since paid off their R&D costs by charging monopoly rates—are being disrupted by nimbler competitors. As we've seen with media and software piracy, this happens whether or not the competitors are "legitimate" under intellectual property law. Can there be any doubt that, if Speak For Yourself is shut down and the app eliminated, Dana will seek out a way to keep it running on her daughter's iPad? Since her story is running on Slashdot, she's already received comments with advice on how to do so, and suggestions that she contact Speak For Yourself and convince them to release their source code on github. At the moment, it looks like she just plans on turning off all connectivity on the iPad so that it will no longer sync and the app will remain even if it is removed from the iTunes store. Can anyone blame her? The simple fact is that markets always eventually find a way to meet demands—and if companies (especially those in industries that seriously affect people's lives) use their intellectual property to block powerful market forces, that control will eventually be wrested from them, one way or another.

The Swedish prosecutor sent out a memo in 2006 saying that TPB wasn't guilty of "main" crimes -- at best it aids and abets (he also mentioned that the people running TPB were very clever). But Hollywood was not happy with this and forced the Swedish Minister of Justice to visit the White House and talk about it. The United States told Sweden that if they didn't get rid of the site, they would not be allowed to trade with the US!

The minister (illegally) told the prosecutor what had happened which forced him to raid TPB -- only a few weeks after sending out that memo about how legal it was.

Evidently, Warner Brothers felt that the investigation was taking too long. The studio contacted the police officer in charge of the investigation (one person that worked mostly by himself) and before I had even been questioned by him, he interviewed for a job with Warner Brothers.

When we found out he'd been hired (by him changing his employer from "Polisen" to "Warner Bros" on Facebook) the reply we got was that it was proof that Swedish IT police are of such high caliber that even the big US companies would hire them.

I got promoted from "witness" to "suspect" a week after the job was promised.

During the trial it turned out that the judge was the chairman for the Swedish pro-copyright society, one lay judge ran a record company, another one was formerly the chairman for the songwriter lobby organisation. I could go on.

Think about the art of writing for a minute. Think about creative, or biographical, or whatever kind of writing. Before blogging, how many people wrote any more than it took to fill the space of postcard? If it wasn't their profession, I'd say very few. Now, it seems like everyone has had a blog at one time or another. And now "micro-blogging" is in style thanks to Twitter. Not as many words you say? Right, but it's a different skill that people are learning. Very concise wording. Do people want to post boring tweets? Of course not. People spend quite a few minutes of their day trying to write interesting, humorous, or informative Tweets and Facebook updates. Small bits of creativity for sure, but add them up on a weekly basis, and it's quite a bit.

I think of all the craftspersons who have learned from each other on-line. Popular knitting blogs for instance have taken that old past-time of grandma's and made it mainstream. Before Etsy and the like, where would a person sell the scarves and hats that they made besides the occasional craft fair? I mean, a family only needs so many scarves, and then the knitting needles were put away. Communities on the web not only serve as a place to share work and ideas, but that also serve as shops to sell your product worldwide, creating a reason to make more, and to try new, crazy ideas. Kind of incredible.

My contention is that these days we live in right now will be looked back on with longing, especially with various governments trying to push through laws to control the internet. If that happens, these will be the good old days, so don't take them for granted. Look around and enjoy. I think this is an incredible time to make things, and I hope it stays around for a while.

It is impossible to enforce the ban against non-commercial file sharing without infringing fundamental rights. As long as there are ways for citizens to communicate in private, they will be used to share copyrighted materials. The only way to even try to limit file sharing, is to remove the right to private communication. In the last decade, this is the direction that copyright enforcement legislation has moved in, under pressure from big business lobbyists who see their monopolies under threat. We need to reverse this trend, in order to safeguard the fundamental rights.

In the economic statistics, we can see that household spending on culture and entertainment is slowly increasing year by year. If we spend less money on buying CD records, we spend more on something else, like for instance going to live concerts. This is great news for the artists. An artist will typically get 5-7% of the revenues from a CD record, but 50% of the revenues from a concert. The record companies lose out, but this is only because they are no longer adding any value.

It may well be that it will become more difficult to make money within some parts of the cultural sector, but if so, it will become easier in some other — including new ones, that we have not even imagined so far. But as long as the total household spending on culture continues to be on the same level or rising, nobody can claim that the artists as a group will have anything to lose from a reformed copyright.

When public libraries were introduced in Europe 150 years ago, the book publishers were very much opposed to this. The argument they used was the same one that is being used today in the file sharing debate: If people could get access to books for free, authors would not be able to make a living, and no new books would be written.

We now know that the arguments against public libraries were wrong. It quite obviously did not lead to a situation where no new books were written, and it did not make it impossible for authors to earn money from writing. On the contrary, free access to culture proved to be not only a boon to society at large, but also turned out to be beneficial to authors.

"What concerns me is the banality of so much that goes out on Twitter. Why should someone be interested in what someone else has had for breakfast? ... It reminds me of a small child (saying): 'Look at me Mummy, I'm doing this', 'Look at me Mummy I'm doing that' ... It's almost as if they're in some kind of identity crisis. In a sense it’s keeping the brain in a sort of time warp."

It seems like every time we think the "what you had for breakfast" hydra is slain, it rears another head. Anyone who still thinks such "banality" defines Twitter is clearly making their assessment based on bitter third-hand descriptions passed around the water cooler or, in this case, the House of Lords. The statement is reminiscent of one she made last year after noting that video games and "fast-paced TV shows" were also a factor:

'We know how small babies need constant reassurance that they exist,' she told the Mail yesterday. 'My fear is that these technologies are infantilising the brain into the state of small children who are attracted by buzzing noises and bright lights, who have a small attention span and who live for the moment.'

That's what the Baroness really takes issue with: the way modern technology is "rewiring" our brains and altering fundamental cognitive patterns. She's not alone, of course: Techdirt recently covered another set of claims about our "rewired" brains, and the media love these stories.

While it is undoubtedly true that our brains adapt to the way we communicate (use of the word "rewire" is misleading at best), the flaw in all these arguments is the assumption that this is somehow bad or even unusual. The entire history of progress has involved changing emphases on various skills. The Baroness made this point extremely well herself, though she seemed to think she was supporting her own position:

'I often wonder whether real conversation in real time may eventually give way to these sanitised and easier screen dialogues, in much the same way as killing, skinning and butchering an animal to eat has been replaced by the convenience of packages of meat on the supermarket shelf.'

I think from this we can begin to understand her a little better. In her world, digital communication is a distraction from real life—you know, just like supermarkets. One wonders if she avoids working by electric light and shits out the window, too. And you know what? There may well be a valid psychological or perhaps even neurological argument for humans getting back in touch with their roots—but while I'm sure it's lots of fun to entertain those arguments, most of us don't have that luxury.

Of course, Baroness Greenfield is no stranger to exaggeration. She made headlines last September when, in a stunning display of ironically wrongheaded hyperbole, she compared Stephen Hawking to the Taliban for denying the existence of God (don't bother trying to figure out how that makes sense). Meanwhile, her crusade against the-kids-these-days has been going on for years—in 2006 she signed an open letter to the Telegraph on the subject penned by fellow techno-panicker Sue Palmer, and also decided to examine the issue with an all-party group in the House of Lords. It consisted of herself and "three former education secretaries, Baroness Williams, Baroness Shephard and Baroness Morris"—a roster that would sound more encouraging for a fetish party than for a group dedicated to exploring new technologies.

The Baroness is no doubt a skilled neurophysiologist, but she seems to be drawing bold and broad sociological conclusions based more on instinct than evidence. Worse still, she apparently takes it as granted that any changes are bad, as if the dynamic nature of our identity and our relationship with our environment is not the very essence of being alive. I'm getting philosophical, I know, but perhaps a little fresh philosophy is exactly what Baroness Greenfield needs—she seems to be stuck in the past.

The phrase "May your day be full of Jasmine," for example, is a coded reference to what's been called the Jasmine Revolution sweeping the region, Mahmoudi told ABC News.

He said the response, "And the same to you. I hope you will call me" meant they were ready to begin.

If the undercover "lovers" wrote "I want love," it meant "I want liberty," Mahmoudi said.

They also communicated in code the number of their comrades supporting the revolution. The five Ls in the phrase "I LLLLLove you," for example, meant they had five people with them.

The shared content is misleading because it makes representations about the efficacy of Tasigna but fails to communicate any risk information associated with the use of this drug. In addition, the shared content inadequately communicates Tasigna’s FDA-approved indication and implies superiority over other products. Thus, the shared content for Tasigna misbrands the drug in violation of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act (the Act) and FDA implementing regulations.

"We did a little research on the basis of the allegations and found that the company was in breach of certain laws, as is of danger to health or integrity of its users...."

"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!!"

"I need a keyboard. Even my phone has that." It is really all about input for her, and her focus on interactivity underscores a glaring limitation of the iPad. It is primarily a media consumption device, not an interactive device. Publishers think of digital merely as a delivery vehicle, but users think of digital as a communications and interactive platform. After a life of leaning in, why would she want to lean back and consume content just to make media companies' business models work for them?

Smith lists several drawbacks to touch-screen tablet input that probably haven't occurred to those who, like me, have never gotten the chance to use one. I still think that with the right interface and after some design iterations, iPads (and other tablets) will be excellent interactive devices, but Smith is dead right in his assessment of how publishers view them. The iPad magazine demos that some have shown off are compelling and cool, but they are mostly one-way media. This is exacerbated by the obsession with native apps, which Smith notes are much less likely to explode on the iPad the way they did on the iPhone:

Unlike the iPhone, where an app can clearly trump a mobile Web site experience, the iPad makes full Web browsing much more viable. Early audience research I have seen suggests that for even those interested in the iPad, Web browsing and email are rated far above app downloads as the device's main attraction. And so, publisher apps will be competing with their own Web sites.

This is a point we've made before: everything in these fancy magazine apps can be replicated in the browser (there is one small problem to do with scrolling that remains, but even that has nearly been solved). Publishers should be working to ensure that their product—whether it's books, magazines or newspapers—is available on every platform with minimum hassle, instead of building closed apps that frustratingly trap the user. Nobody is loyal to one publication anymore, and nobody wants a dozen different news and magazine apps littering their tablet or smartphone—they want to browse the web the way they always have. It's time for publishers to stop trying to alter user behaviour, and start learning from it.

1. You probably didn't follow the suggestions. (Yes, I did.)
2. You didn't do it at the right time. (Yes, I did.)
3. Wait two days. (Waited, nothing happened.)
4. Wait till this afternoon. (Waited, nothing happened.)
5. There's no cache of it. (Yes, there is.)
6. You're not the owner of the site. (Owner steps in and says I am allowed to follow this up for him.)
7. There's no cache of it. (Yes, there is.)
8. I'll ignore the main link you give and focus on a second one that is less useful. (Look at the first one then.)
9. There's no cache of it. (Yes, there is.)
10. There's no cache of it. (Yes, there is.)
11. Your search term is not relevant to this. (But it shows you a cache of it.)