TechCrunch » Blog Archive » Yahoo! China faces new copyright law

When Yahoo! handed over information on a number of dissidents and reporters to the Chinese government, it said it was just following local laws. Those individuals faced serious consequences. If international pressure is able to change Chinese law, those are the laws that should have been changed - not laws seeking to enforce a false scarcity over an ephemeral product like digital music. When Google lost its appeal in a French court last week and was ruled guilty for including search results for counterfeit Louis Vuitton hand bags, most international observers thought it indicated an unrealistic and anti-American sentiment in France. For some reason intellectual property infringement in music is taken far more seriously. I hope people will think about the international politics at issue in the Yahoo! China case as well.

Slashdot | iRex's iLiad E-ink eBook Reader is Now Available

iRex has just started shipping its e-ink eBook reader, the iLiad, starting today (July 3rd) — making it the first e-ink reader commercially available outside of Japan.
The dawn of book piracy?

Peter Suber, Open Access News

BT, (British Telecom) the incumbent phone company in the United Kingdom, is planning to shut off all of its legacy phone networks - a hodge podge of systems that includes the traditional "circuit switched" system that has served as the architecture for delivering phone calls for more than a century - by 2010. In its place, BT is installing a single network based on Internet Protocol, the language of the Internet.

Lawrence Lessig

Claus Pedersen has completed research on the pattern of filesharing in Denmark. His conclusions are (1) the decline in record sales in Denmark is explained by many factors, and (2) the decline that there is is finansed almost in full by the wealthiest artists. What’s particularly interesting about the study is that it uses data from the Nordic Copyright Bureau, which has a monopoly status in Denmark. That means the data are not estimates of sales declines, but actual sales. (Nordic records 99% of the market). A summary of the paper was translated by Marie Elisabeth Pade Andersen. You can read it here. Claus now looking for support to get the full paper translated. If you’ve got an idea, email him at this address.

--Ari