Mary Kaldor, writing in openDemocracy…
There is something perverse about globalisation. I live and work in the area of London targeted in the four explosions on Thursday 7 July. None of our phones worked for several hours and I couldn’t reach my family and close friends. Yet even before I quite realised what was happening, I was receiving emails from India, America, Azerbaijan, Kosovo and even Baghdad.
It’s almost enough to make one feel sorry for Windows users. MessageLabs is reporting that it has intercepted
copies of an email posing as a video news clip of yesterday’s terrorist attack in London which instead contains a Trojan designed to compromise the recipient’s computer. The email containing this Trojan has been crafted to appear as a CNN Newsletter which asks recipients to ‘See attachments for unique amateur video shots’.
When executed the attachment copies itself to %Windir%\winlog.exe and modifies the Windows registry key ‘HKLM/Software/microsoft/Windows/CurrentVersion/Run’ so that it runs automatically on system start-up. The Trojan then attempts to obtain a list of the SMTP servers that the victims machine is configured to use and starts to use these servers to send large volumes of unsolicited mail.
The Supreme Court tried to steer a middle path between these claims [of the content and technology industries], and did a reasonable job. But the outcome of the case is nevertheless unsatisfactory. That’s not the court’s fault. It was struggling to apply a copyright law which has grown worse than anachronistic in the digital age. That’s something Congress needs to remedy.
In America, the length of copyright protection has increased enormously over the past century, from around 28 years to as much as 95 years. The same trend can be seen in other countries. In June Britain signalled that it may extend its copyright term from 50 years to around 90 years.
This makes no sense. Copyright was originally intended to encourage publication by granting publishers a temporary monopoly on works so they could earn a return on their investment. But the internet and new digital technologies have made the publication and distribution of works much easier and cheaper. Publishers should therefore need fewer, not more, property rights to protect their investment. Technology has tipped the balance in favour of the public domain.
A first, useful step would be a drastic reduction of copyright back to its original terms—14 years, renewable once. This should provide media firms plenty of chance to earn profits, and consumers plenty of opportunity to rip, mix, burn their back catalogues without breaking the law. The Supreme Court has somewhat reluctantly clipped the wings of copyright pirates; it is time for Congress to do the same to the copyright incumbents.
Couldn’t have put it better myself. Full text here.
According to The Register,
Opera has released a version of its web browser with the BitTorrent client built in. Users clicking on a Torrent file will see the file load in Opera’s traditional Transfer window, so for most file transfers, there’s no need to install a third-party BitTorrent client. To Opera, it’s simply another MIME type, like Gopher and Usenet before it.
In the days that follow look at our airports, look at our sea ports and look at our railway stations and, even after your cowardly attack, you will see that people from the rest of Britain, people from around the world will arrive in London to become Londoners and to fulfil their dreams and achieve their potential. They choose to come to London, as so many have come before because they come to be free, they come to live the life they choose, they come to be able to be themselves. They flee you because you tell them how they should live. They don’t want that and nothing you do, however many of us you kill, will stop that flight to our city where freedom is strong and where people can live in harmony with one another. Whatever you do, however many you kill, you will fail.
London’s Mayor, Ken Livingstone.