While the European Union is claiming that Stop Online Piracy Act was a bad legislation and nobody needed it, Ireland seems to be not getting the memo.

According to Irish legal experts, the authorities over there are about to bring in a SOPA-style bill that is even vaguer and open-ended. Indeed, it turned out that the Irish law will let record labels order broadband providers to block access to certain online services. However, Sean Sherlock (the Minister of State at the department of Enterprise, Jobs and Innovation) insists that the suggested legislation is completely different to the American Stop Online Piracy Act. Instead, it is only addressing the High Court judgement that had been handed down by Mr Justice Peter Charleton regarding to copyright legislation, according to Sherlock.

Nevertheless, the new “statutory instrument” of the country’s government seems to threaten to do the same things as SOPA. For example, it allows Internet service providers to block online services suspected of having copyrighted content on them.

Worse still, the entertainment industry could also ask a judge to order broadband providers to block services like Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook since they are claimed to contain their copyrighted material. Indeed, according to the suggested legislation, all the rights owner has to do is show a judge their material on the website and after that it will be allowed to order the Internet service provider to pull the plug.

Considering the fact that Google and Facebook are in fact Dublin’s largest employers, it might be very embarrassing for the government to see their websites banned in the country. According to the Irish legal expert, part of the Irish problem is that the tool in question being drawn up is quite woolly, so it will undoubtedly take a test case before we can know what the result will be. The expert underlined that politically, it is a no-win scenario. Even with the government being ready to open the legal doors for the copyright holders to start directing access policies of broadband providers, the entertainment industry is frothing and fuming.

Ironically enough, by taking such approach, the authorities can also attract the anger of a growing sector of the technology and digital communities. Indeed, it would be quite unusual to alienate both sides of a legislative argument.

By:
SaM
January 27th,2012

Iran’s supreme court took a decision that a Canadian man that visited the country three years ago deserves death for promoting pornography. The court has upheld the death sentence for a programmer who is currently facing imminent execution after being found guilty of creating and promoting adult sites.

Saeed Malekpour has arrived to Iran in fall 2008 and was picked up by plainclothes police that took him to Evin prison in Tehran, where he had to spend a year in solitary confinement. Within that time he had no access to lawyers and wasn’t charged.

After a year, Saeed Malekpour was wheeled out in front of the TV cameras to confess to a number of “crimes” connected with porn sites. Based of his television confessions, Saeed was convicted of creating and supporting porn content on the Internet by a court in Tehran. However, Malekpour later retracted his own confessions in a letter he managed to send from prison. In the letter he claimed that confessions had been “extracted under pressure, physical and psychological torture” and under the threats to both him and his family.

Saeed Malekpour is a permanent resident of Canada. He designed photo-uploading program that had been used by some pornographic site without him even knowing. Upon completion of the international campaign and expert evidence, Iran’s supreme court has suspended his death sentence last year and required a judicial review. According to Western media reports, the court believed that it was all fair enough to execute a visitor to their country for something that is not even a crime in the country of his residence, and anyway he is probably innocent. In other words, Iran believes that its local legislation can be extended to other states.

Meanwhile, Saeed Malekpour was charged with the crime of “spreading corruption on Earth”. This one is vaguely worded to say the least. So, it seems that if you are doing anything that might miff the Iranian ideologies, you are strongly not recommended to visit the country which once was a flower of human civilization. Well, that is unless you are willing to be strung up in a car park, but this isn’t on any sensible person’s agenda.

By:
SaM
January 27th,2012

Following MegaUpload shutdown and arrests that took place last week, Filesonic, one of the largest cyberlocker services on the Internet, has removed the features which made the site that popular among file-sharers. This move was done in order to place the service at a safe distance from Hollywood’s revenge. However, some industry observers believe that taking into account what is going on today, nobody can really be sure that such a distance even exists.

The service that used to feature in the list of top 10 file-sharing websites on the web, with 250 million page views monthly placed today a red banner on the main page, saying that all file-sharing functionality on the service is disabled from now on and the site can only be used to upload and download files users have uploaded personally.

Moreover, Filesonic has also terminated its affiliates rewards program, which means that those users who have uploaded files to the service won’t any longer earn money for other visitors downloading their files. However, as the functionality of downloading itself was removed, the program wouldn’t have functioned anyway. Meanwhile, the uploaders are mainly concerned about the reward money they had already collected in their accounts before this shutdown. Users are not sure if they can even still receive that.

After the FBI arrested the founders of famous MegaUpload service and seized its domain name, all websites enabling files uploading and downloading, as well as their users, have been put on guard. However, what the unsuspecting ordinary online user doesn’t realize is that their fundamental rights are currently in danger, too, as they can be tragically limited. The reason for this is a new wicked anti-piracy legislation that hides behind such terms as “digital theft” and “intellectual property protection” is currently awaiting approval.

This is why a lot of the online giants went as far as to arrange a blackout regarding SOPA and PIPA bills in attempt to educate their visitors about the possible consequences of such laws. Today every other service urges everyone to get informed about the proposed legislation, offering detailed information about oncoming Internet filtering, and recommends taking immediate action in cooperation with the rest of the citizens trying to defend their rights and freedom.

By:
SaM
January 24th, 2012