La quadrature du Net
IPtegrity

The European Parliament is about to take very important decisions that will affect the every day use of the internet by europeans: the Telecoms package will be adopted in second reading in April, while the approval of the Medina report, which recommends a very restrictive vision of the web, has been now postponed “sine die” thanks to awareness raised by massive citizen mobilization. The decision to postpone the report “sine die” is confirmed by the JURI committee, where the text was initially voted on the 20/1.

The Medina Report is a Commission’s report on the application of Directive 2001/29/EC on the harmonisation of certain aspects of copyright and related rights in the information society. It is advocating for Internet filtering, three-strikes approach, graduated response, and so on and has been proposed by Manuel Medina Ortega, of the PSE. The Telecoms Package, the Universal Services directive and e-Privacy directive, is a common regulatory framework for networks and services, access, interconnection and authorisation. According to many organizations and researchers the Telecoms package is posing serious threats to fundamental rights, privacy and civil liberties, by legalizing a european-wide “graduated response” against citizens and controlling peoples usage of the Internet, changing the very structure of the Internet at the expenses of people’s freedom. According to amendments pushed by AT&T, “network management practices” could be used to discriminate what content, services and applications users could access and use.
What is at stake is no less than Net Neutrality: will MEPs allow discrimination on the internet? To block the Telecoms package, join this initiative from a citizens coalition and sign this paper.
More info on:
The Green Party website ; Libero Sapere ; La Quadrature du Net; IPTEGRITY

Efforts by the European Union to insert strong provisions
on pharmaceutical patents in a series of free trade agreements it is negotiating
could imperil access to medicines in developing countries, global public health
activists have alleged.
As part of trade talks being conducted with India, Colombia, Peru and a regional
grouping in south-east Asia, EU officials have proposed that drug-makers should
benefit from a robust intellectual property regime. National regulatory authorities
in the countries concerned would be prevented for lengthy periods from using data
provided by a company that holds a drug patent in order to authorise a generic
version of that medicine. Link to the article:
http://www.ip-watch.org/weblog/?p=1835

On Monday morning Sweden’s largest trial against The Pirate Bay begins at the Kungsholmen courthouse in Stockholm. What is at stake is the battle against file sharing empires and surveillance international networks. The Pirate Bay is charged with violating Swedish copyright laws by facilitating the trading of copyrighted material and then making money off that trade by selling advertising on their site. The trial comes after a massive police investigation in 2006, when police raided the TBP office and confiscated some of their servers. The trial will be broadcasted live and translated in english with a translated a commented stream. The coverage of the trial will be a participative, crowd-sourced journalism project, because journalists, reporters and bloggers are encouraged to use Twitter’s hashtag format, which will allow anyone to cover the trial by tweeting or searching for “#spectrial” on Twitter. Hashtags act like keywords on Twitter, and allow you to easily find the content you are looking for. You can read all the information here <a href=”http://trial.thepiratebay.org
and on Piratebyran <a href=”http://www.piratbyran.org , the anti-copyright group and IP researchers.

The European Parliament’s legal affairs committee has approved an extension
of copyright term for music recordings from 50 years to 95 years.
Note that it is a co-decision Procedure; today’s vote was the 1st reading of
the European Parliament. The plenary vote is scheduled on March 11th in Strasbourg, to have the final approval by the Council of Ministers.
See the press release on the European Parliament’s website:
http://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/expert/infopress_page/058-48812-040-02-07-909-20090209IPR48791-09-02-2009-2009-false/default_en.htm

The Legal Affair Committee of the European Parliament will vote the Term Extension Directive to double the term of copyright afforded to sound recordings. The directive will have serious consequences for the European’s IP policy, affecting cultural production and independent producers to favor the majors, the entertainment industries and a few big artists….thanks to the superpower of lobbyists in Brussel!
You can reed the read here the declaration to reject this directive: http://www.edri.org/files/Joint_Statement_Final.pdf and read more on EDRI: http://www.edri.org/reject-term-extention-directive

I am in London doing a research master at the University College of London, Birkbeck. I am researching on digital business and open innovation. I will finish the draft of my research proposal by the end of the month and post it here as well.

I started the new year in London, thinking about the massacre in Gaza. We are all living the Palestinian drama again and again and I am finding back the memory of the war in 2002 when we were in Deheishe camp under the siege.

2009 will be a surpraising and strange year…the financial crisis is taking an unpredictable shape and London is changing…the belly of the beast is craking. I am thinking about start filming the post-financial crisis period…maybe this could help me to understand were we are rushing to!?

On tusday 15th I will be at the the 3rd workshop into the Digital Business Ecosystems area, organized in Brussels by the European Commission Directorate General information Society and Media in representation of the ERA Study of the Networked Enterprise & RFID Unit. The workshop “Setting up a regional ERA Coordination Initiative in the area of Digital Business Ecosystems” will will include seminars and round tables on the DBE defining the research and innovation priorities in the DBE area for the near future, confronting the different actions deployed by European Regions.

Me and my friend Joanne Richardson, filosopher and filmaker, were invited from the Contemporary Art Forum of Alexandria to run a five days workshop/club on Social and Tactical Media. In the workshop partecipated young artists, grafic designers, filmakers and researchers from Alexandria and Cairo. Egypt doesn’t seem to have a big tradition of resistance in the media and internet field, due to the repressive egyptian state policy and to the State control of information, media and the Internet. Egypt indeed have arrested bloggers and closed sites. In february Karim Amer faced the trial for writing blogs criticizing Egypt’s al-Azhar religious authorities, President Husni Mubarak and Islam. He was first detained by the Egyptian authorities for 12 days in October 2005 because of his writings on his blog (karam903.blogspot.com) about Islam and the sectarian riots which took place in the same month in Alexandria’s Maharram Bek district. After he was charged and released, disciplinary measures were taken against him and he was dismissed from al-Azhar University in March 2006. The university’s disciplinary board found him guilty of blaspheming Islam. He’s still under detention. This repression doesn’t seems to go together with the initiatives on freedom of information, digital culture and access to knowledge carried on in the Library of Alexandria. Is this only a cosmetic institutional strategy? Maybe the egyptian society is ready for a political and social change! I will write more impression on Egypt later…

From 13th to 17th March I have been invited to Pixelache Festival, an international festival of electronic Art organized by juha huuskonen in Helsinki. The theme this year was exploring education in the cross-roads of science, technology, art and culture. I partecipated, together with my peer and friend Federico Primosig in the panel “Signals from the South” to exchange infos on differents projects developd in cooperation with southern countries. Me and Federico talked about countercultural digital networks in Italy, Pontos de Cultura in Brazil and the policy of Venezuela Government towards free software. Enjoyed very much the presentation of the MOWOSO collective in Kinshasa, Congo and the ideas for next Pixelazo in Colombia…maybe would be able to go there..During the festival my friend Jean-Noël Montagné presented the Bricofone project and the Bricolabs Network. I enjoed very much also the Arduino workshop and the presentation of Vidalab in Colombia.