ADVOCACY, POLICY & NEWS
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ACLU To Court: It’s Legal To Tell Bob To Eat Shit
So we fully expected the ongoing to lawsuit filed by coal boss Bob Murray against comedian John Oliver to lead to some truly captivating moments (it already has!), but the West Virginia chapter of the ACLU has leapt into the case with wild abandon and made sure that people were…
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Streisand Effect helps Sci-Hub to acquire almost all scholarly literature, dooms traditional academic publishing
Techdirt has been covering the story of Sci-Hub, which provides unrestricted access to a massive (unauthorized) database of academic papers, for a while now. As several posts have emphasized, the decision by the publishing giant Elsevier to pursue the site through the courts is a classic example of the Streisand…
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Discussing the government’s encryption plans
Our Executive Officer Jon Lawrence joined Jane Hebiton on Perth’s RTR FM yesterday to discuss the government’s plans to force providers to give access to encrypted communications. You can listen to the podcast here.
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Amid Unprecedented Controversy, W3C Greenlights DRM for the Web
Last week, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standards body publicly announced its intention to publish Encrypted Media Extensions (EME)—a DRM standard for web video—with no safeguards whatsoever for accessibility, security research or competition, despite an unprecedented internal controversy among its staff and members over this issue. EME is a…
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83 organisations and experts from “Five Eyes” nations demand respect for strong encryption
Today, 83 organisations and individuals from Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States have sent letters to their respective governments insisting that government officials defend strong encryption. The letter comes on the heels of a meeting of the “Five Eyes” ministerial meeting in Ottawa, Canada earlier…
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Australia leads in disability access, thanks to copyright changes
Australians with a disability will have some of the strongest rights to access content in the world, thanks to changes to Australia’s copyright laws passed this week. Copyright peak body the Australian Digital Alliance elatedly welcomed the new laws. Executive Officer, Jessica Coates said: “This is a great step forward…