When it comes to ACTA and TPP, China is the elephant in the room — or maybe that should be the dragon in the room. For without China’s participation, these treaties designed to reduce counterfeiting will have little effect. And despite rather desperate optimism on the part of some that China will rush to sign up, itscomments so far suggest otherwise.

On Techdirt.

As the mobile phone moves closer to the center of daily life in many parts of the world, combining phone, computer, camera, diary, music player, and much else all in one, it becomes a concentrated store of the digital DNA that defines us — who we talk to, what we search for, who we meet, what we listen to. However convenient that may be for us as users, it’s also extremely dangerous if it falls into the wrong hands.

On Techdirt.

Earlier this year, Poland played a crucial role in igniting street protests that pretty much stopped ACTA in its tracks. That’s not the first time it has had a major impact on European tech policy. Half a decade earlier, it derailed a proposed EU software patent directive, which had sought to make software patentable in Europe — something that Article 52 of the European Patent Convention had appeared to rule out. That led to a later vote in the European Parliament wheresoftware patents were decisively rejected.

On Techdirt.

On Monday I posted my talk “Before and After SOPA“.
In it, there’s a reference to “country club” treaties (slide 17) that
may have intrigued some people. It’s a term I came across recently, and
I think provides us with a useful way of thinking about ACTA (and TPP).

On Open Enterprise blog.

Even though just about every objective statistic suggests otherwise, the copyright industries still take turns bemoaning the terrible toll that piracy is supposedly taking on their markets. So it’s good to come across some official figures that suggest the contrary, particularly because in this case they come from the European Audiovisual Observatory—not a market research company, but a public service body. Here are the latest numbers for the European film industry:

On Techdirt.