Over the past few days there have been 3 signficant turnarounds in the media world in terms of privacy, copyright.
Facebook, the social media site has over 175 million customers. And many of those were not happy with the user policy changes Facebook was about to implement. It seems the people have spoken, and Facebook has backed off, now looking for other ways resolve questions such as who controls the information shared on the social networking site.
The outburst was in reaction to Facebooks recent update of the policy which included statements that pretty well said Facebook could do whatever they wanted with your content, forever. Not going to happen, responded the users – tens of thousands joined protest groups on the site to voice their opposition.
Their current stance is that they do not claim right to user media, but need a license in order to help users share the media with their friends. Check out the “Facebook Bill of Rights and Responsibilities” designed to let users give input on Facebook’s terms of use.
NZ Copyright Amendment Act Protest
Over the other side of the world, in New Zealand, protesters of the recently introduced Copyright Amendment Act, which comes into force on February 28, sported blank signs to symbolise that freedom of speech was being stifled by a copyright law and it should be dumped.
Section 92A of the law stipulates that any material subject to an accusation of breach of copyright is made even if it is not proven, will have to be removed from the internet. As it stands, ISPs may have to close down sites even if the complaint is malicious.
Some protesters have even blacked out their webpages as part of a week of action.
What happened to innocent until proven guilty….
Movie and Music Industry Mediation
And on to major media boardrooms, bosses of movie and music conglomerates have bosses pulled back from taking a hard stand in the battle between copyright holders and internet pirates and are instead considering engaging independent mediation to ease the tension between the typical hardline Hollywood approach and Telcos who are being forced to police copyright holders’ property rights.
Under section 92a of the Copyright Act, which comes into force at the end of the month, ISPs and any company operating a server to staff has to investigate complaints about internet piracy such as illegal downloads of music, TV shows and movies.
In a similar environment as NZ, the comms service providers are being tasked with removing clients from the web.