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Links for 2012-08-06

  • French illegal downloads agency Hadopi may be abolished

    According to recent statistics, Hadopi has sent 1 million warning emails, 99,000 “strike two” letters and identified 314 people for referral to the courts for possible disconnection. No one has actually been disconnected. According to Aurelie Filipetti, culture minister in the new French Government, Hadopi has been nothing but a waste of money. “€12 million per year and 60 officials; that’s an expensive way to send 1 million emails,” Filipetti said. “Hadopi has not fulfilled its mission of developing legal downloads. I prefer to reduce the funding of things that have not been proven to be useful.”
    0 disconnections. Not one.

    (tags: hadopi privacy law three-strikes france money)

  • NASA’s Mars Rover Crashed Into a DMCA Takedown

    An hour or so after Curiosity’s 1.31 a.m. EST landing in Gale Crater, I noticed that the space agency’s main YouTube channel had posted a 13-minute excerpt of the stream. Its title was in an uncharacteristic but completely justified all caps: “NASA LANDS CAR-SIZE ROVER BESIDE MARTIAN MOUNTAIN.” When I returned to the page ten minutes later, […] the video was gone, replaced with an alien message: “This video contains content from Scripps Local News, who has blocked it on copyright grounds. Sorry about that.” That is to say, a NASA-made public domain video posted on NASA’s official YouTube channel, documenting the landing of a $2.5 billion Mars rover mission paid for with public taxpayer money, was blocked by YouTube because of a copyright claim by a private news service.

    (tags: dmca google fail nasa copyright false-positives scripps youtube video mars)