NB Sarko-Obama; Protect Net Call by OECD
In the US Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales has threatened to take the site off-line in protest at what he considers ’draconian’ anti-Internet freedom measures currently proposed by the Obama administration. In France there have been ongoing protests about Hadopi, the French effort to clamp down on music and intellectual property piracy — which in reality goes much further. [...]
Privacy laws: Trojan Horse for Censorship?
Are Privacy laws a Trojan horse for censorship? Discuss. The phone hacking scandal involving the Murdoch-owned, UK-based, News of the World tabloid (weekly circulation 2.7m), has brought down the paper and prompted calls in that country for tighter control of the press. The debate is not one that North American readers would have much truck [...]
Sarkozy: ‘Regulate’ not ‘Restrain’ the Internet
Despite plunging popularity in the polls President Nicolas Sarkozy seems determined to pursue an increasingly authoritarian line on Internet regulation. The President now presiding over the G8 group of the world’s most powerful economies, has scheduled a special sideshow, the ‘G8 du Web’ to be held in Deauville on May 26-27 to deal with the [...]
Hadopi Navy Goes to War on “Pirates”
On the high seas of the Internet piracy is rife but France has launched the Hadopi navy to seek redress and, its admirals claim, 100,000 e-mail warheads, sorry warnings, have crossed the bows of swashbuckling pirate offenders since October 2010. In an article in Le Monde on December 18, Eric Walter, general – secretary of [...]
Writing on the (Facebook) Wall? Don’t
A French Employment Tribunal has just ruled that an engineering firm’s dismissal of three employees for badmouthing managers and the HR department on the social networking site Facebook, was “justified”. The Employment Tribunal had been asked to rule that the dismissal by the Paris firm Alten based at Boulogne-Billancourt (Hauts-de-Seine) was illegal because the Facebook [...]
