Deeplinks Blog posts about Content Blocking
The Prevention of Electronic Crimes Bill (PECB) has received harsh criticism inside and outside of Pakistan since its radical re-drafting in April of this year. A coalition of Pakistan’s leading online rights groups and businesses warned the current version, written with no input from legal experts or technologists, would “adversely impact the IT industry…. and [the] constitutional rights and safeguards guaranteed to citizens”. Human Rights Watch went further, saying it constitutes “clear and present danger to human rights”. But it took one of Pakistan’s leading legal experts on computer crime jurisprudence, Zahid Jamil, to call the bill “by far the worst piece of cybercrime legislation in the world.”
Today, in a strong opinion from the Federal Circuit, an attempt for rightsholders to use an obscure trade court to block the “importation” of digital data was rejected. The Federal Circuit held that a court that has the ability to block “articles that infringe” does not have the ability to block digital data.
Today, the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit heard arguments in ClearCorrect v. ITC, a case that threatens to give private companies, via agency power, broad ability to censor and regulate the Internet. But this isn’t a case about net neutrality. Instead, it’s a patent case where the patent owner is asking the Federal Circuit to uphold an agency order banning certain data from entering the United States via the Internet. EFF, along with Public Knowledge, filed an amicus brief in the case arguing that there is no authority allowing this; at least, not the way the patent owner is arguing.
In a dangerous ruling yesterday, a Canadian appeals court upheld an order requiring Google to edit the Internet and effectively “disappear” websites selling a product that allegedly infringed trade secret rights. Google had challenged the order as an improper overreach: a Canadian court shouldn't be using its authority to make rules about what users in other countries can and cannot access. EFF filed a supporting brief, explaining that the order would have likely violated the U.S. Constitution—one of many reasons a foreign court shouldn’t presume to issue orders that will affect citizens far beyond its jurisdiction.
For many years, major U.S. entertainment companies have been trying to gain the power to make websites disappear from the Internet at their say-so. The Internet blacklist bills SOPA and PIPA were part of that strategy, along with the Department of Homeland Security’s project of seizing websites that someone accused of copyright infringement. Hollywood’s quest for more censorship power was on display again today at a House of Representatives committee hearing that was supposed to be discussing reforms at ICANN, the nonprofit organization that oversees the Internet’s domain name system.
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