The BBC report that the Pirate Bay trial verdict is in and the Bay has lost. 1 year jail time and 30m Kroner (£2.4m) in damages.

The appeal should be interesting

(Tip o’the hat to Simon Grigg)

You may remember I mentioned the Copyright thread on Public Address System (PAS to its habitués). It got to 37 pages which we thought was quite a lot. There’s another one, starting from a review of Lawrence Lessig’s lecture in Auckland last year by Matthew Poole, which is now at 81 pages and 1600+ postings, and it’s gone into the issues for the music industry at some length (warning: abandon hope all ye who enter here, as much of it goes round in circles – just pick through and find the nuggets)

Yesterday, Rob Stowell posted a link to a series of posts on Hypebot about free music, from inside the industry. I recommend reading them for some insight and to form your own opinion before reading on, because I’m about to dissect them.

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BREAKING NEWS: Michael has reported a new Wikileaks document which purports to be an ACTA draft. It’s a 5.2MB download and appears to be photographs of a document dated 7 July 2008.

It’s highly resistant to OCR but Wikileaks is hosting a page where transcriptions are being lodged

I think it’s awfully interesting to note that all requests for information around the world have been met with “There isn’t a draft text yet, so we can’t release anything. As soon as we have something, we’ll show you.”

Yeah, right

Someone emailed me and asked why I haven’t blogged anything about the ACTA “release of documents” last week. Basically, because it held no revelation, was not a release of information other than the spin agreed by the countries involved and because I’m currently working on something a lot closer to home, which I’ll post about later in the week.

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Michael Geist, Canadian law professor and copyright activist, has published an ACTA timeline from a Canadian perspective. He kindly notes my post with regard to the pre-negotiation history, and goes into a fair bit of detail from October 2007 onward, and finishing with “To be continued…”. Michael organised the Facebook protest against C-61 – the Canadian DMCA last year, so his government knows he’s not to be ignored.

His column is published in the Toronto Star and the Ottowa Citizen, but that seems to be as close as the MSM is getting to ACTA. With the Russia Today video I wrote about the other day, even knee-jerk Rethuglicans are asking “Why isn’t the Mainstream Media all over this?”

It’s a really fair question, and one I’ve referred to before, but I’ve yet to see a coherent answer.

So I thought I’d ask:

letters@dompost.co.nz

Dear sir

The Government is negotiating an important intellectual property treaty, the Anti Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, and has been for 12 months, as reported on the Ministry of Economic Development’s page at http://www.med.govt.nz/templates/ContentTopicSummary____34357.aspx. Yet I see no reporting of this in your newspaper, or any of the NZ Fairfax stable. Newspapers in Australia and Canada have been reporting on this but our media have been silent.

May one ask why?

Regards

Mark Harris
Waikanae

I hold no huge hope of useful response, but you have to ask.

UPDATE: my name was included in the “points notes” sidebar.