August 12, 2008

The Law on Internet, geek lawyer’s book ready for pre-order

Filed under: Online by Branko Collin @ 8:36 pm

Arnoud Engelfriet is a geek turning lawyer, and a prolific blogger. That puts him a couple of notches ahead of other technology-oriented legal professionals in that he knows what he is talking about when discussing the meeting of law and technology. In September he will discuss this meeting a lot when he publishes his first book, De wet op internet (“The Law on Internet”—the Dutch title unfortunately lacks the second ambiguity).

If you want to know what pitfalls bloggers encounter, when hyperlinks are illegal, or what trademarks have to do with domain names, this book could be what you need. A 5 euro discount awaits those who promise before September 1 to purchase De wet op internet.

Disclaimer: the past few weeks I have been guest-posting at Arnoud’s Iusmentis-blog. Cover design by Jolie Martin-Van der Klis.

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December 8, 2007

Social advertising blog Houtlust becomes Osocio

Filed under: General by Branko Collin @ 2:25 pm

Illustration: A still from a Flash-based SOS Mata Atlântica campaign highlighted at Osocio.

The English language social advertising blog Houtlust is back from hiatus. After a re-branding it has shed its unpronounceable name Houtlust and traded it for Osocio. The concept is still the same: short, mostly graphical reviews of startling social advertising campaigns (see the example we wrote about earlier). Dutch founder Marc van Gurp has been joined by bloggers from over the world. (“Houtlust”, by the way, is a name meant to evoke the image of a pleasant wooded area, and is therefore etymologically related to the more neutral “Holland”, wooded land. In some Dutch areas, and indeed in Germany, the l in “holt” is still pronounced.)

Via Sargasso.

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November 14, 2007

Copyright “trolls” Cozzmoss catch two infringers

Filed under: General by Branko Collin @ 2:07 am

Copyright trolls are the copyright equivalent of patent trolls, but not as common. However, they operate on the same principal: they buy “intellectual property” and use it to legally extort money from the naïve. The Verbal Jam blog reports (Dutch) about a Dutch company called Cozzmoss that has recently managed to extract hundreds of euros from non-commercial bloggers. Their website (Dutch) might look clunky, but their approach is anything but. First, they let authors sign over their copyrights to them, which makes legal action that much easier (no squabbling over who you represent). Then, they only appear to attack people with limited knowledge of the law, and third, they seem to limit their claims for damages to relatively small amounts, amounts that do not exceed the money you would lose if you would let it come to a lawsuit.

Dutch copyright law does not allow the infringed upon party to recoup insanely high statutory damages, but the cost of going to court is still substantial, whether you win or lose, which is why parties usually settle out of court, and this is the sort of reaction that Cozzmoss seems to hope for. People with shallow pockets who won’t contest your claims will settle relatively meekly.

Except of course that bloggers blog: Jolie.nl has a long list of bloggers that have written about Cozzmoss during the past fortnight, and only few of them show any understanding for what the others call “vultures” and “bounty hunters,” both perfect analogies if you ask me.

One of the bloggers that got caught in the trap is Cinner (nomen est omen?), who republished an interview with professor Bram Buunk on her website. In the interview, the social-psychology professor belittles people like her who have chronic fatigue syndrome as not really being ill. Another blog called Ango copies newspaper articles with permission from the local paper, but they found out the hard way that the paper doesn’t own all the articles it publishes. Strictly speaking, Ango is in the clear because it was acting in good faith – they too chose to take the 500 euro hit from Cozzmoss instead of risking a court case that might have cost thousands.

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March 29, 2007

Deep linking to parliamentary documents

Filed under: General by Branko Collin @ 9:00 am

binnenhof.jpgThe Geen Commentaar blog has built a front-end to Parlando, the government website that publishes the minutes of Dutch parliamentary sessions, including the texts of laws that are not yet in effect. The official Parlando service had several usability problems, including that it wasn’t possible to link to parliamentary documents directly, making hyperlinking far less effective, and making government far less transparent. The Dutch government has been aware of these problems since at least the end of 2005 and promised at the time to do something to improve the service, but had not even decided on a deadline by the start of this year.

Rumours have it (Dutch) that this slow progress is because the state has friends that it wants to share its big pie of work with, even at the cost of transparent government. I blogged about one of these friends before.

The new front-end can be found at www.geencommentaar.nl/parlando/.

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