Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
read more
David Heath
Sunday, 08 November 2009 07:25
Now, you've probably never heard of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) and it would seem the organisers would have preferred it that way; however a draft document has leaked and the proposals it contained are very chilling.
It would appear that this draft is closely modelled upon chapter 18 of the recent US – South Korea Free Trade Agreement. This is an agreement that is responsible for some very unexpected outcomes – for instance, Google's local blogging platform Textcube has banned the uploading of songs by subscribers, blaming the anti-file sharing provisions of the legislation accompanying the Free Trade Agreement. The Korea Times article goes on to paraphrase a Google Korea official "Google Korea officials claim that the changes were inevitable, as the company has yet to develop a tool to differentiate between legal and illegal content."
Further, it seems that Google has blocked Korean users from posting both videos and comments to kr.youtube.com in order to avoid regulations mandating that uploaders provide verifiable real-name registrations (in Korea's case, this would require "resident registration codes – the local equivalent of America's Social Security Number). The problem being that, according to the Korea Times, "Complying with the real-name rules would have been an enormous risk for Google, as the government could later demand user information from the company, not a precedent it wants to show to other countries.
"However, this clearly miffed government officials, with the Korea Communications Commission (KCC), the country's broadcasting and telecommunications regulator, threatening to look for legal grounds to 'sanction' Google."
So, how does the US see all this?
 |
Microsoft Office 365Try an easy-to-use set of web-enabled tools for business-class productivity services. Office 365 provides anywhere-access to email, important documents, contacts, and calendars on almost any device.  |
