YouTube: New EU Copyright Law Could “Drastically Change the Internet”
For the past few years, the music industry has complained about the so-called “Value Gap” caused by sites like YouTube. The major labels claim that since unlicensed content is readily available for free on user-uploaded content sites, these platforms are able to pay less to the labels in licensing fees while hiding behind so-called ‘safe harbor’ laws. In an attempt to solve this business model riddle, the...
Canadian ISPs Want Ban on Piracy Settlement Notices
Following a long series of debates, Canada modernized its Copyright Act several years ago. This included a new “notice-and-notice” scheme, which went into effect early 2015. As a result, Internet providers were required to forward all copyright notices they receive from rightsholders to their customers. Providers that fail to comply, face damages up to $10,000. This notice-and-notice scheme created a safe harbor for...
UK Govt. Mulls Easy Pirate Site Blocking & Streaming Crackdown
Around Europe, many governments have expressed a desire to crack down on intellectual property infringement of all kinds. In the UK, efforts are particularly advanced. Over the past couple of years, the Intellectual Property Office (IPO) has produced studies detailing various piracy threats, with the illicit streaming phenomenon taking pole position. Last November and in the wake of a landmark EU ruling, it published advice to...
Getting started with functional programming in Python using the toolz library
In the second of a two-part series, we continue to explore how we can import ideas from functional programming methodology into Python to have the best of both worlds. In the previous post, we covered immutable data structures. Those allow us to write “pure” functions, or functions that have no side effects, merely accepting some arguments and returning a result while maintaining decent performance. read...
Living on the command line: Why mistakes are a good thing
Failure = Freedom. Is that really true? For many organizations, it is. These groups of developers… or marketers or educators… are applying the belief that “failing faster” is how we get better. That digging into disasters is how things get better. This is all a subculture of the agile way of working, by the way. So, how can you do this too? read...
