Today marks a crucial point in the crusade against freedom on the internet in Malaysia. We’ve had SOPA in the US, ACTA in Europe and the TPP has brought the fight closer to our borders. Today in a brilliant tactical move by the enemy of Freedom,  Malaysians will be subjected to an amended evidence act that would shift the burden of proof from the accuser to the accused. It is a black day indeed, and the words John Fogerty ring in my ears–I see a bad moon rising.

Would you get freaked out if I told that from just 1 hour of internet browsing, your information could be shared with nearly 70 organizations, including advertisers who use it to target ads to you. Would you be angered if this information were sold to other 3rd parties including insurance providers and even governments to build profiles of you on their systems. Would you be annoyed that the internet which promised to be a bastion of democracy and anonymity, isn’t all it was cracked up to be? Well read on…

Recently I posted something about how Advertisers track your data via the pages you visited, and how the advertisers successfully build profiles of you based on information readily available online in addition to your browsing habits. What they then have is a treasure trove of information many of us consider private, these include your birthdate (and by extension your age)   your preferences, your affliations (both religious and professional) your likes and dislikes, your family members…etc etc. If you’re a person who likes privacy, you might want to unplug your laptop–right now!

Remember the story of the supermarket who knew a teenage girl was pregnant before her dad did, that’s nothing compared to the amount of data these networks have on your own children. If your children go online regularly, somebody has a pretty good profile on them. And if you would get freaked out if somebody followed your child everyday with a camera and notebook , you should worry about the amount of personal (and very private) information some companies are keeping on you – and your loved ones.

You may remember a previous post about the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) Agreement that the Malaysian Government (our Government) is looking to sign under the pretense of protecting intellectual property to  “encourage investments, innovation, research and development.” Read up this article from the star to learn more.

Like any other law regarding copyright, this one is complicated and hard to understand (at least for me). However, Techdirt recently had two brilliant articles regarding the TPP with regards to Chile. The first article outlines the fact that Chile (another tentative partner in the agreement) was questioning the benefits of joining the TPP, citing the high cost of complying to Intellectual Property obligations:

In my previous post, I wrote about how I bought and Amazon Kindle, and how I can use gift cards to purchase ebooks from the Kindle store. So far the Kindle has been an amazing experience and I personally recommend you get yourself one. However, there is a downside, since there is ’technically’ no legal way to obtain ebooks for your Kindle device.

Today I hope to explore the legality of downloading ebooks from Amazon, and how stupid copyright laws, badly behaving book publishers and a Malaysian Sales Tax  all contribute to making it impossible for you to purchase ebooks for your Kindle while still complying with any and all laws pertaining to them.

*Update: Malaysiakini have confirmed the update on their facebook page, looks like you need to look for other sources of Bersih 3.0  news, this could take a while. It’s also note-worthy that 10 people ’like’ this on facebook, obviously over-looking the fact that nobody should ’like’ this.

With barely 12 hours to go before Bersih 3.0 starts to swing into action, Malaysiakini servers appear to be down. I was trying to logon online to check the news only to notice that I couldn’t access the site, PINGs to the site seem to time out as well. Could this be a repeat of when Malaysiakini went offline in the run up to the Sarawak elections? Plus, I know this doesn’t affect me, because as a Google Chrome user I know when other users are also experiencing problems accessing a site.

Bernama reported today that The Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission  (MCMC or the SKMM) together The Malaysian Islamic Development Department (Jakim) would begin “collaborating to monitor lesbian, gay, bisexual and transsexual (LGBT) activities in the country, particularly on the websites.”

Apart from the usual gung-ho activity of from Jakim, its Director General  Othman Mustapha said “If we find that there are things that are unsuitable on the websites, information would be channeled to the committee for action to be taken,”

Now some of you may know that I contacted the Multimedia Commission some time ago about my Unifi Downtime and to investigate what compensation I could get from a 9 day down time above and beyond the pro-rated cost. In a nutshell their reply was “sorry can’t help you”. It’s quite apparent why they couldn’t help me, they’re busy looking for Gays online.

Did you know Malaysia has a Multimedia and Communication Commission that oversees the quality of service for telecommunications companies including the broadband services they provide. I also understand that they are the enforcers of the Communications and Multimedia Act 1998, with a determination on the mandatory standards for the Quality of Service (Broadband Access Service) .

In not so many words, there are actually laws in place to ensure that your broadband provider meets a minimum standard in terms of uptime and service availability.

However, after reading the a short snippet of the Act from the SKMM website here, I was surprised to find that while it did have a specific outline for the quality of service, it did not have an outline for the penalty imposed if the quality of service was not met.

A couple of days back, I wrote about how copyright law was preventing a lot of us from listening the entire Martin Luther King “I have a dream” speech because it was protected by copyright, and in order to listen to it you had to pay Martin Luther Kings family royalty. Today I did some searching on pinterest, and found some rather remarkable works of art around Martin Luther King that were pinned in pinterest, these works of art would not be possible if the family had further copyrighted other aspects of MLKs life, and with newer stricter copyright laws that could very well be the case.

Remember for a pinterest invite, just leave a comment on the post and I’ll send one to you as soon as I have the time. For now, enjoy!

From pinterest User Effeluna 

Now for an artist to copyright a song or a piece of work, for that artist to then legally make a living of is fine.

It’s not fine if you need to pay royalties to use Martin Luther King Jr’s “I have a dream speech”, because his family own the copyright to a speech that is a part of US history. They later sold those rights to EMI, and now a recording company owns the rights to the speech that encapsulates the civil rights movement, and that same recording company is patrolling the online alleys to catch the copyright infringers.

A recent article from the Star noted that Malaysia was about to sign a new Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement that would make subject local copyright laws to those imposed by the US. Now according to the article from the star the purpose of us looking into a stricter Intellectual property law was to “encourage investments, innovation, research and development”. That is a false premise.

The laws by themselves are useless if enforcement isn’t there, and if you can’t even enforce the current IP law, then why bother changing the laws if there is no plan to up the enforcement? Also this premise that we will encourage research and development with a strict law is both flawed and without basis. There is no empirical evidence to suggest that innovation thrives when Intellectual property is strictly enforced, in fact innovation is effectively crippled when you’re afraid that anything you produce might infringe on someone else’s copyright. It would lead to a point where corporations would spend more checking on copyright infringement then they would actually innovating and producing.