I opened up the news today and I was shocked
Meretz, the so called liberal party, submitted a proposal for new copyright law that will outlaw uploading and download copyrighted material from the net. Halamo has this piece.
For those who can’t read hebrew I’ll try to give a short summary:
- Outlawing uploading and downloading of copyrighted material
- Outlawing the development of drm passing programs without license (yes you won’t be able to play DVD on linux anymore
- Service providers which can must monitor their service to check for illegal activity and regularly clean their caches
- Service provider must remove offending material within 12 hours of being told (that gives so much time to the client to explain and protect itself).
- The law applies also to non Israeli service provider as long as the service was provided in Israel. So they can actually sue companies from all over the world in Israel, I wonder what international trade agreements say about that.
- And last but not least according to ynet, this law will also outlaw file sharing programs! even for legitimate use!
This law will serve a real blow to fair use rights and to opensource in Israel in general. I wondered how long before a DMCA like law is passed in Israel.
Next will be ofcourse software patents…
Meretz if you ever had a chance to get my vote in election you just lost it completly forever.
