Pakistan has unblocked popular social networking site Facebook today, after two weeks of banning access.
The country will continue to block any individual pages that contain “blasphemous” content, however, which mostly means any page that has an image of the Islamic prophet Muhammad.
The ban went into effect earlier in the month when an online competition started that invited Facebook users to submit drawings of Muhammad. Any image, satirical or not, is considered blasphemous.
Pakistan also censored YouTube and Wikipedia along with over 50 other sites, but most have been unblocked in the past week.
Knowledgeable users worked around the bans at first by using proxy sites with foreign proxies, but officials then blocked all proxy sites as well.
This weekend, Bangladesh also banned Facebook, but said it would only lift the block when all offending material was taken down.
Result for: drawings
Christopher Paul Gilham, the UK man convicted in 2008 of installing and selling modified Xbox, PS1, PS2 and GameCube consoles has had his appeal thrown out of court this week.
Gilham sold the modded consoles, which allow users to play back pirated games, from 2003 until 2006. His appeal was based on the issue of “whether the playing of a counterfeit DVD involves substantial copying of a copyright work.”
The court ruled against him: “The various drawings that result in the images shown on the television screen or monitor are themselves artistic works protected by copyright. The images shown on the screen are copies, and substantial copies, of those works. If the game is the well-known Tomb Raider, for example, the screen displays Lara Croft, a recognizable character who has been created by the labor and skill of the original artist.”
In conclusion, the Court ruling added (via GamePolitics): “It is not necessary in future to show that a substantial copy of the game is made in Random Access Memory (RAM), all that needs to be shown is that some copyright work contained within the videogame is substantially copied e.g. the image of a game character.”
Result for: drawings
If you’re a well known artist today it’s almost a certainty that any new album you record will be available on the internet before it goes on sale. Rather than complaining about the ineveitable, alternative members of Wilco have decided to stream their upcoming album themselves.
The obvious benefit from letting visitors stream Wilco (the album) from their website is a chance to sell them pre-orders for the album. Pre-orders will begin shipping on June 25.
They are also providing some incentive for fans to buy it instead of downloading from P2P. People who order from their website get the option to buy an exclusive t-shirt which won’t be available after June 29.
There is also a tote bag offered and every pre-order includes a download of the new song ‘You Never Know’ and entry into a series of drawings to take place between now and June 29.
Prizes will include 4 tickets to any (non-festival) 2009 wilco show and an iPod nano with the new album already loaded.
