#I saw some posts about abolishing ip

[my-life-is-pain]

I’m sorry but I don’t think copyright as a concept should be completely gotten rid of. Other forms of Ip maybe, but not copyright.

In my mind the issue with copyright law as it stands is that it’s been corrupted over decades from a way of protecting the artist to locking down franchises and media so that know one else can build on it expect the company that owns the copyright

The cause for this is that copyright duration is ridiculously long. If I remember correctly it’s the life of the author + way too much time added on to it.

All of the grey stuff and fair use shit happens because copyright lasts longer than it needs to and so we have go around it.

If copyright was reduced to like 2-5 years or something this becomes far less of a problem because we won’t need to go around copyright if it ends within a short period of time.

This is why I think patents are fine in my mind too, patents can expire. They expire for the same reason copyright is supposed to expire, so someone can’t just lock down the rights for essentially forever. Patents can be abused but imagine how much worse it could be if those patents basically didn’t expire.

Ultimately that’s my gripe with most forms of IP. That being that they functionally last forever. So instead of protecting creators, it’s just used as a way to lock down ideas. If they didn’t last essentially forever, this wouldn’t happen.

[expatimes]

Kuwait’s #MeToo moment: Women denounce harassment and violence

Women challenging deeply patriarchal society

DUBAI, March 13, (AP): Abrar Zenkawi was cruising toward the beach in Kuwait City when she saw a man waving and smiling in her rearview mirror. Elsewhere, this may have been a benign highway fl irtation. But in Kuwait, it’s a haunting routine that often turns dangerous. The man pulled up beside her, inched closer and finally drove into her. Zenkawi’s car, carrying her toddler nieces, sister and friend, fl ipped six times. “It’s considered normal here. Men always drive way too close to scare girls, chase them to their homes, follow them to work, just for fun,” said Zenkawi, 34, who spent months in the hospital with a shattered spine.

“They don’t think about the consequences.” But that may be changing as women are increasingly challenging Kuwait’s deeply patriarchal society. In recent weeks, a growing number of women have broken taboos to speak out about the scourge of harassment and violence that plagues the Gulf nation’s streets, highways and malls, in an echo of the global #MeToo movement. An Instagram page has led to an outpouring of testimony from women fed up with being intimidated or attacked in a country where the criminal code doesn’t define sexual harassment and lays out few repercussions for men who kill female relatives for actions they consider immoral.

A wide variety of news and talk shows have taken up the subject of harassment for the first time. And one journalist used a hidden camera to document how women are treated in the streets. The spark may have come from fashion blogger Ascia al-Faraj, who vented in January on Snapchat to her millions of followers after being hounded by a man in a speeding car. In such episodes, men often try to “bump” a woman’s car, but many serious accidents result, as in Zenkawi’s case. “It’s terrifying, all the time you’re feeling so unsafe in your own skin,” al- Faraj told The Associated Press. “The responsibility is always on us. … We must have had our music too loud or our windows down.”

Shayma Shamo, a 27-year-old doctor, sought to seize the momentum of al-Faraj’s viral video, creating an Instagram page called “Lan Asket,” Arabic for “I will not be silent.” Shamo’s rage had been building for weeks. In December, a female employee of Kuwait’s Parliament was stabbed to death by her 17-year-old brother, reportedly because he didn’t want her working as a security guard. It was the third such case – described as “honor killings” – to make headlines in as many months. The National Assembly, all-male despite a record number of female candidates in the recent election, offered none of the customary condolences.

Silence “The silence was deafening,” Shamo said. “I thought, OK, that could happen to me, and anyone could get away with it.” Kuwait, unlike other oil-rich Arab Gulf sheikhdoms, has a legislature with genuine power and some tolerance for political dissent. But restrictions to slow the the spread of the coronavirus prevented Shamo from staging a protest and forced her to take her grievances online, as women in the region’s more repressive countries have done recently.

The Lan Asket account thrust sexual harassment, long shrouded in shame, into the limelight. From there, the conversation moved to traditional media. A well-known female journalist at state-linked al-Qabas newspaper went out at night with a hidden camera and captured motorbike riders recklessly trying to catch her attention, men yelling sexual slurs on the street and strangers pulling the hair of female passersby – offering proof to millions in Kuwait of the harassment women were describing.

Discussions “It seems rudimentary, but we’ve never had these discussions before,” said Najeeba Hayat, who helped organize the Lan Asket campaign, which is also training bus drivers to report harassment, organizing an ad campaign to raise awareness and creating an app that allows women to anonymously report abuse to police. “Every single girl has kept this in her chest for so long.” As the movement gained steam, lawmakers scrambled to respond. Seven politicians, from conservative Islamists to stalwart liberals, submitted amendments to the penal code last month that would define and punish sexual harassment, including one that called for a $10,000 fine and one-year prison sentence. “The Kuwaiti penal code doesn’t cover harassment, there are just some laws that cover immorality that are so vague that women can’t go and report to the local police,” said Abdulaziz al-Saqabi, a conservative who was among those who drafted amendments. But women’s rights activists, whose input the lawmakers did not solicit, are skeptical that the proposals will result in significant change, especially with the nation in the midst of a financial crisis and with Parliament now suspended because of a political standoff.

The frustration is familiar for activist Nour al-Mukhled. For years, she and other women have struggled to abolish a law that classifies the killing of adulterous women by their fathers, brothers or husbands as a misdemeanor and sets the maximum penalty at three years in prison. Such leniency remains common across the Gulf, although the United Arab Emirates criminalized “honor killings” last fall. Kuwait also has statues that let kidnappers evade punishment by marrying their victims and empower men to “discipline” their female relatives with assault.

“In Kuwait, there can be no legal change without cultural change, and this is still culturally acceptable,” al- Mukhled said. Only in August did Parliament pass a law that opened shelters for victims of domestic abuse. But progress is happening outside of official circles, activists say. In recent weeks, a growing number of female collectives have sprung up, in homes and on Zoom – a mirror to the custom of the “diwanyia,” gentlemen’s clubs that often vault men to top jobs. Women also have turned to Clubhouse, the buzzy app that lets people gather in audio chat rooms, to hold discussions of sexual assault and harassment. The horizon for equality may be far off, but campaigners say their ambitions are modest in the short term. “Right now, attempted murder is considered ‘fl irting,’” said Hayat, one of the organizers of the Lan Asket campaign. “We just want to be treated like human beings, not as aliens and not as prey.”

By Isabel Debre

The post Kuwait’s #MeToo moment: Women denounce harassment and violence appeared first on ARAB TIMES - KUWAIT NEWS.

Read full article: https://expatimes.com/?p=19057&feed_id=37711

[thisdaynews]

Facebook uncovers suspected Russian interference in midterms

New Post has been published on https://www.thisdaynews.net/2018/08/01/facebook-uncovers-suspected-russian-interference-in-midterms/

Facebook uncovers suspected Russian interference in midterms

Facebook takes down suspected Russian network of pages-

Facebook has removed a network of suspected Russian-linked accounts and pages involved in organizing political events in the United States. The network is the most extensive effort to interfere in American politics that Facebook has found and made public ahead of November’s midterm elections.

The move comes as part of Facebook’s efforts to prevent a repeat of 2016, when accounts connected to a Kremlin-linked troll group posing as Americans ran rampant on its platform.

In briefings on Capitol Hill, Facebook has told lawmakers that it suspects a Russian group is behind more than 30 pages advocating US political stances, according to a congressional source briefed on the matter. One page promoted a “No Unite the Right 2” march — a counter demonstration to a planned “Unite the Right” event to coincide with the one-year anniversary of the march in Charlottesville in which a woman was killed. There was also an effort to amplify the “Abolish ICE” message pushed by liberals, the source said.

Publicly, Facebook is saying it does not know for sure who was behind the network, but is saying it has “found evidence of some connections between these accounts” and accounts that had been run by Russian trolls in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election. The company also said it had reported the network to law enforcement and to Congress.

Asked by CNN to respond to the reports, Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova said, “I hope the materials will be officially presented to the Russian side.”

Related: Newly released Facebook ads show Russian trolls targeted Mexican-Americans after Trump election

Facebook said the “Resisters” page, which organized the “No Unite the Right 2” event, recruited real activists who “unwittingly helped build interest in” the event” and posted information about transportation, materials, and locations so people could get to the protests.”

Facebook said it has contacted the real activists.

Nathaniel Gleicher, head of cybersecurity policy at Facebook, said in a post that the company was still investigating where the pages were run from but that, “Some of the activity is consistent with what we saw from the IRA before and after the 2016 elections.” (The IRA is the Internet Research Agency, a Kremlin-linked troll group that has been indicted by Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s office on charges related to an alleged conspiracy to defraud the United States.)

He cautioned, “But there are differences, too. For example, while IP addresses are easy to spoof, the IRA accounts we disabled last year sometimes used Russian IP addresses. We haven’t seen those here.”

“It’s clear that whoever set up these accounts went to much greater lengths to obscure their true identities than the Russian-based Internet Research Agency (IRA) has in the past. We believe this could be partly due to changes we’ve made over the last year to make this kind of abuse much harder. But security is not something that’s ever done,” the company said in a statement released Tuesday afternoon,” Facebook said in a statement Tuesday.

The removed pages had more than 290,000 followers, the company said. The most followed Facebook pages were “Aztlan Warriors,” “Black Elevation,” “Mindful Being,” and “Resisters.”

Related: The biggest Black Lives Matter page on Facebook is fake

The company said the pages ran 150 ads for a total of approximately $11,000. The ads were paid for in US and Canadian dollars, the company added. In 2016, the Internet Research Agency had purchased ads targeting Americans using rubles.

Next week’s event was not the only event the pages created. The pages created about 30 events since May 2017 and “The largest had approximately 4,700 accounts interested in attending, and 1,400 users said that they would attend,” Facebook said.

Facebook has sought guidance from U.S. intelligence agencies in its attempt to prevent a repeat of 2016, when its platform was used to meddle in U.S. politics and society.

[expatimes]

Kuwait’s #MeToo moment: Women denounce harassment and violence

Women challenging deeply patriarchal society

DUBAI, March 13, (AP): Abrar Zenkawi was cruising toward the beach in Kuwait City when she saw a man waving and smiling in her rearview mirror. Elsewhere, this may have been a benign highway fl irtation. But in Kuwait, it’s a haunting routine that often turns dangerous. The man pulled up beside her, inched closer and finally drove into her. Zenkawi’s car, carrying her toddler nieces, sister and friend, fl ipped six times. “It’s considered normal here. Men always drive way too close to scare girls, chase them to their homes, follow them to work, just for fun,” said Zenkawi, 34, who spent months in the hospital with a shattered spine.

“They don’t think about the consequences.” But that may be changing as women are increasingly challenging Kuwait’s deeply patriarchal society. In recent weeks, a growing number of women have broken taboos to speak out about the scourge of harassment and violence that plagues the Gulf nation’s streets, highways and malls, in an echo of the global #MeToo movement. An Instagram page has led to an outpouring of testimony from women fed up with being intimidated or attacked in a country where the criminal code doesn’t define sexual harassment and lays out few repercussions for men who kill female relatives for actions they consider immoral.

A wide variety of news and talk shows have taken up the subject of harassment for the first time. And one journalist used a hidden camera to document how women are treated in the streets. The spark may have come from fashion blogger Ascia al-Faraj, who vented in January on Snapchat to her millions of followers after being hounded by a man in a speeding car. In such episodes, men often try to “bump” a woman’s car, but many serious accidents result, as in Zenkawi’s case. “It’s terrifying, all the time you’re feeling so unsafe in your own skin,” al- Faraj told The Associated Press. “The responsibility is always on us. … We must have had our music too loud or our windows down.”

Shayma Shamo, a 27-year-old doctor, sought to seize the momentum of al-Faraj’s viral video, creating an Instagram page called “Lan Asket,” Arabic for “I will not be silent.” Shamo’s rage had been building for weeks. In December, a female employee of Kuwait’s Parliament was stabbed to death by her 17-year-old brother, reportedly because he didn’t want her working as a security guard. It was the third such case – described as “honor killings” – to make headlines in as many months. The National Assembly, all-male despite a record number of female candidates in the recent election, offered none of the customary condolences.

Silence “The silence was deafening,” Shamo said. “I thought, OK, that could happen to me, and anyone could get away with it.” Kuwait, unlike other oil-rich Arab Gulf sheikhdoms, has a legislature with genuine power and some tolerance for political dissent. But restrictions to slow the the spread of the coronavirus prevented Shamo from staging a protest and forced her to take her grievances online, as women in the region’s more repressive countries have done recently.

The Lan Asket account thrust sexual harassment, long shrouded in shame, into the limelight. From there, the conversation moved to traditional media. A well-known female journalist at state-linked al-Qabas newspaper went out at night with a hidden camera and captured motorbike riders recklessly trying to catch her attention, men yelling sexual slurs on the street and strangers pulling the hair of female passersby – offering proof to millions in Kuwait of the harassment women were describing.

Discussions “It seems rudimentary, but we’ve never had these discussions before,” said Najeeba Hayat, who helped organize the Lan Asket campaign, which is also training bus drivers to report harassment, organizing an ad campaign to raise awareness and creating an app that allows women to anonymously report abuse to police. “Every single girl has kept this in her chest for so long.” As the movement gained steam, lawmakers scrambled to respond. Seven politicians, from conservative Islamists to stalwart liberals, submitted amendments to the penal code last month that would define and punish sexual harassment, including one that called for a $10,000 fine and one-year prison sentence. “The Kuwaiti penal code doesn’t cover harassment, there are just some laws that cover immorality that are so vague that women can’t go and report to the local police,” said Abdulaziz al-Saqabi, a conservative who was among those who drafted amendments. But women’s rights activists, whose input the lawmakers did not solicit, are skeptical that the proposals will result in significant change, especially with the nation in the midst of a financial crisis and with Parliament now suspended because of a political standoff.

The frustration is familiar for activist Nour al-Mukhled. For years, she and other women have struggled to abolish a law that classifies the killing of adulterous women by their fathers, brothers or husbands as a misdemeanor and sets the maximum penalty at three years in prison. Such leniency remains common across the Gulf, although the United Arab Emirates criminalized “honor killings” last fall. Kuwait also has statues that let kidnappers evade punishment by marrying their victims and empower men to “discipline” their female relatives with assault.

“In Kuwait, there can be no legal change without cultural change, and this is still culturally acceptable,” al- Mukhled said. Only in August did Parliament pass a law that opened shelters for victims of domestic abuse. But progress is happening outside of official circles, activists say. In recent weeks, a growing number of female collectives have sprung up, in homes and on Zoom – a mirror to the custom of the “diwanyia,” gentlemen’s clubs that often vault men to top jobs. Women also have turned to Clubhouse, the buzzy app that lets people gather in audio chat rooms, to hold discussions of sexual assault and harassment. The horizon for equality may be far off, but campaigners say their ambitions are modest in the short term. “Right now, attempted murder is considered ‘fl irting,’” said Hayat, one of the organizers of the Lan Asket campaign. “We just want to be treated like human beings, not as aliens and not as prey.”

By Isabel Debre

The post Kuwait’s #MeToo moment: Women denounce harassment and violence appeared first on ARAB TIMES - KUWAIT NEWS.

Read full article: https://expatimes.com/?p=19057&feed_id=37699