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An increasingly problematic aspect of free trade agreements (FTAs) is
the inclusion of investor-state provisions that essentially allow
companies -- typically huge multinationals -- to challenge
the policies of signatory governments directly. The initial impulse
behind these was to offer some protection against the arbitrary
expropriation of foreign investments by less-than-democratic
governments. But now corporations have realised that they can use the
investor-state dispute mechanism to challenge all kinds of legitimate
but inconvenient decisions in any signatory nation. Here's a good
example of how this provision is being invoked to contest a refusal by Canadian courts to grant a patent on a drug, as explained on the Public Citizen site:
On
Techdirt.
Just over a year ago, I reported on a remarkable speech by the UK Education Secretary Michael Gove that contained the following words:
On
Open Enterprise blog.
As Techdirt reported a few months back, the Supreme Court Justices seem rightly concerned about the "parade of horribles"
-- things that would happen if the decision in the Wiley v. Kirtsaeng
copyright case over whether or not you have the right to resell a
foreign-made product you bought were applied generally. In the oral
arguments, the line of Wiley's lawyer was essentially: nothing bad will
happen, because copyright holders would never dream of using the
decision to make outrageous demands.
On
Techdirt.
As many know, copyright had its origins in censorship and control.
But over the last few hundred years, that fact has been obscured by
the rise of the powerful publishing industry and the great works it has
helped bring to the public. More recently, though, laws and treaties
like SOPA and ACTA have represented a return to the roots of copyright,
posing very real threats to what can be said online. That's not because
their intent was necessarily to crimp freedom of expression, but as a
knock-on effect of turning risk-averse ISPs into the copyright
industry's private police force.
On
Techdirt.
Back in 2011, I noted
that one of the most significant achievements of the Hargreaves report
was its shockingly revolutionary suggestion that copyright policy
should be based on the available evidence, not "lobbynomics". The fact
that this even had to be said shows to what depths policy-making had
sunk - something clearly demonstrated by the disgraceful Digital Economy
Act, or the extension of copyright term for musical performances, both of which were passed despite the evidence, rather than because of it.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
Linux has a problem: it's running out of platforms to conquer. It's already the top operating system for smartphones and supercomputers,
and is widely used in embedded and industrial systems. It's true the
Year of the GNU/Linux desktop continues to be five years in the future,
but the rise of tablets makes up for that in part.
On
The H Open.
It would be something of understatement to say that the spiralling
cost of healthcare has become a highly-charged political issue in the US
(and elsewhere). But wherever people stand on the funding of medicine,
there is an implicit assumption that it works, and is worth even the
exorbitant prices that pharmaceutical companies may charge. Sadly,
that's often not true.
On
Techdirt.
As Techdirt reported last year, some copyright maximalists in the UK seem to be against the whole idea of basing policy on evidence. Last week saw the launch of CREATe: Creativity, Regulation, Enterprise and Technology,
a new UK "research centre for copyright and new business models in the
creative economy." One of the things it hopes to do is to bring some
objectivity to the notoriously contentious field of copyright studies by
looking at what the evidence really says; so it was perhaps inevitable
that it too would meet some resistance from the extremist wing of the
copyright world. What's surprising is that it seems to have happened during the launch itself, as Paul Bernal, an academic who was there, reports:
On
Techdirt.
Back in March last year, the Indian government announced that it was granting its first compulsory license,
for the anti-cancer drug marketed as Nexavar, whose $70,000 per year
price-tag put it out of reach of practically everyone in India.
Nexavar's manufacturer, the German pharmaceutical giant Bayer, naturally
appealed against that decision, and the hearing before the India
Intellectual Property Appeals Board (IPAB) has now begun. Jamie Love has provided a useful report on the proceedings; here's his summary of what's at stake:
On
Techdirt.
As regular readers of Computerworld UK know, the UK government has
repeatedly said that it wishes to move on from the past patterns of
procurement that have seen the UK spending far more on IT than
comparable governments elsewhere. For years the UK has been the IT
industry's dream: a rich but gormless customer that believes everything
it is told by suppliers, and happy to pay through the nose for projects
that consistently fail to deliver, assuming they are even completed.
Indeed, the UK government has become proverbial in the IT world for its
inefficiency and incompetence in this area.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
Five years ago, I wrote
an article about the relatively new class of netbook computers. I
suggested the ultra-low price machines running GNU/Linux posed a problem
for Microsoft. That's because it needed to charge something for
Windows, pushing the price of Windows-based netbooks above similar
systems running free software. As I wrote:
On
The H Open.
Copyright is sometimes described as a bargain between two parties:
creators and their public. In return for receiving a government-backed
monopoly on making copies, creators promise to place their works in the
public domain at the end of the copyright term. The problem with that
narrative is that time and again, the public is cheated out of what it
is due.
On
Techdirt.
Licenses lie at the heart of open source -- and many other kinds of
"open" too. That's because they are used to define the rights of users,
and to ensure those rights are passed on -- that the intellectual
commons is not enclosed. Their central importance explains in part the
flamewars that erupt periodically over which license is "best" -- many
people have very strong feelings on the subject.
On
Techdirt.
As a recent post noted, net neutrality
is under threat in France, with ISPs like Free asking Google to pay
extra for delivery of its traffic. According to this post on the Forbes
Web site, Google has already agreed to pay the French telecoms company Orange in precisely this way. As well as damaging the whole principle of net neutrality, something that Google has been championing for many years,
this would seem to be a pretty bad business decision. After all, if
Orange is now getting paid to carry Google's traffic, why shouldn't
every other telecom company out there also receive money for delivering
Google's services?
On
Techdirt.
Krita
is a fine sketching and painting program, but few would claim that it
is one of the big names in the open source world, such as Firefox or
LibreOffice. That makes the following recent announcement noteworthy:
On
The H Open.
As I mentioned
a couple of weeks ago, 2013 is already shaping up to be a year in which
data protection is a key battleground. That's been confirmed by a
flurry of stories around Data Privacy Day, which was yesterday in case you missed it.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
You would have thought by now that people would understand that DRM is not only a bad idea, but totally unnecessary: Apple dropped DRM from music downloads in 2009 and seems to be making ends meet.
Despite these obvious truths, the stupidity that is DRM continues to
spread. Here, for example, is a particularly stupid example of DRM
stupidity, as revealed by Manu Sporny:
On
Techdirt.
Back in April last year, we wrote about Colombia's own SOPA, the "Ley Lleras 2"
copyright bill (it's version 2, because an earlier attempt to pass it
failed.) This was rushed through by the Colombian government using an
emergency procedure so as to have it ready as a grovelling welcome gift
when President Obama came calling shortly afterwards.
On
Techdirt.
As Techdirt has reported over the last ten days, the death of Aaron
Swartz has provoked an outpouring of grief from friends and colleagues,
who understandably wish to express their shock and anger at what
happened. You'd expect that. What you might not expect is for a
Vice-President of the European Commission to add her voice, but that's exactly what Neelie Kroes did this week. Her post is short, and worth reading in its entirety:
On
Techdirt.
It's generally accepted that one of the reasons Barack Obama was
re-elected as US President last year was the superiority of the IT
system his campaign team used. It will come as no surprise to readers
of this blog that it was built on open source foundations, as this
fascinating article in The Verge explains:
On
Open Enterprise blog.
Abuse of the DMCA takedown process to remove material that is awkward
or embarrassing for a company is a common enough topic on Techdirt.
But here's one with a slight twist. It concerns hardware security
modules (HSMs), which manage the cryptographic keys and PINs used to
authenticate bank card transactions. These were generally regarded as
pretty secure -- until researchers started analyzing them, as Ross Anderson, head of the Security Research Laboratory at Cambridge University, explains:
On
Techdirt.
Not content with giving the world the "three strikes" approach to
copyright enforcement, France has recently shown signs of wanting to
undermine one of the Internet's foundations: net neutrality. This has
come about as a consequence of the French ISP Free's decision to block
ads on its service. As Mike noted,
this was essentially an attempt to persuade Google to pay the ISP an
extra fee to carry its traffic, even though Free's customers already do
that. That was resolved, at least for the moment, when France's Digital Economy minister Fleur Pellerin stepped in and persuaded Free to restore the ads.
On
Techdirt.
As Techdirt has been reporting, the idea of providing open access to
publicly-funded research is steadily gaining ground. One of the key
moments occurred almost exactly a year ago, when the British
mathematician Tim Gowers announced that he would no longer have anything
to do with the major academic publisher Elsevier. This then turned
into a full-scale boycott: today, over 13,000 academics have pledged not to work with the company.
On
Techdirt.
A couple of weeks ago, I pointed out
how a decision in Norway involving cash registers emphasised one of the
advantages of open source - its natural auditability. Here's another
interesting situation that points out a further reason for choosing
openness.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
One of the striking features of the drug world is how pharma
companies become noticeably more inventive immediately before their
patents are due to run out and their drugs are about to enter the public
domain. That's because they need to find a way to differentiate
themselves from the generic manufacturers that are then able to offer
the same medicines for often vastly lower prices.
On
Techdirt.
Back in February last year, Techdirt wrote about the rather pathetic attempts
of the Portuguese Society of Authors (SPA) to drum up some support
among its members for a new copyright levy on storage devices in the
face of a public outcry at the extra costs this would impose on consumer
and professional products. This was a dismal failure, and so it's
probably no surprise that the Portuguese government didn't move forward
with the original plans.
On
Techdirt.
I have a lot of time for Neelie Kroes,
Vice-President of the European Commission with responsibility for the
Digital Agenda. She's easily the most tech-savvy of the European
Commissioners - although cynics would point out that's setting a low
bar. Sometimes, she's downright radical, as in this speech about copyright, delivered back in 2011:
On
Open Enterprise blog.
There are so many parts to the institutions running the European
Union that it's easy to lose sight of them all and their varied
activities. For example, one of the lesser-known European Parliament
bodies is the Directorate-General for Internal Policies. You might
expect the studies that it commissions to be deadly dull, but some turn
out to be not just highly interesting but hugely important.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
Smartphones have some big advantages: they offer considerable
computing power in a highly-portable form, and are available at prices
that allow a broad spectrum of users to get online easily. But as we reported
last year, there's a big downside, too, one that's all-the-more
dangerous for being invisible to most people: overblocking of sites
caused by opt-out "child protection filters" applied by some mobile
operators to their Internet feed.
On
Techdirt.
As you may have noticed, this weekend the online world has been
filled with news of and responses to the suicide of the young American
activist Aaron Swartz. Many excellent personal tributes have been written
about the man and his achievements, but here I want to concentrate on
the just one aspect: the incident that led to his arrest and probably to
his suicide too. Here's how Techdirt explained the situation:
On
Open Enterprise blog.
The Norwegian Ministry of Finance seems to be taking a bit of stick
at the moment. It wants all the existing cash registers in the country
thrown out and replaced with new ones, as the Norwegian site E24 reports (via Thomas Steen and Google Translate)
On
Open Enterprise blog.
As happened for last year, 2013 will doubtless see plenty of battles
in the domains of open standards, copyright and software patents, but
there will also be a new theme: data protection. That's a consequence
of an announcement made by the European Commission almost exactly a year ago:
On
Open Enterprise.
One of the themes of this blog has been the wider influence of open
source. Everyone knows about open content projects like Wikipedia, but
one open endeavour that still hasn't made the big breakthrough into the
public's consciousness is OpenStreetMap. Here's how it describes itself:
On
Open Enterprise blog.
Back in June last year, Techdirt reported on the warning from the
World Health Organization's Director-General that we risked entering a "post-antibiotic era".
That was in part because the current patent system was not encouraging
the right kind of research by pharma companies in order to develop the
new antibiotics that we desperately need.
On
Techdirt.
One of the extraordinary aspects of the "three strikes" approach to
copyright enforcement is its blind vindictiveness. After three or so
alleged acts of infringing on copyright, it's not one individual that's
punished, but the entire household that depends on the family Internet
connection in question, irrespective of the personal situation of those
affected. This kind of collective punishment is something that is
regarded as abhorrent in other contexts, but the power of the copyright
industries is such that several governments around the world followed
the French lead and introduced precisely this kind of scheme, and to
hell with the damage it might cause to innocent and vulnerable people
caught up in it.
Techdirt.
Even against a background of repeated attempts to censor the Net,
it's still possible to become a little complacent about some of the
actions being taken by the copyright industries. For example, many
people probably feel that blocking a site like The Pirate Bay isn't
really a problem because, after all, it's just one site, right?
On
Techdirt.
As we know, the Internet works by breaking digital information up
into IP packets which are then routed independently over the network,
and then re-assembled at their destination. Anything made up of 0s and
1s can be sent anywhere with an Internet connection in this way, but
that isn't much good for physical objects.
On
Techdirt.
Daft trademarking stories are common enough, but it's always fun to come across new variations on the theme. Netzpolitik points us to this story from Denmark, where a Spanish-owned property site called HomelifeSpain.com ran into trouble because the word "home" was trademarked in Denmark by the Danish property site home.dk.
This resulted in the rather incredible remedy of the website itself
being banned entirely. As Netzpolitik notes, this is classic function
creep: such web blocks were introduced to fight -- you guessed it --
child pornography, and yet here they are being applied in the rather
less serious matter of trademark infringement.
On
Techdirt.
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