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As Mike noted a couple of days ago, international trade agreements often have the effect of constraining
the power of national legislatures. Indeed, that's doubtless one of
the reasons why they have become so popular in recent years: they allow
backroom deals between politicians and lobbyists to set the agenda for
law-making around the world, without the need for any of that pesky
democratic oversight nonsense. In particular, the trade agreement
between South Korea and the US is turning out to be a key limiting factor for both TPP and what US politicians might try to do about phone unlocking. This makes two recent moves to loosen South Korea's harsh copyright laws potentially important far beyond that country's borders.
On
Techdirt.
Yesterday I mentioned the important consultation on IPRED, how
it was closing soon, and what a good idea it would be if you applied to
take part immediately. I also noted there's a helpful guide to filling
in the consultation, from EDRI, but I omitted to mention that there is an equally great one from the Pirate Party MEP Amelia Andersdotter, which I thoroughly recommend.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
Today is Document Freedom Day:
It is a day for celebrating and raising awareness of Open
Standards and formats which takes place on the last Wednesday in March
each year. On this day people who believe in fair access to
communications technology teach, perform, and demonstrate.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
IPRED is not that well known, even among
the Net-savvy. And yet it's one of the most important EU directives
that affects the online world, and a consultation on its future closes
at the end of this week, on 30 March. Here's the background from EDRI:
On
Open Enterprise blog.
Hackers and hacking have been much in the news recently - for all the
wrong reasons, unfortunately. The most dramatic case, perhaps, was the
suicide of Aaron Swartz. He was threatened with 35 years in prison, partly for this:
On
Open Enterprise blog.
Techdirt has been following the rapid rise and current problems
of the various Pirate Parties in Europe for some time. Both their
success and difficulties flow in part from the fact that they do not fit
neatly into the traditional political categories. This makes them
attractive to those who are disenchanted with established parties, but
also makes it hard for Pirate Parties to devise a coherent political
program that they can seek to implement, for example through alliances
with others.
On
Techdirt.
As you may have heard, there's been an election in Rome
recently. These kind of events tend to bring out the crowds, and NBC
had the clever idea of finding a couple of pictures showing roughly the same view, but eight years apart.
They look very similar, except for one rather striking detail: in the
first, from 2005, there are a few mobile phones visible; in the second,
taken recently, tiny screens are visible everywhere in the crowd -- it
seems as if practically everyone is using their phone to take a picture.
On
Techdirt.
It would be something of an understatement to say that people have
strong opinions about patents. But as Techdirt has reported, there's a
growing consensus that software patents in particular aren't working -- James Bessen and Michael J. Meurer have written an entire book, "Patent Failure", about how bad things are there, and why it's happening in this area rather than elsewhere.
On
Techdirt.
Although the use of open source by the UK government has an unhappy
history (and one that certainly isn't finished), one ray of hope comes
from Gov.uk, as I've noted before. The driving force behind that site is the Government Digital Service
(GDS), and on its blog there's a particularly interesting post by Mike
Bracken, who rejoices in the splendid title of "Executive Director of
Digital in the Cabinet Office."
On
Open Enterprise blog.
Regular readers of this column will know that I am not overly
enamoured of the European Patent Office, since it has effectively
introduced software patents by the back door, in direct contravention of the will of the European Parliament. No surprise, then, that the EPO's Annual Report has plenty to worry about. For example, in his foreword, the EPO's President writes:
On
Open Enterprise blog.
In 2001, I published a history of free software, called "Rebel Code:
Inside Linux and the Open Source Revolution." One of the people I
interviewed for the book was Eben Moglen,
for many years the General Counsel for the Free Software Foundation,
and one of the main architects of the later versions of the GNU General
Public License. He had the following interesting thoughts on the
delivery of digital media:
On
Techdirt.
Two years ago, Techdirt wrote about the major report "Media Piracy in
Emerging Economies", which explored how media and software piracy in
emerging countries is largely a question of economics:
people and companies there simply cannot afford Western-style pricing,
and resort to alternative sourcing. That hasn't stopped media and
computer companies from demanding that governments around the world
should inflict ever-more harsh punishments on their own people.
On
Techdirt.
A couple of weeks ago I wrote
about how the irony-immune IT department of the European Parliament was
censoring emails complaining about censorship. Now it seems they have a
kindred spirit here in the UK:
On
Open Enterprise blog.
One of the slogans of the copyright industries is that you can't make
money from giving things away. Unfortunately for them, examples just
keep coming up showing that's simply not true. Techdirt wrote about the
interesting case of the London Evening Standard back in 2009, shortly
after its new owner decided to turn it from a (loss-making) paid-for
newspaper, into one that was given away. So, three years later, how did that work out?:
On
Techdirt.
One of the initiatives gaining momentum around the world is open data --
the idea that, for example, non-personal data affecting the public
should be made freely available. That's partly to improve transparency,
so that citizens are more informed about what is happening, and partly
to stimulate new kinds of business that build products and services
based on that data.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
Back in January, I wrote about what I called the "Trans-Atlantic Partnership Agreement", by analogy with the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement, TPP, whose negotiations have already dragged on for several years. The formal announcement
of what is now variously called the Trans-Atlantic Free Trade Agreement
(TAFTA) or Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), took
place just over a month ago, but already Mexico has stated that it wishes to join, and there are rumours Canada might tag along too.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
Over the last few years, Techdirt has been reporting on a steady stream
of victories for open access. Along the way publishers have tried various counter-attacks,
which all proved dismal failures. But there are signs that they have
changed tack, and come up with a more subtle -- and increasingly
successful -- approach.
On
Techdirt.
If you were online late last night - and especially if you were on
Twitter - you may have noted an enormous wave of pain and anger sweeping
across the network. Here's what caused it:
On
Open Enterprise blog.
Most sane human beings have stopped trying to keep up with the interwined legal actions arising out of the smartphone patent wars
between Apple, Google, Motorola, Nokia, Microsoft and all the rest.
The cases, though, are still grinding through the courts, which
periodically throw out their verdicts. According to Florian Mueller, one such decision in Germany is imminent:
On
Techdirt.
Now that the US and EU have officially announced the start of talks on a new bilateral free trade agreement
-- sorry, a "trade and investment partnership" -- groups in both
regions are trying to work out what this will mean for them and their
constituents. Arguably the most important constituency of all is the
public, and yet it is also the one that until now has been
systematically shut out of previous negotiations for things like ACTA or
TPP. One representative of that huge group -- though not, obviously,
the only one -- is the Transatlantic Consumer Dialogue (TACD), which describes itself as follows:
On
Techdirt.
I've been writing quite a lot about the current Data Protection
regulation that is being considered in the European Parliament. As I've
noted, this has led to an unprecedented level of lobbying from US
companies, who are keen not to have to follow strict EU rules when it
comes to our privacy. So far, I've not singled out any particular
company in this context, but having read somewhat belatedly this post by the privacy expert Simon Davies, I feel a need to talk about one that is clearly right at the heart of this battle: Google.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
There is an extremely dangerous trend to remove proper judicial review
from cases involving alleged copyright infringement. Sometimes that
means "voluntary" actions by ISPs -- the SOPA and ACTA approach.
Sometimes, it means appearances before tribunals by members of the
public without adequate legal representation,
as is happening under New Zealand's "three strikes" law. And sometimes
it might involve a judge, but consist of the latter simply agreeing to
requests from the copyright industry, without anyone challenging the
grounds for doing so.
On
Techdirt.
There have been many posts on Techdirt about the copyright industry's
hatred for new technologies that eventually turned out to be important
sources of additional revenue -- the VCR being perhaps the most famous
example. Here's a splendid column from Adam Turner in the Sydney
Morning Herald about the same thing happening again in Australia.
On
Techdirt.
It began last week, with an article by the Pirate Party MEP Christian Engström, who wrote about a vote that will take place in the European Parliament (possibly tomorrow):
On
Open Enterprise blog.
One of the core areas that Mozilla is working on is user privacy, and
one important aspect of this is controlling cookies. Most people are
now aware that sites they visit seek to place cookies - small strings of
information - on their systems as a way of tracking when and what they
visit on that site. What many may not know is that so-called
"third-party" cookies are also widely used: these allow people to be
tracked as they move from site to site, and effectively enable a
detailed picture of their use of the Web to be built up.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
In an implicit acknowledgement that the Europe-wide protests against ACTA indicated that there was a problem with copyright in the digital age, the European Commission announced back in December what it called "an orientation debate on content in the digital economy." This is what that meant, apparently:
On
Open Enterprise blog.
One of the richest seams of open data concerns transport. After all, by
their very nature, transport systems generate huge amounts of new data
every day -- times, routes, travel options. Similarly, huge numbers of
people use multiple means of transport, which means there is a big
potential audience for analyses of that data. And it's definitely in
the interest of transport operators to make that information freely
available so that developers can use it in new ways, since that is
likely to make traveling easier, and lead to increased custom.
On
Techdirt.
For a year now, Techdirt has been following the sorry saga of Germany's attempt to make search engines and others pay
for licenses to show even small excerpts from online newspapers. The
main motivation seems to be to take money from Google for being
successful, and to give it to the German publishers that are struggling.
On Techdirt.
As I noted recently in the context of the BBC inexplicably supporting the introduction of DRM into the HTML5 specification,
openness lies at the heart of the Web and the Internet. One of the
problems with true openness is that it has to be at every level: if any
part of a system is closed, it interferes with the openness of the
whole.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
If it is to be true to its name, the World Wide Web ought to reflect the
planet's full cultural and linguistic diversity. Currently, though,
many sites and tools remain optimized for English and its character set,
although that's gradually changing as other countries with different
languages and writing systems come online in greater numbers.
On
Techdirt.
The Internet as a mass medium is still relatively young, so it's no
surprise that its function in society and in our daily lives is still
being defined. One important question concerns the nature of our
actions online: to what extent are they public? Here's one rather
extreme view, expressed by Jürgen Maurer, vice-president of Germany's
Federal Criminal Police Office, as reported by Der Spiegel (original in German):
On
Techdirt.
As Techdirt noted last year, France has a regrettable habit of dreaming up really bad ideas
when it comes to the Internet, most famously with the three-strikes
scheme, now known there by the name of the body the oversees it --
Hadopi. Guillaume Champeau points us to a piece in the French newspaper Libération, which contains yet more appalling possibilities (original in French).
On
Techdirt.
Long-time readers will remember the appalling way in which the UK's
Digital Economy Act was brought in - with no research, no debate, and
no democracy. At its heart lies the infamous "three strikes" idea: if
you are alleged - not proved, but merely alleged - to have shared files
online on three occasions you will be subject to some punishment.
Originally that was cutting off your hand, er, your Internet connection,
but as the discussions over implementing this unjust and punitive law
have dragged on, it's become less clear how it will actually work.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
Techdirt has been writing for a while about China's policy of providing incentives to file patents -- regardless of whether those patents have any worth. That's led to a naïve celebration of the large numbers now being granted, as if more patents corresponded to more innovation.
On
Techdirt.
I've written a number of posts about Mozilla's rise and fall and
rise: how it went from saving the open Web and open standards in the
face of the stagnation brought about by Internet Explorer 6's long
dominance; to losing its way
somewhat, with the upstart Chrome threatening to supplant its role as
the "other" browser; and finally finding a role once more as it
concentrated on what it called Web apps.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
New Zealand has the unhappy distinction of being in the vanguard of
using the "three strikes" approach of punishment for people accused of
sharing unauthorized copies online. As in France and the UK, this was
brought in without any preparatory research to ascertain its
effectiveness, and without any real thought about the practical
implications. That makes a post by Susan Chalmers on the blog of
InternetNZ, a "non-profit open membership organisation dedicated to
protecting and promoting the Internet in New Zealand", particularly
valuable.
On
Techdirt.
Back in November last year, I wrote
about a particular class of open data - that regarding clinical trials
data. I pointed out that of all open data, it is arguably the most
important, because it can literally save lives - huge numbers of them.
That post was by way of a taster for future columns - like this one -
which touch on this area, since I believe it will become one of the most
important battlegrounds for openness in the next few years.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
One of the reasons Techdirt rails against exaggerated responses to
supposed terrorist threats is that it has caused police forces around
the world to lose all sense of proportion -- literally, in the case of
this UK story from the Daily Mail.
On
Techdirt.
Recently, Techdirt noted that the European "database right" could pose a threat
to releasing public data there. But that assumes that central
governments are at least trying to open things up. A splendid piece by
Sebastian Haselbeck on the Open Gov Germany blog, with the
self-explanatory title "German government screws up open data," underlines that things can fail because the government itself sabotages transparency moves.
On
Techdirt.
The open source programming language Python
-- named after the British comedy series "Monty Python" -- became
popular in the 1990s, along with two other languages beginning with "P":
Perl and PHP. Later, they formed a crucial part of the famous "LAMP"
stack -- the GNU/Linux operating system + Apache Web server + MySQL
database + Python/Perl/PHP as scripting languages -- that underpinned
many of the most successful startups from this time.
On
Techdirt.
It seems like every other headline is about drones these days
-- drones being used in battle, drones being used by the police, drones
as a threat to privacy. As we've noted
before, it's easy to get the impression that drones are inherently
evil, and should be made illegal or something (good luck with that.)
But drones are simply a new kind of technology, largely made possible by
Moore's Law and the dramatic reductions in size, weight and cost it has
brought with it for electronic control devices. Like any other
technology, drones can be used for all kinds of purposes, both good and
bad. It's just that we have heard mostly about the more dubious ones.
To remedy that, here's a heart-warming tale of how drones could tackle one of the most serious threats facing wildlife around the world: poaching.
On
Techdirt.
Last week I wrote about the revelation (to me, at least - maybe other people knew this was going on) that MEPs
were simply cutting and pasting from lobbyists' proposals and
presenting them as amendments to the important Data Protection
regulation. I also suggested that readers might like to write to the UK
MEPs involved, and ask about this. Several
kindly did so, and sent me the reply, which came from Malcolm Harbour.
Here's what he wrote:
On
Open Enterprise blog.
Trademarks are a problem for free software, because there is a
tension between a desire to encourage sharing of the software, and a
need to ensure that people are not misled over what exactly that
software is. For example, you don't want people distributing modified
copies of your code claiming that it is your code, or that it is
approved by you - in the worst cases, it might contain malware, for
example.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
The Web is one of the most dramatic demonstrations of the power of
openness, alongside free software, which not coincidentally runs most of
it and the rest of the Internet. At the heart of that openness lies HTML, a
completely open way of sharing information. So what would be a really
stupid thing you could do to try to throttle that openness and
innovation? Why, yes: adding DRM to HTML so that you can lock down Web page elements:
On
Open Enterprise blog.
Here on Techdirt, one of the things we look forward to each year is
the comedy production known as the 301 Report, where the US makes the
world line up in a row, and then names and shames all the naughty
countries whose intellectual monopoly laws aren't outrageous enough. In
advance of the official naughty list, there are helpful suggestions
from the fans of monopoly maximalism, including the International Intellectual Property Alliance
(IIPA), which has just released its 2013 demands. Mostly it's the
usual suspects -- China, India, Russia etc. But there's an interesting
change from the previous year's list: Canada has moved from the really naughty "Priority Watch List" to the only slightly naughty "Watch List".
On
Techdirt.
Techdirt covered the WCIT circus in Dubai in some depth last year,
since important issues were at stake. As many feared, after a moment of
farce, it became clear that a serious schism
in the ITU was opening up -- between those who wanted the Internet
largely left alone to carry on much as before, with the possibly naïve
hope that it might act as a vehicle of freedom, and those who wanted it
regulated more closely, certain it could become an even better
instrument of control.
On
Techdirt.
The European Patent Office (EPO) is a curious body. Despite its
name, it is not the patent office for the European Union (EU) in the
same way that the USPTO handles patents in the US. As its history page explains:
On
Techdirt.
It's hardly a surprise these days that Chinese Internet companies
routinely self-censor what appears on their services: the world knows
there's not much it can do about what happens within China's borders.
But here's a disturbing story about how that censorship has started spreading further afield.
On
Techdirt.
Everyone knows that politicians are lobbied, sometimes massively.
But it's rare to be able to track directly the detailed effects of that
lobbying. That's why a new site called LobbyPlag is so interesting: it allows people to do precisely that in the case of the controversial data protection rules in the EU,
which aim to regulate how personal information harvested from users of
online services can be used. Naturally, many large Net companies --
mostly in the US -- are unhappy about these moves; some US diplomats are even talking of a possible "trade war"
if the proposals go through in their current form. That's unlikely,
not least because the lobbying is starting to pay off, as LobbyPlag's
analysis makes clear.
On
Techdirt.
The Spratly Islands
are some 750 reefs, atolls and islands in the South China Sea that are
claimed variously by Brunei, the People's Republic of China, the
Republic of China (Taiwan), Malaysia, the Philippines and Vietnam.
That's largely because of the rich fishing grounds that surround them,
and the possibility of significant oil and gas reserves nearby.
On
Techdirt.
It's becoming clear that the lobbying around the proposed EU
directive on Data Protection is some of the most intense ever seen -
some activists have said it's even worse than during ACTA, while on the US side there's mutterings about starting a "trade war" if it's passed in its present form.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
Maybe it's just me, but this year's annual meeting of the global elite at the World Economic Forum in Davos
seemed particularly irrelevant. In fact, all those movers and shakers
had packed up and flown off in their private jets before I had even
noticed that they had flown in, and it's hard to detect much of a ripple
from anything that happened there (or maybe I just move in the wrong
circles....)
On
Techdirt.
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