Early-Morning Raid Sent To Confiscate 9-Year-Old's Winnie The Pooh Laptop For Downloading Music

One of the biggest problems with the current approach to dealing with alleged copyright infringement is the totally disproportionate nature of the action undertaken in response to it. The "three strikes" collective punishment of households that is available in France, New Zealand and South Korea is one example of this. From Finland, we learn about another completely over-the-top action: 

On Techdirt.

W(h)ither the UK Database Nation?

Interesting:

The court’s view was that health care staff who are not involved in the care of a patient must be unable to access that patient’s electronic medical record: “What is required in this connection is practical and effective protection to exclude any possibility of unauthorised access occurring in the first place.” (Press coverage here.)

A “practical and effective” protection test in European law will bind engineering, law and policy much more tightly together. And it will have wide consequences. Privacy compaigners, for example, can now argue strongly that the NHS Care Records service is illegal.

To say nothing of the central ID card database that permits all kinds of decentralised access....

Fool Britannia: Why Aren't We Using Firefox?

On Open Enterprise blog.

Nokia: Hollywood's Lapdog, and People's Enemy

Somewhat naively I thought that Nokia was a savvy company on the side of light - maybe because it's Finnish; but I was wrong, it seems:

Nokia has filed a submission with the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) objecting to the use of Ogg Theora as the baseline video standard for the Web. Ogg is an open encoding scheme (On2, the company that developed it, gave it and a free, perpetual unlimited license to its patents to the nonprofit Xiph foundation), but Nokia called it "proprietary" and argued for the inclusion of standards that can be used in conjunction with DRM, because "from our viewpoint, any DRM-incompatible video related mechanism is a non-starter with the content industry (Hollywood). There is in our opinion no need to make DRM support mandatory, though."

...

Nokia intervention here is nothing short of bizarre. Ogg is not proprietary, DRM is, and DRM-free may be a "non-starter" for Hollywood today, but that was true of music two years ago and today, most of the labels are lining up to release their catalogs without DRM. The Web, and Web-based video, are bigger than Hollywood. The Web is not a place for proprietary technology or systems that take over your computer. For Nokia (and Apple, who also lobbied hard for DRM inclusion) to get the Web this badly wrong, this many years into the game, is really sad: if you haven't figured out that the Web is open by 2007, you just haven't been paying attention.

Time to cross Nokia off the Christmas card list, then.

Why I (Heart) Trees

I've expressed my undying love for trees before, particularly as a way of preserving our atmospheric commons, but I had no idea that they were this good:

'Every year, the expanding European forests remove a surprisingly large amount of carbon from the atmosphere,' the study's co-author Aapo Rautiainen stresses. 'According to rough estimates, their impact in reducing atmospheric carbon may well be twice that achieved by the use of renewable energy in Europe today.'

So what's the obvious lesson to learn from this? Why, that they should be included in calculations of carbon sinks - and that countries who plant more trees/don't cut down the ones they have should be rewarded in terms of carbon credits:

Under the Kyoto Protocol, countries currently do not get emission credits for increasing natural carbon sinks through forestry and agriculture. The Finnish researcher's suggest, however, that this might be a helpful tool. 'Policies that accelerate the expansion of our forest biomass not only represent a win-win for climate change and biodiversity, they also open up economic opportunities,' states Laura Saikku, the third author of the study. 'Land owners can benefit with new industries like forest-based bio-energy production. This could also help to reduce one of the main threats to sustained forest expansion - the need to open land to produce agricultural biofuels as alternatives to fossil fuels.'

Obvious, really.

The Man Who Invented Freedom of Information

Anders Chydenius is hardly a well-known name; it should be:

Last year, the Anders Chydenius Foundation celebrated the 240th anniversary of the world's first Freedom of Information Act. Sweden and Finland were one big empire in those days, and the Swedish-Finnish law -- passed in 1766, two hundred years before a similar law was passed by the U.S. Congress, and ensuring open access to all government papers and other kinds of information under a "principle of public access" -- was largely the product of one man's visionary ethical ideas.

Good news, though: you can read his masterpiece, The National Gain, which seems to be pretty similar to Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations, but predating it by 11 years, online and in English thanks to the Anders Chydenius Foundation.

Free, of course.

Warning: Tenuous Connection Follows

Well, Linus is Finnish, and hails from Helsinki, and this story is about a Finn in the same fair city.

OK, I confess, I choose it for the headline: "Suicide squirrel in opera-hating kamikaze bike spoke mangle". Gawd bless The Reg.

W(h)ither Sun?

McNealy leaving Sun is certainly the end of an era. But the big question is: what follows?

As far as Jonathan Schwartz is concerned, too much is being made (a) of his ponytail, and (b) of his blog. Perhaps the clearest indication of his thinking is this panegyric:

There is no single individual who has created more jobs around the world than you. And ... I'm not talking hundreds or thousands of jobs, I'm talking millions. They ended up in America and India, Indonesia and Antarctica, Madagascar, Mexico, Brazil and Finland. They ended up everywhere. Everywhere the network travels.

No single individual has spawned so many startups, fueled so much venture investment, or raised so much capital without actually trying - just with a vision of the future that gets more obvious by the day.

No single individual has so effectively created and promoted the technologies at the heart of a new world emerging around us. A world in which the demand for network computing technology will never decline - as we share more family photos, watch more digital movies, do more banking on-line, build more communities on line, run our supply chains, automate our governments or educate our kids.

Unfortunately, Schwartz is not talking about Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who did all these things, and did them entirely out of altruism, but supposedly about McNealy, who did nothing on the same scale, and did it for the dosh. If this is the quality of analysis we can expect from the new head of Sun, it's probably time to find some comfortable chairs, order a dry sherry, and to enjoy the imminent sunset.

The Horror! The Horror!

Can any fellow-countrymen (or anyone, for that matter) explain to me why the UK now sits wallowing at the bottom of the Firefox market share table? Only 11% of us Brits use Firefox, compared to 38% of the enlightened Finn nation, and against a Europe-wide average of 20%. Even the North Americans use it more than we do.

Why is this?