German Politician Who Wanted Two-Strike Copyright Law Should Disconnect Himself After Multiple Infringements Found

One of the most noticeable trends in copyright law around the world is the way countries tend to adopt similar approaches. So after the "three strikes" law was introduced in France, the UK followed suit, and other nations are at various stages of doing the same. A cynic might almost suggest the whole thing was coordinated somehow. 

On Techdirt.

Well, I Do Declare: Washington and Open Government Declarations

There seems to be something in the air (maybe it's the crazy weather): everyone is making “declarations”. 

On Open Enterprise blog.

Shutting Down... the West

The pundits have only just begun to offer their weighty thoughts on the subject, but already one of the key threads to emerge in discussions around the riots in England and Wales has been technology - specifically, social networks.

On Open Enterprise blog.

EU's New IT "Principles" Show Unprincipled Hypocrisy

You may remember that there was a big to-do about the European Interoperability Framework, and the definition of “open standards”. The key issue was how to create a level playing field so that any company can compete fairly when IT contracts are being awarded by the EU. As I pointed out then, the end-result was a complete disgrace, since it basically paid lip-service to such level playing fields while fundamentally undermining them.

On Open Enterprise blog.

Why SAP is a Sap

There's some interesting turbulence in the blogosphere about the following call from Dr. Vishal Sikka, Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of SAP:

To ensure the continued role of Java in driving economic growth, we believe it is essential to transition the stewardship of the language and platform into an authentically open body that is not dominated by an individual corporation. Java should be free of any encumbrances to permit fair competition between compatible implementations for the benefit of customers. By preserving the integrity of Java, the IT industry can ensure a vibrant developer community and continued innovation for enterprise software customers. This ensures the continued global economic success brought about through open innovation.

Matt Asay rightly calls him out on this:

Irony, thy name is SAP.

SAP, after all, is hardly the most open-source or open-process friendly company on the planet. Despite early involvement in Eclipse, some interaction with MySQL (MaxDB), and a new commitment to the Apache Software Foundation, SAP remains a firmly proprietary company.

Even Microsoft, which arguably has the most to lose from open source, has consistently and continually experimented with greater open-source involvement.

SAP? Not so much. In large part, SAP hasn't been forced to embrace open source because it hasn't been threatened by it. ERP (enterprise resource planning) is such a complex beast that it has remained largely impervious to open source (with the exception of open-source start-ups like Compiere and Openbravo, to which I'm an adviser).

Now, Dirk Riehle is stepping into the fray:

I don’t think that this is a fair critique. SAP has always provided the source code of its main business applications suite to user-customers as part of a commercial license, and users have always customized SAP’s business suite to their heart’s content. In fact, it is the only way to make it work for their needs.

That may well be the case, but I think it's irrelevant.

The real reason SAP's call is hypocritical is this document [.pdf], essentially a love-letter to software patents, submitted as an amicus curiae brief to the European Patent Office. Software patents are simply incompatible with free software, because they are government-granted monopolies designed to *stop* people sharing stuff. They also prevent hackers from writing new code because they represent an ever-present digital sword of Damocles hanging over them.

SAP simply cannot claim to be a true friend of openness while it also supports software patents in any jurisdiction, in any form - the same applies to other companies, too, I should note. They can share as much code as they like, but until they repudiate software patents - for example, by placing their patent portfolios in the public domain - that's little more than window-dressing.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca.

Don't Do as I Do, Do as I Say

Wasn't Damian Green threatened with life imprisonment for allegedly doing precisely this:

Government officials handed confidential police intelligence about environmental activists to the energy giant E.ON before a planned peaceful demonstration, according to private emails seen by the Guardian.

Correspondence between civil servants and security officials at the company reveals how intelligence was shared about the peaceful direct action group Climate Camp in the run-up to the demonstration at Kingsnorth, the proposed site of a new coal-fired power station in north Kent.

Intelligence passed to the energy firm by officials from the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (BERR) included detailed information about the movements of protesters and their meetings. E.ON was also given a secret strategy document written by environmental campaigners and information from the Police National Information and Coordination Centre (PNICC), which gathers national and international intelligence for emergency planning.

So it's official now, I take it: *they* can break any law they like, while we are afforded no protection from them - even by innocence.

Do As I Say, Not As I Do

I've noted several times on this blog the tension between openness and privacy, but reading the excellent Your Right to Know blog - which, to my shame, I've only come across recently - another dimension became apparent.

This is the interesting contrast between what UK politicians want to do to us in terms of constant surveillance and intrusion into our private lives, and their own - outraged - refusal to allow us to do the same, even when it concerns them spending our money through their extremely generous allowances. For example, try this for hypocrisy:

However, I should tell those who press and press such issues that, sooner or later, the allowances will be rolled into our salary, handed out without any claim mechanism or dealt with under some other device, because it is intolerable that this intrusion into Members’ private lives should have to be endured or should be permitted, and something will happen to prevent it from going too far. We can see what will happen: local news reporters and local political opponents will start trying to air these issues in public, which will be demeaning, as well as reducing the stature of Parliament and damaging our democracy. It cannot be right that things should reach such lengths.”

O Hypocrisy, Thy Name is Sony

Do as I say, not as I do, seems to be the case with Sony:

PointDev, un éditeur français, attaque la maison de disques en justice pour avoir utilisé sans licence un de ses outils d'administration : Ideal Migration.

[PointDev, a French software publisher, is taking the record company to court for having used one of its administration tools, Ideal Migration, without a licence.]

Well let's hope these scurvy Sony dogs feel the full force of the law. (Via Planet Creative Commons.)