As Michael Geist and others have pointed out, ACTA is the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement without the main sources of counterfeits being involved -- notably, China. This has required some skilful footwork on the part of ACTA supporters, who need to justify the ratification of a loosely-worded treaty with potentially harmful effects on Internet service providers, civil liberties and developing countries, but which doesn't provide the key benefit claimed in its name. Here's how the European Union's representatives tried to deal with this issue in a "statement on IP Enforcement Trends" made at the WTO Council for TRIPS: 

On Techdirt.

Workshop Audience Barred From 'Demonstrating' Approval Of Michael Geist's ACTA Takedown

Although ACTA has now been referred by the European Commission to the European Court of Justice, it continues its passage through the various committees of the European Parliament, each of which will provide input on the final decision of whether to ratify ACTA or not. The first of these took place last week, when the International Trade (INTA) committee had a preliminary ACTA workshop. This included hearing from external experts, one of whom was Michael Geist, well known to Techdirt readers. 

On Techdirt.

Why the “Copycats?” Report has a Copycat Problem

Along with death and taxes, one of the other certainties in life is the constant flow of reports from the media industries claiming that copyright infringement is causing them to lose billions of pounds of revenue each year, and that they will inevitably go to the wall if even harsher legal sanctions against infringement are not brought in (although, strangely, they have been saying this for about 10 years now, and they seem not to have gone bust yet....)

Of course, you might expect industries to paint the situation as bleak as possible – that's why they spend large chunks of their considerable revenues on expensive PR companies and lobbyists to “sex” things up a bit. But there are other kinds of reports, typically sponsored by national government departments, that claim to provide more objective information about what is happening in this field.

Sadly, those expectations of objectivity are not always fulfilled. The most blatant example occurred just this week, when some fine digging by Michael Geist showed that a report from The Conference Board of Canada, which purports to be an independent research institute, not only copied text verbatim from the International Intellectual Property Alliance (the primary film, music, and software lobby in the U.S.), but also used figures from an old Canadian Recording Industry Association press release to justify dramatic statements like the following:

As a result of lax regulation and enforcement, internet piracy appears to be on the increase in Canada. The estimated number of illicit downloads (1.3 billion) is 65 times higher than the number legal downloads (20 million), mirroring the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development’s conclusion that Canada has the highest per capita incidence of unauthorized file-swapping in the world.

As Geist points out:

While the release succeeded in generating attention, the report does not come close to supporting these claims. The headline-grabbing claim of 1.3 billion unauthorized downloads relies on a January 2008 Canadian Recording Industry Association press release. That release cites a 2006 Pollara survey as the basis for the statement. In other words, the Conference Board relies on a survey of 1200 people conducted more than three years ago to extrapolate to a claim of 1.3 billion unauthorized downloads (the survey itself actually ran counter to many of CRIA's claims).

After stupidly trying to defend this indefensible position, The Conference Board of Canada has now backed down, admitted that the report plagiarised material, and withdrawn it, along with two others.

Against that background, the appearance of the report “Copycats? Digital consumers in the online age”, produced by University College London's CIBER for the UK governmnent's Strategic Advisory Board for Intellectual Property Policy (what a name) takes on an added significance. Among other questions, one issue is to what extent the report manages to look objectively at the facts, rather than blithely accepting the highly-partial views of the media industry itself.

The 85-page report is detailed, and as you might expect from an academic outfit, is fully referenced, which is excellent. I strongly recommend that anyone interested in this important field read the whole thing. But for those of you slightly more pressed for time, the executive summary gives a good flavour of its approach:

The backdrop to our research on online consumer behaviour – and the impacts and implications this has on legal practice, the content industries, and governmental policy – is one of vast economic losses brought about by widespread unauthorised downloading and a huge confusion about (or denial of) the definition of what is and is not legal and copyright protected. Industry reports suggest that at least seven million British citizens have downloaded unauthorised content, many on a regular basis, and many also without ethical consideration. Estimates as to the overall lost revenues if we include all creative industries whose products can be copied digitally, or counterfeited, reach £10 billion (IP Rights, 2004), conservatively, as our figure is from 2004, and a loss of 4,000 jobs. This is in the context of the “Creative Industries” providing around 8% of British GDP. And the situation is not solely a British problem, but a global one. Downloading culture (Altschuller, 2009: unpaginated) “has forced society into a muddle of uncertainty with how to incorporate it into existing social and legal structures.” Altschuller adds that: “...music downloading has become part and parcel of the social fabric of our society despite its illegal status,” (emphasis added).

Just to make it clear - this is not simply an issue of music and film downloads alone. Software losses due to what is often described as “piracy” were, for example, $48 billion worldwide in 2007 (BSA, 2007); and in the UK the figure was $1,837,000 or approximately £1.25 billion. An exploratory CIBER investigation found vast quantities of films, music, software, e-books, games and television content available to download and share without cost. On one peer-to-peer network we found that at midday on a weekday there were 1.3 million users, sharing content. If each “peer” from this network (not the largest) downloaded one file per day the resulting number of downloads (music, film, television, e-books, software and games were all available) would be 473 million items per year. If the figure for each individual is closer to five or more items per day, the lowest estimate of downloaded material (remembering that the entire season of the Fox television series “24”, or the “complete” works of the rock group Led Zeppelin can be one file) is just under 2.4 billion files. And if the average value of each file is £5 – that is a rough low average of the price of a DVD or CD, rather than the higher prices of software or E-books – we have the online members of one file sharing network consuming approximately £12 billion in content annually – for free. These figures are staggering.

Staggering indeed – and complete piffle.

Sadly, the basic problem with the whole report is made clear in the first line of the above extract: “The backdrop to our research on online consumer behaviour – and the impacts and implications this has on legal practice, the content industries, and governmental policy – is one of vast economic losses brought about by widespread unauthorised downloading”. That is, it starts from an *assumption* that unauthorised downloading is causing economic damage, rather than examining whether that is the case: clearly, this is going to skew all the results of the research, because it is seen through a particular optic – that of the media industries.

But wait, you may say: maybe that is simply a statement of what the report found out during its objective research, which is a fair point. So let's just look at the figures cited above, and their source.

Estimates as to the overall lost revenues if we include all creative industries whose products can be copied digitally, or counterfeited, reach £10 billion (IP Rights, 2004), conservatively, as our figure is from 2004, and a loss of 4,000 jobs.

A quick check in the references gives the following:

IP Rights (2004) UK Tackles counterfeiting and piracy – launch of national IP Crime Strategy, Alert, Press Release, August 2004, issue 156. Available online at: www.iprights.com/publications/Alert_156.pdf (accessed 02.03.09)

So that £10 billion figure actually comes from a press release from the UK government itself – looking good so far. But why don't we check up on what exactly that reference says? Here's the relevant paragraph:

there has been a growing recognition of the economic impact of IP crime. Rights owners have estimated that last year alone counterfeiting and piracy cost the UK economy £10 billion and 4,000 jobs.

There we have it: that cast-iron, irreproachable, UK government-guaranteed £10 billion figure is merely – you guessed it – an estimate from the media industries themselves. In other words, there is no fundamental difference here from the situation with the Canadian report, except – importantly – there is no attempt to hide the connection (provided you are prepared to follow the links). But the figure is essentially worthless: it was produced by the media industries to justify their perennial wails of anguish.

That's one pretty obvious way in which the whole context for the report is biased by the media industries' agenda. But the problems go deeper, and operate in a more subtle way. Consider, for example, this passage from the paragraphs above:

On one peer-to-peer network we found that at midday on a weekday there were 1.3 million users, sharing content. If each “peer” from this network (not the largest) downloaded one file per day the resulting number of downloads (music, film, television, e-books, software and games were all available) would be 473 million items per year. If the figure for each individual is closer to five or more items per day, the lowest estimate of downloaded material (remembering that the entire season of the Fox television series “24”, or the “complete” works of the rock group Led Zeppelin can be one file) is just under 2.4 billion files. And if the average value of each file is £5 – that is a rough low average of the price of a DVD or CD, rather than the higher prices of software or E-books – we have the online members of one file sharing network consuming approximately £12 billion in content annually – for free.

Again, this is riddled with unexamined assumptions that are taken straight from the media industries framing of the situation. For example:

“if the average value of each file is £5 – that is a rough low average of the price of a DVD or CD, rather than the higher prices of software or E-books”

This assumes many things. For example, that all these downloaded files represent real losses for the media industries – that people would have bought this stuff had it not been available online. This is a huge jump to make: it's just as likely that people are trying out stuff they would never have looked at if they needed to pay for it. In this case, it's closer to marketing materials, providing powerful free advertising. As other research indicates, people who download unauthorised material from the Internet are *more* likely to buy stuff afterwards.

Then there is the pricing - “average value of each file is £5”. This simply accepts that the pricing the media industries are trying to impose on online customers is reasonable. And yet economics teaches us that the price of goods tends to fall to their marginal cost – zero in this case. The media industries are basically trying to defy the laws of economic gravity: that prices of digital goods will inevitably fall to earth (reference is made to this later in the report, but the authors don't seem to have understood the implications).

It's the same with software: what illegal downloading has shown is that the prices Microsoft and other proprietary companies have tried to obtain for software are, in fact, unjustifiable, and essentially unenforceable in an online world. Paying several hundred pounds for something that costs effectively zero to manufacture and distributed is rightly perceived as unfair by consumers – which is why they feel little compunction in downloading it. Costs of development need to be recouped, but that doesn't justify the kind of price-gouging that has been going on in the software industry for the last few decades (just think of the profit margins that companies like Microsoft have achieved historically).

The difference is, people now have a way of manifesting their discontent by using open source, or through unauthorised downloads (which Bill Gates has admitted he prefers to the former option). And, of course, free software, as produced by open source companies, shows that there are other ways of developing code – be it drawing upon a wider community of volunteer programmers, or selling support etc. - without charging high prices for goods with zero marginal cost.

In fact, there is a larger point here, completely missed in the report, as far as I can see. One reason why people have few qualms about downloading copyrighted material – that lack of “ethical consideration” the report refers to above - is that there is growing realisation that copyright law as currently construed is totally tilted in favour of businesses. Copyright term – originally *fourteen* years – is now effectively forever, thanks to constant extensions. The basic social compact that a creative work was granted a short-term, government-backed monopoly in return for placing that work in the public domain soon afterwards has been betrayed: people effectively give lots and get nothing. Illegal downloads are a way of striving for a fairer balance in a world where the laws are completely skewed against ordinary citizens, who have no other way of obtaining a more equitable approach.

Again, the report does not reflect this, but silently assumes that copyright is good in itself, and is working as it should. In fact, the massive flouting of the law is proof that this is not the case: when “[i]ndustry reports suggest that at least seven million British citizens have downloaded unauthorised content, many on a regular basis, and many also without ethical consideration”, then clearly today's copyright system is badly – perhaps irremediably - broken.

So while “Copycats” is to be welcomed as an honest effort to report on the true situation of unauthorised downloads in the UK, it fails at a profound level by overlooking its own deep, ingrained biases, fruits of years of relentless propaganda campaigns waged by the media industries and their lobbyists. Ironically, then, it would seem that the authors of the “Copycats” report, which delineates a wired-up Britain permeated by the “copycat” tendency in the realm of digital artefacts, are themselves unconscious copycats, albeit of a different, more rarefied kind, in the realm of ideas.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca.

Goodbye WIPO, Hello ACTA?

Something strange is happening at the WIPO: it's becoming more reasonable. Where once it was a bastion of intellectual monopoly intransigence, it is now showing signs of being, well, more *open* to new ideas....

On Open Enterprise blog.

Is the EU Acting Duplicitously Over ACTA?

As I and many others have noted, the current negotiations over the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) are, on the one hand, shrouded in secrecy for the general public, while on the other, being conducted in close consultation with media industries. This leads to the doubly deplorable situation that an important treaty is being negotiated to favour a particular industry without allowing those most affected by it – the tax-paying public – to even offer comments on it.

One measure of the growing impossibility of sustaining this position was the release by the EU of its “fact sheet” on ACTA, last updated in January. This smooth-talking document attempts to assuage the concerns of the little people, assuring us:

ACTA is about tackling large scale, criminal activity. It is not about limiting civil liberties or harassing consumers.

ACTA will not go further than the current EU regime for enforcement of IPRs – which fully respects fundamental rights and freedoms and civil liberties, such as the protection of personal data: This Community acquis on IPR enforcement is without prejudice to national or Community legal provisions in other areas, in particular in the area of personal data protection, as regulated by the Data Protection Directive and the Directive on privacy and electronic communications.

ACTA is not designed to negatively affect consumers: the EU legislation (2003 Customs Regulation) has a de minimis clause that exempts travellers from checks if the infringing goods are not part of large scale traffic. EU customs, frequently confronted with traffics of drugs, weapons or people, do neither have the time nor the legal basis to look for a couple of pirated songs on an i-Pod music player or laptop computer, and there is no intention to change this.

Of course, in the absence of any details about what the treaty contains, it's hard to tell whether this is just palliative spin or not.

Fortunately, the sunlight of openness is beginning to pierce even the sepulchral gloom of the ACTA negotiation process, and leaks of its current text are beginning to seep out. The news is not good, as Michael Geist explains:

The Border Measures proposals are also still subject to considerable disagreement. Some countries are seeking de minimum rules, the removal of certain clauses, and a specific provision to put to rest fears of iPod searching customs officials by excluding personal baggage that contains goods of a non-commercial nature. The U.S. is pushing for broad provisions that cover import, export, and in-transit shipments.

The proposals call for provisions that would order authorities to suspend the release of infringing goods for at least one year, based only on a prima facie claim by the rights holder. Customs officers would be able to block shipments on their own initiative, supported by information supplied by rights holders. Those same officers would have the power to levy penalties if the goods are infringing. Moreover, the U.S. would apparently like a provision that absolves rights holders of any financial liability for storage or destruction of the infringing goods.

...

The Criminal Enforcement proposals make it clear that the U.S. would like ACTA to go well beyond cases of commercial counterfeiting. Indeed, their proposal would extend criminal enforcement to both (1) cases of a commercial nature; and (2) cases involving significant willful copyright and trademark infringement even where there is no direct or indirect motivation of financial gain. In other words, peer-to-peer file sharing would arguably be captured by the provision. The treaty would require each country to establish a laundry list of penalties - including imprisonment - sufficient to deter future acts of infringement. Moreover, trafficking in fake packaging for movies or music would become a criminal act as would unauthorized camcording.

Now, it may well be that the EU is fighting tooth and nail against the intrusive border control measure, and the criminalisation of P2P file sharing – both of which would certainly “limit civil liberties” and “harass” consumers. But the best way for the EU to demonstrate its bona fides would be to bring the negotiations out into the open.

It is clear that the scope of this treaty is far reaching: indeed, there is a clear attempt to use it to slip in very powerful clauses that would over-ride national and international legislation. This is simply unacceptable. Moreover, if it turns out that the EU is *not* fighting the above moves, it is nothing short of scandalous that it should be acting in such a duplicitous fashion over ACTA – in which case, those responsible for following this course should be called on to resign.

Why Copyright, O Canada?

Over on the Open Enterprise blog, I have been extolling the virtues of James Boyle's new book, The Public Domain. I still urge you to read it (freely available here), but recognise that not everyone has the time (or energy) to snuggle down with 300 pages of deep meditation on intellectual monopolies.

For those of you who want something a little more, er, oyster-like in terms of slipping down the cognitive gullet, can I also recommend this video from the irrepressible Michael Geist?

Although it's entitled "Why Copyright? Canadian Voices on Copyright Law", and it's largely about the battle to stop Canada making the same mistakes as the US (and Europe) by bringing in its own DMCA, the issues it raises apply around the world. And it's refreshing to hear all the old arguments I and others have been peddling for a while from a fresh bunch of talking heards.

More Unspeakable Acts

Michael Geist has been warning about this for a while, and now the beast is out:

Today the Government of Canada introduced long-overdue and much-needed amendments to the Copyright Act that will bring it in line with advances in technology and current international standards.

"Our government has committed to ensuring Canada's copyright law is up to date, and today we are delivering by introducing this "made-in-Canada" bill that balances the interests of Canadians who use digital technology and those who create content," said the Honourable Jim Prentice, Minister of Industry. "It's a win-win approach because we're ensuring that Canadians can use digital technologies at home with their families, at work, or for educational and research purposes. We are also providing new rights and protections for Canadians who create the content and who want to better secure their work online."

The phrase "made-in-Canada" would be funny if it weren't so pathetic: this bill has been dictated down to the last comma by Hollywood, and it would be hard to imagine anything less "made-in-Canada". Moreover, despite the misleading stuff about "win-win", this is simply a loss for Canadians, as Geist explains:

1. As expected, Prentice has provided a series of attention-grabbing provisions to consumers including time shifting, private copying of music (transferring a song to your iPod), and format shifting (changing format from analog to digital). These are good provisions that did not exist in the delayed December bill. However, check the fine print since the rules are subject to a host of strict limitations and, more importantly, undermined by the digital lock provisions. The effect of the digital lock provisions is to render these rights virtually meaningless in the digital environment because anything that is locked down (ie. copy-controlled CD, no-copy mandate on a digital television broadcast) cannot be copied. As for every day activities like transferring a DVD to your iPod - those are infringing too. Indeed, the law makes it an infringement to circumvent the locks for these purposes.

2. The digital lock provisions are worse than the DMCA. Yes - worse. The law creates a blanket prohibition on circumvention with very limited exceptions and creates a ban against distributing the tools that can be used to circumvent. While Prentice could have adopted a more balanced approach (as New Zealand and Canada's Bill C-60 did), the effect of these provisions will be to make Canadians infringers for a host of activities that are common today including watching out-of-region-coded DVDs, copying and pasting materials from a DRM'd book, or even unlocking a cellphone.

While that is the similar to the U.S. law, the exceptions are worse. The Canadian law includes a few limited exceptions for privacy, encryption research, interoperable computer programs, people with sight disabilities, and security, yet Canadians can't actually use these exceptions since the tools needed to pick the digital lock in order to protect their privacy are banned. In other words, check the fine print again - you can protect your privacy but the tools to do so are now illegal. Dig deeper and it gets worse. Under the U.S. law, there is mandatory review process every three years to identify new exceptions. Under the Canadian law, its up to the government to introduce new exceptions if it thinks it is needed. Overall, these anti-circumvention provisions go far beyond what is needed to comply with the WIPO Internet treaties and represents an astonishing abdication of the principles of copyright balance that have guided Canadian policy for many years.

So far, so bad - and pretty much expected. But what struck me was the following gratuitous comment at the end of the press release:

These amendments to the Copyright Act are part of the government's broader intellectual property strategy, which includes the recent amendments to the Criminal Code to combat movie piracy and the announcement that Canada will work with other international trading partners towards a possible Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA).

In other words, all this stuff is just a prelude to the even more Draconian, even less democratic ACTA which is beetling towards us. Time to start protesting, people....

O(SS) Canada! Our Home and Native Land!

Some impressive official stats about open source use in Canada:

"Open source" software is rising in popularity, according to survey data. Open source software is software for which the underlying source code is readily available for modification by any interested person or firm.

In 2007, an estimated 17% of private sector firms reported using open source software, up from about 10% just two years earlier, when this practice was first measured.

As in previous years, about one-half of organizations in the public sector reported using open source software in 2007.

An advantage of open source software is flexibility, allowing users to customize or modify the software to their specific needs. In 2007, 3% of private firms and 13% of public organizations reported customizing open source software.

That's damn good growth: 10% to 17% in just two years.... (Via Michael Geist.)

Michael Geist on a Misleading Microsoft

The Hill Times this week includes an astonishingly misleading and factually incorrect article on Canadian copyright written by Microsoft.

So says Canadian Copyright Crusader Michael Geist.

Why is that interesting? Because it shows that Microsoft regards copyright as within its purview. Which also indicates why people in the open source world need to stand up for copyright rights around the world: it's all connected.

P2P'ers (Heart) CDs

Imagine:

A newly study commissioned by Industry Canada, which includes some of the most extensive surveying to date of the Canadian population on music purchasing habits, finds what many have long suspected (though CRIA has denied) - there is a positive correlation between peer-to-peer downloading and CD purchasing.

So tell me again why the music industry is pursuing the P2P crowd with such ferocity? Death wish, perhaps?

Tragedy of the (Music Score) Commons

Here's Wikipedia's info about the International Music Score Library Project (IMSLP):

a project for the creation of a virtual library of public domain music scores, based on the wiki principle. Since its launch on February 16, 2006, more than 15000 scores, for 9000 works, by over 1000 composers (as of October 2007) were uploaded, making it one of the largest public domain music score collections on the web. The project used the popular MediaWiki software.

A kind of Project Gutenberg for music - a digital commons, in other words, lovingly put together by hundreds, maybe thousands of volunteers, for the greater good.

And here's what has happened:

On Saturday October 13, 2007, I received a second Cease and Desist letter from Universal Edition. At first I thought this letter would be similar in content to the first Cease and Desist letter I received in August. However, after lengthy discussions with very knowledgeable lawyers and supporters, I became painfully aware of the fact that I, a normal college student, has neither the energy nor the money necessary to deal with this issue in any other way than to agree with the cease and desist, and take down the entire site. I cannot apologize enough to all IMSLP contributors, who have done so much for IMSLP in the last two years.

This tragic situation arises because of the discrepancy in copyright terms: what is in the public domain in Canada (where IMSLP is hosted) may still be in copyright in Europe (where Universal Edition is based). But trying to impose European terms on Canadian content is clearly wrong, as Michael Geist rightly points out:

As for a European infringement, if UE is correct, then the public domain becomes an offline concept, since posting works online would immediately result in the longest single copyright term applying on a global basis. That can't possibly be right. Canada has chosen a copyright term that complies with its international obligations and attempts to import longer terms - as is the case here - should not only be rejected but treated as copyright misuse.

Remind me never to buy a score from Universal Edition again.

MPAA Jets in To Spread Some Cinematic Fantasy

When are these people going to get a clue?

Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) president Dan Glickman is today lobbying UK film minister Margaret Hodge, advisers to prime minister Gordon Brown and the UK Film Council to make camcorder recording in cinemas a criminal offence, FT.com reports.

I have no time for idiots who try to record films in cinemas - but they aren't the problem. As Michael Geist noted, when he was rebutting a similar attempt to force stupid laws on Canada, earlier research has shown it's mostly the film industry itself that is to blame:

77% of these samples appear to have been leaked by industry insiders. Most of our samples appeared on file sharing networks prior to their official consumer DVD release date. Indeed, of the movies that had been released on DVD as of the time of our study, only 5% first appeared after their DVD release date on a web site that indexes file sharing networks, indicating that consumer DVD copying currently represents a relatively minor factor compared with insider leaks.

Criminalising the use of camcorders will simply be one more stupid piece of legislation, one more thing the police and legal system don't need, and one more paranoid response to a non-problem.

So MPAA, do us all a favour: save your fantasy world-views for the silver screen.

Copyright Done Right(er)

Meanwhile, back in the real world:

The Government has proposed a change to the damages available under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, ruling out the possibility of the award of punitive damages in civil cases of copyright infringement.

...

The Government has long considered punitive damages more appropriate to criminal law. "[The] aim of civil law should be to provide compensation for loss, not to punish the defendant," said the paper.

Amazing. Kudos to the UK Government. (Via Michael Geist.)

OECD on UCC

That's user-created content to you. A big, rather dry, but useful report on said. (Via Michael Geist.)

A Lot of Copyright Whatnot

A superb example of how cavalier proponents of intellectual monopolies can be with figures:

Leaving aside the rhetoric, what is particularly remarkable about these comments is the claim that Canadian copyright law is costing the economy between $10 to $30 billion per year. Obviously any estimate that varies by up to $20 billion is not particularly credible. Further, even the low end figure looks ridiculous as it is four times the losses claimed by the MPAA in China and is more than three times the total amount of cultural goods that Canada imports from the U.S. every year. Or considered another way, the $10 billion figure is more than the Finance Minister committed yesterday to new health care initiatives, the environment, education, and special services for armed forces veterans combined. And that is the low end - the $30 billion figure represents nearly 13 percent of total government revenues and nearly equals the total amount of provincial transfers and subsidies. All of this from "a lot of counterfeiting of movies and songs and whatnot?"

Public Domain Day

An interesting list of works that have come into the public domain this year - in some places, depending on how idiotic the term of copyright is (50 years after death, 70 years etc.).

Bad to see the UK doing so badly:

Even more sadly, in the United Kingdom, where millions of pages of archival documents on Canada and other former British possessions are held, not one will be public domain, no matter how old it is or when its author (if known) died, until January 1, 2039.

"Only" 32 years to go.... (Via Michael Geist's Blog.)

Hold the Front Page

This is rather impressive in its way:

The TAB is owned by GateHouse Media, a newspaper conglomerate that owns 75 daily and 231 weekly newspapers. And the TAB isn’t the only paper that got a silver CC badge this week. Without fanfare, the company is rolling out Creative Commons licenses covering nearly all of the 121 dailies and weeklies they own in Massachusetts. The CC license now covers 96 of the company’s TownOnline sites, which are grouped within a portal for their many Eastern Massachusetts newspapers.

CC for 96 newspapers? Go, Larry, go. (Via Michael Geist's Blog.)

The Parallel Politics of Copyright and the Environment

One of the ideas that I've been banging on about on this blog is the commonality of the commons - how entirely disparate areas like open content and the atmosphere have much in common. Of course, I didn't invent this meme, and there are plenty of others out there helping to push it. The latest I came across was Michael Geist, with a piece on this idea from a Canadian viewpoint.

The Death of WIPO?

I barely dared hope that the recent events at WIPO marked a significant moment, but here's someone rather better qualified than I am to comment. Let's hope.