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At the end of last year, we wrote about an extraordinary attempt by the University of California (UC) to resuscitate the infamous "Eolas" patents that were thrown out
earlier by a jury in East Texas. Clearly, the University of California
likes patents, and the way that they can be used to extract money from
people with very little effort. In fact, it likes them so much it is
trying to privatize research produced by taxpayer-funded laboratories so
that even more patents can be taken out on the work, and even more
money obtained through licensing them. The background to this new approach,
implemented via a new entity provisionally entitled "Newco", is
described in a fantastic feature by Darwin BondGraham that appears in
East Bay Express:
On
Techdirt.
In the wake of the news that spies at GCHQ -- the UK equivalent of the NSA -- have been tapping
into every fiber optic cable that comes into and goes out of the
country, downloading and storing phone calls and Internet traffic for up
to 30 days, you might think the British authorities have enough
information at their disposal, without needing to turn to other sources.
But it seems not, according to the latest revelations in The Guardian:
On
Techdirt.
As we've noted before, when it comes to the Internet, governments around
the world have an unfortunate habit of copying each other's worst
ideas. Thus the punitive three-strikes approach based on accusations,
not proof, was pioneered by France, and then spread to the UK, South
Korea, New Zealand and finally the US (where, naturally, it became the
bigger and better "six strikes" scheme). France appears to be about to abandon this unworkable and ineffective approach, leaving other countries to deal with all the problems it has since discovered.
On
Techdirt.
It's hard to believe that the heady times that saw SOPA's rise and fall are only a year and a half ago. Of course, SOPA didn't die, but was merely "delayed". But if you've ever wondered what happened to it, wonder no more; it emigrated to Russia, as TorrentFreak reports:
On
Techdirt.
There finally seems to be a growing recognition in many countries that
copyright is not fit for the digital age. In the US, the Copyright Registrar
has spoken on this; in the UK, the Hargreaves Review delineated many
problems; and more recently, Australia, too, is starting to address the
question. As part of the process of implementing Hargreaves'
recommendations, the UK government is carrying out a consultation on
whether the UK should adopt the full list of copyright exceptions that
are laid out in the EU Copyright Directive, which provides the
overarching framework for copyright in Europe. It has now published some questionnaires seeking input in this area:
On
Techdirt.
It is extraordinary how companies have failed to grasp three basic facts
about DRM: that DRM only needs to be broken once, and it is broken
everywhere, thanks to the Internet; that DRM is always broken at
least once; and that once DRM is broken, anything still with that DRM is
effectively worth less than zero -- since copies freely available
online never have DRM. Despite these inconvenient truths, copyright
companies continue to hope that there is some magic technology that will
"protect" them from the pirates. Here's the latest forlorn attempt to do that, as reported by paidContent:
On
Techdirt.
Here on Techdirt we've had stories about how the ubiquity of digital cameras is changing the way we look at public events and art.
But as has also become clear, the ability to take photos of more or
less everything we see brings with it certain problems -- especially if
what we see are police.
So it was perhaps inevitable that the politicians would start to get
involved, in order to "solve" some of those problems. Here's a rather extreme example from Sweden, as reported by TechHive:
On
Techdirt.
Techdirt readers may recall that over three years ago, the UK's Digital Economy Act was passed in totally disgraceful
circumstances. Since then, almost nothing has been heard about it, as
British civil servants grapple with the fact that this poorly-drafted
law is almost impossible to implement in any sensible way. If you were
wondering what is going on behind the scenes, James Firth has put
together a fascinating post piecing together the information that he was
able to glean. The main point is that the UK's "three-strike" warning letters won't be going out for years:
On
Techdirt.
One of the problems with the debates around copyright and patents is
that they too often assume that intellectual monopolies are necessary in
order to promote innovation or even basic economic activity. But that
overlooks all kinds of domains where that's not true. In the field of
technology, free software and the other open movements based on sharing
are familiar examples of this kind of thing. Less well known so are the
so-called "informal economies" found in many parts of the world.
On
Techdirt.
So the revelations from Edward Snowden keep on coming, exposing
ever-more profound attacks on privacy and democracy in the UK and
elsewhere. News that GCHQ is essentially downloading, storing and searching
through the entire flow of Internet traffic that comes into and goes
out of the UK without any specific warrant to do so is one side of that.
That seems to be taking place through an extremely generous
interpretation of the out-of-date RIPA law
that is supposed to bring some level of accountability to just this sort
of thing. The fact that it doesn't shows that we must reform RIPA and make it fit for the Internet age.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
The last couple of weeks have been full of the revelations about NSA spying
on a massive scale. What has been slightly disconcerting is that the
agency and its defenders have essentially tried to argue that the spying
doesn't matter because it's only aimed at "foreigners". But that's us:
which means that we are the target of this spying, even if others get
caught up in it too.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
Irrespective of the details of the current revelations about US
spying being provided by Edward Snowden in the Guardian, there is
already a huge collateral benefit. On the one hand, the US government
is falling over itself to deny some of the allegations by offering its
own version of the story. That for the first time gives us official
details about programmes that before we only knew through leaks and
rumours, if at all. Moreover, the unseemly haste and
constantly-shifting story from the US authorities is confirmation, if
anyone still needed it, that what Snowden is revealing is important -
you don't kick up such a fuss over nothing.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
Remember the Digital Economy Act, surely one of the most disgraceful
episodes in recent British political history? It was "passed" back 2010
- I use inverted commas, since it was actually rammed through an almost
empty House of Commons in the guttering hours of the previous
government, with no scrutiny, riding roughshod over all those pointing
out it was both unjust and unworkable.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
The extraordinary revelations about the NSA's global spying programme Prism
have only just started - was it really just last Thursday that things
began? So it would be extremely rash to attempt any kind of definitive
statement about what is going on. But that doesn't preclude a few
preliminary comments, as well as initial thoughts on what action those
of us in Europe might take in response.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
It's been a while since I wrote about net neutrality, but of course
it's never gone away as an important theme. Indeed, it was inevitable
that it would start to rear its ugly head again, since so many powerful
companies have vested interests in destroying it. For example, in
Germany the telecom giant Deutsch Telekom (DT) has already made a move
to kill net neutrality by giving preference to its own IPTV platform. This has led to a heated debate about net neutrality in that country (for those who read German, the site hilf-telekom.de offers some hilarious satire of DT on the subject.)
On
Open Enterprise blog.
Mozilla and its central Firefox project are themes that I have
returned to often on this blog. That's not so surprising: Mozilla is
one of the oldest free software projects, starting back in 1998 when Netscape stunned the world by announcing that it would open up its key product, Netscape Navigator.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
"Law is the operating system of our society ... So show me the
manual!" Not alas, my witty words, but those found on the site
Public.Resource.Org, run by the redoubtable Carl Malamud.
The basic idea is simple: that laws can only be obeyed if they are
truly public, which means freely available, not hidden behind paywalls.
After all, how can the phrase "ignorance of the law is no excuse" have
any validity when key documents are only available to those with pockets
deep enough to afford them?And not just laws: we need case law and
associated government regulations too.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
I love the spring. Not, of course, because of the glorious weather,
since we don't have any. But because it's time for the annual BSA report
on piracy, which is guaranteed to provide me with hours of innocent fun
as I go through finding its methodological errors and dodgy data.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
I've written a number of posts looking at less-familiar advantages of
open source over closed source, and here's another one. Proprietary
systems can't be forked, which means that it's not possible to change
the underlying ethos, for example by tweaking the software or using code
on a different platform. But you can with open source, as this
interesting example shows.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
I've written
a few times about open data in the context of clinical trials - the
information that must be provided when new drugs seek approval. As I
noted, there is a growing movement
to make such basic safety data freely available, the idea being that it
could then be analysed by third parties, perhaps finding new
applications of drugs, overlooked problems, or even wilful concealing of adverse effects.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
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