We Need This...

...like we need a hole in the head:

the European Commission wants the EU to bypass WIPO and the WTO and move forward on a new anticounterfeiting trade agreement (ACTA) made directly with key trading partners.

The goal is to strengthen the intellectual property protections so important to the EU, the US, Korea, Japan, and others. Despite formidable protection offered by WIPO treaties and WTO rules, the Commission announced today that it needs to do more to protect European business, in part due to the "speed and ease of digital reproduction" and "the growing importance of the Internet as a means of distribution."

I Was Wrong: Microsoft Won

I could feel it in my bones: the great victory of the EU over MS is a sham. Here's why.

Ex-steely Neelie - to be renamed wheeler-dealer Neelie - said as follows:

I told Microsoft that it should give legal security to programmers who help to develop open source software and confine its patent disputes to commercial software distributors and end users. Microsoft will now pledge to do so.

And naively, I thought that meant what it said. Silly me. Reference to the rather low-profile EU FAQ clarifies:

Can open source software developers implement patented interoperability information?

Open source software developers use various “open source” licences to distribute their software. Some of these licences are incompatible with the patent licence offered by Microsoft. It is up to the commercial open source distributors to ensure that their software products do not infringe upon Microsoft’s patents. If they consider that one or more of Microsoft’s patents would apply to their software product, they can either design around these patents, challenge their validity or take a patent licence from Microsoft.

WTF?!? "Some of these licences are incompatible with the patent licence offered by Microsoft" - what, you mean like - choosing totally at random - the GNU GPL, as used by Samba, the only program that really cares about Microsoft's damn protocols?

And let's not forget that this "patented interoperability information" isn't even valid in Europe, because you can't patent software or business methods or whatever you want to call this stuff. And yet the EU has just passed a quick benedictus on the whole bloody thing.

This is a total and utter cop-out, and confirms my impression that politicians are a total waste of skin. But don't take my word for it, read those of someone who understands what's going on far better than me, Pieter Hintjens, of the FFII:

I've watched the emerging deal between the EU and Microsoft over the last weeks with increasing skepticism. From the moment the ECJ decided that Microsoft was indeed guilty of abusing its dominant position, it seemed clear that the vendor was negotiating its way through the wet paper bag that the EU - indeed the global - anti-trust policy has become.

The EU Commission steps down in 2009, and any appeal would have taken three years at least, damning Kroes and her department to eternal infamy as the anti-trust team who could not get Microsoft to back down.

Now Kroes can retire with glory, and Microsoft has to start behaving. But as the Las Vegas saying goes, every game has a patsy, and if you don't know who the patsy is, chances are it's you.

Microsoft pays the EU its fine, plus additional costs. It's perhaps a month or two of net profit for the vendor. The EU gets its paper victory. And what about open source?

Read it, and weep.

Update: More analysis from Groklaw seems to confirm the details.

Oracle Users (Heart) MySQL

The Independent Oracle Users Group (IOUG) recently surveyed their members about open source and has now published their findings. A few highlights:
-More than one third of the respondents reported that they have deployed an open source database in production, which is a higher rate than for open source tools, frameworks or applications.
-Nearly three-quarters of that group have MySQL installed

Three-quarters? Wow. Bear in mind that MySQL, just like Linux before it, will become more powerful, nudging Oracle from underneath. Classic Innovator's Dilemma stuff. Maybe time to worry a little, eh Larry?

Microsoft Changes Its Tune....

This is too cool. How do you follow up C#? Why, with F#, of course....

Pity they spoil it by using a shared source licence, rather than going fully open source. (Via Ars Technica.)

Groklaw Begins to Grok the iPlayer

I've written pretty extensively about the scandal that is the BBC iPlayer. The main man fighting the good fight here is the indispensable Mark Taylor, and it's good to see that Groklaw has caught up with him and the iPlayer saga in this interview. Do read it to learn the terrifying twists and turns in this sorry tale.

Mighty Mozilla Maketh Mucho Moolah

Mozilla's revenues (including both Mozilla Foundation and Mozilla Corporation) for 2006 were $66,840,850, up approximately 26% from 2005 revenue of $52,906,602. As in 2005 the vast majority of this revenue is associated with the search functionality in Mozilla Firefox, and the majority of that is from Google.

It's also doing rather well on just about every other metric, as Mitchell's post "Beyond Sustainability" explains. Recommended reading.

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.

Blogging in Italy: Not La DolceVita

I love Italy - wonderful people, wonderful scenery, wonderful art, wonderful food, wonderful wine - well, you get the picture; but I do sometimes wonder about the politicians:

The Levi-Prodi law lays out that anyone with a blog or a website has to register it with the ROC, a register of the Communications Authority, produce certificates, pay a tax, even if they provide information without any intention to make money.

...

the Levi-Prodi law obliges anyone who has a website or a blog to get a publishing company and to have a journalist who is on the register of professionals as the responsible director.

99% would close down.

The lucky 1% still surviving on the Internet according to the Levi-Prodi law would have to respond in the case of the lack of control on defamatory content in accordance with articles 57 and 57 bis of the penal code. Basically almost sure to be in prison.

Cazzarola!

Update: A blogospheric firestorm seems to have brought the Italian government - some of it, at least - to its senses. Dio sia ringraziato.

Microsoft Opens Its Gritted Teeth

I didn't write about Microsoft's capitulation to steely Neelie earlier because the open source aspect seemed unclear. Trust Matthew Aslett to dig up the official details of her announcement:

I told Microsoft that it had to make interoperability information available to open source developers. Microsoft will now do so, with licensing terms that allow every recipient of the resulting software to copy, modify and redistribute it in accordance with the open source business model.

I told Microsoft that it should give legal security to programmers who help to develop open source software and confine its patent disputes to commercial software distributors and end users. Microsoft will now pledge to do so.

I worry that there's some wiggle room here - just what exactly is "the open source business model"? - but given the soundness of its thrashing, maybe Microsoft really has given up fighting the EU. Let's hope.

I suppose it's worth pointing out the huge symbolism of this win. Microsoft, a company built on black box nature of its code, and on using its proprietary interfaces to lock out competitors, has been forced to open up those interfaces - something that would have been unimaginable ten years ago. So deeply has openness now entered the system.

Open Content Alliance - Good, but not New....

Nice story in the New York Times about libraries choosing to go with the Open Content Alliance rather than that nice Mr. Google or Mr. Microsoft:

Several major research libraries have rebuffed offers from Google and Microsoft to scan their books into computer databases, saying they are put off by restrictions these companies want to place on the new digital collections.

The research libraries, including a large consortium in the Boston area, are instead signing on with the Open Content Alliance, a nonprofit effort aimed at making their materials broadly available.

Libraries that agree to work with Google must agree to a set of terms, which include making the material unavailable to other commercial search services. Microsoft places a similar restriction on the books it converts to electronic form. The Open Content Alliance, by contrast, is making the material available to any search service.

That's all jolly well and good, but what I can't understand is that the blogosphere is going nuts about this "new" initiative:

The Internet Archive, whose main claim to fame is the Wayback Machine, designed to archive the internet's web history, has created a new project: the Open Content Alliance.

Well, no, not as such:

The Open Content Alliance (OCA) represents the collaborative efforts of a group of cultural, technology, nonprofit, and governmental organizations from around the world that will help build a permanent archive of multilingual digitized text and multimedia content. The OCA was conceived by the Internet Archive and Yahoo! in early 2005 as a way to offer broad, public access to a rich panorama of world culture.

So founded in 2005; and as its press archive shows, it's hardly been dormant since then....

Update: More details from Da Man himself, Brewster Kahle, here.

Open Tesco?

Tesco may not be a name that means much outside the UK, but the fact that this huge retailer is selling GNU/Linux-based systems - some for as little as £140 (without a screen) - is pretty significant. After all, it's not hard to imagine lots of people seeing the price tag and buying one without really noticing that it doesn't have Windows, discovering that it doesn't matter that much (aside from games). (Via 451 CAOS Theory.)

Green...About the Gills

Well, that didn't last long:

Trolltech has discontinued its Linux-based "Greenphone" development platform. Touted upon its introduction as the first Linux-based mobile phone with user-modifiable firmware, the device will be superseded by various third-party products, including not only open phones, but also portable media players, navigation devices, and home automation equipment, the company says.

Out of the Mouth of Babes and Sucklings

Look, this content stuff is quite easy. It costs money to make a CD because it's a physical object, and if you take a CD from a shop, the shop no longer has it: that's stealing. It costs (virtually) nothing to make a digital file (electrons are cheap), and if you make a copy of a file, the original owner of that file still has a copy: that's not stealing (it may be copyright infringement, but that's another matter).

See, even nine-year-olds understand the difference:

TF. Do you think you should be paying for stuff off LimeWire? You have to buy CD’s from the shop…

- You have to pay for CD’s because they’re actually on a disc not on the computer. My cousin, right, she uses LimeWire when she doesn’t have any money for CDs.

Simple.

Trivial Defamation

One of the unanswered questions is to what extent web sites/blogs need to worry about defamatory postings made by their users. Here's a little legal sanity from the UK:

In a move sure to please football fans arguing the toss on bulletin boards all over the UK, a High Court judge has ruled that lively banter of a “strictly defamatory” nature can still be so trivial that The Man can’t always force board owners into revealing poster’s identities.

God bless pragmatism.

China Gets Wired

Indeed, it's possible that the restrictions on press reporting, both on- and offline, is actually spurring Internet use. In the first half of 2003, for example, during the SARS crisis, 9 million Chinese people went online for the first time, and almost 50% of users reported an increase in their Internet usage during SARS. Silencing the press anywhere is likely to pique interest, and despite the surveillance, China's Internet is still a place to sate such curiosity. As blogger Lian Yue said in a recent email interview with your correspondent, "For people who have even just a little Internet experience, you can pretty much get any information you want to know."

Just think about the implications of that last sentence....

Weekend Reading

Here are two online journals that may be of interest. Both, happily, are open access, so you can root around to your heart's content.

The first is the inaugural issue of the International Journal of the Commons. I have to declare a very tangential interest here in that they asked me to review a submitted paper: obviously my well-intentioned comments were devastating, since it's not included in the present issue...

The other journal is Innovations from MIT Press. This has an interesting mix of articles, including one by Cory Ondrejka on Second Life, and others on the Science Commons and Open-Sourcing Social Solutions.

Should We Tolerate Tolerated Use?

Although this article by Tim Wu came out a few days ago, I hadn't read it through until now; but I see that it's raising some fascinating questions about the *next* stage of the copyright battle, not least through Our Man in the Audience, Larry Lessig:

This spring, at the Max-Planck Institute in Bonn, Germany, I gave a talk on the phenomenon of tolerated use, and in the audience was Stanford professor Larry Lessig, a Thomas Jefferson figure in the information revolution. "So here's what I want to know," he asked. "Why should we tolerate tolerated use?" His point: If you care about free expression and the core reasons for our copyright law—i.e., protecting the artists—why would you put up with a system that makes something like fan art illegal and then tries to ignore the problem? Surely the right answer is to fight for reform of the copyright law: Have the law declare clearly that most noncommercial activities, like fan sites and remixes, are simply beyond the reach of the law.

In a sense, it's simple: laws that are ignored by hundreds of millions of people are, by definition, bad laws.

Update: If you enjoy Tim Wu's article, as I'm sure you will, why not give this rather meatier paper a whirl: it's a fascinating alternative history of copyright, and its "role in the regulation of competing disseminators."

The Dash of OpenMoko

What's Dash?

Dash Express is the smartest Internet-connected automotive navigation system on the road. In fact, it's the first and only navigation system with built-in two-way connectivity. Which means it gets you where you want to go—in the fastest time possible—and delivers the most relevant information—right to your dashboard. Plus, Dash Express is the only device on the market that automatically and wirelessly updates its software and features, so all you have to do is drive.

That's certainly cool, and presages things to come. But what's even cooler?

But when I asked about the hardware, and discovered that it was based on openmoko, the open source linux-based phone infrastructure, my ears really perked up. At bottom, this is a PHONE, and that tells us something very interesting about the future of the phone, with more and more devices with phone functionality that don't actually look or act like phones. It's also a full linux computer. Let your imagination be the guide.

This gives me a whole other perspective on openmoko. I had seen a couple of openmoko phone prototypes, and I thought, these are never going to get the fit and finish of commercial phones. But wow, does the Dash highlight the power of open source, allowing for innovation that you'd never expect.

Watch out for more devices made brilliant with a dash of OpenMoko.

Copyrighting Trees

No, that's not a metaphor (as in social graphs), but literally about people copyrighting trees:

Then there’s the Lone Cypress, a tree along California’s famous 17-Mile Drive. It’s probably the most infamous example of someone trying to exert ridiculous intellectual property rights. They must’ve made it sound like a good idea, though, because it seems that the idea of copyrighting trees is catching on.

And this promotes creativity?

DNA Vu

Now, where have I heard this before?

Today it costs only $300,000 to sequence a person's DNA, and the $100,000 benchmark is in sight. It's an information processing problem, he said. In other words, Moore's Law and genetics are tightly tied. It won't be long before your genome--and your likelihood to get various diseases, live long, be athletic, etc.--will be available in a standard medical test.

The implications for medicine, and its evil twin the insurance industry, are vast. Despite the privacy issues, Venter is in favor of transparency in genomics, so that, for example, you'll be able to "Google a date's DNA," as O'Reilly remarked. Scary? Sure. But "a good idea," Venter said. "Especially if you plan to have children."

Oh yes, I remember:

Consider a not-too-distant future in which personal genomes are readily available. For those with relations affected by a serious medical condition, this will conveniently provide them with any genetic test they need. But it will also offer the rest of us information about our status for these and other, far less serious, autosomal recessive disorders that might similarly manifest themselves in children if we married a fellow carrier.

A bioinformatics program running on a PC could easily check our genomes for all genes associated with the autosomal recessive disorders that had been identified so far. Regular software updates downloaded from the internet - like those for anti-virus programs - would keep our search software abreast of the latest medical research. The question is, how potentially serious does a variant gene's effects have to be for us to care about its presence in our DNA? Down to what level should we be morally obliged to tell our prospective partners - or have the right to ask about?

And just when is the appropriate moment to swap all these delicate DNA details? Before getting married? Before going to bed together? Before even exchanging words? Will there one day be a new class of small, wireless devices that hold our personal genomic profile in order to carry out discreet mutual compatibility checks on nearby potential partners: a green light for genomic joy, a red one for excessive recessive risks?

Given the daunting complexity of the ethical issues raised by knowing the digital code of life in detail, many may opt for the simplest option: not to google it. But even if you refuse to delve within your genome, there are plenty of others who will be keen to do so. Employers and insurance companies would doubtless love to scan your data before giving you a job or issuing a policy. And if your children and grandchildren have any inconvenient or expensive medical condition that they have inherited from one side of the family, they might like to know which - not least, to ensure that they sue the right person.

Under Slashdot's Bonnet

Everybody knows that Google runs on scadzillions of GNU/Linux boxes, but now we also know the details about Slashdot's Penguin power:

Slashdot currently has 16 web servers all of which are running Red Hat 9. Two serve static content: javascript, images, and the front page for non logged-in users. Four serve the front page to logged in users. And the remaining ten handle comment pages. All web servers are Rackable 1U servers with 2 Xeon 2.66Ghz processors, 2GB of RAM, and 2x80GB IDE hard drives. The web servers all NFS mount the NFS server, which is a Rackable 2U with 2 Xeon 2.4Ghz processors, 2GB of RAM, and 4x36GB 15K RPM SCSI drives.

Impressive what you can do with 16 boxes.

Microsoft's Monopoly: "Indisputably Resilient"

Well, well:

In what appears to be a surprise move, four state attorneys general who previously praised the effectiveness of Microsoft's antitrust settlement with the feds are now changing course.

In a nine-page court filing with U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly on Thursday, officials in New York, Maryland, Louisiana and Florida said they were joining a group of six states, led by California, and the District of Columbia in calling for extending oversight on Redmond until 2012.

And listen to this:

The New York group's filing centers largely on what it calls the "indisputably resilient" monopoly that Microsoft holds in the operating system realm. The attorneys general said they were "mindful" that Windows' approximately 90 percent market share in client operating systems is not the only test for how successful the antitrust agreement has been. But they added, "the absence of meaningful erosion in Windows' market share is still problematic for the public interest."

What a fine phrase that is: "indisputably resilient". I think I could really get to like using that....

Open Gaming Platform?

Rival gaming systems should make way for a single open platform, a senior executive at Electronic Arts has said.

Gerhard Florin said incompatible consoles made life harder for developers and consumers.

"We want an open, standard platform which is much easier than having five which are not compatible," said EA's head of international publishing.

Well, you've convinced me, squire.

UGC "Principles" - Ugh!

Here's a fatuous little document:

Copyright Principles for UGC Services

Leading commercial copyright owners (“Copyright Owners”) and services providing user-uploaded and user-generated audio and video content (“UGC Services”) have collaborated to establish these Principles to foster an online environment that promotes the promises and benefits of UGC Services and protects the rights of Copyright Owners.

Well, no, actually. All it does is codify the petnulant demands of the media industry, and lay bare their incomprehension of the brave new world in which they find themselves, darkling. There is no quid pro quo for users (except "principle" no. 6: When sending notices and making claims of infringement, Copyright Owners should accommodate fair use. - Well, that's jolly nice of them), and precious little for any "UGC" service that signs up.

The most interesting thing about this utterly pointless exercise in self-delusion is that Microsoft has signed up, and Google hasn't, which speaks volumes about their respective positions as far as "UGC" and the media industries are concerned. Curious, too, that the whole document is marked "©2007 Microsoft Corporation" as if Microsoft had written the whole thing....

Springer Told to Spring Off

Another fine example of a major research institution saying "basta" (or maybe "Es ist genug", since it's the Max Planck Society) to price gouging by scientific publishers:

Following several fruitless rounds of talks the Max Planck Society (MPG) has, effective January 1, 2008, terminated the online contract with the Springer publishing house which for eight years now has given all institutes electronic access to some 1,200 scientific journals. The analysis of user statistics and comparisons with other important publishing houses had shown that Springer was charging twice the amount the MPG still considered justifiable for access to the journals, the Society declared. "And that 'justifiable' rate is still higher than comparable offers of other major publishing houses," a spokesman of the Max Planck Digital Library told heise online.

Open access, here we come.