Governments Have Political Agendas? Surely Not

This interview about the EU's intervention on the Oracle-Sun deal made me chortle:

Q: What is the motivation for the EC itself?

Weiss: We have a pretty common position in Gartner that there is either a misunderstanding or lack of knowledge on the part of the EC where it feels open source can be used as a competitive threat in the market. ... That commission is there to protect the European vendors and opportunities for European common market members. There are vendors with databases that would find Oracle an intimidating presence and may be competing with Oracle not only on the database level but also on the applications level.

Feinberg: It's a political agenda. And although it's pretty strong, for a lack of better term it is the re-emergence of protectionism by a governing body of some organization. The EU is looking for how it can protect the companies in Europe.

I see, so what they're saying is that the EU has a political agenda, and is trying to protect companies in Europe. And this would be different from what the US does, or Japan, or China, exactly *how*....?

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Why Gordon Brown is Not Turing Complete

Thousands of people have come together to demand justice for Alan Turing and recognition of the appalling way he was treated. While Turing was dealt with under the law of the time and we can’t put the clock back, his treatment was of course utterly unfair and I am pleased to have the chance to say how deeply sorry I and we all are for what happened to him.

Kudos to Gordon Brown for at last apologising to the memory of this poor man. Or at least partial kudos, since he doesn't quite seem to have taken those words fully to heart.

If we wish to render some justice to Turing, there would be no better way than to ensure the preservation of Bletchley Park, perhaps the central theatre of his work, as a monument to him, and to the thousands of others involved in the early years of code-breaking and computing in this country. If Gordon Brown is sincere in his apology, and these are to be more than a politician's easy words, he should make that happen now.

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Marriage Made in Hell: FOI+DRM

This is not as it's supposed to be:

Secretive management at Southampton University are undermining the spirit of Freedom of Information (FOI) laws, if not necessarily contravening the letter.

Reg reader and founder of website publicwhip, Francis Irving, draws our attention to a fairly innocuous request to the University requesting details of the "total amount received by the purchase of printer credit at the University of Southampton for the academic years 2006/7, 2007/08 and 2008/09".

Hardly earth-shattering information. The author of the request, Adam Richardson, was therefore very surprised to receive back from the University – about a month later than the law suggests – a copy-protected PDF document, which requires the recipient to swear that they are indeed the person who made the FOI request before viewing the rest of the document.

...

In addition to these technological barriers, the University also adds an "Intellectual Property Rights Notice" which would appear to be a direct contravention of the law in this area. They claim to "reserve all intellectual property rights" in respect of material provided under the FOI request. The material may not be further used without the "written permission of the University".

They're claiming what? - intellectual monopolies on the facts? Talk about being true to the spirit of the law....

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BBC Worldwide Merging with Microsoft?

Against this background:

BBC Worldwide’s digital sales and business development head Peter Mercier is leaving to be Microsoft’s content acquisitions and strategy senior director - the latest in the revolving HR door between the two companies.

...

BBCWW hired Mercier from MobiTV as head of mobile in 2007 before he got a wider digital role in ‘08. Ashley Highfield left as CEO of BBCWW’s Kangaroo JV last year. Microsoft’s UK online services group VP Chris Dobson went the other way to be BBCWW’s WVP and GM of global ad sales, leading BBC.com ad sales in particular; he later took two BBCWWers with him.

Rather than try to cover up the symbiotic relationship between the two organisations, wouldn't it just be simpler if they merged them together now? At least then there wouldn't be any pretensions of independence by the BBC Worldwide...

The Open Dinosaur Project

Now this is what I call open science:

Hello, and thanks for dropping by at the Open Dinosaur Project. This blog is part of a wider project, in which we hope — with your help — to make some science. We want to put together a paper on the multiple independent transitions from bipedality to quadrupedality in ornithischians, and we want to involve everyone who’s interested in helping out. We’ll get to the details later, but the basic idea is to amass a huge database of measurements of the limb bones of ornithischian dinosaurs, to which we can apply various statistical techniques. Hopefully we’ll figure out how these transitions happened — for example, whether ceratopsians, thyreophorans and ornithopods all made it in the same way or differently.

Who are “we”, I hear you ask. The core ODP team is Andy Farke (curator at the Raymond M. Alf Museum of Paleontology, Claremont, California), Matt Wedel (Western University of Health Sciences, Pomona, California) and Mike Taylor (University College London). We’re all researching and publishing scientists, specialising in dinosaurs — although up until now Matt and Mike have concentrated on sauropods.

As for who you are: if you care about dinosaurs, and want to make some science, then you can be involved. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a seasoned professional palaeontologist, a high-school kid or a retired used-car salesman: so long as you can conduct yourself like a professional, you’re welcome here.

And beyond this great idea, there's lots of practical stuff on the site about how it will done: this will clearly carry over to other projects, which makes it well worth studying for those contemplating similar collaborative open science projects. (Via @BoraZ.)

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Intellectual (Monopolies) Ventures

I've been avoiding this story about nathan Myhrvold's Intellectual Ventures using patent trolls as proxies because it's just beyond even the deepest irony, and thus immune to my pen. But then I came across this post that puts it so well, and I felt had to pass it on:

Until recently, one of the few points Myhrvold could make in his own favor is that he hadn’t started suing firms that declined to license his patent portfolio. I say “until recently” because we’re now learning that the lawsuits have started. IV has begun selling off chunks of its patent portfolio to people like Raymond Niro with well-deserved reputations for being “patent trolls.” Threatening to sell patents to a third party who will sue you is more subtle than threatening to sue you directly, but the threat is just as potent. Myhrvold’s “sales pitch” to prospective licensees just got a lot more convincing.

The fundamental question we should be asking about this business strategy is how it benefits anyone other than Myhrvold and the patent bar. Remember that the standard policy argument for patents is that they incentivize beneficial research and development. Yet IV’s business model is based on the opposite premise: produce no innovative products, spend minimal amounts on research and development, and make a profit by compelling firms that are producing products and investing in R&D to pay up. Not only does this enrich Myhrvold at everyone else’s expense, but it also reduces the incentive to innovate, because anyone who produces an innovative product is forced to share his profits with Intellectual Ventures. Patents are supposed to make innovation more profitable. Myhrvold is using the patent system in a way that does just the opposite. In thinking about how to reform the patent system, a good yardstick would be to look for policy changes that would tend to put Myhrvold and his firm out of business.

That last line is an absolute killer.

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Someone Has a Man with a Red Flag Moment

This is so misguided:

Digital personal property (DPP) is an attempt to make consumers treat digital media like physical objects. For instance, you might loan your car to a friend, a family member, or a neighbor. You might do so on many different occasions and for different lengths of time. But you are unlikely to leave the car out front of your house with the keys in it and a sign on it saying, "Take me!" If you did, you might never see the vehicle again.

But that's the whole point about digital content: you *can* leave it out in front of your virtual house, and allow people to take it, because you *still* have a copy. It's non-rivalrous - that's it's amazing, wonderful, nature. Trying to make it rivalrous is like putting a mad with a red flag in front of a motor car because it goes too fast: it's *meant* to go fast.

And to those who riposte: What about the creators?, it's the usual answer. Being able to give away copies of your work freely is an opportunity, not a threat: it's called marketing, and it's cost has just gone down to nothing.

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In Praise of the Book Sprint

One of the things that I find fascinating about open source is the way it generates epiphenomena - things that don't really happen with conventional computing. Here's another one: the book sprint.

The event is another in the growing body of FLOSS Manuals Book Sprints, kicked off by our first meeting to write a manual for Inkscape. The aim of these sprints is to write a book in 5 days. Actually, we have done it it in shorter time – in February of this year we wrote a 260 page manual introducing newbies to the Command Line in 2 days. Though created quickly, these books are extremely well written texts: comprehensive, readable, and complete.

Needless to say, as well as being about free software, these creations are imbued with its spirit:

A 220 page manual in 5 days - not bad. And it's all free, libre and gratis. Some of the material is also now being translated by the FLOSS Manuals Finnish community, and we hope more translations will follow.

Present at the sprint was myself (Adam Hyde, founder of FLOSS Manuals), Jan Gerber (ffmpeg2theora developer), Jörn Seger (Ogg Tools developer), Holmes Wilson (FSF Campaigns manager) and Theora geeks Susanne Lang and David Kühling. A few popped in remotely to help out, for which we are always grateful – notably Silvia Pfeiffer and Ogg K.

In the end we have free documentation that you can read online, download as a PDF, or log in and improve. It's also available in dead tree format for those who'd like it on their shelf.

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Lies, Damned Lies and Media Industry Numbers

A few months back, I wrote about how some figures quoted in the "Copycats" report produced by University College London's CIBER for the UK governmnent's Strategic Advisory Board for Intellectual Property Policy were based on nothing more than wishful thinking by the media industries. You would have thought that having been caught red-handed once, they might have stuck to the truth. It seems not:

The British Government's official figures on the level of illegal file sharing in the UK come from questionable research commissioned by the music industry, the BBC has revealed.

Specifically, we're talking about that emotive "7 million people" that are engaged in allegedly illegal file sharing:

As if the Government taking official statistics directly from partisan sources wasn't bad enough, the BBC reporter Oliver Hawkins also found that the figures were based on some highly questionable assumptions.

The 7m figure had actually been rounded up from an actual figure of 6.7m. That 6.7m was gleaned from a 2008 survey of 1,176 net-connected households, 11.6% of which admitted to having used file-sharing software - in other words, only 136 people.

It gets worse. That 11.6% of respondents who admitted to file sharing was adjusted upwards to 16.3% "to reflect the assumption that fewer people admit to file sharing than actually do it." The report's author told the BBC that the adjustment "wasn't just pulled out of thin air" but based on unspecified evidence.

The 6.7m figure was then calculated based on the estimated number of people with internet access in the UK. However, Jupiter research was working on the assumption that there were 40m people online in the UK in 2008, whereas the Government's own Office of National Statistics claimed there were only 33.9m people online during that year.

If the BPI-commissioned Jupiter research had used the Government's online population figures, the total number of file sharers would be 5.6m. If the researchers hadn't adjusted their figures upwards, the total number of file sharers would be only 3.9m - or just over half the figure being bandied about by the Government.

I don't want to focus on the way the government supinely relies on the media industry for its "data", or the fact that the media industry continues to resort to these fabricated figures to justify its insane actions. Instead, I'd like to look at two other aspects.

First, let's give some kudos to the BBC for deciding to investigate these figures. At a time when the BBC is under attack (a) from interested parties like James Murdoch for daring to exist, and from (b) trouble-makers like me over its weak coverage of the computing sector, it's great to see some great reporting from it.

But what I really want to underline here is the own goal scored by the content industries. The more plausible 3.9 million figure mentioned above would have served their purposes admirably: it's quite big, and so is "shocking" enough. By foolishly going for the 7 million figure, the media moguls have dug their own grave.

By quoting that number, they are effectively saying a vast swathe of the UK population is engaged in that activity. And as history teaches us, when such a vast proportion of a nation is doing something that is technically breaking the law, this shows not that these people are bad, but that such a law is self-evidently unjust to that nation.

So, whether we believe it or not, we should use this 7 million figure, and throw it back in the face of the media industries as proof that they are totally alienated from their customers. And based on that, we should invite them either to show that they do indeed care about such people by changing their approach radically, or at least frankly to admit what seems obvious to any dispassionate observer: that they actually hate their customers for revealing them to be liars, bullies, cheats and fools.

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Needlessly Needling Neelie

Predictably, the EU's announcement that it would be conducting an "in-depth investigation into proposed takeover of Sun Microsystems by Oracle" has led to a certain amount of mouth-frothing from the free-market side. I don't want to comment on that aspect, since it's as much about political viewpoints as economic analysis, and talking about politics always ends in tears. But I'd just like to point out one interesting detail of Neelie Kroes's statement:

“The Commission has to examine very carefully the effects on competition in Europe when the world's leading proprietary database company proposes to take over the world's leading open source database company."

What's interesting here is that Kroes is juxtaposing proprietary and open source. Now, for you and me, this is reflexive, but for the EU's Competition Commissioner to be framing an extremely contentious intervention in these terms seems pretty stunning to me. It implies that the difference between those two worlds has been interiorised by at least some senior politicians to such an extent that they are using it as a central part of their analysis in major decisions, *without* feeling the need to justify that approach. Whatever your views on other aspects of the decision, I think Kroes deserves some credit for getting to that point.

More importantly, it basically means we're winning, people.

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Good Thoughts on Naughty Lord Mandelson

One of the heartening things about the disheartening three-strikes saga currently playing out in the UK is the quality of the opposition that has provoked. I've already tweeted today about Cameron Neylon's splendid polemic - written with a rigour that only a scientist can provide - which I strongly urge you to read.

Meanwhile, here's an important point made by Monica Horten:

What he [Lord M.] doesn't get is that the Internet is not an entertainment system. It is a public communications network. The powers that he could acquire have serious implications for civil liberties, in particular for freedom of speech. Under the UK's own Human Rights Act, freedom of speech may only be restricted where there is a genuine public interest objective, and any measures must be specific and limited.

I think this goes to the heart of the problem with Lord Mandelson's intervention: he thinks the Internet is like radio or television, and does not appreciate how much bigger it is than that. As Horten points out, the UK's Human Rights Act may well provide the coup de grâce to his plans.

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Microsoft Teaches Pupils About Lock-in

I'm amazed Microsoft hasn't done this before:

Microsoft's Education Labs launched a new project this afternoon and it's better on trees and the environment. The group just announced a new Math Worksheet Generator where teachers can generate math problems and email them in paperless Word format to their students. In addition to Math Worksheet Generator, the group also announced plans for two additional projects to be released in the Fall.

Hard-pressed teachers will love this - and won't even notice that they are being turned into a vector for lock-in to Word (not that they aren't already). I predict we'll be seeing much more of this content-driven approach, whereby Microsoft makes people offers they can't refuse...provide they take King Billy's shilling.

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UK: Bye-Bye Biometrics

I missed this during the summer lull, but that handy invention, Twitter (in the form of Oliver Morton), has alerted me to this stunning take-down of the UK's Identity & Passport Service's plans to place biometric systems at the heart of its service:

Here at the end of the review, the adventitious question arises of why do politicians and civil servants all over the world continue to advocate the use of biometrics when the evidence simply doesn’t support them? There is no answer. Their behaviour is inexplicable.

One thing is clear, though, and that is that biometrics cannot deliver. Identification is not feasible. Verification is laughably unreliable. And the flat earther David Blunkett is wrong. So is Tony Blair when he says that “biometrics give us the chance to have secure identity”. And so is Gordon Brown when he says that biometrics “will make it possible to securely link an individual to a unique identity”.

The scale of the institutional fantasy which constitutes the NIS is grotesque. Biometrics cannot underpin the NIS and so, by IPS’s logic, the NIS cannot underpin the “interactions and transactions between individuals, public services and businesses”. Safeguarding Identity is a false prospectus – no properly managed stock exchange would allow its shares to be listed. The NIS is guaranteed to fail.

Assuming the many figures quoted in this detailed analysis are correct - and I have no reason to doubt that they are - I feel positively cheerful at the prospect of the total and utter collapse of this ill-advised and ill-thought-out scheme. It seems that the awesome laws of physics, if nothing else, will protect us against the awful laws of this demented and delusional government.

Is This a Wind-up?

A major British inventor is calling for a change in the law to strengthen protection against those who try to steal ideas.

Trevor Baylis, who invented the wind-up radio, has written to the business secretary urging him to criminalise the theft of intellectual property.

The move would involve a fundamental change to the law on patents.

Currently, inventors have to sue those they believe have stolen their idea through the civil courts.

For an apparently intelligent inventor, this is a rather foolish thing to suggest.

It's foolish on a theoretical level, as this quotation proves:

"If I was to nick your car, which is worth £10,000, say, I could go to jail," Trevor Baylis told the BBC.

"But if I were to nick your patent, which is worth a million pounds, you'd have to sue me.

Which is the old confusion between theft and infringement. Indeed, it's probably impossible to nick a patent, since it's a government-granted monopoly, and they're pretty hard to steal.

And it's foolish on a practical level: imagine the current insanity of patent law cases turned into even higher-stake criminal cases, and the burden they would imposed on an already stretched legal system.

So, Trevor, do stick to inventing clever things, and leave stupid intellectual monopolies alone.

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Microsoft Wants Patent Harmonisation...

...guess what kind:

Big challenges certainly confront the global patent system: Escalating patent application backlogs; lengthening pendency periods; increasing costs of patent prosecution; dubious patent quality due to the global explosion of prior art and the time allowed to examine applications; and examination inefficiency due to duplication of work by multiple offices.

But these challenges also present unprecedented opportunity. One of the biggest is the opportunity to advance patent harmonization.

...

The logical next step is to accelerate the work underway to align patent approval procedures and application formats, including a common digital application, and to collaboratively set standards for patentable subject matter, adequacy of disclosure and enablement requirements, and the completeness of the examination record. Bold action is needed.

Riiight: "bold" as in "infect the rest of the world with the insanity that is the US patent system" bold, I imagine - not forgetting software as "patentable subject matter" while we're at it.

Danke, aber nein, danke, Horacio.

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Copyright Reform Made Easy

As readers of this blog will have noticed, I'm not a big fan of intellectual monopolies like copyright or patents. For the former, I'd prefer a return to the original term of 14 years, or even less. But even I recognise that this is not going to be easy to achieve in the short term, so until there's an outbreak of mass sanity, we need a stopgap solution.

I was reminded of what that might be by the following post on Techdirt about orphan works:

the real shame is that the whole reason we need an orphan works bill in the first place is due to how screwed up copyright law has become since switching from a "formalities" approach to one where everything is automatically covered by copyright. Under the old system (pre-1976 Act in the US), in order to get a copyright, you had to register, and then at certain points, re-register it, to have and keep it covered by copyright. Thus, any such "orphan" works fell into the public domain after a short period of time -- and it worked fine. There was no "orphan works" problem, because those works that no longer that weren't being used for commercial purposes went into the public domain in a relatively short period of time. The most amazing thing, though, is that very few of those supporting orphan works legislation seem to recognize that the whole "problem" is one they made themselves by extending insanely long copyrights to pretty much everything.

At the time, I imagine one of the arguments against the system of re-registration was that it was cumbersome. But thanks to the wonders of the Web, such a system would be trivial to use: works could be registered online, and re-registered just as simply. It would take less than a minute. And to those who argued that even that was too much trouble, I'd suggest that the copyright clearly isn't really worth having.

In a way, it's self-selecting: if the copyright is still valuable, then copyright owners won't mind spending a minute renewing it every few years (I'd suggest every 14). If it isn't worth renewing, it will fall into the public domain. Those worried about "losing" their valuable copyright won't - because if it's so valuable they will renew it. So the only works that enter the public domain are the ones that no one cares enough about.

Of course, this is only a sticking-plaster solution, rather than a real fix, but it would avoid the absurd situation we have today of millions of works that are "protected" - that is, blocked - by copyright, with no one taking an active interest in them. And it would start to get away from the pernicious notion that everything comes with copyright by default: monopolies should be the exception, not the rule.

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Microsoft Impresses Itself Upon the Press

Roy Schestowitz has some astonishing documents up on his site that detail Microsoft's attempts to bend the press to its will:

Stephanie/Kate/Chuck, please find attached the PR response plan for the anticipated OSDL announcement. As discussed in our PR meeting this morning. David & I have spoken with Maureen O’Gara (based on go ahead from BrianV) and planted the story. She has agreed to not attribute the story to us. WaggEd actions include reviewing the positioning, review the proposed buddy mail, review Q&As, etc.

As well as the details of this "planting", there's also a fascinating list of journos and whether they are "negative" or "neutral" towards Microsoft. I'm not included in the list, so it looks like I'll never know what Microsoft think of my writing....

James Murdoch is Confused

Two quotations from James Murdoch's speech at the Edinburgh International Television Festival:

So talking about a coming digital future, or a digital transformation, is to ignore the evidence that it has already happened. Why do I think we are getting this wrong? Why do I believe we need to change direction as a matter of urgency? It’s quite simple. Because we have analogue attitudes in a digital age.

GoGot that? "Analogue attitudes in a digital age." Now try this:

We don’t even have the basics in place to protect creative work. Whether it’s shoplifting at HMV or pirating the same movie online, theft is theft.

Er, what was that about analogue attitudes in a digital age, James....?

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Defending the Digitised Public Domain

The European Commission has published a review of the Europeana digital library (remember that?). There's one critically important section, which touches on the hot issue of digitising public domain content:

Much of the material accessible in digital format through Europeana is in the public domain; this means it is not or no longer covered by copyright and can in principle be accessed and used by all. This material is an important source of re-use by citizens and companies alike and a driver of creativity in the internet age. For this reason, the Commission has underlined the need to keep "public domain works accessible after a format shift. In other words, works in the public domain should stay there once digitised and be made accessible through the internet".

In practice this is not always the case. While some of the cultural institutions explicitly indicate that the material they bring into Europeana is in the public domain, others claim rights on the digitised copies and/or charge for downloads. A few institutions apply watermarks and, in one case, viewing the material in a reasonable size is subject to payment. The different practices reflect the wide range of approaches across the EU, which are sometimes dictated by increasing pressure on cultural institutions to raise direct income from the assets they hold. Requiring payment for digitised public domain works also reflects the fact that digitisation has a cost. At the same time it seriously limits the cultural and economic potential of the material.

From a legal point of view the question is whether digitisation in itself creates new rights. Normally this would not be the case. However, the level of originality needed for the creation of copyright is not harmonised at European level, so the answer to the question may differ from one Member State to another.8 It may also vary for different types of digitisation (for example the scanning of books is not the same as costly 3D rendering of objects).

The issue of principle is whether it is acceptable to lock up public domain material that has been digitised with public money by public institutions instead of turning it into a pervasive asset for the information society. The latter approach is in line with the Community policy on the re-use of public sector information, as well as the OECD Ministerial Recommendation on Enhanced Access and More Effective Use of Public Sector Information.9 This issue is essential for the functioning of Europeana, since in its conditions of use the site follows the policies of the contributing institutions.

Similar issues arise when public institutions grant exclusive arrangements to private firms for the digitisation and exploitation of their unique public domain assets in exchange for material advantages. Such arrangements risk locking up public domain content, but in some cases they may be the only way to finance digitisation. This dilemma was expressed by the High Level Group on Digital Libraries in its report on public private partnerships for digitisation. The Group recommended that "public domain content in the analogue world should remain in the public domain in the digital environment. If restrictions to users’ access and use are necessary in order to make the digital content available at all, these restrictions should only apply for a time-limited period."

This is a crucially important issue. At the moment, some publishers are trying to create a new copyright in public domain materials just because they have been digitised. This is not only absurd, but threatens to nullify much of the huge potential of turning analogue knowledge into digital form. The European Commission deserves praise for highlighting this danger: now it needs to do something about it by passing legislation that settles the issue once and for all. (Via At last ... the 1709 Copyright Blog.)

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Fon and Games with "Three Strikes"

Interesting:

BT’s wifi network has reached half a million hotspots. Fon has made a major contribution toward its growth, since about 90% of the BT hotspots are BT Fon. The rate of growth is such that, together with BT, we are on the way to one million hotspots. This is the goal for February 2010.

Suppose, now, that people use some of those million hotspots to download copyright material: how easy is it going to be (a) establishing exactly who downloaded it and (b) cutting off that person?

Gives a new meaning to the term "hotspot"...

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RMS: 1, Symbolics: 0

Symbolics probably doesn't mean much to you, but it should. It was the main reason that Richard Stallman started the GNU project.

You can read the full story in Rebel Code - or, if by some mischance, you don't have the book to hand, in this speech by RMS. But to summarise an extremely complex tale, at first, Stallman fought Symbolics directly by matching their (proprietary) code with his own, which he gave to a rival; but later he realised that this was not really a sensible way of helping people to use and share software freely:

Once I stopped punishing Symbolics, I had to figure out what to do next. I had to make a free operating system, that was clear — the only way that people could work together and share was with a free operating system.

At first, I thought of making a Lisp-based system, but I realized that wouldn't be a good idea technically. To have something like the Lisp machine system, you needed special purpose microcode. That's what made it possible to run programs as fast as other computers would run their programs and still get the benefit of typechecking. Without that, you would be reduced to something like the Lisp compilers for other machines. The programs would be faster, but unstable. Now that's okay if you're running one program on a timesharing system — if one program crashes, that's not a disaster, that's something your program occasionally does. But that didn't make it good for writing the operating system in, so I rejected the idea of making a system like the Lisp machine.

I decided instead to make a Unix-like operating system that would have Lisp implementations to run as user programs. The kernel wouldn't be written in Lisp, but we'd have Lisp.

As well as provoking the creation of the free software movement, Symbolics has another claim to fame: it was the first registered domain name. Amazingly, only now is that name leaving its original owner:

Did you know the first .com domain name that was ever registered was Symbolics.com, on the 15th of March 1985 by the now defunct Massachusetts-based computer manufacturer Symbolics?

While the first that was created in January of that same year was Nordu.net (used to serve as the identifier of the first root server, nic.nordu.net), symbolics.com was the first domain name to actually be registered through the appropriate DNS process a few months later. This was of course long before there was a WWW, but you already had ‘the Internet’. In fact, the first TCP/IP-based wide-area network had already been operational for two years when nordu.net was created, right around the time the United States’ National Science Foundation (NSF) commissioned the construction of the legendary NSFNET, a university 56 kilobit/second network backbone. Only six companies thought it’d be a good idea to reserve the domain name on the root servers in 1985 (the others were bbn.com, think.com, mcc.com, dec.com and northrop.com). But Symbolics was first to make the move.

Remarkably, Symbolics.com hasn’t changed ownership once during the nearly 25 years that followed its initial registration. Marking an end to that era, domain name investment company XF.com Investments has just purchased the domain name for an undisclosed sum.

It's pretty extraordinary how all these trailblazing events were tied up together back then; pretty strange, too, how distant they all seem. And, of course, good for the world that ultimately it was RMS that won.

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UK Surveillance Fails? Solution: Use More

This is so rich. The Criminal Records Bureau (CRB) is becoming less and less useful as it produces more and more errors; these arise in part because the CRB is getting far too big to be manageable as the insanely authoritarian UK government tries to get as many people as possible on it (currently 11 million and counting).

So what's the solution to having a broken system of surveillance? Use another one even more intrusive and even less useful:

Millions could be asked to provide ID card and fingerprint data to get a job under new systems being developed by the Home Office following a collapse in the accuracy of background checks.

News of the plans emerged in the response to a Register Freedom of Information Act request to the Criminal Records Bureau (CRB). Today campaigners warned it could be used to help impose ID cards through the back door.

The way that one failure is used to justify an even bigger one would be funny if it weren't so serious. Roll on the General Election...

UK "Three Strikes": Please Write to Your MP

Yesterday I wrote a quick analysis of the insane U-turn effected by the UK government over "three strikes and you're out". Below I've posted the corresponding letter that I've sent to my MP on the subject. I urge you to do the same if you're a Brit, since it's the only way we have of influencing the situation. I'm not holding my breath waiting for a result, but I feel it's my duty....

I am writing to express my deep disquiet at the UK government's U-turn over disconnecting those accused of sharing copyright materials on the Internet.

For the eminently sane and well-balanced conclusions of Lord Carter and his Digital Britain team, based on many months of hard work, to be thrown away in this manner is extraordinary. In the place of a carefully-considered view that access to the Internet is a right not to be removed lightly, and that doing so on the say-so of media companies would be an inappropriate response to alleged copyright infringement, we now have a diktat from on high that proposes precisely this punishment.

As the indecent haste clearly demonstrates, this has not been thought through.

First, it is completely disproportionate. Cutting off people's Internet connection for allegedly swapping copyright materials is not just, any more than cutting someone's electricity supply would be for watching the TV without a licence, or cutting someone's water supply off would be for brewing illegal spirits.

Secondly, it represents a fundamental assault on due process in this country. If people can be cut off from the most important communication medium of the 21st century on the whim of media companies, who don't even need to prove their accusations in court, then things have reached a pretty sorry state in this country.

Thirdly, the approach won't work from a technical viewpoint. All it means is that the more tech-savvy will start encrypting their traffic; those who can't take this route will simply buy a few huge external hard discs – ones able to hold a quarter of a million songs cost around £50 these days – and swap files personally when they visit their friends.

Fourthly, the idea is at odds with European legislation. Amendment 138 of the Telecoms Package currently being finalised in Europe forbids the cutting off of users without judicial oversight. And that's even before the ISPs start taking legal advice on other ways in which it breaks relevant laws. Moreover, the European Court of Human Rights would probably have something to say about legislation that allows what Viviane Reding has explicitly called a “fundamental human right” (http://opendotdotdot.blogspot.com/2009/05/internet-access-is-fundamental-fight.html) to be taken away so easily.

What's particularly bizarre about this move is that those who will suffer the most are likely to be traditional Labour supporters. For it is the poor who cannot afford to pay for high-priced digital downloads, and may therefore look for material on P2P networks. It is the poor who may well share an Internet across several families using a wifi connection in a block of flats, for example. If one user is accused of swapping copyright materials, several families will be severely disadvantaged – hardly something that fits with Labour's historical mission to help precisely these people.

For all these reasons - assuming this truly is a consultation and not just another rubber-stamping – I urge you to join your colleague, Tom Watson (http://www.tom-watson.co.uk/2009/08/filesharing-revised-consultation/), in passing on to Lord Mandelson and Stephen Timms the comments of myself and others who may write to you on this subject.

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Another Reason for Open Access

Yet again, Cameron Neylon is daring to ask the unasked questions that *should* be asked:

Many of us have one or two papers in journals that are essentially inaccessible, local society journals or just journals that were never online, and never widely enough distributed for anyone to find. I have a paper in Complex Systems (volume 17, issue 4 since you ask) that is not indexed in Pubmed, only available in a preprint archive and has effectively no citations. Probably because it isn’t in an index and no-one has ever found it. But it describes a nice piece of work that we went through hell to publish because we hoped someone might find it useful.

Now everyone agreed, and this is what the PLoS ONE submission policy says quite clearly, that such a paper cannot be submitted for publication. This is essentially a restatement of the Ingelfinger Rule. But being the contrary person I am I started wondering why. For a commercial publisher with a subscripton business model it is clear that you don’t want to take on content that you can’t exert a copyright over, but for a non-profit with a mission to bring science to wider audience does this really make sense? If the science is currently unaccessible and is of appropriate quality for a given journal and the authors are willing to pay the costs to bring it to a wider public, why is this not allowed?

Why not, indeed? For as Neylon points out:

If an author feels strongly enough that a paper will get to a wider audience in a new journal, if they feel strongly enough that it will benefit from that journal’s peer review process, and they are prepared to pay a fee for that publication, why should they be prevented from doing so? If that publication does bring that science to a wider audience, is not a public service publisher discharging their mission through that publication?

Which is only possible, of course, in open access journals adopting a funder pays approach, since traditional publishers need to be able to point to the uniqueness of their content if they are trying to sell it - after all, why would you want to buy it twice? Open access journals have no such imperative, since they are giving it away, so readers have no expectations that the stuff is unique and never seen before.

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An Old Train of Thought

An analogy I and others frequently use in discussing the media industries' refusal to consider new business models is that of the transition to the motor car, particularly with reference to obsolete accoutrements for horse carriages. But I've just read an article from TorrentFreak that links to a rather interesting Wikipedia page about the Locomotive Act - the one that required a person to walk in front of a car with a red flag. It had this interesting paragraph:

Under pressure from motor car enthusiasts, including Coventry manufacturer Harry J. Lawson, the government introduced the Locomotives on Highways Act 1896, which became known as The Emancipation Act, which defined a new category of vehicle light locomotives, which were vehicles under 3 tons unladen weight. These vehicles were exempt from the 3 crew member rule, and were subject to the higher 14 mph (22 km/h) speed limit.[5] In celebration of the Emancipation Act Lawson organised the first London to Brighton run.

The relaxation of usage restrictions eased the way for the development of the British motor industry.

Nearly one and a half centuries later the motoring journalist and author L. J. K. Setright speculated that the Locomotive Acts were put in place to suppress motor car development in the United Kingdom, because of the financial interests that some members of government and other establishment personalities had in the development and viability of the railway industry.

So maybe a better analogy is motor cars and railways....

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