Walk Like a Geek? Talk Like a Geek? Vote Geek

As you may have noticed, there's some kind of political thingy happening in a few weeks' time. Too often, the geek vote is simply ignored amid all the exictement. As readers of this blog will appreciate, that's wrong at many levels: there are lots of us and we know what we're talking about when it comes to technology (unlike most politicians).

Here's a fine initiative that wants to do something about that sad state of affairs. Called “Vote Geek”, it demands “Technocracy not Idiocracy”:

Welcome to Vote Geek, our mission is to find out where the candidates in the forthcoming UK General Election stand on issues of technology.

The website depends on your participation, we need you to write to your candidates and ask them what their views are on the issues that matter to you.

First find your constituency using the search or list of counties to the right. We are gathering information on the standing candidates and how to contact them, if it is incomplete or wrong then please leave a comment and it will be corrected. You can see what other people have written to the candidates and you can leave copies of letters you have written to them, plus any responses you get back.

Although this website is run by a bunch of Free and Open Source Software enthusiasts it is not here to tell you what to think, it is here to find out what the candidates think. If you think the Digital Economy Bill is a good thing for you then please do write to your candidates asking for their support and post the responses here. Which ever way they respond would be just as interesting as a response to someone with a negative opinion. It would of course be very interesting if a candidate’s views changed depending on how the question was asked!

This is a really great move, and the people behind it are to be commended for being both civic-minded and geeky. I urge everyone to pose some suitably burning questions relating to technology to their candidates and to post the results to this site. Speaking from personal experience, I know that these letters do have an impact, if only because they get candidates say something about technology, which requires at least some thought by them and/or their handlers. If enough of us do it, it will bring home to future MPs that technology is important and that geek power shouldn't be overlooked.

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The King of the Trolls Strikes Gold

Well, this is rather droll. The other day I was writing about the patent troll to end all trolls, Intellectual Ventures. And now we have this:

Patent #7,679,604 — “Method and apparatus for controlling a computer system” — the broad motion-control patent I’ve been writing about all week, has passed through a number of hands over the years. First assigned to ArrayComm in 2006, it was subsequently handed over to Durham Logistics, a limited liability company which is itself managed by another obscure Las Vegas LLC called Memscom. But there’s one more company at the end of that oblique line of ownership: Intellectual Ventures, an “invention capital firm” or patent troll, depending on your views on innovation and intellectual property.

On Open Enterprise blog.

Cameron as Future Avatar of Film Industry

For some months now, I've been touting "Avatar" as a good example of how the film industry should be concentrating on enhancing the experience of watching films *in the cinema* - something that no copied DVD can reproduce - thus making unauthorised copies pretty much into marketing devices that encourage people to go to the cinema for the full experience.

It seems that one person who gets this is James Cameron himself:

He said the music industry made a critical mistake by trying to stop piracy instead of innovating to give consumers new experiences that the industry could use to generate more money.

"The music industry saw it coming, they tried to stop it, and they got rolled over," he said. "Then they started suing everybody. And now it is what it is."

Instead, Cameron said he has tried to innovate to give movie goers a reason to go to theater. And in creating a rich, "reinvigorated cinema experience," Cameron said he discovered that people are willing to pay money to experience the same content in different ways. Not only are they willing to pay $10 or more to see Avatar on the big screen in 3D, but they also will pay to own the DVD and to take it with them on their phone or portable device.

"People are discriminating about the experience," he said. "They want to own it, have it on a iPhone when they want it, and they want the social experience of going to the cinema. These are really different experiences. And I think they can all co-exist in the same eco-system."

Cameron said the fact that people are still going to the theater to see Avatar now nearly four months after it was released supports his conclusion. He said he has had several discussions with the movie studio trying to figure out when to release the DVD of the movie. Typically DVD's are released after the film has left movie theaters. But he said since people are still going to see the movie in the theater, they decided to release the DVD next month with the movie still playing in some cinemas. The movie will also be available soon on iTunes.

What a perfect summary of what can be done, and what should be done. Let's hope Cameron is the future of cinema - at least in this respect.

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Digg for Democracy

Digg's pretty established these days as a way of crowd-sourcing newsgathering. How about applying the same idea to politics?

Lots of sites enable debate and voting over issues, but with Digital Democracy the site members have absolute authority over identifying, prioritising and voting on the issues. What's more, Digital Democracy has the power to enable participation of every British citizen in the process of democratic decision making.

Bit quiet at the moment,: perhaps someone should submit it to Digg...

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File-sharing and the War on the Internet

Yesterday I attended the Counter Conference:

The COUNTER Project (www.counter2010.org), funded under Framework 7 of the EU SSHRC Programme, is a two year multidisciplinary project exploring the economic, legal, consumer and cultural dynamics of counterfeiting, piracy and filesharing. It aims to generate new knowledge which will contribute towards the development of evidence-based policy making at the European, national and international level. The project emphasises that effectively addressing this complex area requires a variety of strategic multistakeholder actions which recognise the importance of understanding and engaging with the psychological, social and cultural dynamics of consumer behaviour.

On Open Enterprise blog.

The Indispensable Background Twitter?

Nice observation:

The other remarkable thing that happened at the conference took place during the three-strikes session. This was a parallel session held in a very small, hot and crowded room with no more than 20 attendees. The panel included several twitterers, and the audience was clearly following what promised to be an interesting discussion. The end result pretty much exemplified to me why Twitter has become a must-have at conferences. As this was an emotionally-charged topic, the tweets emanating from the room were soon picked up by various other users, so much so that at some point we had journalists and even a Member of Parliament making comments about what was being said. What transpired in the little room spawned claims and counter-claims elsewhere, and even led to the MP asking questions via Twitter.

I might be guilty of overstating the importance of the technology, but I truly think that there is something important happening with social media. Opening discussion to the wider public is not a bad thing.

As it happens, I was there too. Since I wasn't twittering, I missed much of this, but a look at the Twitter stream afterwards showed just how much was going on. Which suggests, perhaps, that even people who were taking part needed to be on Twitter in order to take part fully. Exciting stuff.

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Urgent: Please Write to your MEPs in Next Hour

There's a big “plenary vote” in the European Parliament at 11.30 local time (10.30 UK time). This is great opportunity for MEPs to sign the Written Declaration 12 on ACTA, which basically says the European Parliament is very unhappy with ACTA.

If you can, please write a short note to your MEPs asking them to support that declaration *now*. Here's what I've written:

I believe that there is a plenary vote today: I am writing to ask you to take that opportunity to sign the Written Declaration 12 on ACTA, which I feel is an important document that deserves your support for the sake of the European electorate and European democracy.

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Big ACTA Leak: Full Consolidated Text

La Quadrature du Net has obtained another ACTA document - and it's a biggie, but at the moment only a 56-page PDF. You can help convert it into text.

But what's really striking to me, as someone who has been covering this area for 18 months now, is how the rate of leaks is increasing: the more leaks there are, the more we get. It's a bit like those slow-motion scenes in films where the dam begins to break slowly, and then more and more cracks appear until finally - transparency.

So, let's keep those leaks coming, please.

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Free Software's Secret Patent Weapon

Yesterday I was warning about the threat that the super-troll Intellectual Ventures represents. To provide some balance, here's a surprisingly upbeat piece from Samba creator Andrew Tridgell on how to read software patents. It's incredibly well done, and I recommend it to everyone. But what really struck me was the concluding section that suggested that free software actually has a secret weapon when it comes to software patents: its community.

On Open Enterprise blog.

Free Software's Second Era: The Rise and Fall of MySQL

If the first era of free software was about the creation of the fully-rounded GNU/Linux operating system, the second saw a generation of key enterprise applications being written to run on that foundation. Things got moving with the emergence and rapid adoption of the LAMP stack – a term coined in 1998 - a key part of which was (obviously) MySQL (the “M”).

On The H Open.

What Was Gordon Brown Thinking this Morning?

It's a measure of how far digital technology has entered our lives that Gordon Brown should get up at some ungodly hour this morning in order to give a major speech devoted entirely to “Building Britain’s Digital Future”. Even more extraordinary is that it includes passages like this:

On Open Enterprise blog.

Saint Tim Berners-Lee

Here's a fine piece of hagiography, with a really excellent conclusion that touches on those diabolical software patents:

The founders of Google and Microsoft have made their fortunes out of the world wide web, as have numerous other dot-com entrepreneurs. Sir Tim, though, has never cashed in on his brilliant idea. He doesn’t have a yacht or a mansion or a private jet. But neither does he have any regrets about his lack of wealth.

“I couldn’t have made a fortune even if I’d wanted to,” he says. “If I’d patented my idea and tried to make money, other people would have just set up rival networks and it wouldn’t have worked. The web only happened because everyone pulled together.”

Beatific Berners-Lee.

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Beware the King of the Trolls

If you haven't heard of Intellectual Ventures, you will do. Set up by ex-Microsoftie Nathan Myhrvold, with investments from Microsoft among others, it is basically a patenting machine – filing and buying them in huge quantities. Note that it doesn't actually *use* these patents – except to threaten people with. In other words, Intellectual Ventures is a patent troll – or, rather the King of the Patent Trolls.

On Open Enterprise blog.

Open Source's (Not-so-)Secret Sauce: Modularity

Why does open source succeed? Apart, that is, from the fact that it is created by huge numbers of amazingly clever and generous people? Or, put another way, what is a key ingredient that must be present for the open source methodology to be applicable to other spheres?

Modularity.

If the stuff to hand isn't modular, you can't really share, because your stuff isn't compatible with other people's stuff. If it isn't modular, you can't share out tasks and scale. If you can't share out tasks, you can't have people working independently, at their own pace and in their own way, which means the project isn't really open. If it isn't modular, you can't swap in some new elements while leaving everything else untouched, which means no "release early, release often", no experimentation, no rapid evolution. Modularity is indispensable.

I think that's why open source hardware has singularly failed to take off. It's difficult to make bunches of atoms modular in the way that bunches of bits are (at least until we have general 3D printers, in which case we're done...)

But could there be a way of introducing that modularity at a higher level so as to enjoy the benefits outlined above? I do believe there is, and with hindsight, it was pretty obvious (er, so why didn't I think of it?). It's called OpenStructures:

The OS (OpenStructures) project explores the possibility of a modular construction model where everyone designs for everyone on the basis of one shared geometrical grid. It initiates a kind of collaborative Meccano to which everybody can contribute parts, components and structures.

As you can see, the clever people behind this project have the magic word "modular" in there. Specifically, they have devised a very simple grid system that ensures that things fit together, even when they're made by different people at different times and for different purposes. Significantly, the grid is based on binary multiples and subdivisions:

If you choose to apply the OS grid for the dimensions of a part, at least one of the measurements of this part (length, wideness and thickness or height) should correspond to either 0,125cm / 0,25cm / 0,5cm / 1cm / 2cm and multiples of 2cm in order to be compatible with other parts. (see part examples)

What's really impressive about this project is not just this insight into the modularity of elements, but the completeness of the vision that results. For example, there is an explicit hierarchy of elements, starting from OS Parts, which combine to form OS Components, from which are made OS Structures, and finally OS Superstructures.

It's an amazing vision, and I think it could have a major impact on the world of open source hardware, at least of this particular construction-set type. If you want to see some of the exciting objects that have already been created, don't miss the fab photos on the project's blog. (Via @opensourcerer.)

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To: EC's Directorate General for Trade

Without much fanfare, the European Commission has arranged an "ACTA Stakeholders’ Consultation Meeting". Of course, the big problem is that it's in Brussels, and few of us can afford to take a day off work to attend - unless we are professional lobbyists, of course, who get *paid* huge sums to attend.

However, it is still possible to make some comments on ACTA, since

Those unable to participate in the meeting and/or wishing to present their positions in writing may send their comments to TRADE-ACTA-MEETING@ec.europa.eu , no later than 22 March 2010.

So if you have a few minutes to spare this afternoon, I urge you to drop the EC's Directorate General for Trade a short note to let them know what you think. Here's mine:

Unfortunately, I won't be able to attend the ACTA Stakeholders’ Consultation Meeting; but I shouldn't need to. If the Internet has taught us anything, it is that such processes can – and should – be opened up to all using this wonderful democratising tool. By resorting to such traditional meetings, the European Commission makes it difficult for ordinary people with jobs (to say nothing of those who are unemployed) from attending and thus voicing their opinions. Instead, it will be the usual well-funded lobbyists who turn up and pack the meeting, crowding out the few who represent the hundreds of millions of ordinary EU citizens.

So my comment really comes down to this: we need full transparency for the ACTA negotiations, with all of the drafts released as and when they are modified, along with all other related documents, so that all of us can participate in this crucially important process. This is not some ancillary facet that can be tacked later, but is absolutely central. If other partners won't agree to transparency, then the EU should simply refuse to negotiate further, since there is no reason why such drafts should not be open for all to discuss – unless, of course, there is something in them that certain participants want hidden until the negotiations have been concluded and can be presented as a fait accompli.

ACTA negotiations without transparency are simply a continuation of the bad old days of closed-door meetings of cosy insider groups to the detriment of ordinary citizens. If the EU is truly to represent the citizens of Europe, it must definitively turn its back on that unrepresentative system, and place openness and transparency at the heart of everything it does.

If it does not, voters' disenchantment with politics will grow, and the already-gaping chasm between the politicians and the people will widen, until our nominal representatives find themselves increasingly alienated from the electorate. That would have dire consequences not just for politicians, but for European democracy itself.

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Bye-Bye Bluefin Tuna

So, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) rejected international trade restrictions on northern bluefin tuna, thus probably consigning it to extinction, and removing a key predator from the oceans, with who knows what knock-on effects.

Here's a certain Hisao Masuko, of the Japan Tuna Fisheries Cooperative Association, referring to the proposal to add the bluefin tuna to the CITES list of endangered species, which failed largely because of Japan's lobbying against it:

This could set a dangerous precedent. The list could grow to include yellowfin and bigeye tuna, as well. If nothing is done, we won't have any tuna at Tsukiji fish market.

Presumably you have to take a special stupidity test in order to become spokesperson for this organisation.

Sharing Ideas about Open Philanthropy

As regular readers of this blog will know, for the last five years or so I have been tracking the diffusion of the ideas behind open source into other spheres. I'm particularly interested to see what does and does not translate easily to other domains.

Here's another application: open philanthropy. Although something called the Open Philanthropy Exchange has been around for ten years, I think this is something different, not least because people's understanding of openness and sharing have moved on enormously in that time:

# Open sharing of ideas in philanthropy serves us all as we seek to solve shared problems.

# We need a Freedom of Foundation and Nonprofit Information Act. These organizations are tax-privileged data repositories. As such, their tax privileges should be linked to the degree they openly share and contribute the information, data, and knowledge that they produce for the public good.

# Openness extends to the interoperability of data - ours and others. Efforts to open government reporting, data sharing from municipalities and states, and open access to public records on donations, nonprofit filings, and public funding sources are all in the best interest of solving social problems.

# Experimenting with openness will show us what works. The Sunlight Foundation's recent "datajams" and Sunlight Live coverage of the health care reform discussions are a great working example of what information matters to whom, about what, and when.

# The ability and expectations of open-ness are changing. These new expectations will change what transparency really looks like and how it works (Here's one version - the Cycle of Transparency). Philanthropy can guide this or react to it, but it can not ignore it.

# Open matters to communities.

There's also this important point:

One of the things we've learned from the open source software movement is that codes of professional practice matter - the early licensing efforts to create code that developers could access, use, improve, and share again are critical to how software development happens. We need similar codes of professional conduct and practice in philanthropy.

It's a work in progress, and it will be fascinating to see how it developers. Good luck to all concerned.

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Spotify: Make Money with Analogue Scarcity

This isn't another post about Spotify: it's a perceptive comment made by the company's CEO during an interview:

Q: We’ve heard services like Spotify people say “oh no we’re not going to buy music any more”. The idea of geting people to play a monthly fee, that seems promising. Why would someone buy something?

A: I think we’re going that route. But we find that music I really love, I tend to want to buy it. Not necessarily a plastic disk, but a special edition for an artist I really like, I’m more than happy to pay $100 for a box set with a t-shirt in it, liner notes. Another person may be willing to pay for a live edition with extended tracks. Or pay for a live concert experience. The reality of the music industry today is that there isn’t one biz model. It’s about figuring out how to use downloads, streaming, promotion, ticketing, all these things. I don’t think streaming music is stream.. with Spotify people label us ‘free’ music. But people pay, either with time (adverts, which are targeting), or actually paying for the service.

Of course, this is exactly what many of us have been saying for a while, and it's good that someone behind one of the more interesting new offerings seems to get this.

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Why the ICC Report Makes Me Ick

I have restrained myself from writing much about the ICC's "Building a Digital Economy" report, because I knew it would make me too cross. Fortunately, someone who is rather calmer me than me has done a better job than I would with some careful, rigorous analysis.

I urge you to read the whole thing, since it points out really well the huge holes in the report's logic and methodology. But there's one paragraph I'd like to pull out:

Most telling is the fact that the ICC report states that cinema ticket sales are also dropping, and seems to blame piracy for that. However, the MPAA has recently reported that global ticket sales are at an all-time high, with a global increase of 30% since 2005! More importantly, there is a lot of investment going into the industry, which indicates that it is very healthy. The MPAA reports that the number of digital 3D screens in Europe has grown from 0 in 2005, to 3,495 in 2009. That is hardly an industry affected by piracy.

I really think this is key: people are re-discovering both cinema and live music (something I've written about extensively on this blog). The fact that these are ignored is why the latest report is not just wrong, but completely wrong-headed. It perversely ignores the fundamental shifts in people's taste that the industry needs to understand and build upon.

And that's what really makes me sick: the fact that the media companies doesn't even want to acknowledge that it actually has a huge opportunity, but prefers instead to try to blame ordinary users for sharing and thus promoting their content.

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Eben Moglen - Freedom vs. The Cloud Log

Free software has won: practically all of the biggest and most exciting Web companies like Google, Facebook and Twitter run on it. But it is also in danger of losing, because those same services now represent a huge threat to our freedom as a result of the vast stores of information they hold about us, and the in-depth surveillance that implies.

Eben Moglen - Prof. of Law at Columbia and former General Counsel for the FSF. Vergrößern Better than almost anyone, Eben Moglen knows what's at stake. He was General Counsel of the Free Software Foundation for 13 years, and helped draft several versions of the GNU GPL. As well as being Professor of Law at Columbia Law School, he is the Founding Director of the Software Freedom Law Center. And he has an ambitious plan to save us from those seductive but freedom-threatening Web service companies. He explained to Glyn Moody what the problem is, and how we can fix it.

On The H Open.

Is Microsoft About to Declare Patent War on Linux?

Microsoft's comments on happenings outside its immediate product portfolio are rare, and all the more valuable when they do appear. Here's one from Horacio Gutierrez, “Corporate Vice President and Deputy General Counsel”, entitled “Apple v. HTC: A Step Along the Path of Addressing IP Rights in Smartphones.”

On Open Enterprise blog.

Speaking of Monsanto and Gene Patents...

And right on cue, like the catastrophe of the old comedy, comes some fresh news about Monsanto and its gene patents:

Monsanto Co., facing antitrust probes into its genetically modified seeds, may benefit from previous court rulings in which intellectual property rights trumped competition concerns, antitrust lawyers say.

Got that? Intellectual monopolies, as well as being inherently bad, are also a "Get Out of Jail Card" for companies breaking anti-trust law. Broken, or what? (Via @schestowitz.)

Where Do I Stand on GMOs?

I'm conscious that I've written a lot of negative posts about genetically-modified organisms on this blog. That might lead readers to believe I'm against them. That's not the case: I am naturally pro-technology, and GMOs are potentially an important tool for addressing many of the world's most pressing problems. But I have my concerns, and I was pleased to find that Salon's Andrew Leonard not only shares them, but has expressed them rather well:

I don't actually have a position on whether GMOs are by definition good or bad for the environment or human health or even the challenge of alleviating hunger in the developing world. My basic stance, in fact, is pro-science: I believe technological advances have greatly advanced human health and affluence, and will continue to do so, if properly regulated. My concern re GMOs has always stemmed from a profound skepticism that profit-seeking corporations can be trusted to responsibly serve the public good. One need look only at the constant stream of reports detailing unethical and criminal behavior by major pharmaceutical companies to realize that this is hardly a hypothetical concern.

In the case of GMOs we are dealing with a remarkable concentration of intellectual property ownership in just a handful of corporations. Like all well-endowed corporate actors, these companies do not shy from vigorously lobbying governments in favor of putting into place place legal frameworks that are designed to maximize profits and minimize caution.

Exactly: what worries me is the way that global companies are using GMOs, and the intellectual monopolies they represent, as instruments of power - particularly over poor farmers in developing countries - purely to bolster their market and financial positions. The sooner we can de-fang companies like Monsanto - for example by revoking gene patents - and explore the potential of GMOs in an objective and scientific manner, the better.

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Time to Learn from China on Open Standards?

One of the major battles under way in Europe is over open standards. As its name suggests, an open standard is one that is open to all, without restrictions or obstacles; anything less than that is just window-dressing.

On Open Enterprise blog.

Beethoven by Numbers

One of the reasons I am so excited by Spotify is that it is asymptotically approaching an online library of All Music. Even in its necessarily incomplete state, it offers amazing possibilities. For example, one of the key advantages of having all this stuff on tap is that it's possible to create playlists that mix and match in interesting ways.

Here's a great example: a playlist of Beethoven's works ordered by opus number. Now, I already have the Brilliant Classics boxed set of Beethoven's complete works on CD, but that's rather different. In particular, I can't move through the works by opus number easily.

Why might I want to do that? Well, it's an interesting journey through Beethoven's works - not strictly chronological, but historical in terms of what came out when. In particular, it lets me see at a glance all those odd little works that usually get overlooked - the opus 42, 105, 128 etc. that rarely pop up.

The other great thing about services like Spotify is that they let people share in interesting ways by passing on their playlists. It's a level above simply sharing the files themselves, and adds a richness to listening that is not otherwise easy to replicate. It's a hint of a world where all content is freely available online, and we can share and build on each other's insanely stimulating mashups.

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