Last Chance: Write to MPs on Digital Economy Bill

Now is probably our last chance to influence our MPs on the Digital Economy Bill. Here's what I've sent:

Although the main news today will obviously be the announcement of the General Election, I would like to urge you once more to support calls for a proper debate on the Digital Economy Bill. If this is important legislation, as I and I am sure you believe it is, then it deserves real scrutiny, not some cursory waving through.

Just because an election is imminent, there is no reason to lower the standards required for passing laws; indeed, how they act in the closing days of this Parliament could be seen as a final chance for politicians to demonstrate their professionalism in this regard.

The DRM of Government Policy

One area that I have been covering increasingly is that of open government. The parallels with the other opens are not immediate, but there are some suggestive similarities. Here's a great interview that has these illuminating thoughts on the subject:

if lobbyists are the spammers of policy making, then closed doors are the DRM of good policy. Obstacles to creativity, inspiration, and just sort of generally an affront to the most creative people in that field. Being open to a social network of contributors helps solve a lot of those problems, and that gets a sigh of relief from a lot of policy makers.

BTW, the rest of the interview is well-worth reading. (Via @mlsif.)

Where and Whither Mozilla?

The importance of Mozilla and its Firefox browser went up a notch last week. For it was then that it became clear that Microsoft has little intention of following a very particular standard – its own OOXML, pushed through the ISO at great cost to that institution's authority. Contrast that with Microsoft's increasingly positive signals about Web standards, which it is adopting with notable fervency – largely thanks to Firefox.

On Open Enterprise blog.

RMS and Tim Berners-Lee: Separated at Birth?

We all knew that Sir Tim was a total star, choosing to give away the Web rather than try to make oodles of billions from it. Some of us even knew that he contemplated using the GNU GPL for its licence, before being persuaded that placing it in the public domain would help it spread faster. But even I did not know this:

Much government work is done by civil servants emailing Word documents back and forth. Yet Berners-Lee refuses, on principle, to use Word, which is a proprietary rather than an open source format. On one occasion, one official recalled, Berners-Lee received an urgent document in Word from one of the most senior civil servants—and refused to look at it until a junior official had rushed to translate it into an acceptable format.

Seems RMS has some competition in the uncompromising integrity stakes....(Via @timjph.)

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Microsoft's Gift to Open Standards

Long-time readers of this blog will recall the bitter fight over the submission of Microsoft's OOXML formats to the ISO. To the dismay of most people in the world of open source, a compromise was reached that enabled Microsoft to claim that OOXML was being approved. Here is how Alex Brown, who played a crucial role in the standardisation process, describes it:

On Open Enterprise blog.

Last Chance to Save BBC from DRM

Six months ago, I wrote about a shabby attempt to slip through a major change at the BBC that would entail adding DRM to its HDTV output. Thanks in no small part of the prompt letter-writing of Computerworld UK readers, Ofcom extended the consultation period on this; subsequently, it also held meetings with the Open Rights Group, which I attended.

Despite all those representations, the BBC is still hell-bent on throwing over decades of public broadcasting and becoming in thrall to commercial interests through ineffective DRM:

On Open Enterprise blog.

Writing (Yet Again) to my MP

I must be a glutton for punishment: I've written yet another letter to my MP about the Digital Economy Bill (not that he bothered replying to the last one...):

I wrote to you a little while back in connection with the Digital Economy Bill. I don't intend to rehearse all the arguments I made there; I'd just like to point out that this is an incredibly important bill that will affect the future of this country greatly. As such, surely it is important to get it right?

If, as may be the case, time is simply too short to debate it properly, then it should be dropped now and picked up after the General Election. If the bill is not scrutinised fully, there is a strong possibility of a seriously-flawed piece of legislation reaching the statute books with all kinds of unforeseen and highly detrimental effects for the country, both in economic and social terms.

I would therefore urge you to press ministers for a full debate on the Bill, perhaps by signing this Early Day Motion (EDM 1223):

“That this House believes that the Digital Economy Bill [Lords] is too important to be taken further in the last days of a dying Parliament; and considers that a bill with so many repercussions for consumers, civil liberties, freedom of information and access to the internet should be debated and properly scrutinised at length and in detail, with a full opportunity for public discussion and representation in a new Parliament after the general election and not rushed through in the few days that remain in this Parliament.”

At a time when the public's confidence in politicians is at an all-time low, surely the worst thing that could be done is rushing through legislation that has been criticised by every kind of expert, including those in the realms of technology, law, consumer affairs and human rights to name but a few.

Italian Court OKs Preference for Open Source

Here's a big win for open source: the Italian Constitutional Court has approved a law in Piedmont giving preference to open source, ruling that it is not anti-competitive:

Just over a year ago, the Piedmont Regional Council passed a law which states: "... the Region, in the process of choosing computer programs to acquire, prefers free software and programs whose source code can be inspected by the licensee" (Article 6, paragraph 2).

This choice was welcomed with enthusiasm by Free Software supporters and civil society, while the Presidency of the Italian Council of Minister contested this law, by referring to the Constitutional Court in order to declare it unlawful.

On March the 23rd, 2010, the Court ruled that the preference for Free Software is legitimate and complies with the principle of freedom of competition.

The reasoning given by the Constitutional Court is interesting:

The Court points out: "It is not understandable how the the choice of a Public institution with regard to a feature, and not a product ... can be deemed as a breach of antitrust law”. Furthermore, the Court clarifies that “The concepts of Free Software and software whose code can be inspected do not refer to a particular technology, brand or product, but they rather express a legal feature".

As the Italian Associaation for Free Software notes:

In short, according to the Court, favoring Free Software does not infringe freedom of competition, since software freedom is a general legal feature, and not a technological aspect connected to a specific product or brand. This ruling demonstrates the weakness of the arguments of those who, until now, have opposed the adoption of rules aimed at promoting and favoring Free Software arguing that they conflict with the principle of "technological neutrality".

This is an important result, and not just for Italy: it establishes a line of reasoning that could be applied in other jurisdictions.

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Open Source and Open Standards under Threat in Europe

Open source is under attack in Europe. Not openly or obviously, but in the background, behind closed doors. The battleground is the imminent Digital Agenda for Europe, due to be unveiled by the European Commission in a month's time, and which defines the overall framework for Europe's digital policy. According to people with good contacts to the politicians and bureaucrats drawing up the Agenda, Microsoft is lobbying hard to ensure that open standards and open source are excluded from that policy - and is on the brink of succeeding in that aim.

We need to get as many people as possible writing to the key Commissioners *now* if we are to stop them. Details of who to write to are given below. To help you frame things, here's some background on what's at stake.

On Open Enterprise blog.

The Battle for Scholarly Publishing's Soul

Before Peter Suber became Mr Open Access, he was a philosopher by trade. This is evident in the long, thoughtful essays he writes for the SPARC Open Access Newsletter, which help console us for his absence these days from the world of blogging.

Here's the latest of them, entitled "Open access, markets, and missions". It asks some deep questions about what kind of scholarly publishing we should strive for: market oriented or mission oriented? As he observes:

Profit maximizing limits access to knowledge, by limiting it to paying customers. If anyone thinks this is just a side-effect of today's market incentives, then we can put the situation differently: Profit maximizing doesn't always limit access to knowledge, but is always ready to do so if it pays better. This proposition has a darker corollary: Profit maximizing doesn't always favor untruth, but is always ready to do so if it would pay better. It's hard to find another explanation for the fake journals Elsevier made for Merck and the dishonest lobbying campaigns against OA policies. (Remember "Public access equals government censorship"? "If the other side is on the defensive, it doesn't matter if they can discredit your statements"?)

He concludes:

Instead of hypnotically granting the primacy of markets in all sectors, as if there were no exceptions, we should remember that many organizations compromise profits or relinquish revenues in order to foster their missions, and that we all benefit from their dedication. Which institutions and sectors ought to do so, and how should we protect and support them to pursue their missions? Instead of smothering these questions for offending the religion of markets, we should open them for wider discussion. Should scholarly publishing, with all of its mixed incentives and hard choices, migrate closer to market-oriented end of the spectrum or to the mission-oriented end of the spectrum? For me the answer depends on a prior question. Do we want scholarly publishing to serve a certain function in the community?

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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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