Most people in the hacking community are well aware that patents represent one of the most serious threats to free software. But the situation is actually even worse than it seems, thanks to the proliferation of what are called patent thickets. To understand why these are so bad, and why they represent a particular problem for software, it is necessary to go back to the beginning of patent law.
On The H Open.
One of the most amazing - and heartening - developments in the world of openness recently has been the emergence of the open government movement. Although still in its early stages, this will potentially have important ramifications for business, since one of the ideas at its heart is the opening up of government datasets for anyone to use and build on - including for commercial purposes (depending on the particular licences). The UK and US are leading the way in this sphere, and an important question is to what extent the experiences of these two countries can be generalised.
On Open Enterprise blog.
Last week I wrote a piece about analogue copying. Specifically, it centred on the 3D scanning and copying of an Aston Martin – because that was how somebody framed the question to me. This provoked plenty of thoughtful comment, which I encouraged people to post over on my other blog, since a slightly longer format was needed than this blog could accommodate. However, because the original piece was posted here, I've decided to reply to them here (sorry if this bloggy to-ing and fro-ing causes digital travel sickness.)
On Open Enterprise blog.
Apparently, there's an interesting thread over on a site called Quora about the future of Firefox. I say apparently, since I can't seem to join the site (“we'll e-mail when we're ready for you to try out the service” - thanks a bunch: obviously it's only for the Chosen Few). Anyway, according to TechCrunch, the meat of the argument is this:
On Open Enterprise blog.
One of the reasons that digital music will be free - whether the recording companies want it or not - is basic economics: the marginal cost is practically zero, which means that the price will tend to that point, too. And now we have this:Spotify is slashing the cost of its advert-free music streaming in the UK and Europe, in a bid to win more paying customers besides just mobile users. It comes in two new tariffs Spotify’s introducing…
—Spotify Unlimited: £4.99pm/ for no-ads music, but no mobile access, no offline or MP3 play and no higher-bitrate quality.
—Spotify Open: Free, with ads, no invite required, but no mobile, no offline or MP3 play, no higher-quality and limited to 20 hours a month.
What's interesting here is that Spotify has already been accused of not paying artists much for each play: this new pricing scheme is likely to mean their fees won't be going up anytime soon. The sooner artists use free digital music to enable them to make money from analogue scarcity, the better.
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A couple of weeks ago I wrote about Diaspora, a free software project to create a distributed version of Facebook that gives control back to users. Since then, of course, Facebook-bashing and Diaspora-boosting have become somewhat trendy. Indeed, Diaspora has now soared past its initial $10,000 fund-raising target: at the time of writing, it has raised over $170,000, with 15 days to go. That's amazing, but what's more interesting is the way in which Diaspora has done it.
On Open Enterprise blog.
If you haven't seen the shocking but important video "Collateral Murder", which shows the callous gunning-down of Iraqi citizens (and the subsequent rocket attack on a civilian van with children inside), don't miss it on Wikileaks, its original source. Unfortunately, you may not find it on YouTube or other obvious video sites, since they have been taken down (although YouTube is back now, apparently).
A clear example of censorship, you might think, but in some respects its even worse:
Collateral Murder, with over 6M views, removed from YouTube after unknown US copyright claim http://bit.ly/aS3bMk
That's right, it was taken down on the basis of alleged copyright infringement, not because somebody thought it too shocking to be displayed. The idea that such an action would be taken because of an alleged infringement on somebody's monopoly, while the underlying cold-blooded massacre of Iraqi civilians is swept under the carpet, is of course, repulsive. But it's just another effect of the outdated law that is copyright - collateral damage, so to speak.
After all, copyright grew up in England for the purpose of controlling the flow of information, by allowing people to become itss "owners" - and hence a convenient throttle point:The first copyright law was a censorship law. It had nothing to do with protecting the rights of authors, or encouraging them to produce new works. Authors' rights were in no danger in sixteenth-century England, and the recent arrival of the printing press (the world's first copying machine) was if anything energizing to writers. So energizing, in fact, that the English government grew concerned about too many works being produced, not too few. The new technology was making seditious reading material widely available for the first time, and the government urgently needed to control the flood of printed matter, censorship being as legitimate an administrative function then as building roads.
It should come as no surprise that copyright is still being used for the purposes of censorship - although often dressed up as if it were somehow "merely" a commercial issue (how that can be the case when we're talking about battleground footage is hard to see.)
This kind of abuse is one more reason why we need to abolish copyright completely: it is not only irrelevant to true creativity (artists don't need an "incentive" to create - they *have* to because of an inner compulsion), it is increasingly a threat to liberty in the online world.
Anyone who doubts that should look at the kind of clauses included in anti-piracy legislation like the Digital Economy Act, which allows websites to be blocked if they are alleged to hold material that infringes on someone's copyright. That will effectively allow the UK government to take down any leak of its documents, since there is no public interest defence in the Act. Had this been introduced as a law explicitly to block such leaks, there would have been an uproar over the censorship it implied; disguised as something to "protect" the poor creative artists, it passes with only protests from the usual troublemakers (like me). The stronger the copyright enforcement, the greater the scope for censorship: it's as simple as that.
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Remember the Digital Economy Act? Yes, I thought you might. It's still there, hanging like a proverbial sword of Damocles over our digital heads. But a funny thing happened on the way to the forum, er, Houses of Parliament: that nice Mr Clegg found himself catapulted to a position of some power. Now, what was it he said a month ago?
On Open Enterpries blog.
I write a lot about copyright, and the right to share stuff. In particular, I think that for digital artefacts – text, music, video etc. - free software has shown us that there is no contradiction between allowing these to be copied freely and creating profitable businesses that are powered by that abundance. What has to change, though, is the nature of the business models that underlie them.
The parallel between digital content and software is obvious enough, which makes it relatively easy to see how media companies might function against a background of unrestricted sharing. But we are fast approaching the point where it is possible to make copies of *analogue* objects, using 3D printers like the open source RepRap system. This raises some interesting questions about what might be permitted in that situation if businesses are still to thrive.
On Open Enterprise blog.
Most people in the free software world know about the famous “LINUX is obsolete” thread that began on the comp.os.minix newsgroups in January 1992, where Andrew Tanenbaum, creator of the MINIX system that Linus used to learn about operating system design, posted the following rather incendiary comment:
On The H Open.
Just over a month ago I wrote about a leaked version of the imminent Digital Agenda for Europe. I noted that the text had some eminently sensible recommendations about implementing open standards, but that probably for precisely that reason, was under attack by enemies of openness, who wanted the references to open standards watered down or removed. Judging by the latest leak [.pdf] obtained by the French site PC Inpact, those forces have prevailed: what seems to be the final version of the Digital Agenda for Europe is an utter travesty of the original intent.
On Open Enterprise blog.
It's a red letter day here on Computerworld UK, for the open source section just gained an important new strand in the form of Simon Says, a blog from Simon Phipps:
On Open Enterprise blog.
What a sad, sad day for this country:
A trainee accountant who posted a message on Twitter threatening to blow an airport "sky high" has been found guilty of sending a menacing electronic communication.
Now, the judge may not know this, but there's a technical term for this kind of tweet: it's what we Internet johnnies call a "joke"...
The truly sickening part of this judgement is the following:a district judge at Doncaster Magistrates Court ruled that the Tweet was "of a menacing nature in the context of the times in which we live".
In other words, our society has become so corrupted by the cynical abuse of the idea of "terror" that we have lost all sense of proportion, not to mention humour. Tragic - and dangerous, since it is bound to have a chilling effect on Twitter in this country.
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Here's a nice move from the Internet Archive:
More than doubling the number of books available to print disabled people of all ages, today the Internet Archive launched a new service that brings free access to more than 1 million books — from classic 19th century fiction and current novels to technical guides and research materials — now available in the specially designed format to support those who are blind, dyslexic or are otherwise visually impaired.
And here's a nice analysis of that move:The new service demonstrates the principle behind the Chafee Amendment: that copyright is a conditional monopoly, not a property right, and that when we decide the monopoly is hampering an important public purpose, we can change it. The Chafee Amendment is an open acknowledgement that monopoly-based distribution was not serving the needs of the blind, the visually impaired, or or dyslexic people very well, and that fixing that situation is simply a policy decision. It reminds us that copyright itself is a policy decision, and that if it is not serving the public well, we can change the policy.
A double win, then: for the visually impaired, and in terms of reminding us about the true nature of copyright as a conditional intellectual monopoly.
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One of the key thinkers in the free software world is Eben Moglen. He's been the legal brains behind the most recent iterations of the GNU GPL, but more than that, he's somebody who has consistently been able to pinpoint and articulate the key issues facing free software for two decades. Recently, he did it again, noting that cloud computing is a huge threat to freedom.
On Open Enterprise blog.
After I published Rebel Code in 2001, there was a natural instinct to think about writing another book (a natural masochistic instinct, I suppose, given the work involved.) I decided to write about bioinformatics – the use of computers to store, search through, and analyse the billions of DNA letters that started pouring out of the genomics projects of the 1990s, culminating in the sequencing of the human genome in 2001.
One reason I chose this area was the amazing congruence between the battle between free and closed-source software and the fight to place genomic data in the public domain, for all to use, rather than having it locked up in proprietary databases and enclosed by gene patents. As I like to say, Digital Code of Life is really the same story as Rebel Code, with just a few words changed.
Another reason for the similarity between the stories is the fact that genomes can be considered as a kind of program – the “digital code” of my title. As I wrote in the book:In 1953, computers were so new that the idea of DNA as not just a huge digital store but a fully-fledged digital program of instructions was not immediately obvious. But this was one of the many profound implications of Watson and Crick's work. For if DNA was a digital store of genetic information that guided the construction of an entire organism from the fertilised egg, then it followed that it did indeed contain a preprogrammed sequence of events that created that organism – a program that ran in the fertilised cell, albeit one that might be affected by external signals. Moreover, since a copy of DNA existed within practically every cell in the body, this meant that the program was not only running in the original cell but in all cells, determining their unique characteristics.
That characterisation of the genome is something of a cliché these days, but back in 2003, when I wrote Digital Code of Life, it was less common. Of course, the interesting question is: to what extent is the genome *really* like an operating system? What are the similarities and differences? That's what a bunch of researchers wanted to find out by comparing the Linux kernel's control structure to that of the bacterium Escherichia coli:The genome has often been called the operating system (OS) for a living organism. A computer OS is described by a regulatory control network termed the call graph, which is analogous to the transcriptional regulatory network in a cell. To apply our firsthand knowledge of the architecture of software systems to understand cellular design principles, we present a comparison between the transcriptional regulatory network of a well-studied bacterium (Escherichia coli) and the call graph of a canonical OS (Linux) in terms of topology and evolution.
We show that both networks have a fundamentally hierarchical layout, but there is a key difference: The transcriptional regulatory network possesses a few global regulators at the top and many targets at the bottom; conversely, the call graph has many regulators controlling a small set of generic functions. This top-heavy organization leads to highly overlapping functional modules in the call graph, in contrast to the relatively independent modules in the regulatory network.
We further develop a way to measure evolutionary rates comparably between the two networks and explain this difference in terms of network evolution. The process of biological evolution via random mutation and subsequent selection tightly constrains the evolution of regulatory network hubs. The call graph, however, exhibits rapid evolution of its highly connected generic components, made possible by designers' continual fine-tuning. These findings stem from the design principles of the two systems: robustness for biological systems and cost effectiveness (reuse) for software system.
The paper's well-worth reading, but if you find it heavy going (it's really designed for bioinformaticians and their ilk), there's an excellent, easy-to-read summary and analysis by Carl Zimmer in Discover magazine. Alternatively, you could just buy a copy of Digital Code of Life...
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Where do open source companies come from? That's not a trivial question, for free software startups can arise in all sorts of ways. You might create a company around someone else's software (as Red Hat, say, did); build one on software you've written yourself (like Jboss); pay people to write something from scratch (Alfresco); hire the creator of a program and use their software (Jaspersoft); or put together pre-existing projects to create something new.
On Open Enterprise blog.
...nor any stop to think.
Software patents are an issue that crops up fairly often on this blog, since they represent one of the principal threats to free software. But recently something seems to have got into the water, for the entire world, apparently, has gone software patent mad.
On Open Enterprise blog.
The recent battle over the Digital Economy Bill has focussed renewed attention on the area of copying digital artefacts – music and films, for example. It's a subject I've started writing and speaking about more and more; for example, here are some thoughts on why free software's success is crucially important in this area.
But I have confession to make: that article is a bit of a cop-out. I didn't address the even bigger issue of what happens when we can copy *analogue* artefacts. Yup, you read that aright: the time is fast approaching when we will be able to download a chair or a bicycle and just print it out. Clearly, this will make the idea of *analogue* scarcity rather more complex (although energy concerns will always place a lower bound on the cost of making such copies).
People have only just begun thinking about the implications of this shift – not least because it's so mind-boggling, and will make the current brouhaha over digital copying look like the proverbial vicar's tea party. But the first works grappling with this have started emerging; here's one of them:Throughout recorded history most people who have wanted a household article have bought or bartered it from someone else – in past times an artisan or trader, more recently a seller of mass-produced products. With few exceptions (such as some clothing) it is rare that any of us make such articles for ourselves these days. That may soon change. Thirty years ago only dedicated enthusiasts would print their own photographs or edit and reproduce their own newsletters. The advent of the home computer, and in particular of low-cost high-quality printers, has now made such things simple and commonplace. Recent developments in producing affordable and hobbyist-friendly printers that can reproduce three-dimensional rather than just flat objects may mean that printing a toast-rack or a comb becomes as easy as printing a birthday card.
Any lawyer familiar with copyright and trade mark law can see, however, that printing one’s own birthday cards could, depending on the source and nature of the images used, infringe a number of intellectual property (IP) rights. Tempting as it may be to copy and use a picture of a well-known cartoon character, the resulting cards would very likely be an infringement of the copyright and perhaps trade marks owned by the relevant rights holder. But what if someone uses a printer capable of producing a mobile phone cover bearing such an image? Or reproducing a distinctively-styled piece of kitchenware? What about printing out a spare wing-mirror mount for your car? Do these uses infringe IP rights?
In the first part of this paper, we review the history of 3D printing and describe recent developments, including a project initiated by one of the authors to bring such printers into the home. We then examine the IP implications of personal 3D printing with particular reference to the bundle of rights that would typically be associated with a product that might be copied.
It finishes with the following interesting observations:rights holders are likely to be concerned if personal 3D printers become widespread and effective enough to impinge on commercial exploitation of their IP rights. Indications as to how they might react can be seen from the recent history of music copyright infringement via the Internet. Both technical and legal responses have been tried, including the use of Digital Rights Management (DRM) technology and proposals to strengthen legislative measures. Will these be applied to restrict low-cost 3D printing?
Technical measures would quickly founder on the problem that, unlike music file-sharing, personal 3D printing does not produce an exact copy that can be digitally signed or protected with DRM. It is the sharing of (as seen, legitimately) reverse-engineered designs that is the issue, not original design documents. Although scanners and printers have incorporated anti-forgery measures to detect attempts to duplicate banknotes, such techniques are very specifically targeted at one well-defined item.1 Whist commercially-produced low-cost 3D printers might be configured to only use authorised DRM-protected 3DPDFs digitally signed by the rights holder, such measures would seriously constrain their usefulness and make them unattractive compared to open-source 3D printers.
It is worth noting, however, that this same point indicates that it may be some time before the level of detail and accuracy attainable by personal 3D printers becomes sufficient to seriously impinge upon the market for quality products, as distinct from utilitarian goods or spare parts (the reproduction of which, as has been noted, is in any case less likely to infringe IP rights.) Unlike digital audio and video copying, which produces perfect copies, copying of articles via 3D printing will be readily distinguishable from the original.
It concludes:The most optimistic evangelist of low-cost 3D printing would probably admit that the household domestic 3D printer is years, if not decades, from widespread use. Its impact will be gradual, as unlike file-shared MP3s it will not immediately provide for the reproduction of faithful copies. Rather, as its ease-of-use, fidelity and range of materials increases, so will its attractiveness and range of applications. This should, at least, allow for a more measured consideration of the legal issues that will arise from such use. In the longer term, personal 3D printers may conceivably lead to radical changes in the nature of the manufacturing economy; the IP implications of such further developments have so far been imagined only in science fiction.
But make no mistake: it's coming....
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The ECM company Alfresco ought to occupy a special place in the open source pantheon for readers of this blog. As well as being one of the leading companies in its category, it shows how free software can meet the most demanding enterprise needs and – most importantly, perhaps – it's British by birth and location. As such, it offers a great example to others who might be contemplating an open source start-up, and proves that you don't have to be based in California to succeed in the world of computing.
On Open Enterprise blog.
I've written a number of times about the curious experiment South Korea has been conducting: making its entire governmental and financial computing infrastructure dependent on Microsoft by requiring *all* users to install proprietary security software that is typically an ActiveX plugin (yes, one of *those*).
This is obviously insane, because it forces people to use a piece of technology that has been a major cause of security problems on the Windows platform, and it creates a monoculture, with all the weaknesses that implies.
Despite the manifest folly of this approach, changing it has been hard because of the total lock-in. But apparently change is finally coming, and for a couple of surprising reasons:For those of you who have followed my blog, you know that it has been 3 years since I first reported on the fact that Korea does not use SSL for secure transactions over the Interent but instead a PKI mechanism that limits users to the Windows OS and Internet Explorer as a browser. Nothing fundamentally has changed but there are new pressures on the status quo that may break open South Korean for competition in the browser market in the future.
In fact, one of the new pressures on the status quo has been the popularity of the iPhone in South Korea, which wasn’t available officially until late 2009 due to a different Korean software middle-ware requirement, WIPI, which has since been deprecated. With WIPI dead and buried, Apple released the iPhone to great fanfare in the Korean market and Blackberry has also launched in the Korean market.
Another pressure on the status quo was a recent report out from 3 researchers (Hyoungshick Kim, Jun Ho Huh and Ross Anderson) from the University of Oxford’s Computing Laboratory, “On the Security of Internet Banking in South Korea.”
...
The popularity of the iPhone (the press claims 500,000 units sold in the few months since it was released) resurfaced the issue that only Windows and IE can be used to make secure transactions with Korean Internet services. iPhone/Blackberry/Android users in Korea (not to mention Firefox/Opera/Safari/Chrome users) cannot bank online or purchase items online or do any secure transaction with the smartphone browser because Korean services only support the PKI mechanism that only works with Active-X in IE and Windows.
This is a rather unlooked-for consequence of the arrival of smartphones in general, and of the iPhone in particular. Combined with pressure from the users of other browsers and other operating systems, we can hope that this will bring the South Korean government to its senses, and end this bizarre and unfortunate experiment in government-mandated monoculture.
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When I first read the news that HP was buying Palm for $1.2 billion, my first reaction was that HP had lost its marbles (“clueless” was how I tweeted it.) Why, I wondered, did it need to pay $1.2 billion for a dying platform when it could have used the increasingly-popular Android for nothing (OK, it probably picked up a few useful patents, as well)? I also thought that it didn't have the resources to enter the extremely competitive area of smartphones.
On Open Enterprise blog.
I am not an unthinking fan of everything Clay Shirky says, but I do find much of the stuff he writes thought provoking. In particular, I found his recent essay, “The Collapse of Complex Business Models” really spot-on in analysing the central problem faced by certain industries.
But not everyone seems to agree judging by this post:That evening I reread the essay more closely, and the closer I read it, the less I liked it. At sunrise the essay had been an entertaining set of anecdotes built around an intriguing core idea; by sunset it had wilted, revealed as an entertaining set of anecdotes pulled from all over the map in the vain hope that there might, somewhere, be a theme that would hold them together.
The point about Shirky's use of anecdote is fair enough, although he's hardly the only person to adopt this rhetorical trick. Most "big idea" books follow the same pattern of getting their message across through easily-digested stories (but then, so does the Bible).
However, I did find problematic the following section of the critique:Aside: here is Clay Shirky writing about YouTube:
The most watched minute of video made in the last five years shows baby Charlie biting his brother’s finger. (Twice!)
which is, as of this date, no longer true. The most watched video made in the last five years shows Lady Gaga and a group of hired models dancing on an elaborate set in a video that embodies complex production methods, that is part of the Vevo channel (a joint venture between Google and major record labels) and that features product placements by Nemiroff Vodka, Parrot by Starck, Carerra sunglasses, and HP Envy [link]. Now there is a complex business model.
As a further aside, analysts Visible Measures add in all copies of a video together with spoofs and pastiches, and their list of the top fifteen videos is as follows.
1. Soulja Boy: Crank Dat (music video: Universal) - 722,438,268
2. Twilight Saga: New Moon (film: Summit Entertainment) - 639,966,996
3. Beyonce: Single Ladies (music video: Sony) - 522,039,429
4. Michael Jackson: Thriller (music video: Epic Records) - 443,535,722
5. The Gummy Bear Song (music video: Gummibear International) - 394,327,606
6. Lady Gaga: Poker Face (music video: Universal) - 374,606,128
7. Lady Gaga: Bad Romance (music video: Universal) - 360,020,327
8. TImbaland: Apologize (music video: Mosley Music Group) - 355,404,824
9. Susan Boyle: Britain’s Got Talent (TV: Freemantle/ITV) - 347,670,927
10. Twilight (film: Summit Entertainment) - 343,969,063
11. Modern Warfare 2 (video game: Activision) - 339,913,412
12. Jeff Dunham: Achmed the Dead Terrorist (TV) - 328,891,308
13. Mariah Carey: Touch My Body (music video: Universal) - 324,057,568
14. Charlie Bit My Finger Again (user generated) - 288,666,331
15. Michael Jackson: Beat It (music video: Records) - 286,279,009
It seems that complexity has its place after all.
The first point is fair enough, but the following section actually undermines it. For notice that this long, impressive list counts "copies of a video together with spoofs and pastiches" - in other words, *precisely* the kind of stuff that has nothing to do with complex production. So the figures actually include all the stuff that Shirky is suggesting as an alternative to traditional production - hardly a valid way of arguing against him.
That's not the only place where the post is incorrect. Later on, it says:Back to his Charlie story again:
Expensive bits of video made in complex ways now compete with cheap bits made in simple ways. “Charlie Bit My Finger” was made by amateurs, in one take, with a lousy camera. No professionals were involved in selecting or editing or distributing it. Not one dime changed hands anywhere between creator, host, and viewers. A world where that is the kind of thing that just happens from time to time is a world where complexity is neither an absolute requirement nor an automatic advantage.
But Charlie didn’t “just happen” because Charlie is not the only story here. As YouTube became a phenomenon, those 174 million-and-counting views could only be delivered by acres of these:
which then shows us a picture of serried ranks of Google hardware in Google server farms.
It's true that the YouTube video was indeed held on these systems; it is not true "those 174 million-and-counting views could only be delivered by acres" of such massive, organised server farms. Unstructured P2P systems are not only capable of delivering this kind of volume, they have been doing so for over a decade, often under the radar of the established companies, which only sit up and notice when some of their stuff starts being shared across them.
In a way, the fact that this could be overlooked is a neat summary of what's going on here: the changes Shirky describes have already happened, but not everyone has noticed.
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Public sector procurement is becoming a real battleground for open source in Europe. There have been few successes, but lots of groundwork has been laid in the form of interoperability frameworks and suchlike - despite fierce rearguard actions by old-school software companies naturally alarmed about losing their cosy monopolies.
On Open Enterprise blog.
Free software began as a political movement: its central aim was – and remains – the propagation of freedom. Later, it became a development methodology too, largely at the hands of Linus, whose geographical isolation in Finland forced him to develop ways of using the Internet to coordinate a new kind of massive, but decentralised, global collaboration. Later still, free software also became a way of making serious money – something that Stallman has repeatedly said he is quite happy with, contrary to much FUD claiming otherwise.
On The H Open.
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