I was pleased to discover last night that the video of my talk at FSCONS last November is now available:
Glyn Moody - Keynote: Ethics of Intellectual Monopolies from FSCONS on Vimeo.
One of the things that interests me is the way that the ideas underlying open source are being applied in other fields. That's something that I normally cover in my other blog, but sometimes things happen in those other domains that have ramifications back in the world of open source, and so may be of interest here.
On Open Enterprise blog.
One of the reasons why I find the whole Nokia saga so fascinating is that the reasoning behind what is clearly a move of huge importance for many groups is not being communicated at all convincingly.
On Open Enterprise blog.
We are entering a post-PC world – or so we are told. But is that good or bad for open source?
The open source world has been fixated so long on the “Year of the GNU/Linux Desktop” that it runs the risk of failing to notice that the desktop is no longer the key platform. That's been evident for some time in the developing world, where cost and power constraints mean that big, expensive PCs are simply impractical for most people. But with the rise of smartphones like the iPhone and Android devices, many people in western countries are also ditching their desk-bound systems in favour of powerful, more pocketable ones.
On The H Open.
So the publishing dinosaurs have got together and produced an egg: The Berlin Declaration on the Future of the Digital Press.
Unfortunately, as you probably guessed, this is backward- rather than forward-looking. Try this, for example:It is recognition of copyright which fundamentally underpins investment in editorial content. It enables publishers to make quality works available, whilst providing a framework to secure remuneration for their investment and the sustainable delivery of creative content. Providing new exceptions in this field would therefore represent a direct threat to publishers’ economic sustainability and their ability to respond adequately to digital challenges. Digitization has not reduced but increased the need for the protection of copyright.
Do you detect a sense of desperation here? The idea that there might be the teensiest rolling back of the copyright ratchet through "new exceptions"? Because, of course, the current copyright framework is working so well online, as is the increasingly deranged enforcement legislation designed to "support" it, that we shouldn't dare tinker with it. The idea that it is precisely because copyright is dysfunctional online that publishers are finding themselves in trouble obviously never entered their minds.
The next bit is fun, too:The different possibilities to utilize content on the internet and via tablets make it very easy for third parties, like aggregators, search engines and pirate sites, to use publishing houses’ creative content for free, without authorization and remuneration of the publisher. It is thereby one of the most important tasks of copyright to draw the line between the widely permitted reference to content of third parties and the unauthorized re-use of such content, which is prohibited.
It's interesting to see the flip-side of publishers' ridiculous obsession with tablets. Alongside the hope that they will be the salvation of the industry (newsflash: they won't) there is also a fear that somehow they will make things worse (well, no, not really.) Again, this is indicative of the fact that the publishers don't really have a clue when it comes to the digital world, and over-emphasise surface details like the tablet while overlooking key trends like the arrival of digital abundance.
To be fair, there is one point in their declaration that is absolutely right:The future of the European press strongly depends on the ability of publishers to monetize their digital editions. Therefore the EU should allow Member States to extend their reduced - including the possibility of zero % - VAT rates to the digital press.
One of the things that I learned when I went along to a roundtable discussion of the UK Independent Review of "IP" and Growth was that ebooks are subject to VAT, whereas physical books aren't. That's partly - but only partly - why ebooks are more expensive than you would expect.
I think the publishing industry is spot on here: VAT rates should match those for physical books, and ideally be set at zero. As for the other points of the declaration, they certainly do declare the publishers' positions, but probably not in the way that was intended.
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Craig Venter is a bit tiresome at times, but indubitably clever. And to prove his cleverness (again) when he was creating artificial life, he thought he'd throw into the DNA a quotation or two:In order to distinguish their synthetic DNA from that naturally present in the bacterium, Venter’s team coded several famous quotes into their DNA, including one from James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist of a Young Man: “To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life.”
Rather witty, no? Sadly, the humourless Joyce Estate didn't see it that way:After announcing their work, Venter explained, his team received a cease and desist letter from Joyce’s estate, saying that he’d used the Irish writer’s work without permission. ”We thought it fell under fair use,” said Venter.
Yeah, we really need Draconian copyright laws to protect (dead) artists from this kind of evil infringement.
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When I first started writing about the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) in 2007, practically no one had heard of it. That wasn't an accident, but a consequence of the attempt to keep the ACTA negotiations hidden behind tightly-closed doors.
On Open Enterprise blog.
A couple of weeks ago I posted in full the near-final version of my submission to the UK Independent Review of "IP" and Growth (sorry, the deadline's passed if you felt a sudden urge to follow suit...). Arguably, it was the most important review that we've had for a long time in this area, but that doesn't mean there aren't others worthy of your attention.
On Open Enterprise blog.
Back in August last year, I wrote the following:
we no longer live in a simple binary world of Internet Explorer as the dominant player and Firefox as the doughty but distant challenger. We are entering a new situation with three powerful players all striving to impress users with their respective strengths and capabilities, each sometimes gaining, sometimes losing a little market share.
In this sense, Mozilla has won, because this kind of healthy competition was precisely what it was trying to achieve when it launched its open source browser project over a decade ago. It has also won in the sense that Internet Explorer is now much more compliant with open Web standards, and seems unlikely to try to lock down the Internet again with its own proprietary add-ons as it did successfully during the dotcom boom. As a result, it's probably fair to say that with its relatively static market share, what we are seeing is not so much the beginning of the end for Firefox, just the end of the beginning where it was the plucky underdog able to ride an easy wave of browser rebellion.
But if this is the end of the beginning, what comes next?
On Open Enterprise blog.
When I was reviewing the fall-out from Nokia's decision to stake its future on Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 system, I mentioned parenthetically that I thought it likely the Qt division would be sold. It turns out I was right, although Nokia has chosen to do this in an unusual way:
On Open Enterprise blog.
For the last 15 years we have been living in a Microsoft monoculture, which has had very real knock-on consequences for everyone online – not just for users of its products. Today, though, that monoculture is fading away, to be replaced by something much more complex.
On The H Open.
One of the oddest aspects of open source is that unlike any comparable computing field that I am aware of, it has been stalked for years by a strange, insubstantial beast going by the name of FUD. Back in 2006, I wrote a short history of the topic, but in the five years since then we've seen plenty more.
On Open Enterprise blog.
Anyone who has been following me on Twitter or identi.ca will have noticed that I have a bee in my bonnet - actually, make that a Beeb in my bonnet - about the BBC.
In fact, I have several - including the fact that I really want it to be the best broadcasting organisation in the world, as it once was. But my other bee/Beeb is that its journalistic standards in the few areas where I can claim some knowledge are pretty woeful.
This is seen nowhere more clearly than in its coverage of malware.
To read the reports on the BBC website (I don't watch UK television, so I've no idea what happens there, but suspect it's just as bad), you'd think that malware were some universal affliction, an unavoidable ill like death and taxes. Rarely does the BBC trouble its readers' pretty little heads with the tiresome fact that the overwhelming majority of viruses and trojans affect one operating system, and one operating system only: Microsoft Windows.
To see this, try the following experiment. Search on the BBC news site for "microsoft windows virus" or "microsoft windows trojan" or "microsoft windows malware", and you'll get a few dozen hits, not all of which refer to Microsoft malware.
But try the same searches without the words "microsoft windows", and you will get many more hits every year (try "computer malware", for example), very few of which mention that such malware is almost exclusively for Microsoft's platform.
That sin of omission has now been matched by an equally telling sin of commission. For hot on the heels of the first serious Android viruses, we have a report on BBC news spelling out the terrible facts:More than 50 applications available via the official Android Marketplace have been found to contain a virus.
Analysis suggests that the booby-trapped apps may have been downloaded up to 200,000 times.
The malicious apps were copies of existing applications, such as games, that had been repackaged to include the virus code.
Fifty applications, can you believe it? Terrifying stuff. And downloaded no less than 200,000 times...shocking.
Of course, the fact that back in 2007 Symantec detected more than 711,912 novel threats which brings the total number of malicious [Microsoft Windows] programs that the security firm's anti-virus programs detect to 1,122,311.
as reported by the BBC in one of its rare balanced pieces on the subject, rather puts those 50 Android programs in context. Similarly, if you consider how many *billions* of times all those Windows viruses have been downloaded over the years, the 200,000 Android downloads pale into insignificance. And yet the BBC chooses not to provide any of that background information.
And it hasn't finished there. Not content with reporting on the Android virus without providing any context, the BBC article then goes on to trash - guess what? - yes, Android's open approach, via this quotation:
"This greater openness of the developer environment has been argued to foster an atmosphere of creativity," he wrote, "but as Facebook have already discovered it is also a very attractive criminal playground."
Again, the missing context is that the *closed* world of Windows has not only provided a rather larger and more attractive "criminal playground", but has caused tens of billions of dollars of economic damage every year according to one estimate. Rather more than just a playground for criminals, one might say - an entire global industry.
All-in-all, this is extraordinarily poor journalism from the BBC, and something that would never have been tolerated when it was at the height of its reputation. What's really sad is that the latest one-sided reporting of the Android viruses suggests that far from getting better, things are getting even worse in this particular area. That is truly a great loss for not just the BBC but for all of its long-time supporters (like me) who would like to see it flourish in the digital age, not shrivel into irrelevance.
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Rather patronisingly, the West has tended to regard China as little better than a copy-cat in advanced technologies, not least on the Web. That's been fuelled in part by the tendency of Chinese companies to create clones of Western Net companies without even changing the design.
But there's definitely a new wave of innovation coming through, although it's hard for those who don't read Chinese to follow this. But one example that is accessible to everyone is the site O.cn.
That's because it's a mapping site - here's Beijing - and hence highly visual, but rather different to Google Maps because it uses an axonometric projection, which makes it look a little bit like SimCity. Paradoxically, this makes it easier to grasp the lay of the land. Moreover, many individual buildings are named (in Chinese, of course), provided a handy level of detail, and you can also pull out categories like food or entertainment.
All-in-all, its an impressive site, and one that really puts Western rivals in the shade. Expect to see this happening more and more.
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As I noted on Tuesday, the UK government has been pretty much a total disaster when it comes to using open source. Indeed, it has arguably been a total disaster when it comes to using computers of any kind, spending far more on this area than any comparable European government. Moreover, the stuff is almost always late, and rarely works properly.
On Open Enterprise blog.
One of the ironies of this column, which appears in a UK title, and is about the use of open source software in large enterprises, is that the biggest UK enterprise of all - the UK government - is singularly backward when it comes to using open source.
On Open Enterprise blog.
As promised in my previous post, I include below my submission to the UK Independent Review of "IP" and Growth.
Submission to Independent Review of “IP” and Growth
In this submission I will restrict my comments to two areas: software patents and digital copyright.
On Open Enterprise blog.
A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the UK's ”Independent Review of Intellectual Property and Growth”, which is currently soliciting submissions from interested parties. The corresponding Web site is very helpful, providing background information and an entire section that seeks to explain what exactly the review is looking for.
On Open Enterprise blog.
I've noted elsewhere that there is a major piece of FUD being put about by content producers: that piracy causes massive damage to a country's economy. But as that post explained with regard to the BSA's claims about the harm of software piracy, here's the reality:Reducing software piracy will not magically conjure up those hundreds of billions of dollars of economic growth that the BSA invokes, or create huge numbers of new jobs: it will simply move the money around - in fact, it will send more of it outside local economies to the US, and reduce the local employment.
The basic idea is really pretty simple to understand. When people make unauthorised copies of content or software, they save money. But that doesn't mean they put it in a bank: human nature being what it is, that money is generally spent elsewhere in the local economy.
And yet despite the simplicity of this crucial idea, report after report seems to have difficulty grasping it. Here's another [.pdf], this time on film piracy, put together by UK Ipsos MediaCT and Oxford Economics for AFACT (the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft). The top-line "results":6,100 Full Time Equivalent (FTE) jobs were forgone across the entire economy (equivalent to more than six times the number of job cuts announced by Telstra in October 2010) including nearly 2,300 forgone directly by the movie industry and retailers. These impacts of piracy on employment persist as long as piracy persists.
Allowing for effects on other industries, some A$1,370m in Gross Output (Sales) was lost across the entire Australian economy.
This was equivalent to a loss of GDP of A$551m across the Australian economy – reducing national economic growth and Australia’s ability to invest in its future.
Tax losses are A$193m, representing money that government could employ for other social uses in areas such as education and healthcare.
What's sad is that the report does try to make reasonable assumptions about piracy:We do not assume that every pirate version equates to a lost sale.
We do allow for ‘sampling’ - those who see an authorised version subsequent to the pirate version are not treated as contributing to lost revenue. In fact, we make the very cautious assumption that no lost revenue results from piracy if any authorised version is seen subsequently.
We do allow for ‘over-claim’ – we apply a ‘downweight’ to those claiming they would have paid for an authorised version (had the pirate version not been available).
But this laudable attempt at rigour is completely undermined by the fact that nowhere in the report is there any recognition that all this "lost" money does *not* disappear, but is simply channelled elsewhere in the Australian economy, where it might actually create more jobs than it would if spent on films (because of revenue outflows to the US, and the fact that local money would be spent on more labour-intensive industries like retailing or catering.) Similarly, it *does* produce tax revenue for the Australian government, just from different sources.
It would be far more conducive to producing an honest debate about the *real* effects of unauthorised copies on national economies if these key facts were included for a change; by continuing to ignore them, these misleading and one-sided reports amount to little more than industry propaganda.
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The dust has barely settled on the announcement of the major deal between Nokia and Microsoft, weird possibilities have been and gone, and we are all still pondering the implications. One of the key concerns for readers of this blog will be: what are the effects on free software? And: who will be the open source losers - and winners? What follows is just a first sketch of what the eventual answers may be: expect them to be refined and possibly reversed as more details and reactions emerge.
On Open Enterprise blog.
In a post last week, I wrote about the current obsession with “IP”, and noted some moves to make it more suitable for the digital age. In this post, I want to look at the other main class of “IP”, patents. Surprisingly, perhaps, I won't be talking about software patents, not least because I've written plenty on the topic. Instead, I want to consider patents on analogue - that is, purely physical - objects.
On Open Enterprise blog.
One of the sure signs that open source has entered the mainstream is when companies not normally associated with this approach starting getting involved. A case in point is Qualcomm, not someone that I've come across in this area before apart from this kind of half-hearted toe-dipping (but maybe I missed earlier work: anyone know of anything previously?) Here's a very interesting project they are supporting:
On Open Enterprise blog.
As you may have noticed, the topic of “IP” - “intellectual property” - seems increasingly to the fore these days. Actually, that's not really a new trend: as this helpful ngram shows, there has been a really rapid uptake of the term since the 1980s. But promoting the supposed virtues and use of “IP” ever-more widely has turned into something of a bandwagon for politicians who want to be seen to be doing something, and for those who want to assert their intellectual monopolies more strongly.
On Open Enterprise blog.
As I've noted before, one of the tricks used in the current ACTA negotiations is to blur the lines between counterfeiting and piracy, and to switch between the two whenever it suits the argument. So it's no surprise that a conference bringing together many intellectual monopoly maximalists, the grandly-titled "Global Congress Combating Counterfeiting and Piracy", used the same trick.
The emphasis is very much on the frightening "big numbers" of counterfeiting:the problem of counterfeiting is growing, which is illustrated by a report on challenges facing the world in 2011, which was recently published by Robert Greenhill from the World Economic Forum. The report says that the illegal economy, corruption, and organized crime all work together to the detriment of society. It estimates the total value of counterfeits in the world to be $360 billion, including $200 billion in counterfeit medicines and $50 billion in counterfeit cigarettes. There is also $60 billion worth of pirated videos. This lessens the economic competitiveness of many countries.
Even if we accept what are probably inflated numbers, the last sentence is simply wrong. Countries where counterfeits are widely sold may damage themselves in the long term through fake medicines, but in the short term they keep more money in the local economy, which is likely to boost their competitiveness since it allows for greater economies of scale there.
Similarly, a speaker from Interpol talked about:two specific operations taken in the past year to combat piracy and counterfeiting. Operation Jupiter 5 in South America involved 13 countries and led to over 7000 arrests and the seizure of over $200 million worth of counterfeit goods.
Meanwhile:Gerhard Bauer, President of the International Trademark Association (ITA) noted that the size of the counterfeiting phenomena is so vast that it is hard to grasp, and that it leads to the ruination of many legitimate businesses. The ITA participated in a summit yesterday to discuss how different organizations can work together to build awareness of the program and to build support for ACTA.
None of this, of course, has anything to do with Internet piracy, and yet, as the mention of ACTA reminds us, it is precisely in this field that intellectual monopolists have been most active - and disproportionate in their demands.
The crucial role of ACTA was admitted during the conference:ACTA is very important because it is more ambitious than any other previous agreement, including unique provisions on seizure and destruction of infringing goods; more criminal prosecutions; more possibilities for enforcement at the border. Especially significant, ACTA is the first treaty that specifically deals with the internet. He noted civil society concerns with ACTA, which he called “legitimate,” but which “must be allayed.” ACTA is compatible with the Doha Declaration, won’t interfere with trade of generic drugs, contains and contains no measures for intrusive searches of passengers. Civil society must be convinced of this.
Again, there is the confusion between counterfeiting - "seizure and destruction of infringing goods...enforcement at the border" - and the digital world, whose goods cannot be seized or destroyed, and for which borders are largely nominal.
Significantly, as the speaker seeks to address "civil society concerns with ACTA", he does not mention the fact that ISPs will be forced to become agents of intellectual monopolists, or the knock-on loss of privacy that will result, or the chilling effect this will have on free speech. That's because he has no answer to these very serious criticisms of ACTA, which has been pushed through largely by exploiting the deliberate confusion between counterfeiting, with its undoubted analogue risks, and digital piracy, which has none.
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One of the most embarrassing features of the dotcom era was a habit of putting “cyber” in front of everything to make it look hot and trendy (disclosure: I did it too, but I was 15 years younger then...). Don't look now, but it's back:
On Open Enterprise blog.
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