World Copyright Summit: 7 Billion Elephants

In a couple of weeks' time, the World Copyright Summit takes place in Brussels:

Creating value in the digital economy

The World Copyright Summit is a truly international and cross-industry event addressing the future of the creative community and the entertainment business in the digital economy.

All stakeholders involved in creative industries – creation, licensing, usage, collective management, legislation and dissemination of intellectual property and creative content – now have a unique forum to exchange views on the value of creative works, the future of authors’ rights, the role of creators and their collective management organisations.

It's certainly a pretty high-powered event, judging by some of the big names there. There's Francis Gurry, Director General, WIPO; Michel Barnier, European Commissioner, Internal Market and Services; Maria Martin-Prat, Head of Unit “Copyright”, Intellectual Property Directorate; and Marielle Gallo, Member of the Committee on Legal Affairs, European Parliament.

Alongside these, we have the heads of just about every industry association for writers, musicians, filmmakers etc., as well as a few big names from the creative and media worlds - people like The Reg's Andrew Orlowski and Robert Levine.

The organisers really seem to have included everyone, just as they say: "All stakeholders involved in creative industries – creation, licensing, usage, collective management, legislation and dissemination of intellectual property and creative content."

Well, everyone except one: The Public.

The public is the elephant in the room at this conference - or, rather, the seven billion elephants in the room.

Not only is the public not participating here, it is not even mentioned, as if the very word were some kind of defilement in these hallowed halls celebrating the great intellectual monopoly of copyright, and ways of extracting the maximum "value" from it.

In the extensive programme [.pdf], the nearest thing I can find to an acknowledgement that the public exists is the odd mention of "consumers" - that is, passive recipients of the content industries' largesse - like this one:

Several initiatives around the world have attempted to connect rights holders – and primarily creators – to consumers in order to promote values such as the respect of copyright. This session looks at some of those projects which are aiming to bring creators and consumers closer together.

Even here, then, the "connection" between these consumers and rights holders is "respect of copyright". It's almost as if no other connection can be imagined - the idea, say, that art loses much of its deeper meaning as a social act without an appreciative and involved audience.

Indeed, that word "respect" is hammered home again and again throughout the programme. It forms one of the three defining themes of the whole conference. But here "respect" means one thing only: respect of the public for the monopolies of the rights holders.

This huge and insulting asymmetry is perhaps the perfect symbol of all that is wrong with industries based around copyright today: they sincerely believe that the "respect" involved is all one-way - that the public has no right to respect whatsoever; that laws can - and should - be passed that take from the public and never give, just as the copyright ratchet means term is always extended, never shortened.

This conference, then, is the perfect expression of an industry talking to itself, reinforcing its own prejudices and delusions, and unwilling to accept that the world has changed utterly under the impact of digital technologies; unable even to mention the idea that it's time to engage with those seven billion people - not as consumers, but as new kinds of creators, just as worthy of "respect" as the traditional kind - and rather more numerous.

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Hargreaves Report: Patently Sensible Stuff

It's a measure of how central traditionally dry-as-dust subjects like copyright and patents have become to the modern (digital) world that the Hargreaves Report on the UK's “intellectual property framework” has been so eagerly awaited. That's partly because there is a clear sense that the current systems are dysfunctional and desperately need fixing, and that this report is an important opportunity to do something about it.

On Open Enterprise blog.

Re-using PCs: Remploy's Radical Route

One of the problems with the rapid pace of development in the world of computers is that the latter become out of date and slightly slow compared to the latest speed fiend. Moreover, the computer industry is predicated on the idea that everyone upgrades their systems every year or two, and marketing is largely geared to that end.

On Open Enterprise blog.

Self-Perpetuating Copyright Enforcement

One of the most powerful emotional tricks used by the copyright industry against those seeking to reduce the term and reach of copyright to more rational levels is to invoke the poor starving artists who would suffer if this were to happen.

The fact that the vast majority of creators earn most money soon after producing their work, and relatively little years later, means that taking copyright back to the original 14-year term specified in the Statute of Anne would have minimal effect on them, but it's an undeniably clever pitch.

In reality, the copyright industry couldn't give two hoots about the artists it feeds off, as the following makes clear:

RIAA spokesman Jonathan Lamy previously told TorrentFreak that the ‘damages’ accrued from piracy-related lawsuits will not go to any of the artists, but towards funding more anti-piracy campaigns. “Any funds recouped are re-invested into our ongoing education and anti-piracy programs,” he said.

If the copyright industry *really* cared about the artists, this money would go straight into their deserving pockets.

Moreover, this "re-investment" in anti-piracy programmes makes such actions self-fuelling: the money supposedly gained for those poor starving wretches, is actually used to fund the next action, which funds the next action, and so on.

This means that the copyright organisations have a real incentive to choose a strategy that privileges heavy-handed enforcement over new business models. The latter might result in creators getting paid more, while the former ensures that the fat-cats running the enforcement machine continue to lap up the cream....

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Spain: America's Trojan Horse?

Techdirt had an interesting, if depressing, story the other day:

according to reports about some of the latest Wikileaks State Department cable leaks, it appears that Hollywood and US diplomats were behind the crafting of Spain's newly proposed copyright law. You may recall, of course, that Spain actually has a fairly reasonable copyright law. It says personal, non-commercial, file sharing is okay, and does not seem to agree with the idea that you should blame third parties for actions of their users.

Now put that together with this:

The European Commission is contemplating making Internet providers police their networks to tackle illegal downloads, a highly contested measure which is currently being scrutinised by the European Court of Justice.

Sources close to the Commission claim that the EU executive will try and replicate a Spanish law which forces Internet providers to come down hard on users for making illegal downloads.

It's pretty clear what is going on here: get one or two EU countries to bring in repressive laws that can be cited as precedents, then "harmonise" EU laws so that all European countries do the same.

It emphasises why every country has to fight these kind of neo-colonial impositions by the US copyright industries, because once a crack appears at the national level, the European Commission will be sure to start using it to open up the whole of Europe.

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BSA 2010 Piracy Report: Big Numbers, Big Flaws

In the digital world, it seems, there are two certainties: that every year the Business Software Alliance will put out a report that claims huge amounts of software are being “stolen”; and that the methodology employed by that report is deeply flawed.

On Open Enterprise blog.

Skype-ing Out an Open Source Future

You may remember a legacy company from a few years back – used to be very big in old market segments like the desktop, but never managed to make much impact in growth areas like the web or mobile. Seems like it's found some money down the back of the sofa:

On The H Open.

As British as Raspberry Pi?

There's been a lot of chatter about Apple possibly switching to ARM chips for its laptops and even its desktops. Whether or not that is true, it's certainly the case that the ARM architecture is a major success, as a glance at the huge list of major manufacturers employing it for their products confirms: as well many Android phones, the Apple iPhone and iPod touch are to be found there.

On Open Enterprise blog.

Portugal to Make CC Licences Illegal?

I recently wrote about the suggestion that a "Great Firewall of Europe" should be created - a fine example of political cluelessness when it comes to technology. Here's another, this time from Portugal:

The Socialist Party will present this new proposal for approval in the next Government, no matter if they win the elections or not. In regards to Creative Commons, they support a vision where Creative Commons harm Culture, and in this law proposal they intend to turn them illegal. Here's how (quick translation, I'll soon post the whole proposal in Portuguese online, so others can make their own translation; this is only the part regarding written works, but there are similar items in "Article 3" for other works, except software):

Article 3, point 1 - The authors have the right to the perception of a compensation equitable for the reproduction of written works, in paper or similar support, for instance microfilm, photocopy, digitalization or other processes of similar nature.

[...]

Article 5 (Inalienability and non-renunciability) - The equitable compensation of authors, artists, interpreters or executives is inalienable and non-renunciable, being null any other contractual clause in contrary.

Here: in sum, every author (except software authors, so thankfully free software isn't affected) has the right of getting money out of private copy, and they can't renounce it, so every Creative Commons license, where saying "You are free to share — to copy, distribute and transmit the work" (or actually, in legalese, "licensor hereby grants you a worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive, perpetual license to reproduce the Work") is illegal.

Judging by the interesting discussion around the post quoted above, it's still not entirely clear whether this is really the intent of this new law. It's possible, for example, that this is just very badly drafted, and not actually an attack on the idea that creators should be able to share their work freely if they wish.

Unfortunately, a follow-up comment to the post is more pessimistic:

The SPA position (that the Ministry of Culture shares because they state they agree 100% in their positions) is that every creative commons author is harming artists, authors and the creative ecosystem.

The SPA is the "Sociedade Portuguesa de Autores", or Portuguese Authors Society:

Since its creation in May 22, 1925, the Portuguese Authors Society took on two important areas of activity: the mutualist and the cultural. The mutualist one has allowed thousands of authors to find support in old age and in sickness. As for the cultural one, it remains active, always with new proposals.

It seems here that those "new proposals" have nothing to do with helping authors distribute their creations as they wish, but is more about imposing a very one-sided and anachronistic view that only fools give away their creations. (Or as Bill Gates put it some years back: "Who can afford to do professional work for nothing? What hobbyist can put 3-man years into programming, finding all bugs, documenting his product and distribute for free?")

This shows how prescient Rick Falkvinge was when he wrote recently:

Some people, and corporations in particular, claim that the purpose of the copyright monopoly is for a certain profession to make money. That was never the case, and frankly, the idea is revolting to any democracy and functioning market. Bricklayers don’t have laws guaranteeing they make money, marketers don’t, plumbers don’t, and nobody else does, either.

However, the means of achieving the maximization of the available culture has been to give some creators a monopoly on the opportunity — not the right, but the opportunity — to make money off of a creative work. This has been the means to maximize culture for the public at large, and never the end in itself.

This also means that the only legitimate stakeholder in copyright legislation is the public. The monopoly is indeed a balance, but not the “balance” between corporate profits and human rights that the copyright industry likes to paint and pretend. In fact, the copyright industry is not part of the balance at all.

Unfortunately, this is not some abstract battle between different points of view. For example, if CC licences become illegal in Portugal, this would presumably mean that contributing to Wikipedia would also become illegal. Maybe Wikipedia itself would become illegal - there seems no limit to the absurdity of the knock-on consequences when starting from such a ridiculous premise.

Let's hope that enough Portuguese artists protest and the politicians come to their senses before Portugal becomes the laughing-stock of the civilised world.

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Another Business Model for Art: eBay

One of the things that I and others like to emphasise is that investigating new business models is crucial for the survival of art, artists and the companies that work with them. A signal failure to do that has led to the current excesses by the content industries, which have instead become fixated on increased enforcement of copyright laws that are simply unenforceable in the digital age.

Against that background, it's always heartening to hear about artists trying out new things - like this:

Hello, my name is Daniel and I make songs. You can see my stuff by typing "Dan Bull" into YouTube. I've decided to find out what my music is really worth so I'm sticking myself on eBay. The winning bidder will receive:

One song on any topic of your choice, written, performed and produced by Dan Bull. Duration: 2.30 - 3.30 approx. I will liaise with you via e-mail if there any specific details you wish to include in the song. You will be free to use and redistribute this song in any way you wish, however I reserve the right to do the same. The song will be delivered to you in MP3 format within 14 days of the winning bid.

Get bidding now, because this may never happen again. Love from Dan :) x

Well, I actually think it might well happen again - especially if people bid enough money for Mr Bull's song. This patronage/auction model clearly generalises to other forms of creativity, and is flexible enough to encompass all levels of production, from rank amateurs to the biggest names. Interesting stuff. (Via @tdobson.)

Righting Wrongs by Re-writing Ebooks

One key property of printed books is that it is very hard to modify them. Digital books, by contrast, are trivially easy to re-write - provided they are released under a licence that permits that.

One early enlightened example of a book that does allow such modification is Free as in Freedom, a biography of Richard Stallman that came out around the same time as Rebel Code.

Although Free as in Freedom was based on extensive interviews with him, Stallman was not entirely happy with certain aspects of it; he has therefore taken advantage of the GNU Free Documentation Licence it was published under in order to offer his own gloss on the text and facts [.pdf]:

I have aimed to make this edition combine the advantages of my knowledge and Williams’ interviews and outside viewpoint. The reader can judge to what extent I have achieved this.

I read the published text of the English edition for the first time in 2009 when I was asked to assist in making a French translation of Free as in Freedom. It called for more than small changes. Many facts needed correction, but deeper changes were also needed.

...


The first edition overdramatized many events by projecting spurious emotions into them.

However, as Stallman explains, making changes was a non-trivial task:

For all these reasons, many statements in the original edition were mistaken or incoherent. It was necessary to correct them, but not straightforward to do so with integrity short of a total rewrite, which was undesirable for other reasons. Using explicit notes for the corrections was suggested, but in most chapters the amount of change made explicit notes prohibitive. Some errors were too pervasive or too ingrained to be corrected by notes. Inline or footnotes for the rest would have overwhelmed the text in some places and made the text hard to read; footnotes would have been skipped by readers tired of looking down for them. I have therefore made corrections directly in the text.

This ability for subjects of books to offer comments on and corrections to the text is a fascinating new development made possible by digital books and liberal licences. It raises all sorts of questions of how best to offer this extra layer of information and comment, and what the ethical - and legal - issues are in terms of making sure that the reader knows who is claiming what.

With Free as in Freedom 2.0, Stallman is once again a blazing a new trail; it will be interesting to see who follows him, and how.

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Why We Need Firefox

Earlier this week, I reported on my travails with Firefox, and how I teetered on the brink of switching to Google's Chromium. Actually, I wasn't too seriously tempted, and thanks to the kind efforts of Mozilla, the problem has been resolved (see Update at the end of the above post for details.)

On Open Enterprise blog.

Who Should Buy SuSE Linux?

In the early days of companies based around open source, the questions were: would they make any money? Would they survive? Once it was clear that they not only could survive, but also make money quite nicely, the next question became: what happens when they become successful enough to get bought by traditional software companies?

On Open Enterprise blog.

Marine Litter: Fishing for Answers

I have long been appalled by what we are doing to our oceans. Not content with taking out more fish than is sustainable - a mathematically stupid thing to do - we have also turned this amazing, fundamental resource into the world's dustbin. The most visible result of that is the clutch of gyres of marine litter whose dimensions are almost beyond comprehension - and growing.

Closer to home, I have also looked on with rising anger at how European fisheries are mismanaged, not least because of the absurd practice of discards, which results in huge quantities of fish being thrown back into the sea. That is again insane from the viewpoint of sustainability, and a perfect symbol of the irrational way fishing is conducted in Europe.

So I was delighted to hear that the EU fisheries commissioner, Maria Damanaki, wants to stop it:

She wants a ban – which she says is necessary to preserve fish stocks – within two years, as part of a wide-ranging reform of the European common fisheries policy.

Of course, nothing is simple: the fishing industry seems incapable of recognising its own best interests, and is against an idea that would enable them to preserve their industry and jobs in the long run:

at a hearing in Brussels on Tuesday afternoon, held by Damanaki and attended by fishermen's representatives, green groups and consumer groups, some members of the fishing industry vehemently opposed the plans, while others suggested the proposals should be modified.

But something rather amazing has happened. Damanaki has not only come up with a way to address some of the concerns of the fishermen, she has at the same time found a way to start reducing marine litter in the Mediterranean:

I am working with my colleague Janez Potočnik, who is responsible for Environment; we have just been to Athens together, on Friday, to meet public authorities and representatives from environmental organisations and the industry and discuss concrete opportunities to address the issue.

We think to limit –or even ban – the use of plastic bags in retailing. Several EU countries have already put in place different mechanisms to try to achieve this: in Italy plastic bags were banned since the beginning of the year; Ireland was the first country to take action imposing a duty of around 0,22€ on plastic bags since 2002; in Belgium, there is a voluntary agreement of the retailing sector not to issue or at least to charge plastic bags. There is consensus among EU member states on the need to take up the challenge and the Commission is now examining the problem and its possible solutions.

The EU can also offer opportunities to remedy to the present situation: the European Fisheries Fund, for instance, offers now the possibility of developing projects that may contribute to the preservation of the marine environment, such as “fishing for litter” initiatives. Such projects are already ongoing in some countries: in France, among other initiatives, a pilot project will be launched at the end of May, whereby marine litter will be collected by fishermen and sent for treatment.

The fisheries fund can also co-finance port reception facilities in cooperation with the local authorities and municipalities, to collect the waste of fishing and recreational boats.

This is brilliant. Instead of simply telling fishermen they must - for their own good - do things differently, and do different things, it offers a concrete way for them to earn extra money. At the same time, it mobilises precisely those people who are best able to address the problem of marine litter - and avoids all the costs and complications of creating some new task force to do so.

Although it would be naive to expect these measure to be implemented without a fight, I am incredibly heartened to see such creative thinking from the European Commission. This kind of smart approach that turns a problem into a solution elsewhere is exactly what we need for the difficult times ahead. It is vital that we as European citizens support such moves and not let bureaucracy and lobbying stymie them.

Until the last few weeks I'd not really followed Maria Damanaki's work in the European Commission, since I had no expectation that anything so radical was about to emerge from her deparment, but these recent announcements have certainly made me sit up and take notice.

The fact that just a few hours after I tweeted about these marine litter proposals I received a reply from her (or her office) is also highly encouraging, since it suggests someone at ease in the new world of highly-connected and open politics. That, too, is vitally important for the Europe's future, notably its digital side: let's hope she can infect some of her less clueful colleagues.

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Do the Maths

Long-time readers of this blog will know that I like to point out that software patents shouldn't be allowed because (among other reasons) software routines are just algorithms, and algorithms are just maths, which is pure knowledge. Well, a splendid chap has gone much further than my vague handwaving, and *shown* this explicitly:

Google has just been ordered to pay $5M for infringing patent 5,893,120 (hereafter "Patent 120"). This patent covers a very simple data structure and the algorithms for manipulating it. In fact much of the text of the patent is a pseudo-code implementation in a Pascal-like language. So I thought I would provide a practical demonstration of what has, until now, been a theoretical proposition; the reduction of a software patent to set of mathematical formulae.

...

Of course a judge isn't going to know the Lambda Calculus from a lump of rock, but that is what expert witnesses are for. Get a professor of mathematics from an internationally recognised university to testify that these are formulae in the Lambda Calculus, and that the Lambda Calculus is part of mathematics, and you have a sound legal proof. The only thing the patent holders could do is find another professor to testify differently.

Of course, that doesn't stop the lawyers from trying to wriggle out by saying that the patent is for the *application* of maths, and therefore is perfectly legitimate, because it leaves the "knowledge" untouched.

But what this conveniently overlooks is that such patents block anyone else from using that maths in the given field (and knowing lawyers, probably in other fields, too). That effectively turns knowledge into an abstract, useless, glass bead game.

If knowledge is to have any relevance in the real world, it must be applicable there, and not just disembodied and theoretical. Thus these software patents - even if "only" on the application of maths - remain monopolies on knowledge itself; and that way lies madness.

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The Day I Nearly Dumped Firefox

I remember well the moment when the beta version of Netscape Navigator 0.9 was released in October 1994. It was so clearly superior to the main Mosaic browser I was running at the time, that there was no question about using anything else thereafter.

On Open Enterprise blog.

Why Did Wikileaks Fail New Zealand?

As I noted elsewhere, we now know that the US played a major role in pushing for tougher copyright regimes in Canada, Spain and Sweden. It seems that we must add New Zealand to the list of countries that were nobbled:

As you may recall, back in 2008, New Zealand politicians tried to sneak through a three strikes law, that would kick people offline based on accusations (not convictions) of infringement. A few months later, mainly due to massive public outcry, the government scrapped those plans and actually promised a complete rethink of copyright laws.

In a cable just after New Zealand decided to scrap the proposed law, the US embassy noted that it made it clear a new 3 strikes law needed to be put in place as soon as possible and saying that the US can help them write the new law.

...

The cables turned up a few other interesting tidbits from a bit further back, including the fact that a program -- run by the Recording Industry Association New Zealand (RIANZ) to set up a website and get people to snitch on their friends, reporting them as infringers -- was funded by the US government. Yes, the US government handed half a million dollars (New Zealand dollars) to the recording industry to get people to turn in their friends for copying music. Lovely.

Now, this is all pretty shameful stuff; but what makes it doubly so is the fact that New Zealand has recently passed precisely the kind of anti-consumer, pro-industry legislation that the US was demanding.

But consider what might have happened had these same cables surfaced *before* that crucial vote: doesn't it seem likely that quite a few New Zealand MPs would have been revolted by the massive US interference in their internal affairs? Might not enough have voted against the legislation to cause it to fall?

Maybe that wouldn't have happened, but given even the slight possibility, I have to ask why on earth Wikileaks held off publishing these cables that provided such crucial insights into what was going on behind the scenes?

Was this out of some new-found reluctance to influence the unfolding politics of a country? Given Wikileaks' track record, that hardly seems likely. Sadly, this looks more like a case of pure incompetence - only noticing what hugely important materials they had when it was too late for them to have much effect; or maybe - perhaps even worse - they just didn't care what happened in such a far-off land....

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Chipping Away at Open Source Hardware

It would be something of an understatement to say that open source software has been successful. This has led to many interesting attempts to translate that success into different fields, notably content (with things like Wikipedia) and data (the whole open data movement currently spreading through enlightened governments around the world.)

On Open Enterprise blog.

Moral Bankruptcy of the Copyright Industry

As anyone who has followed the area for a while learns, the copyright industry has an extraordinary sense of entitlement. It seems to think that it has a right to demand that governments around the world preserve its outdated business models and existing profit margins - and that it should be granted any kind of extraordinary legal protections for its monopolies to ensure that, whatever the concomitant cost to society.

And yet as Rick Falkvinge points out, that's wrong in all sorts of ways:

The copyright monopoly legislation is a balance between the public’s interest of having access to culture, and the same public’s interest of having new culture created.

That’s it. Those are the two values that go into determining the wording of the copyright monopoly.

The copyright industry always demands to be regarded as a stakeholder in this monopoly. But to give them that status would be to royally confuse the means of the copyright monopoly with its end.

If they were a stakeholder, they would never agree to anything that went against their interests. But the copyright industry is not a stakeholder. They are merely a beneficiary of the copyright monopoly. Just because you benefit from something, you don’t get to affect its future.

That unfounded sense of entitlement would be bad enough, but it seems that it engenders something much worse in some quarters: a complete and utter moral bankruptcy, as this statement from the new director of the Mexican Institute of Industrial Property, Rodrigo Roque Diaz, makes plain:

El tema de la piratería es gravísimo […] brutal para la sociedad mexicana y para el mundo. Las cifras que tenemos del Foro Económico Mundial indican que el comercio ilegal representa el 10% del comercio mundial.

El ingenio lo usamos para violar la ley.

El tema de la piratería es más importante que el tema narcotráfico. El tema de la piratería cuesta billones de doláres al mundo. El impacto económico es muy importante.

[Via Google Translate: The issue of piracy is very serious [...] brutal to Mexican society and the world. The figures we have from the World Economic Forum indicates that illegal trade represents 10% of world trade.

We use ingenuity to violate the law.

The issue of piracy is more important than the drug issue. The issue of piracy costs billions of dollars to the world. The economic impact is very important.]

There we have the view of the copyright maximalists in a nutshell: "piracy is more important than the drug issue" - this from a citizen of a country where the level of violence due to what is here simply dismissed as "the drug issue" is almost incomprehensible for those of us fortunate enough to be distant from it:

Casualty numbers have escalated significantly over time. According to a Stratfor report, the number of drug-related deaths in 2006 and 2007 (2,119 and 2,275) more than doubled to 5,207 in 2008. The number further increased substantially over the next two years, from 6,598 in 2009 to over 11,000 in 2010.

According to the director of the Mexican Institute of Industrial Property, piracy is "more important" than those 27,000 deaths in the last five years.

This is where the insanity of copyright maximalism leads: to valuing the preservation of a government-backed monopoly over the lives of tens of thousands of people. That a high functionary representing the copyright industries can trivialise the suffering of those victims and their families in this way shows how desperately we need to restore not just Falkvinge's "balance" to the copyright debate, but decency and humanity too.

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Who Was Really Behind the Digital Economy Act?

It was just over a year ago that the Digital Economy Act was passed. Of course, the battle to stop this insanity goes on, although the recent verdict against BT and TalkTalk does not bode well. But rather than re-visit all that is wrong with the bill, I want to talk about how it was passed.

On Open Enterprise blog.

Is This the Start of Microsoft Anti-Trust 2.0?

Although it probably seems like impossibly-distant ancient history to most people now, the Microsoft anti-trust case was pretty exciting stuff at the time.

Highlights included Larry Lessig being made Special Master to the court and Microsoft objecting (sadly, it eventually got Lessig taken off the case.) The judge's final “remedy” was to split up Microsoft into two parts: one for operating systems, the other for everything else. Then we had a change of US government, and a much watered-down final settlement that did nothing of the kind.

On Open Enterprise blog.

The Not-So-Great Firewall of Europe

I am staggered by the cluelessness of some politicians [.pdf]:

The Presidency of the LEWP [Law Enforcement Working Party] presented its intention to propose concrete measures towards creating a single secure European cyberspace with a certain "virtual Schengen border" and "virtual access points" whereby the Internet Service Providers (ISP) would block illicit contents on the basis of the EU "black-list".

A big hint of that cluelessness is that these people are still using the term "cyberspace" *seriously* in 2011, as is the fact that they actually think it's possible to create a "single secure European cyberspace" with "virtual borders" and "virtual access points". They only have to look at how porous the Great Firewall of China is - something that has been created and honed by experts with huge resources.

Finally, they seem completely oblivious of the implications of their daft "plan": the imposition of Europe-wide censorship. Again, the fact that "blacklists" (a) don't work and (b) are always flawed is obviously not something the twits in Brussels have quite appreciated. But even if they did work, it's outrageous that the European Union can be contemplating their use without even the slightest twinge of conscience.

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Damaging the DNA of Science

Here's a sad story, but not for the reason you might expect:

Developing therapies from human embryonic stem cells is under threat in Europe, say scientists.

In a letter to Nature, they express "profound concern" about moves at the European Court of Justice to ban patent protection for embryonic stem cell lines.

...

In their letter to Nature, the scientists argue that industry would have no incentive to invest in this area unless their innovations could be protected with patents.

This is the old FUD that unless patents are given for every possible advance, industry will never "invest". Well, even assuming that were true, scientists shouldn't be worrying about that: they are *scientists*, not managers. They are supposed to be motivated by love of knowledge, by the joy of research. Patents weren't allowed on the results of the Human Genome Project, and yet somehow that came to splendid fruition: why should stem cell research be any different?

And the idea that industry doesn't invest without patents is nonsense: that's precisely what happened in the world of software until a misguided court decision allowed programs to be patented in the US. But the introduction of patents in that field has led to a net *loss* for the industry of billions of dollars, as the book "Patent Failure" - written by two supporters of patents - explains in great detail.

The central motivation for innovation is not to get a patent, but to use that innovation to surpass rivals and win business as a result - it's a means to an end. Even if those rivals then use that same invention, they are still at a disadvantage because they are simply following in the original innovator's footsteps. And if they manage to develop the work further, then they advance the field and provide more ideas for yet more innovation - that's how things are supposed to work.

But what's really sad about this whole episode is the fact that scientists have become so corrupted by the trend towards turning knowledge into property that they can't conceive of carrying out exciting science without the nominal incentives of patents. This indicates that something bad has happened to very DNA of science - and patented stem cell research certainly isn't going to fix it.

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Breaking the Monopoly of Celebration

Today is apparently something called "World Intellectual Property Day". How bizarre to be celebrating government-backed monopolies that lock down knowledge.

According to the WIPO site:

The aims of World IP Day are:

to raise awareness of how patents, copyright, trademarks and designs impact on daily life;

to increase understanding of how protecting IP rights helps promote creativity and innovation;

to celebrate creativity, and the contribution made by creators and innovators to the development of societies across the globe;

to encourage respect for the IP rights of others.

So, that impact would be things like HADOPI, which wants to install spyware on every French user's PC; or ACTA, that will turn enforcement agencies around the world into the content industry's private police force; or the New Zealand legislation that would make even watching unauthorised copies of videos on YouTube enough to get you thrown off the Internet.

So what about that "understanding of how protecting IP rights helps promote creativity and innovation"? Well, I'd certainly like to understand that by seeing some independent, peer-reviewed research into the field, because at the moment what we have is just an unstated assumption that intellectual monopolies promote creativity, not evidence.

And it's certainly clear that those same monopolies do crimp creativity when it comes to mashups that are forbidden by copyright, or to writing software programs when surrounded by impenetrable patent thickets. What we need is some research that actually examines whether copyright and patents *do* promote creativity and innovation on balance.

And I'm all for "creativity, and the contribution made by creators and innovators to the development of societies across the globe", but I believe we should celebrate all kinds of creativity, not just the kind that makes money for WIPO's friends. And that means giving back to the great commons of culture - letting creators present and future do with your content what you have done with the work of the past - something that is impossible when copyright terms are so long most people will never live long enough to create using the raw material of their own culture.

And finally, that "respect": respect for monopolies? Really? Respect for excluding people, respect for refusing to share? Can't we do better than that? How about another, rather different, global day that celebrates generosity not judicial threats, sharing not suing?

Of course, pitting ourselves against the might of WIPO machine and its monopolist friends is no easy task: they possess all the power and money, while we must make do with having only right and time on our side.

Time, because the younger generation know instinctively that sharing is good - it's what their mothers told them, after all. And once they rise to positions of power the old monopolistic dinosaurs will suddenly find themselves superseded and looking very silly for the anachronistic idea that digital creations could ever be treated as anything but abundant.

But how should we organise all this? Well, Leo Loikkanen has knocked up a quick World Sharing Day manifesto - completely open and editable, of course - and invites everyone to help hone and perfect it (with a rather tight deadline....)

But that's just one approach: there are many other ways we can celebrate sharing - and I encourage you to , er, share some in the comments, or on your own site, or, indeed, anywhere. After all, why should the intellectual monopolists have a monopoly on all the fun...?

Dell Does it Again

One of the first PCs that I bought was a Dell. It came with 8 Mbyte of memory, 230 Mbyte hard disc, and cost a mere £1479 (the HP Laserjet IV cost an extra £1030) - all excluding VAT. Sadly, it was running Windows 3.1, not least because at this time - 1993 - I had yet to discover free software (and GNU/Linux was, in any case, still pretty rudimentary at this point.)

On Open Enterprise blog.