Which Causes More Harm: Copyright Or Patents?

One of the recurrent themes on Techdirt is the harm caused by intellectual monopolies – copyright and patents – to the economy in particular, and to society in general. Stephan Kinsella has raised an interesting question: which of them is worse? 

On Techdirt.

Mozilla's Brendan Eich on the Birth of Firefox

A couple of weeks ago I posted the first part of an interview with Brendan Eich, who is Mozilla's CTO. That covered the early years of browsers at Netscape, and the origin of Mozilla. Somewhat belatedly, here's the second part of that interview, which picks up the story at the beginning of this millennium, and reveals the complex sequence of events that led to the creation of Mozilla Firefox.

On Open Enterprise blog.

Russian Internet Content Monitoring System To Go Live In December

Back in April of this year, the Russian government put out a tender:

Last week, Roskomnadzor, Russian Federal Service for Telecoms Supervision, announced a public tender for developing Internet monitoring system. According to the tender, the budget for such system is 15 million rubles (about $530,000) and the job applications should be submitted by April 15, 2011. The system needs to be developed by August 15, 2011 and the testing period should end on December 15, 2011.

On Techdirt.

Free As In Freedom: But Whose Freedom?

It would be hard to overstate the contribution of Richard Stallman to the digital world. The founding of the GNU project and the creation of the GNU General Public License laid the foundations for a wide range of free software that permeates computing from smartphones to supercomputers. Free software has also directly inspired like-minded movements based around sharing, such as open access and open content (Wikipedia, notably). 

On Techdirt.

Phorm Still Looking For A Large-Scale Deployment, Still Finding Investors

As a search through the Techdirt archives shows, Phorm's behavioral advertising service based on watching your Web activity was beset by problems in its early days. One of the last Techdirt posts on the company from a couple of years ago explained how Phorm was planning to expand overseas, and here's some news on how that's been going: 

On Techdirt.

Academic Publishing Profits Enough To Fund Open Access To Every Research Article In Every Field

The arguments against open access have moved on from the initial "it'll never work" to the "maybe it'll work, but it's not sustainable" stage. That raises a valid point, of course: who will pay for journals that make their content freely available online? 

On Techdirt.

India Wants UN Body To Run The Internet: Would That Be Such A Bad Thing?

The Internet is under attack – but not, as politicians would have us believe, from hordes of cyber criminals, but from the politicians themselves. Alongside national legislation like E-PARASITE and international treaties such as ACTA, there is this proposal that a UN body should take over the running of the whole system: 

On Techdirt.

Spanish Judge Gets It: Pirated Copies Not Necessarily Lost Sales, May Boost Purchases Later

One of the favorite assumptions of industries based around copyright used to be that every pirated copy is a lost sale. More recently, that rhetoric has been moderated somewhat, as a review of the area in the report "Media Piracy in Emerging Countries" shows, but a variation of that fallacy lives on, expressed now as vague "losses" caused by piracy. 

On Techdirt.

Germany To Put Special Monitoring Software On School Computers To Search For Infringement

Just under a month ago, the "Chaos Computer Club" (CCC), which styles itself as "the largest European hacker club", had some disturbing news for Germans:

The largest European hacker club, "Chaos Computer Club" (CCC), has reverse engineered and analyzed a "lawful interception" malware program used by German police forces. It has been found in the wild and submitted to the CCC anonymously. The malware can not only siphon away intimate data but also offers a remote control or backdoor functionality for uploading and executing arbitrary other programs. Significant design and implementation flaws make all of the functionality available to anyone on the internet.

On Techdirt.

What Exactly Makes A Pop-Up Mall A Pop-Up Mall? On Second Thought, Who Cares?

One of the pernicious effects of once-obscure legal issues surrounding copyright and patents seeping into everyday life is the belief that even the vaguest ideas can be owned, and that such ownership is a thing worth fighting over. Here, for example, is a sorry tale from Christchurch in New Zealand, which suffered a massive earthquake in which 181 people died back in February of this year: 

On Techdirt.

What Microsoft's Patent FUD Reveals About Its R&D

Microsoft is currently engaging in some incredible rewriting of history. Here's Horacio Gutiérrez, deputy general counsel at the company, trying to defend Microsoft's evolution into a patent troll that is unable to make a smartphone that anyone wants, and thus seeks to tax those who can:

On Open Enterprise blog.

Why Creative Commons Licenses Help Rather Than Hinder Struggling Artists

Creative Commons (CC) has been with us for nearly a decade, so you would have thought people might understand it by now. Apparently not, judging by the title of this blog post: "How Creative Commons Can Stifle Artistic Output." 

On Techdirt.

Will Anti-Free Trade Protectionist Agreements Be Bad For US Citizens Too?

As we've noted, the US has been using multilateral and bilateral negotiations conducted in secret as a way to craft some very one-sided trade treaties. They seem to offer pretty raw deals to the other nations involved – and correspondingly great ones for the US copyright and pharma industries. But could they turn out to have direct negative consequences for US citizens as well? 

On Techdirt.

Mozilla's Brendan Eich on JavaScript - and Microsoft Buying Netscape

It seems so long ago now, but for those of us lucky enough (and old enough) to have been there, the launch of Netscape's 0.9 version of its Netscape Navigator browser in October 1994 was clearly the beginning of a new era. For a few years, Netscape was the centre of the Internet universe - it's home page was the first you checked each morning for news about what was happening on this strange new Web thing that the company was doing so much to define.

On Open Enterprise blog.

Leading French Presidential Candidate Would Repeal HADOPI But Keep Net Surveillance

As a recent Techdirt post noted, France's HADOPI "three strikes" policy has effectively criminalized vast swathes of that country. Despite widespread opposition, the law was pushed through in 2009 by the current French President, Nicolas Sarkozy, as one of his pet projects - it's probably no coincidence that he is married to a pop singer. 

On Techdirt.

Open Source, Open Science, Open Source Science

One of the key inspirations for the free software movement was the scientific tradition of sharing information and building on the work of others. That arose a few hundred years ago, at a time of rapid scientific progress:

On The H Open.

Just Because Something's Fake Doesn't Mean It Can't Be Innovative

The term "shanzhai" literally means a fortified mountain village, and originally meant those places in China that were outside government control, and hence not subject to its law. Today, by extension, it refers to Chinese outfits producing counterfeit goods that ignore intellectual monopolies like patents. 

On Techdirt

EU Politician Wants Internet Surveillance Built Into Every Operating System

"Think of the children" has become the rallying cry of politicians around the world trying to push for ever-increasing Internet surveillance powers. Since nobody wants to run the risk of being branded as soft on crimes like paedophilia, resistance to such measures is greatly reduced as a result. 

On Techdirt.

Calling the Anti-Net Neutrality Bluff

One of the key arguments used by companies who want to see the end of net neutrality is that with growing use of high-bandwidth services like video on demand, or video telephony, there isn't enough bandwidth to go around, and that other services will suffer as a result. This leads them to call for differential pricing, charging more for such services. 

On Open Enterprise blog.

Please Respond to the PDC Consultation (and PDQ)

Last month I wrote about the UK government's "Making Open Data Real" consultation. That's actually just the first part of a double-headed enquiry into open government data. The other part concerns "Data Policy for a Public Data Corporation" (PDC). 

On Open Enterprise blog.

Hint: If You Commit A Crime, Do Not Google Every Aspect Of It Afterwards

Techdirt has reported on a number people accused of murder googling for things like "neck snap break" or "how to commit murder" beforehand, and leaving these suggestive details on their computers. Those were some years back, and since then there has been plenty of attention given to the idea that your search histories provide a great deal of information about what you were thinking - and possibly even what you were thinking about doing. 

On Techdirt.

Of Open Source, Microsoft, India and Paraguay

One of the recurrent recent themes of IT in the UK has been how moves to open source by local and central government have been stymied by Microsoft - the most famous example being the Newham Council saga. Of course, that's not a problem unique to the UK: it's a pattern repeated around the world, as some recent stories highlight.

On Open Enterprise blog.

London 2012 Olympics Go For Gold in the Extreme 'Ambush Marketing' Law Event: 'Guilty Until Proven Innocent' – And No Streaking Allowed

The Olympic Games are not just about sporting success, but also legal excess – in particular, taking laws to extremes in order to "protect" sponsors, who are routinely elevated to the level of Greek gods during the games, with similarly superhuman rights over lesser beings like you and me.

Techdirt has already written about the UK police getting special powers to enter homes during the 2012 games, as well as free speech being curtailed. Now there are plans to suspend the presumption of innocence too: 

On Techdirt.

Out ACTA-ing ACTA: All TPP Negotiating Documents To Be Kept Secret Until Four Years After Ratification

The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) has now been signed by several nations – even if its actual status is by no means clear. But that doesn't mean governments have finished with their trade negotiations behind closed doors. As Techdirt reported earlier this year, the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement is, in some ways, even worse than ACTA, and looks to be a conscious attempt to apply the tricks developed there to circumvent scrutiny yet further. 

On Techdirt.

'British Cinema's Golden Age Is Now': So Where's The 'Serious Problem' Of Copyright Infringement?

Last week we learned the UK government has precisely no evidence to support its plans for stricter copyright enforcement, which include disconnection upon repeated accusation. Instead, the best it could come up with was: 

On Techdirt.