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The founding of the Pirate Party in Sweden in 2006 was regarded by
many as a joke. After all, the argument went, who would want to be
associated with "pirates" or vote for such a narrow platform? This
overlooked the fact that the traditional political parties had
consistently ignored the concerns of voters who understood that the
Internet raised important questions about areas such as copyright and
privacy. By focusing on precisely those issues, the Pirate Party gave
disaffected voters the opportunity to express their dissatisfaction with
the old political parties and their outdated policies.
On
Techdirt.
Just as politicians routinely invite us to "think of the children"
when they want to push through some new liberty-reducing law, so the
copyright industries regularly invoke "the artists" when they want to
justify longer copyright terms or harsher enforcement laws.
On
Techdirt.
In striking contrast with its disappointing performance in terms of
supporting open source, the UK government continues to take huge strides
in the world of open data. Details about its latest moves are
contained in this document [.pdf] that came out of the recent 2011 Autumn Statement:
On
Open Enterprise blog.
Mark Shuttleworth
is probably best known for three things. Selling the certificate
authority Thawte Consulting to VeriSign for about $575 million in 1999;
using some of that money to become the second self-funded space tourist;
and using some more of it to found and sustain the Ubuntu version of GNU/Linux.
On
Techdirt.
One of the many hopeful signs that the Hargreaves team knew what they
were talking about was the recognition that patent thickets were an
increasing danger in many fields, notably that of mobile technology.
One of the actions flowing from the report was to investigate this area
further, and now the UK government has released its report [.pdf]:
On
Open Enterprise blog.
The European Patent Organization (EPO) is a strange entity. Despite its
name, it has nothing to do with the European Union. Instead, it was
set up on the basis of the 1973 European Patent Convention to grant patents under that Convention.
On
Techdirt.
The ACTA saga has been grinding on for
years now, distinguished by a wilful lack of transparency that is a
clear sign that you and I are being right royally stitched up. If, like
me, you were wondering where we are in the UK with this charade, the
Open Rights Group has put together a useful summary:
On
Open Enterprise blog.
One of the most striking - and disturbing - trends of recent years
has been the assumption by the copyright industries that protecting
their intellectual monopolies outweighs the rights of the public.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
Earlier this week Techdirt reported on the surprisingly forthright statements of Neelie Kroes concerning the failure of the copyright system in the digital world. She made her remarks at the Forum d'Avignon in France, which was about "strengthening the links between culture and the economy".
On
Techdirt.
Last year, Techdirt reported on the approval
by the European Parliament of the Gallo Report, which calls for
harsher enforcement of intellectual monopolies. Although the Report has
no legal force, it's important, since it functions as a framework for
future legislation in this area. And now the eponymous French MEP
Marielle Gallo is at it again, with her new "IP Forum":
On
Techdirt.
Sometimes you just have to shake your head over patent law. Here's a practice from the UK that has been going on since 1876, and involving the Reverend Henry Moule's patented earth closet:
On
Techdirt.
In the 2005 "Grokster" decision, the Supreme Court ruled
unanimously that file sharing networks could be held liable for
copyright infringement if they take "affirmative steps" to encourage
infringement. Grokster closed down as a result, and the recording industry pretty much assumed it had won that battle
But as a fascinating analysis by Rebecca Giblin of what happened afterwards points out, against the industry's expectations, P2P filesharing flourished:
Techdirt.
One of the recommendations made by the Hargreaves Review
in the UK was that a text- and data-mining exception to copyright
should be created, with the following explanation of why that made sense
(PDF):
On
Techdirt.
Neelie Kroes is that rare thing: a politician who actually seems to
understand digital technologies. Before she became the European
Commissioner for Digital Agenda, her current post, she was European
Commissioner for Competition, and in that capacity made a speech about
open standards in 2008 that included the following interesting statements:
On
Techdirt.
Last week I was invited to talk at the South Tyrol Free Software Conference
which took place in northern Italy, in the city of Bolzano (disclosure:
a paid gig.) As its title indicates, this was a more local,
specialised conference than some of its more famous international
siblings, but I was impressed just how much activity was going on. It
was also interesting to see that open data was already a hot topic here -
it's not just national holdings that are being opened up.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
Increasingly, publishers are joining the music and film industries in
bemoaning the effects of piracy on the sales of digital products – and
some are even starting to sue people for alleged copyright infringement (because that has worked so
well elsewhere.) Perhaps they should take a look at what is happening
in China: instead of whining about e-book sales "lost" to piracy,
publishers there have come up with a business model that embraces the possibilities of the Internet:
On
Techdirt.
There is a general belief that science proceeds by smooth cycles of
discovery and sharing – that scientists formulate theories, investigate
problems, produce data and then publish results for other scientists to
check, reproduce and then build on.
On
Techdirt.
With so many bad things happening in the digital world at the moment- ACTA, TPP, Digital Economy Act, HADOPI,
La Ley Sinde etc. - there is a natural tendency to focus on your own
country's woes. But there's something spectacularly awful going on in
the US at the moment that is likely to have very serious ramifications
here, too.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
As I've noted many times, one of the biggest threats hanging over
open source is patents, because of the way trivial but indispensable
software techniques have been patented in some jurisdictions (mostly the
US). Things are made worse by the fact that vague threats can be made
in this area, for example this famous assertion in 2007:
On
Open Enterprise blog.
It's a curious fact that the term of copyright only ever gets longer.
Since copyright is a government-backed monopoly, and monopolies are
generally regarded as bad things, you might have expected some
countervailing pressure against this continual extension, and that at
some point Peak Copyright would have been reached. You might, if you
were extremely optimistic, even expect copyright term to be reduced
occasionally.
On
Techdirt.
Certain terms crop up time and again in the arguments around copyright
infringement and file sharing. Words like "theft" and "stealing"
clearly represent an attempt to frame the debate in a certain way.
That's hardly a new insight: many posts on Techdirt have pointed out
these attempts to manipulate the discourse.
On
Techdirt.
Google matters for open source. First and foremost, it is an example
of a multi-billion dollar global company that simply would not be
possible without an underpinning of free software. Open source's
customisability means that its engineers have been able to fine-tune
Linux and other code to meet Google's very specific needs. That, and the
fact that there is no licensing fee, has allowed the company to scale
its operations to unprecedented levels – rumoured to be over a million
servers.
On
The H Open.
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.
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.
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