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At the end of last year I reported
on the worrying signs of vacillation from the UK government over its
support for truly open standards. At least it's relatively
straightforward to keep tabs on what's happening in Blighty; Europe is
another matter - I find the labyrinthine bureaucracy and its digital
shadow pretty hard to navigate. So I was pleased to come across the
following page, entitled "Strategy for internal use of OSS at the EC".
On
Open Enterprise blog.
Already it's clear that one of the hot tech topics of 2012 will be "The
Internet of Things" – the idea that even the most mundane objects will
be hooked up to the Net and communicating over it. So far, pundits have
concentrated on trivial applications like being able to check your
fridge's contents from a browser, but potentially it could be much more
than that if the "things" are groups of sensors whose data can be
usefully aggregated.
On
Techdirt.
In my last column,
I suggested that one of the best things that Mozilla could do in order
to promote the Open Web and openness in general would be to support the
battle for online freedom in more general ways. That's something it has
already started doing, notably in trying to halt the passage of the
awful Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) that is currently grinding through the US legislative process.
On
The H Open.
By their very nature, drug patents can create monopolies that allow
prices to be kept artificially high. In other domains that may be
simply an annoyance or inconvenience, but in the world of medicines, it
can be a matter of life or death for those unable to afford those
inflated prices.
On
Techdirt.
One of the striking features of some of the most successful startups
over the last ten years – companies like Google, Facebook and Twitter –
is that their infrastructure is based almost entirely around open
source. Of course, that shouldn't really be surprising: open source
allows people to get prototypes up and running for the price of a PC,
which is great for trying out ideas with live code. And yet despite
these zero-cost origins, open source software scales up to supercomputing levels - the perfect solution for startups that hope to grow.
On
Techdirt.
One of the great tasks facing humanity today is digitizing the world's
books and liberating the huge stores of knowledge they contain. The
technology is there – scanners are now relatively fast and cheap – but
the legal framework is struggling to keep up. That can be seen in the
continuing uncertainty hovering over Google's massive book scanning project. It can also be observed in some recent digitization projects like Cambridge University's Digital Library:
On
Techdirt.
As the battle rages over SOPA and PIPA, censorship is very much on
people's minds. But there are many different kinds of censorship,
operating at different levels of precision. For example, while some
forms are crude and inexact, like Homeland Security's shutdown of 84,000 sites, others are highly targeted, and designed to block in a very specific way.
On
Techdirt.
Copyright maximalism has proceeded along two axes. The first is the
term of copyright, which has been steadily extended from the basic 14
years of the 1710 Statute of Anne to today's life + 50 or 70 years,
depending on the jurisdiction.
The other is the scope of copyright, where there are constant attempts
to make yet more fields of human endeavor subject to it – for example fashion or food.
On
Techdirt.
As this timeline
indicates, Brazil's attempts to draw up a copyright reform bill have
been dragging on for five years now. That in itself wouldn't matter too
much – the process of updating major laws is by its very nature a
complex and slow process; but during those five years there has been a
change of administration, and with it, apparently, some major shifts in
policy.
On
Techdirt.
Back in February of this year, I wrote about PPN 3/11, a Cabinet Office “Procurement Policy Note - Use of Open Standards when specifying ICT requirements” [.pdf], which contained the following excellent definition of open standards:
On
Open Enterprise blog.
Those with good memories may recall the following amusing episode when BT wanted to sue people for daring to use its super-duper patented hyperlink invention:
On
Open Enterprise blog.
QuestionCopyright has an interesting article about the role that open access might play in opening up China to new ideas. But what really caught my attention was the following section:
On
Techdirt.
Trey Ratcliff is an extremely successful photographer, who specializes in HDR photography. His blog Stuck in Customs is the top travel photography blog on the internet, with over a million views each week.
On
Techdirt.
The latest big boost to open access has come from in UK government's "Innovation and research strategy for growth" (pdf), which says:
On
Techdirt.
The contentious nature of the "three strikes" response to unauthorized
sharing of copyright materials can be seen by the legal battles being
fought around it across Europe. That's particularly the case in
Ireland, which has emerged as a key testing ground for the approach and
its legality.
On
Techdirt.
At the end of last week, the Council of the European Union – which is
where national ministers from each EU country meet to adopt laws and
coordinate policies – had a meeting. A group of some 40 ministers for
agriculture and fisheries signed off on a range of important matters,
including:
On
Techdirt.
Apple has been garnering quite a reputation for itself as a patent bully, for example using patents around the world in an attempt to stop Samsung competing in the tablet market, and bolstering patent trolls. But that's not enough for the company, it seems: now it wants to use patents to block open standards.
On
Techdirt.
Most people instinctively appreciate the dangers of government
surveillance. But at least it's possible to be on your guard when you
suspect such surveillance may be present by taking care what you write
and send. You might even use some industrial-grade encryption for the
important stuff.
On
Techdirt.
It's no secret that Windows Phone is struggling desperately in the
battle against the smartphone leaders, iPhone and Android. And
desperate times demand desperate measures; but even so, this move by Microsoft is pretty extraordinary:
On
Open Enterprise blog.
There has been a flurry of excitement about Mozilla recently. Not, as
you might hope, about the latest version of Firefox; one of the
unintended consequences of the rapid release approach currently adopted
is that nobody really gets excited about the constant flow of new
versions, which is a pity.
On
The H Open.
The narrative around counterfeit goods usually ends with their
seizure. We rarely get to hear or see what happens to them afterwards
unless some token burning or breaking is laid on for the cameras'
benefit. That makes the following story doubly noteworthy: we not only
find out where fake designer clothes go after they have been seized in
the UK, we discover that they are put to an excellent use:
On
Techdirt.
The road to copyright reform is a long one, full of false starts and diversions. Those with good memories may recall the Gowers Review from 2006, which made lots of sensible suggestions, all of which were promptly ignored by the UK government. So following the good work of the Hargreaves Report, the very real risk was that it, too, would be simply filed and forgotten.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
As readers of this blog will have noticed, open data is particularly
hot at the moment. Whether that will endure is another matter, but for
the moment we should be grateful for all the politicians jumping on this
particular bandwagon, and we should grab the open data they are
releasing with both hands while we can. Here's the latest convert, the European Commission itself:
On
Open Enterprise blog.
The Vice President of the European Commission responsible for the
Digital Agenda for Europe, Neelie Kroes, recently made quite a stir when
she dubbed copyright "a tool to punish and withhold". Now she's back with two major projects: a pan-European open data stategy and the "No Disconnect Strategy":
On
Techdirt.
One of the most important aspects of the UK's Hargreaves Report was
that it called for copyright policy to be based on evidence. It also
noted that so far that simply hadn't been the case, and that practically
all of the so-called "studies" used to justify laws in this area came
from the copyright industries, with missing or dubious methodologies.
On
Techdirt.
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