Recently, there was some justified excitement that Red Hat had finally done it, and turned in annual sales of over $1 billion. A couple of years ago, I wrote a post here on Computerworld UK wondering why there were no companies based around open source that had managed to achieve such billion-dollar turnovers, and suggested that the key reason was one put forward by Red Hat's CEO, Jim Whitehurst:
Rick Falkvinge has another of his fascinating posts up on his Web site, but this one's slightly different from his usual insights into the dysfunctional nature of copyright and patents. It concerns some little-known (to me, at least) history of how Sweden went from being a beacon of freedom to a country under comprehensive surveillance.
ACTA and TPP have much in common. That's no coincidence, since they are both born of a common desire to move away from multilateral forums like WIPO that are relatively open to scrutiny, to invitation-only groups negotiating behind closed doors. That lack of transparency has allowed all kinds of extreme measures to be proposed without any countervailing arguments being heard about why they are neither fair nor sensible.
One of the fields that is ripe for disruption by open digital technologies and business models based on abundance is education. That's already starting to happening with growing successes in the areas of open access and free textbooks. Now here's a major win for open educational resources in Poland (via Slashdot):
We're so inured to hearing about unjustified claims of copyright infringement going unpunished that's it's good to come across a case where extensive damages were awarded for the harm caused. It concerns a film that the Australian artist Richard Bell made in New York, with the help of an assistant called Tanya Steele:
Last year Techdirt wrote about Leah Day, who was trying to introduce a free model to quilting -- apparently a bold thing to do. Sadly, it seems that the ownership mentality is nonetheless spreading in her field, as she reports in this really excellent new blog post entitled "Copyright Terrorism":
The German series "Tatort" ("Crime Scene") has been running since 1970, and remains one of the most popular programs on German television. Given this venerable position, it's perhaps not completely surprising that its scriptwriters -- 51 of them -- have written an open letter complaining about the supposedly negative attitudes of some groups to copyright (German original). But what is noteworthy is the tone and content of the letter.
As you may have noticed, the weather is
rather confused in the UK at the moment – one moment sweltering,
the next freezing. But I predict this summer is certainly going to
be hot, judging at least by what's going on in the world of digital
rights.
After an eventful process where a minority of pro-ACTA MEPs used procedural arguments to delay a decision, the EU Parliament's "International Trade" committee refused to refer ACTA to the EU Court of Justice. Such a referral would have delayed for 18 months the final vote on ACTA.
Respecting the original timetable, the rapporteur David Martin (S&D, UK) will now present a draft report to his colleagues on April 25th, 2012. This draft report will form the basis of the INTA committee's final recommendation to the rest of the Parliament on whether to consent to ACTA or to reject it.
The INTA committee, as well as the other committees working on opinion reports, will also resume their works on this illegitimate agreement.
the EU Commission released a communication on the digital single market covering most EU policies related to the Digital Agenda1. As this document suggests, the Commission is working on combating illegal gambling websites, which could take the form of censorship measures such as those implemented in France and other Member States2. Hypocritically, and probably to please the banking industry, the Commission does not even consider attacking illegal businesses' financial streams, which would be an effective way to tackle them. Instead, the Commission paves the way to censorship measures at the core of the network.
In the area of Copyright, the EU Commission sticks to the dangerous notion of “illegal content”, which doesn't mean anything by itself, except that the network will be programmed for enforcement. It is also pushing for extra-judicial “cooperation” between Internet actors, payment providers and entertainment industries, mirroring the very controversial Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA), currently discussed in the US Congress.
I'm told ISPs would become responsible for deciding what is and what isn't copyright infringement on their networks and blocking infringing content without intervention from a court.
Notice and takedown would be expanded so that a whole website or domain could be taken down on a mere allegation from rights holders that the domain was used "substantially" for copyright infringement.
And search engines would be asked to police results, maintaining both a blacklist of whole domains which would never appear in search results and a whitelist of preferred purveyors of e-entertainment who would always appear at the top of the search results.
The government will be able to monitor the calls, emails, texts and website visits of everyone in the UK under new legislation set to be announced soon.
Internet firms will be required to give intelligence agency GCHQ access to communications on demand, in real time.
The Home Office says the move is key to tackling crime and terrorism, but civil liberties groups have criticised it.
….
A new law - which may be announced in the forthcoming Queen's Speech in May - would not allow GCHQ to access the content of emails, calls or messages without a warrant.
But it would enable intelligence officers to identify who an individual or group is in contact with, how often and for how long. They would also be able to see which websites someone had visited.
Copyright consultations seem to be like buses: you wait for years, then several come at once. In the wake of the Hargreaves report, and the follow-up UK government consultation, we have another one, albeit rather different in emphasis.
As regular readers know, there is a struggle going on between the free software community that needs open standards to be RF (strictly speaking "restriction-free", but usually called "royalty-free") and traditional companies based on proprietary software that are pushing for FRAND - Fair, Reasonable and Non-Discriminatory - not least because it will allow licences like the GNU GPL to be excluded. The argument is that RF means that any claimed patents within a standard must be made available at zero cost - and that, the proponents of FRAND insist, is unworkable, since companies will not be prepared to "sacrifice" their patents in this way.
Although I've not written about ACTA here for a few weeks, things are still bubbling away in Brussels. Here's a good summary of what's going on from La Quadrature du Net, probably the best source of information on ACTA:
One of the striking features of the ACTA debate is the deafening silence from those who are in favor of it. Maybe that's down to the SOPA effect: companies and organizations are frightened of being associated with such an unpopular idea. Of course, it could just be that even its most fervent supporters can't really come up with any plausible justifications for it. That's certainly the impression you get reading a rare attempt to raise the ACTA flag from the Institute for Policy Innovation, entitled "Acting Out on ACTA."
Last month I wrote about how the Netherlands is looking to introduce new flexibilities into its copyright laws, based on some interesting research on copyright exceptions. There must be something in the air, because a wide range of other groups are contemplating exactly the same approach.
Like many people, I've been tracking the steady ascent of Google Chrome - and corresponding decline of Microsoft's Internet Explorer - for some time now. Just recently, yet another milestone has been reached, apparently:
One reason the European Commission decided to refer ACTA to the European Court of Justice may have been in the hope that people would simply get bored and move on. It's certainly true that the cities of Europe aren't full of protesters as they were a couple of months ago, but that doesn't mean that everything has died down completely. Here, for example, is one country whose population still has strong feelings on the matter:
One of the recurrent themes on this blog is the painfully slow progress in terms of getting open source deployed by the UK government. That's despite the fact that there have been multiple statements that it really wants to use more of the stuff, and definitely will - probably, at some point in the future, if the wind is the right direction....
Even though the ACTA text is now finalized, getting details from national governments about what exactly happened during the negotiations is proving extremely difficult, with information still trickling out slowly.
In an interesting blog post, James Firth discusses a comment from music industry analyst Mark Mulligan, quoted in a BBC story about the digital locker site Hotfile:
Back in October I wrote about a UK government consultation on the subject of the proposed Public Data Corporation. The government has now responded with one of its well-written documents [pdf]. Here's part of the executive summary:
Building on the solid work of the Hargreaves Report on copyright, the UK government took a surprisingly sensible attitude in its proposed implementation of most of Hargreaves' suggestions. The consultation period for those proposals ends shortly, and the panic among the copyright industries that the UK government might actually make copyright slightly less biased in their favor is evident. Here's a Daily Telegraph piece where they try to undermine the economic rationale behind the moves, professing scepticism about UK government claims that modernizing copyright will add billions to the UK economy:
It seems like the UK copyright studies and consultations have been going on for years - first with the Gowers Review, followed by the Hargreaves Report and concluding with the current consultation on copyright. That consultation ends this Wednesday, so time is running out to make a submission.
One of the unresolved problems of copyright is how to deal with huge numbers of orphan works -- creations still in copyright, but whose owners can't be traced to give permissions that may be necessary for re-use. The European Parliament's JURI committee met recently to vote on a new report on possible permitted uses of orphan works, prepared by the Polish Member of the European Parliament, Lidia Geringer de Oedenberg.
It's striking how drones have passed from a mysterious weapon used to wreak destruction in distant lands to something that could well become a familiar sight in the skies of the US and Europe. Meanwhile, the technology is progressing rapidly, allowing drones to fly in synchronized swarms and even to be printed out by the sheet. But what might some of the effects on our daily lives be -- for example in the sphere of privacy?
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