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Techdirt has always been sceptical about Nathan Myhrvold's business
plan for Intellectual Ventures (IV) -- build up a huge portfolio of
patents, simply so that it can then license them to those that will, and
sue those that won't. Others, however, have been dazzled by Myhrvold's
pedigree as an extremely wealthy ex-Microsoft manager, and by the fact
that patents have undeniably become a central concern for the tech
industries in recent years, which suggests that there is plenty of money
to be made from them.
On
Techdirt.
One of the earliest proposals for mass surveillance was the Panopticon:
On
Techdirt.
As I wrote yesterday, one of the most pressing problems the open
source community faces in the near future is the Unitary Patent
proposal, which is likely to bring in software patents to Europe.
Here's the background, and what we can do about it.
On
Techdirt.
Mike recently reminded us that for some people, bizarrely, stopping "piracy" is more important than making money. Here's another example, this time from Norway:
On
Techdirt.
Marielle Gallo is probably best known for the Gallo Report, which Techdirt described
back in 2010 as a "similarly draconian intellectual property
enforcement" to ACTA, with which it has much in common. So it's no
surprise that Gallo has been one of the few vocal supporters of ACTA,
and it was widely expected that the EU's Legal Affairs (JURI) committee
she chairs would support her draft opinion calling for ACTA to be
ratified. As we now know, that didn't happen, and JURI formed one of five committees that all recommended that ACTA should be rejected.
On
Techdirt.
One of the the reasons why legislation like SOPA and treaties like
ACTA are so dangerous is that their loose definitions allow measures
intended to deal with copyright infringement to be used to censor
inconvenient opinions. Unfortunately, that's not just a theoretical
problem with future legislation, but one that is already happening, as this post from Rick Falkvinge makes clear:
On
Techdirt.
Something seems to be going on in the European Union. Over the next
few weeks a range of really important debates and votes are taking
place, all connected with openness in some way. Quite why everything is
happening at once is not entirely clear - unless politicians are trying
to get everything out of the way before their summer hols, perhaps....
On
Open Enterprise blog.
The day before the EU's International Trade committee (INTA) recommended
that the European Parliament should reject ACTA, the EU commissioner
with responsibility for the treaty, Karel De Gucht, had given a speech
to its members, trying to win them over. Although it was short, it
turns out to be highly revealing about the European Commission's future ACTA strategy. Here's what he said:
On
Techdirt.
There's a fairly constant pattern in the world of copyright
enforcement. The media companies claim that piracy is "destroying"
their industries, although they never offer any independent evidence to
back this up. They "demand" that governments "do something" -- by which
they mean introduce harsher penalties for unauthorized downloads.
Because of the hypnotic effect that musicians and artists seem to have
on politicians, governments happily oblige, even though there is no
evidence that such laws will help artists. After the laws come in to
force, online sharing may dip for a while, but soon returns to previous
levels, so the media companies start whining again, and demand yet
tougher penalties.
On
Techdirt.
Last year I wrote about the OpenCorporates project, which describes itself as follows:
On
Open Enterprise blog.
Once more, there's good news on the ACTA front. Today, the important European Parliament committee responsible for handling international trade issues, INTA, voted to recommend that the European Parliament reject ACTA when it comes to a plenary vote on 4 July.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
Another major milestone has been achieved in the push to get ACTA
rejected by the EU: a fifth parliamentary committee has recommended that
the European Parliament should refuse to ratify it when it is put to
the vote on July 4th, effectively killing it in Europe. The other committees
– on legal affairs, civil liberties, industry and international
development – recommended rejection a few weeks ago, but today's vote by
the international trade committee (INTA) was seen as the most
important.
On
Techdirt.
The computing revolution is not the only one driven by constant
scaling of technologies: the field of genomics -- the study of DNA
sequences -- has also enjoyed rapid falls in basic costs over the last
decade and a half. This means that whereas the first human genome cost
around $3 billion to sequence, we are fast approaching the point where
it will cost first a few thousand, and then a few hundred dollars to
sequence anyone's complete DNA. An interesting post on the Health
Affairs Blog points out that neither the law nor society is ready for this.
On
Techdirt.
On the not-very-scientific basis of several calls to MEPs yesterday, the impression I get is that the right-of-centre ECR group on the INTA committee will be pushing for delay until after the ECR has delivered its judgement. That could be in more than a year's time, and would be a big problem in terms of getting ACTA rejected, since all of the momentum that has built up over the last six months would be lost.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
Until recently there has been an unchallenged assumption that the
more copyright, the better. Although people have begun to realize
that's not the case – and that extending copyright diminishes the public
domain because we must all wait longer for works to enter it --
governments around the world continue to make copyright longer, stronger
and broader.
On
Techdirt.
A few months ago we wrote
about a really bad idea that was being floated in Germany: making
companies like Google pay for the use of news snippets in services such
as Google News. Unfortunately, that idea has now been turned into a
concrete proposal for a new law; remarkably, it is even worse than the
original plans.
On
Techdirt.
When the history of modern Brazil comes to be written, a special
place will be reserved for the soybean, the powerful farmers that grow
it -- and the deforestation
it is driving. And at the center of that tale will be Monsanto, with
its patented "Roundup Ready" crop, so called because it has been
genetically modified to withstand the herbicide glyphosate, marketed as
Roundup.
On
Techdirt.
So, we arrive at the penultimate stage of the battle to stop ACTA in
Europe. Before the final plenary vote in the European Parliament in
July, there is a vote in the International Trade committee (INTA) this Thursday. As its home page explains:
On
Open Enterprise blog.
Performing rights societies probably don't have the best reputations
here on Techdirt, but just when you think they can't get any more
outrageous in their demands, they do. Here are two stories from the Slovak Republic, both involving SOZA, the Slovak Performing and Mechanical Rights Society:
On
Techdirt.
Net Neutrality has suddenly become a hot topic again. Partly, that's
thanks to some awful ideas about regulating the Internet coming from
the International Telecommunication Union, notably those proposed by the
ETNO -- the European Telecommunications Network Operators Association
-- discussed recently on Techdirt. New information from WCITLeaks Wikileaks (found via the Net neutrality in Europe site) provides us with the following details (pdf):
On
Techdirt.
We knew it was coming, and here it is: the Communications Data Bill (.pdf.). First the good news:
On
Open Enterprise blog.
As expected, the UK government has published its Draft Communications Bill
(pdf) -- better known as the "snooper's charter," since it requires
ISPs to record key information about every email sent and Web site
visited by UK citizens, and mobile phone companies to log all their
calls (landline information is already recorded).
On
Techdirt.
The Belgian EU Commissioner Karel De Gucht is the driving force
behind ACTA, and is apparently really keen to combat crimes like
counterfeiting and piracy. It also seems he has a slight problem with the tax authorities:
On
Techdirt.
In recent months, Techdirt has reported on an important development in the world of medicine, as both India and Brazil
have allowed local companies to produce cheap generic versions of drugs
covered by patents. In an even bigger blow to Western pharmaceutical
companies, it looks like China is following suit:
On
Techdirt.
Since my last ACTA update, quite a lot of good stuff has happened. For a start, all four European Parliament committees have recommended that ACTA should be rejected
when the plenary vote takes place at the beginning of July. That just
leaves one more committee - that for International Trade, or INTA - to make its recommendation, which should take place next week. I'll be writing more about this vote soon.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
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