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The reaction to the jury's decision in the US patent infringement
case between Apple and Samsung has been rather remarkable. I've seen it
called all kinds of turning and inflection points for the
computing/mobile world, as if we are entering some strange new era whose
landscape is weird and unknown to us. This is utter nonsense. I don't
think Apple's "stunning" or "total" victory - all phrases I've seen
bandied about - is particularly stunning, or even a victory.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
As promised, here is my submission to the Joint Parliamentary
Committee considering the UK government's Draft Communications Bill:
On
Open Enterprise blog.
The Draft Communications Bill [.pdf]
is one of the most controversial pieces of UK legislation proposed in
recent years - not least because it represents a betrayal of election
promises by the coalition to roll back state surveillance in the UK.
As usual, the government is attempting to claim that current plans are
"different" because the databases are distributed, not centralised; but
the fact that searches will be possible across all the decentralised
holdings means that there is no practical difference. This is quite
simply another example of politicians promising one thing to get
elected, and then doing its opposite.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
One of the most important messages in the history of free software – and computing – was posted 21 years ago, on 25 August 1991:
On
The H Open.
It seems a long while ago now, but June was a pretty hectic month in this neck of the woods, since it saw the final push to get ACTA rejected
in the European Parliament. But of course, plenty of other things were
happening then, and one in particular that I wanted to cover was the
release of this UK Open Data White Paper entitled "Unleashing the Potential".
On
Open Enterprise blog.
Although the following is a little outside the mainstream of Open
Enterprise, it does have a very clear moral with direct relevance to
this blog's readers. It concerns the proprietary program Sibelius,
which describes
itself as "the world’s best-selling music notation software". It only
runs on Windows and Macintosh, and comes with an oppressive DRM that
places it about as far away from free software as is possible.
Nonetheless, it seems widely-loved by most of its users, presumably
because it does what they want it to.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
As I noted recently, net neutrality is back in the spotlight, so I
thought it would be useful - and maybe entertaining - to look at an
anti-net neutrality article for the insights it gives us about how the
other side views things. It's called "Pick Up On One and Let The Other
One Ride", and appears in the Huffington Post. Here's how it frames the discussion:
On
Open Enterprise blog.
As the old joke goes, standards are wonderful things, that's why we
have so many of them. But who would have thought that ETSI, the
European Telecommunications Standards Institute, has already produced a
draft standard on how European governments can snoop on cloud-based
services like Facebook and Gmail -- even when encrypted connections are
used?
On
Techdirt.
Recently we wrote about how copyright rules designed for an analog
age were causing problems when transposed without modification to the
digital world. Here's another example, this time from Australia, where
the Brisbane Times' site reports on an increasingly difficult situation in education as a result of outdated copyright approaches:
On
Techdirt.
At the end of last year, I wrote about the great service Barnes & Noble had performed by drawing back the curtain on one of Microsoft's patent lawsuits.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
When the UK Hargreaves Review of intellectual monopolies in the digital age came out last year, Techdirt noted
that one of its innovations was an emphasis on basing policy on
evidence. The fact that this was even notable shows how parlous the
state of policy-making has become. One important way to gather evidence
is through public consultations, and in the wake of the Hargreaves
Review, the UK government conducted a major exercise in gathering views and information in this field.
On
Techdirt.
I have been writing about the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, ICANN, since its birth in 1998 (see the ICANN entry
on Wikipedia for a good summary of how that came about, and the
evolution of the organisation since then.) That move was contentious at
the time, since it saw the running of the Internet's basic
infrastructure taken out of the hands of the geeks, personified by Jon Postel,
and put in the hands of the business world. As a fully intended
side-effect of that move, it also placed the system fully under the
control of the US, rather than allowing a more distributed, global approach to evolve.
On
Techdirt.
Last year Techdirt wrote about the almost unbelievable Meltwater
decision in the UK, where the courts said that viewing a Web page
without the owner's permission was copyright infringement. In November last year, leave was granted to Meltwater to make an appeal against the ruling to the UK's Supreme Court.
However, that still leaves the inconvenient matter of the infringement
by tens of millions of UK Web users hundreds of times every day in the
meantime.
On
Techdirt.
I've written a couple of articles
recently about Ofcom's consultation on the implementation of the
Digital Economy Act. That consultation has closed now (it was only open
for a month), but I'm conscious that in those posts I was making quite a
lot of technical claims about Internet security, an area in which I am
certainly no expert.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
It's something of a truism that the courts take time to catch up with
technology, especially in the fast-moving world of the Internet, but Thomas Steen
points us to a recent court decision in Norway where the gulf between
law and life is particularly wide. The case concerns a blogger called
Eivind Berge who was arrested recently on account of some statements on
his blog that allegedly "glorified and encouraged the killing of policemen" as a report on the Dagbladet newspaper site puts it (Norwegian original.) Moreover:
On
Techdirt.
Yesterday I wrote that I hoped to post here my submission to the
important EU consultation on net neutrality that is currently open.
However, there have been some important developments in this area that
need to be covered first.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
The implicit justification for various new copyright enforcement
laws, such as the "three strikes" approach, is that they will encourage
people to buy more authorized digital goods and thus support artists and
their works. Naturally, those in favor of this logic like to produce
figures that purport to show that it is working.
On
Techdirt.
Last week I wrote
about the extremely short consultation period for aspects of
implementing the Digital Economy Act. Time is running out - the
consultation closes tomorrow at 5pm, so I urge you to submit something soon. It doesn't have to be very long. Here, for example, is what I am sending - short, but maybe not so sweet....
On
Open Enterprise blog.
One of the recurrent themes here on Techdirt is the increasing lack
of balance in copyright, which is now heavily weighted in favor of
creators and their proxies, and against the public. That bias has come
about thanks to the rise of the Internet, which has turned the
traditionally rather specialist area of copyright law and enforcement
into a matter of everyday concern: it affects practically everything we
do online, and can criminalize even the most trivial of activities
there.
On
Techdirt.
Last week, the British policeman Simon Harwood was acquitted of
killing a man during the 2009 G20 protests in London -- a controversial
verdict given the video footage of the incident. In order not to prejudice their views, the jury was not informed that Harwood had been investigated a number of times previously for alleged violence and misconduct.
On
Techdirt.
Net neutrality is one of those areas that most people are vaguely in
favour of, without giving it much thought. Governments take advantage
of this to make sympathetic noises while doing precisely nothing to
preserve it. For example, following a UK consultation on net neutrality two years ago, Ofcom came out with a very wishy-washy statement that basically said we think net neutrality is a jolly good idea but we won't actually do anything to protect it.
On
Computerworld UK.
One of the defining characteristics of the digital world -- and one
of the problems for copyright law, which was conceived in an analog age
-- is the importance of being able to build on the work of others not
just indirectly, but directly, through mashups or the re-use of existing
material. Stig Rudeholm points us to a fascinating feature in the Guardian about "sweded movies":
home-made tributes to Hollywood titles that adopt precisely this
approach of creative re-interpretation. The name apparently comes from
the film "Be Kind Rewind", where DIY imitations of studio favorites are
passed off as Swedish editions.
On
Techdirt.
Last month we wrote about a new copyright law in Japan whose punishments seemed so disproportionate
it was hard to take it seriously. For example, downloading
unauthorized copies or backing up content from a DVD were both subject
to criminal penalties. According to this story from Daily Yomiuri
Online, it looks like it's no joke:
On
Techdirt.
They say that a lie is halfway around the world before the truth has
got its boots on, and the same seems to be true about Internet policy:
the bad ideas spread like wildfire, while the good ones languish in
obscurity. Snooping on the Net activity of an entire population is the
latest example: now Australia wants to join the club that currently
consists of the US and UK, with Canada waiting in the wings. Here's part of the EFF's excellent summary of what the Australian government is proposing:
On
Techdirt.
Recently, Techdirt reported
on the ruling by a German court on the issue of filtering -- whether
Internet sites have a responsibility to block files continually if they
have been notified about infringing materials once, sometimes called
"Notice and Stay Down". The German court basically said they do, but
the highest French court has taken a different view (French original.)
On
Techdirt.
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