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A recurrent theme here on Techdirt is the persistent lack of transparency
during the drafting of new laws or the negotiation of new treaties.
Most governments, it seems, retain the view that they know best, that
the electorate shouldn't worry about all those tiresome details being
discussed in secret backroom negotiations, and that since the public
will be able to see the result once it's all finished, what's the
problem?
On
Techdirt.
It's become something of a cliché that anyone with a mobile phone is
carrying a tracking device that provides detailed information about
their location. But things are moving on, as researchers (and probably
others as well) explore new ways to subvert increasingly-common
smartphones to gain other revealing data about their users. Here's a
rather clever use of malware to turn your smartphone into a system for taking clandestine photos -- something we've seen before, of course, in other contexts -- but which then goes even further by stitching them together to form a pretty accurate 3D model of your world:
On
Techdirt.
Techdirt has been following the important story of the kidney and liver cancer drug marketed under the name Nexavar since March,
when India granted a compulsory license for the first time since
re-instating patents on pharmaceuticals. Naturally, the patent holder,
Bayer, fought back, and appealed against that decision. Now we learn from Intellectual Property Watch that Bayer has lost:
On
Techdirt.
As Techdirt has reported, after a year of amazing successes, the German Pirate Party is going through something of a bad patch
at the moment. One reason is that it seems to spend more time
squabbling in public than on crafting policy documents that will win
over the public. That makes the recent appearance of proposals for
copyright reform particularly significant.
On
Techdirt.
An increasing number of Open Enterprise posts are about moves to open
up government in myriad ways. That's not really surprising, since open
source clearly is a perfect match for public administrations, as are
open standards, and open data is a natural outgrowth of software
openness.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
There's plenty of breathless writing about the imminent 3D-printing
revolution, but realistically, what is it likely to mean for most
people? They probably won't all be printing out their own planes, but they may well be printing out small replacement parts for goods they own. Here's an early example of that from the world of electronics, spotted by the Shapeways site:
On
Techdirt.
As I've noted a couple of times,
one of the key issues that has yet to be resolved concerning the
proposed EU Unitary Patent system is which court will have the final
say. Will it be the European Court of Justice (ECJ), or the main
Unitary Patent Court? Or, put another way, will Articles 6 to 8 of the
Unitary Patent Regulation to be adopted by the Council and the European
Parliament be deleted or not? If they are removed, ultimate power rests
with the Unitary Patent Court; if they remain, the ECJ has the last word.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
Levies on blank storage media are a relic of older times when copying
was a new possibility for copyright works. You no longer needed an LP
pressing plant, say, you could copy music in the comfort of your own
home, first on analog cassette tapes, then later on digital media like
CDs and MP3 players. At that time, it was easy to see each of those
copies as somehow replacing purchases, and so the argument for levies
was born: people should pay indirectly for the "lost" sales their
copying caused.
On
Techdirt.
Last week, I mentioned
that I attended the Open Forum Europe 2012 conference. Preceeding it
was the first meeting of the Open Forum Academy (OFA), of which I am a
member. Here's how it describes itself:
On
Open Enterprise blog.
If you cast your mind back to the heady days of summer, when we were all worried about what ACTA might do, one of the problems was with Article 27, whose third paragraph reads:
On
Open Enterprise blog.
Techdirt writes a lot about the problems with DRM, and how
inefficient and inconvenient it is. But for millions of
visually-impaired people, those "inconveniences" represent something
much deeper, and much worse. Somebody who has started writing
eloquently about this issue is Rupert Goodwins. He is one of the UK's
most respected technology journalists and also, sadly, is losing his
sight. As he points out in a powerful new piece, things ought to be getting better for the visually impaired in the Internet age:
On
Techdirt.
Any EU project called "Clean IT",
with all that implies for elements that are regarded as "dirty", is
worrying enough. But combined with a stated intention of "reducing the
impact of the terrorist use of the Internet", the concerns naturally
grow. After all, it is precisely by invoking the vague and emotional
threat of "terrorism" that the UK government has sought to short-circuit
criticism of many of its most illiberal policies, most recently with
the ill thought-out Draft Communications Bill.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
Just when you think the Megaupload farce can't get any more ridiculous, it does. Following revelations
that New Zealand's Government Communications Security Bureau illegally
intercepted communications in the Megaupload case and provided those
details to law enforcement authorities, the country's Prime Minister has
been forced to apologize personally to Kim Dotcom:
"Of course I apologize to Mr Dotcom, and I apologize to New
Zealanders." From his position of increasing strength as more and more
missteps by the New Zealand authorities come to light, Dotcom graciously accepted those apologies.
On
Techdirt.
Remember back in 2009, when Techdirt reported
that Rupert Murdoch hated Google so much he had decided to block the
search engine from indexing his titles, even though this would
inevitably cut down their visibility and online traffic? He obviously
thought that he would put this upstart technology in its place, showing
that mighty media moguls don't need this Internet thing in order to
flourish just like they did 50 years ago. According to this story in
paidContent, it seems that strategy hasn't worked out too well:
On
Techdirt.
Neelie Kroes is not your average European Commissioner. 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, which included the following statements:
On
Open Enterprise blog.
As Tim Cushing rightly noted earlier this week, the UK's "Free Speech" laws are more about the many things you can't say. As if to back up that view, in the last few days, there's been yet another case of somebody being arrested there for "an offensive Facebook page."
On
Techdirt.
A recent scandal in the UK concerned the country's worst sporting
disaster, when 96 football/soccer fans were crushed to death at a
stadium in Hillsborough in 1989. Prime Minister David Cameron issued an official apology to the families of the victims
for the fact that the safety measures at the ground were known to be
inadequate, and that police and emergency services had tried to deflect
the blame for the disaster onto fans.
On
Techdirt.
Large-scale surveillance of private communications is becoming depressingly routine, even in supposedly enlightened democracies. In less freedom-loving locations, Internet cafes are viewed with particular suspicion, and subject to tight controls. But it looks like Cambodia is taking surveillance of Internet cafes in particular, and communications in general, to new heights/depths:
On
Techdirt.
The debate is still raging whether Bitcoin is a brilliant idea that will revolutionize business and society, a high-tech money laundering scheme, or just a fad that will soon pass into history. But in a fascinating post, Jon Matonis points to a problem that doesn't really seem to have been considered before:
On
Techdirt.
Back in February we wrote
about the ominously-named "Clean IT" project in Europe, designed to
combat the use of the Internet by terrorists. At that time, we
suspected that this would produce some seriously bad ideas, but a leaked document obtained by EDRI shows that these are actually much worse than feared
(pdf), amounting to a system of continuous surveillance, extrajudicial
removal of content and some new proposals that can only be described as
deranged.
On
Techdirt.
As Techdirt observed
back in 2007, Brazilian artists were some of the first to recognize
that piracy can be a positive force that helps get the word out about
their creations. That was part of a larger openness to new ideas about
copyright that was symbolized by the appointment of the well-known
Brazilian musician Gilberto Gil
as Minister of Culture, a post he held from 2003 until 2008. However,
more recently, things have gone into reverse on the copyright front.
Ana de Hollanda, the Minister of Culture appointed by the current
President, ordered the CC license to be removed from the Ministry of
Culture's website, and there were indications that harsher copyright laws were coming.
On
Techdirt.
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