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Back in August, I urged
people to respond to the consultation on the truly dreadful Draft
Communications Bill, aka Snooper's Charter. Obviously, I wasn't alone
in doing that: many organisations concerned about the impact on civil
liberties in this country have done the same. For example, both 38
Degrees and Open Rights Group (ORG) provided suggested texts and asked
people to contact the Joint Parliamentary Committee that has been
considering the Bill - and doing rather a good job of it, I must say.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
As we know, lock-in is one of the biggest obstacles to moving from
closed, proprietary formats, to open ones. But so far as I know, no one
has tried to quantify the extent to which people cling to old formats.
That makes the following piece of research useful, at least as a first stab at finding out what is really going on:
On
Open Enterprise blog.
One of the reasons the copyright lobby has been able to get so far
with Net-hostile legislation like SOPA/PIPA and treaties like ACTA and
TPP is that the companies affected adversely -- both big Internet
players and smaller startups -- have failed to make their voice heard
effectively. That's finally starting to change, as Google ramps up its
lobbying efforts, and Net entrepreneurs start to get organised.
On
Techdirt.
Transparency is worth having for itself, since governments often tend
to behave a little better when they know that someone is watching. But
occasionally, requests for data turn up something big and totally
unexpected because someone failed to notice quite what the information
provided implies.
On
Techdirt.
Linux went from being a cool personal hack in a bedroom to software
that would eventually change world just over 21 years ago when Linus
sent out his famous "Hello everybody out there using minix" message that
invited people to join in. As I noted last month, that open, collaborative approach was really quite new and proved key to the uptake and development of Linux.
On
The H Open.
In the last year I've written what some might have felt were rather too many thousand words about ACTA.
But I'd argue that it was an important moment, not least because of the
European Parliament's refusal to ratify the treaty, which was quite
unprecedented for an international agreement of this kind.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
This is getting silly. Over the last year I've been warning about problems with the EU's plan to bring in a Unitary Patent system, culminating in a call to write to your MEPs a few weeks ago about an imminent vote that was taking place in the crucial JURI committee. That didn't take place, but word is that the committee vote will now take place this Thursday:
On
Open Enterprise blog.
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.
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