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New Zealand has the unhappy distinction of being in the vanguard of
using the "three strikes" approach of punishment for people accused of
sharing unauthorized copies online. As in France and the UK, this was
brought in without any preparatory research to ascertain its
effectiveness, and without any real thought about the practical
implications. That makes a post by Susan Chalmers on the blog of
InternetNZ, a "non-profit open membership organisation dedicated to
protecting and promoting the Internet in New Zealand", particularly
valuable.
On
Techdirt.
Back in November last year, I wrote
about a particular class of open data - that regarding clinical trials
data. I pointed out that of all open data, it is arguably the most
important, because it can literally save lives - huge numbers of them.
That post was by way of a taster for future columns - like this one -
which touch on this area, since I believe it will become one of the most
important battlegrounds for openness in the next few years.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
One of the reasons Techdirt rails against exaggerated responses to
supposed terrorist threats is that it has caused police forces around
the world to lose all sense of proportion -- literally, in the case of
this UK story from the Daily Mail.
On
Techdirt.
Recently, Techdirt noted that the European "database right" could pose a threat
to releasing public data there. But that assumes that central
governments are at least trying to open things up. A splendid piece by
Sebastian Haselbeck on the Open Gov Germany blog, with the
self-explanatory title "German government screws up open data," underlines that things can fail because the government itself sabotages transparency moves.
On
Techdirt.
The open source programming language Python
-- named after the British comedy series "Monty Python" -- became
popular in the 1990s, along with two other languages beginning with "P":
Perl and PHP. Later, they formed a crucial part of the famous "LAMP"
stack -- the GNU/Linux operating system + Apache Web server + MySQL
database + Python/Perl/PHP as scripting languages -- that underpinned
many of the most successful startups from this time.
On
Techdirt.
It seems like every other headline is about drones these days
-- drones being used in battle, drones being used by the police, drones
as a threat to privacy. As we've noted
before, it's easy to get the impression that drones are inherently
evil, and should be made illegal or something (good luck with that.)
But drones are simply a new kind of technology, largely made possible by
Moore's Law and the dramatic reductions in size, weight and cost it has
brought with it for electronic control devices. Like any other
technology, drones can be used for all kinds of purposes, both good and
bad. It's just that we have heard mostly about the more dubious ones.
To remedy that, here's a heart-warming tale of how drones could tackle one of the most serious threats facing wildlife around the world: poaching.
On
Techdirt.
Last week I wrote about the revelation (to me, at least - maybe other people knew this was going on) that MEPs
were simply cutting and pasting from lobbyists' proposals and
presenting them as amendments to the important Data Protection
regulation. I also suggested that readers might like to write to the UK
MEPs involved, and ask about this. Several
kindly did so, and sent me the reply, which came from Malcolm Harbour.
Here's what he wrote:
On
Open Enterprise blog.
Trademarks are a problem for free software, because there is a
tension between a desire to encourage sharing of the software, and a
need to ensure that people are not misled over what exactly that
software is. For example, you don't want people distributing modified
copies of your code claiming that it is your code, or that it is
approved by you - in the worst cases, it might contain malware, for
example.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
The Web is one of the most dramatic demonstrations of the power of
openness, alongside free software, which not coincidentally runs most of
it and the rest of the Internet. At the heart of that openness lies HTML, a
completely open way of sharing information. So what would be a really
stupid thing you could do to try to throttle that openness and
innovation? Why, yes: adding DRM to HTML so that you can lock down Web page elements:
On
Open Enterprise blog.
Here on Techdirt, one of the things we look forward to each year is
the comedy production known as the 301 Report, where the US makes the
world line up in a row, and then names and shames all the naughty
countries whose intellectual monopoly laws aren't outrageous enough. In
advance of the official naughty list, there are helpful suggestions
from the fans of monopoly maximalism, including the International Intellectual Property Alliance
(IIPA), which has just released its 2013 demands. Mostly it's the
usual suspects -- China, India, Russia etc. But there's an interesting
change from the previous year's list: Canada has moved from the really naughty "Priority Watch List" to the only slightly naughty "Watch List".
On
Techdirt.
Techdirt covered the WCIT circus in Dubai in some depth last year,
since important issues were at stake. As many feared, after a moment of
farce, it became clear that a serious schism
in the ITU was opening up -- between those who wanted the Internet
largely left alone to carry on much as before, with the possibly naïve
hope that it might act as a vehicle of freedom, and those who wanted it
regulated more closely, certain it could become an even better
instrument of control.
On
Techdirt.
The European Patent Office (EPO) is a curious body. Despite its
name, it is not the patent office for the European Union (EU) in the
same way that the USPTO handles patents in the US. As its history page explains:
On
Techdirt.
It's hardly a surprise these days that Chinese Internet companies
routinely self-censor what appears on their services: the world knows
there's not much it can do about what happens within China's borders.
But here's a disturbing story about how that censorship has started spreading further afield.
On
Techdirt.
Everyone knows that politicians are lobbied, sometimes massively.
But it's rare to be able to track directly the detailed effects of that
lobbying. That's why a new site called LobbyPlag is so interesting: it allows people to do precisely that in the case of the controversial data protection rules in the EU,
which aim to regulate how personal information harvested from users of
online services can be used. Naturally, many large Net companies --
mostly in the US -- are unhappy about these moves; some US diplomats are even talking of a possible "trade war"
if the proposals go through in their current form. That's unlikely,
not least because the lobbying is starting to pay off, as LobbyPlag's
analysis makes clear.
On
Techdirt.
The Spratly Islands
are some 750 reefs, atolls and islands in the South China Sea that are
claimed variously by Brunei, the People's Republic of China, the
Republic of China (Taiwan), Malaysia, the Philippines and Vietnam.
That's largely because of the rich fishing grounds that surround them,
and the possibility of significant oil and gas reserves nearby.
On
Techdirt.
It's becoming clear that the lobbying around the proposed EU
directive on Data Protection is some of the most intense ever seen -
some activists have said it's even worse than during ACTA, while on the US side there's mutterings about starting a "trade war" if it's passed in its present form.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
Maybe it's just me, but this year's annual meeting of the global elite at the World Economic Forum in Davos
seemed particularly irrelevant. In fact, all those movers and shakers
had packed up and flown off in their private jets before I had even
noticed that they had flown in, and it's hard to detect much of a ripple
from anything that happened there (or maybe I just move in the wrong
circles....)
On
Techdirt.
An increasingly problematic aspect of free trade agreements (FTAs) is
the inclusion of investor-state provisions that essentially allow
companies -- typically huge multinationals -- to challenge
the policies of signatory governments directly. The initial impulse
behind these was to offer some protection against the arbitrary
expropriation of foreign investments by less-than-democratic
governments. But now corporations have realised that they can use the
investor-state dispute mechanism to challenge all kinds of legitimate
but inconvenient decisions in any signatory nation. Here's a good
example of how this provision is being invoked to contest a refusal by Canadian courts to grant a patent on a drug, as explained on the Public Citizen site:
On
Techdirt.
Just over a year ago, I reported on a remarkable speech by the UK Education Secretary Michael Gove that contained the following words:
On
Open Enterprise blog.
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