Chinese Junk Patents Flood Into Australia, Allowing Chinese Companies To Strategically Block Innovation

Techdirt has been writing for a while about China's policy of providing incentives to file patents -- regardless of whether those patents have any worth. That's led to a naïve celebration of the large numbers now being granted, as if more patents corresponded to more innovation. 

On Techdirt.

Mozilla to the Rescue, Again?

I've written a number of posts about Mozilla's rise and fall and rise: how it went from saving the open Web and open standards in the face of the stagnation brought about by Internet Explorer 6's long dominance; to losing its way somewhat, with the upstart Chrome threatening to supplant its role as the "other" browser; and finally finding a role once more as it concentrated on what it called Web apps.

On Open Enterprise blog.

Early Lessons From New Zealand's 'Three Strikes' Punishments

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.

Select Committee Inquiry into Clinical Trials Data

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.

Bizarre: Indian Government Orders Censorship Of One Its Own Sites

Techdirt has been tracking for some time the worrying moves in India that have involved censoring the Twitter accounts of journalists and political groups, or blocking sites. But this bizarre story from the Times of India goes beyond these in a number of ways: 

On Techdirt.

Armed UK Police Raid House Over Facebook Picture Showing Toy Weapon In Background

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.

The Continuing Disaster Of Open Government In Germany

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.

HADOPI May Be Succeeding -- In Driving French Customers To Dotcom's Mega

Last week, Techdirt reported on the news that falling numbers of P2P users are being trumpeted as a victory for HADOPI's "three strikes" approach in France, but that it is a hollow victory, since sales of recorded music are still dropping in that country. The French site Numerama points out something else interesting happening there (in French), as revealed by the following tweet from Kim Dotcom: 

On Techdirt.

Bhutan's Government: Gross National Happiness, Yes; Sense Of Humor, Not So Much

Aside from its spectacular location up in the Himalayas, the Kingdom of Bhutan is probably best known for eschewing measurements of Gross Domestic Product in favor of Gross National Happiness: 

On Techdirt.

Python Trademark At Risk In Europe: Python Software Foundation Appeals For Help

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.

Here's A Use Of Drones (Nearly) Everyone Will Like

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.

EU Data Protection: Please Write to MEPs Now

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.

Python in Peril - Please Help

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.

BBC Attacks the Open Web, GNU/Linux in Danger

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.

IIPA Wants Canada And Spain On The 'Naughty' Special 301 List Even Though They Brought In Tough New Copyright Laws

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.

Will The ITU's Increasing Focus On Control And Surveillance Split The Internet?

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.

European Patent Office Gives Staff Bonus For Issuing Bumper Crop Of Patents: What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

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.

Europe's 'Database Right' Could Throttle Open Data Moves There

One of the more benighted moves by the European Union was the introduction of a special kind of copyright for databases in 1996: not for their contents, but for their compilation. This means that even if the contents are in the public domain, the database may not be. Thanks to a recent court judgment in France, this "database right" now threatens to become a real danger for the burgeoning open data movement in Europe (original in French). 

On Techdirt.

China's Censorship Hits Internet Users In Other Countries

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.

How Lobbyists' Changes To EU Data Protection Regulation Were Copied Word-For-Word Into Proposed Amendments

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.

China Tries To Bolster Claim To Disputed Pacific Islands By Upgrading Mobile Coverage There

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.

EU Data Protection: Proposed Amendments Written by US Lobbyists

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.

Digital Copyright Principles, According To The Davos Set

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.

Canada Denies Patent For Drug, So US Pharma Company Demands $100 Million As Compensation For 'Expropriation'

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.

UK National Curriculum: A Level Playing-Field?

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.