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News that the NSA has unfettered access to most of the leading Internet
services inevitably has an international dimension. After all,
Microsoft, Yahoo!, Google and the rest of the Naughty Nine
all operate around the world, so spying on their users means spying on
people everywhere. Indeed, as Mike explained earlier today, the NSA is
actually trying to quell criticism by selling this news as something
that purely concerns non-Americans (although that's clearly rubbish.)
On
Techdirt.
Techdirt has been writing about investor-state dispute resolution
(ISDR) mechanisms in international trade treaties like TPP and
TAFTA/TTIP for two main reasons. First, because of the scale involved:
ISDR allows companies to sue entire countries for huge sums, alleging loss of future
profits. And secondly, because few seem aware of this growing threat
to the national sovereignty of many countries around the world. That
finally seems to be changing, with a number of articles warning about
the dangers of ISDR appearing recently.
On
Techdirt.
One of the key flaws with the data retention schemes being proposed by
the UK and elsewhere, supposedly to catch terrorists and serious
criminals, is that they won't work. It is trivially easy to avoid
surveillance by using encrypted connections, for example those provided
by The Onion Router (Tor). This means that the only people who are likely to end up being spied on are innocent members of the public.
On
Techdirt.
You might have hoped that the extensive discussions that took place
around SOPA a year or so ago would have warned off governments elsewhere
from replicating some of the really bad ideas there, like DNS blocking,
but it seems that Taiwan didn't get the message, as Global Voices reports:
On
Techdirt.
Back in February we reported on a worrying
attempt by the European Commission to reframe the discussion about
modernizing copyright in Europe purely in terms of licensing, reflected
in the name of the initiative, "Licences for Europe". Although originally a series of discussions
were promised to "explore the potential and limits of innovative
licensing and technological solutions in making EU copyright law and
practice fit for the digital age," in practice moderators shut down
discussions of things like exceptions or even Creative Commons
licensing. As far as the Commission was concerned, it seemed the answer
to updating copyright for the modern age was just old-style licensing
and nothing else.
On
Techdirt.
Recent news that Angelina Jolie underwent a preventive double mastectomy because of her elevated risk of developing breast cancer has drawn attention to the Myriad Genetics
case currently before the US Supreme Court, and to the whole area of
gene patents. Myriad's monopoly has allowed it to set a high price for
its tests -- $3000 -- and this is bound to have acted as a disincentive
for those who were unable to afford such a sum. It is therefore quite
likely that people have died as a result of Myriad's patents.
On
Techdirt.
As readers of this blog will have noticed, much of the most
innovative work in the field of openness is taking place in open data.
One of the largest stores of data is held by government, and the
argument for opening it up where possible is strong: after all, we, the
public, paid for this data, so it is only right that we, the public,
should have access to it.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
Open Enterprise mostly writes about "obvious" applications of open
source - situations where money can be saved, or control regained, by
shifting from proprietary to open code. That battle is more or less
won: free software is widely recognised as inherently superior in
practically all situations, as its rapid uptake across many markets
demonstrates. But there are also some circumstances where it may not be
so obvious that open source is the solution, because it's not always
clear what the problem is.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
One of the more disgraceful examples of the inherent selfishness of
the copyright world is that it has consistently blocked a global treaty
that would make it easier for the blind and visually impaired to read
books in format like Braille. The thinking seems to be that it's more
important to preserve copyright "inviolate" than to alleviate the
suffering of hundreds of millions of people around the world.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
One of the amazing things about free software is how it has managed
to succeed against all the odds - and against the combined might of some
of the world's biggest and most wealthy companies. That shows two
things, I think: the power of a simple idea like open collaboration, and
how individuals, weak on their own, collectively can achieve miracles.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
I've written many times about why FRAND licensing
is not an option for open source projects, and should therefore be
replaced by Royalty/Restriction-Free (RF) terms when it comes to
defining open standards to create a level playing field. That's simply a
fact arising from the nature of free software licences. But it turns
out that FRAND is fundamentally flawed anyway, for reasons the following press release
from the European Commission, on its "Statement of Objections to
Motorola Mobility on potential misuse of mobile phone standard-essential
patents", makes clear:
On
Open Enterprise blog.
For the last few months, Techdirt has been following the surprisingly
rapid embrace on both sides of the Atlantic of the proposed
transatlantic free trade agreement, known variously as TAFTA or TTIP. Coming out of nowhere, the agreement is being talked about as if its success and benefits are more or less guaranteed.
On
Techdirt.
As we've pointed out in a few stories, drones aren't necessarily
something to worry about. Like any technology, they can be used for good and bad purposes, and shouldn't be dismissed out of hand. But determining where exactly the line between acceptable and unacceptable lies is tricky, as the following story from the Capitol Hill Seattle blog shows:
On
Techdirt.
A recurrent theme here on Techdirt is the lack of transparency when
international agreements and treaties are being drawn up. That's
increasingly recognized not just as problematic, but simply unacceptable
in an age when the Internet makes it easy to provide both access to
draft documents and a way for the public to offer comments on them.
On
Techdirt.
A couple of days ago Techdirt wrote about how Murong Xuecun, a
well-known user of the Chinese microblog Sina Weibo with over a million
followers, had his account closed down suddenly. Murong has now written a fine article about the background to what happened:
he points out that the deletion of his account looks to be part of a
larger clampdown on the use of microblogging services by well-known
figures who are critical of the Chinese government. The problem for the
latter is that these services are becoming a real channel for free
expression and less-than-perfectly-censored information:
On
Techdirt.
Although New Zealand's decision not to allow patents for programs "as such"
was welcome, other moves there have been more problematic. For
example, after it became clear that the New Zealand intelligence
service, the Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB), illegally
wiretapped and spied on Kim Dotcom, the New Zealand government
announced that it would change the law so as to make it legal in the
future to snoop
on New Zealanders as well as on foreigners. Judging by a major new
bill that has been unveiled, that was just the start of a thoroughgoing
plan to put in place the capability to spy on every New Zealander's
Internet activity at any moment.
Here's an excellent analysis of what the bill proposes, from Thomas Beagle, co-founder of the New Zealand digital rights organization Tech Liberty:
On
Techdirt.
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