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The UK is famous for its abundant CCTV cameras, but it's also pretty
keen on the equally intrusive Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR)
cameras that can identify cars and hence their owners as they pass.
Here, for example, is what's been going on in the town of Royston, whose
local police force has just had its knuckles rapped by the UK's Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) for the over-enthusiastic deployment of such ANPR systems there:
On
Techdirt.
At the beginning of last year we reported on a Swedish study that showed that streaming services had halved
the number of people who were downloading music illegally in
Scandinavia. That's a pretty stunning figure, but of course is only one
data point, which means that people can always argue that it's not
possible to generalize. So it's good that not just one but two new
reports confirm and broaden that finding.
On
Techdirt.
A few months ago we wrote about the extraordinary -- and worrying --
case of Eli Lilly suing Canada after the latter had refused to grant a
pharma patent. Eli Lilly's contention was that by failing to grant its
patent (even if it didn't meet the criteria for a patent in Canada),
Canada had "expropriated" Eli Lilly's property -- and that it should be paid $100 million as "compensation".
On
Techdirt.
One of the striking features of the Snowden story is that there has been
no serious attempt to deny the main claims about massive, global
spying. Instead, the fall-back position has become: well, yeah, maybe
we did some of that, but look how many lives were saved as a result.
For example, the day after the first leaks appeared, it was suggested
that PRISM was responsible for stopping a plot to bomb the NYC subways.
However, further investigation showed that probably wasn't the case.
On
Techdirt.
Two of the key arguments during the Myriad Genetics
trial were that gene patent monopolies stifle innovation by preventing
others from building on and extending key knowledge, and that they can
cause unnecessary suffering and even death by driving up prices for
medical treatment beyond the reach of many people. Even though the
Supreme Court struck down Myriad's key patents, reducing those issues
for DNA, a new technology with major ramifications for health runs the
risk of suffering from precisely the same problems.
On
Techdirt.
One technique in the world of pharma that has started appearing here
on Techdirt is "evergreening" -- making small changes to a drug, often
about to come off patent, in order to gain a new patent that extends its
manufacturer's control over it. The advantages for pharma companies
are evident, but what about the public? What economic impact does evergreening have? That's what a fascinating new paper in the open access journal PLoS Medicine seeks to establish:
On
Techdirt.
As we've noted before, many publishers have the crazy attitude that
ebooks shouldn't be lent by libraries, and that it should be made harder for people to access literature in these places if it's in a digital form. Over in the Netherlands, public libraries have had enough of this, and are taking legal action over the issue, as an article in Future of Copyright reports:
On
Techdirt.
Today, the European Parliament held a three-hour long debate on PRISM,
Tempora and what the EU response should be. Many wanted TAFTA/TTIP put on hold;
others didn't. But one theme cropped up again and again: the need for
strong data protection laws that would offer at least some legal
protection against massive and unregulated transfer of Europeans'
personal data to the US.
On
Techdirt.
As the growing number of Techdirt stories on the subject testify, drones
are becoming a more familiar part of modern life. But their presence
can add a new element to situations. An obvious example is during
demonstrations, where drones can be used to monitor those taking part --
but also the authorities' reaction. As with cases where members of the
public have used smartphones to capture police abuse, so drones offer the possibility of revealing questionable police activity that might in the past have gone unrecorded.
On
Techdirt.
In the past, Iran has provided plenty of light relief here on Techdirt, whether because of plans to build its own Internet, or thanks to weird stuff like this. But it looks like those days are over
following the election of a surprisingly-moderate President, Hassan Rouhani. Here, for example, are his thoughts on Net filters, as reported by The Guardian:
On
Techdirt.
Open standards has been a recurring theme here on Open Enterprise.
It's also been the occasion of one of the most disgraceful U-turns by
the European Commission. That took place in the wake of the European Interoperability Framework v1, which called for any claimed patents to be licensed irrevocably on a royalty-free basis. But when EIF v2 came out, we found the following:
On
Open Enterprise blog.
On Wednesday I wrote
about the Houses of Parliament deciding to use cloud computing
solutions, despite the fact that we now know - not just surmise - that
this is like handing your documents to the NSA.
As I noted, that may not be problematic if your documents were going to
be in the public domain anyway. But of course, that's only the case
for a tiny fraction of most companies' documents. And for those, it is
clearly the height of irresponsibility to place them with cloud-based
systems that are wide open to demands from the US government for any and
all data to be handed over, decrypted where possible.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
Last week I wrote about the perils
of using proprietary software, where companies regularly hand over
zero-day vulnerabilities to the US authorities who then go on to use
them to break into foreign systems (and maybe domestic ones, too, but
they're not owning up to that, yet....). Of course, cloud-based
solutions are even worse, as we've known for some time.
There, you are handing over all your data to the keeping of a company
that may be on the receiving end of a secret US government order to pass
it on to them - perhaps with necessary encryption keys too.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
At the end of last year, we wrote about an extraordinary attempt by the University of California (UC) to resuscitate the infamous "Eolas" patents that were thrown out
earlier by a jury in East Texas. Clearly, the University of California
likes patents, and the way that they can be used to extract money from
people with very little effort. In fact, it likes them so much it is
trying to privatize research produced by taxpayer-funded laboratories so
that even more patents can be taken out on the work, and even more
money obtained through licensing them. The background to this new approach,
implemented via a new entity provisionally entitled "Newco", is
described in a fantastic feature by Darwin BondGraham that appears in
East Bay Express:
On
Techdirt.
In the wake of the news that spies at GCHQ -- the UK equivalent of the NSA -- have been tapping
into every fiber optic cable that comes into and goes out of the
country, downloading and storing phone calls and Internet traffic for up
to 30 days, you might think the British authorities have enough
information at their disposal, without needing to turn to other sources.
But it seems not, according to the latest revelations in The Guardian:
On
Techdirt.
As we've noted before, when it comes to the Internet, governments around
the world have an unfortunate habit of copying each other's worst
ideas. Thus the punitive three-strikes approach based on accusations,
not proof, was pioneered by France, and then spread to the UK, South
Korea, New Zealand and finally the US (where, naturally, it became the
bigger and better "six strikes" scheme). France appears to be about to abandon this unworkable and ineffective approach, leaving other countries to deal with all the problems it has since discovered.
On
Techdirt.
It's hard to believe that the heady times that saw SOPA's rise and fall are only a year and a half ago. Of course, SOPA didn't die, but was merely "delayed". But if you've ever wondered what happened to it, wonder no more; it emigrated to Russia, as TorrentFreak reports:
On
Techdirt.
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