Undermining the Case for Long Film Copyrights

One of the arguments given for protecting films with long terms of copyrights is that they are very costly to make, and so film producers require long periods for full payback. It is certainly true that many films are obscenely expensive today, but whether they need to be is another matter.

For those, like me, who argue that films will become progressively cheaper to make as technology advances (and open source software takes over), without any substantial loss in perceived quality, an article in the Washington Post provides some useful ammunition.

According to the story:

Chris Moukarbel was intrigued by director Oliver Stone's latest project, a $60 million movie to be released this summer about two police officers rescued from the rubble of the twin towers.

But as a 28-year-old filmmaker, Moukarbel wanted to do more than simply watch Stone's "World Trade Center." He decided to create his own version -- using a bootleg copy of the screenplay and Yale University student actors -- and offer it free on the Internet.

...

According to its lawsuit, which was filed Friday, the studio is afraid that people will see the student film on the Internet and confuse it with the big-time Hollywood version set to hit 1,500 screens on Aug. 9 and backed up with a $40 million marketing campaign.

Well, if that's the case, it can only be because you don't actually need to spend $60 million to make such a film. So it looks like Hollywood is digging itself into a fine hole here. (Via Techdirt.)

Linuxcare Lives - or Does It?

A few months ago I interviewed Dave Sifry, CEO of Technorati. Doing so brought back memories of the previous time I'd interviewed him, when he was CTO of Linuxcare.

The idea behind Linuxcare was a good one: to act as a 24x7 support service for all the main free software programs - and thus plug what many saw as the big gap in the open source offering for corporates. It was a great idea, and they had some great people, but the company crashed and burned for reasons that seem to have nothing to do with that idea, in one of the more spectacular crashes of the dotcom meltdown.

Given this history, I was amazed to learn that Linuxcare lives on, as a company now called Levanta. Or rather, reading the BusinessWeek story on the latter, it seems that Linuxcare has gradually morphed into something else:

Levanta sells a box that connects to all of a company's Linux servers. The customer's software and applications actually run through that box, not individually on each server. That means that if a server crashes, there's a backup for that data. Or, if administrators need to switch an application from a test server to a more reliable one, it's just a few mouse clicks away.

I can't help feeling that an outfit that has changed its management, name and product isn't really the outfit I knew those years back. And so, for me, this strange, zombie-like resurrection is more of an end than a beginning.

Microsoft's GNU/Linux Gnasher is now Ex

Some of you may remember the Microsoftie Martin Taylor, who had the unenviable job of arguing Microsoft's corner against open source a few years back. Well, he is now an ex-Microsoftie. Or as his official bio puts its tersely:

Martin Taylor is no longer with Microsoft.

(Via PaidContent.org.)

MS Does CC

Microsoft has released an add-in that enables you to embed Creative Commons licences directly into Word, PowerPoint, and Excel documents. As Larry Lessig is quoted as saying:

This is important to us because a huge amount of creative work is created inside the Office platform. Having a simple way to add Creative Commons licenses obviously helps us spread those licenses much more broadly.

To Microsoft's credit, this is not the first time that it has supported Creative Commons. When the latter was short of cash recently, Microsoft coughed up $25,000 - hardly a huge sum for the company, but laudable, nonetheless. (Via C|net.)

One of the Digital Commons

OpenDemocracy has a piece called "Free culture and the internet: a new semiotic democracy". Apart from the obfuscatory title, it's quite good. It's basically about open content, which it calls "the digital commons". This isn't quite right: it's a digital commons, since there are lots of them these days - open source, open access, etc.

The article is written by Elizabeth Stark, who's a board member of the international student organisation Freeculture.org. The latter is new to me, and has an interesting background:

FreeCulture.org is a diverse, non-partisan group of students and young people who are working to get their peers involved in the free culture movement. Launched in April 2004 at Swarthmore College, FreeCulture.org has helped establish student groups at colleges and universities across the United States. Today, FreeCulture.org chapters exist at over 30 colleges, from Maine to California, with many more getting started around the world.

FreeCulture.org was founded by two Swarthmore students after they sued voting-machine manufacturer Diebold for abusing copyright law in 2003. Named after the book Free Culture by Stanford University law professor Lawrence Lessig, FreeCulture.org is part of a growing movement, with roots in the free software / open source community, media activists, creative artists and writers, and civil libertarians. Groups with which FreeCulture.org has collaborated include Creative Commons, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Public Knowledge, and Downhill Battle.

Dosh Probs and the PLoS Blog

Nature has as story that reports (doubtless with a certain satisfaction) on some looming financial probs at PLoS. As Nature also notes:

PLoS will next month hike the charge for publishing in its journals from US$1,500 per article to as much as $2,500

in an effort to staunch some of the likely losses (though even with the "hike", it's still a bargain).

As far as I can tell, there's no comment yet from the PLoS blog on these matters. Here's a hint, chaps: that's what blogs are for.... (Via Open Access News.)

Update: There's now a comment.

TechDirt's Cleansing Power

You won't learn much new here about the pathetically bent and dirty minds of the MPAA and RIAA, but you will emerge oddly cleansed by the sheer power of the prose. Complimenti, Carlo.

A Study in Stupidity

I am constantly amazed at how many people do not get what net neutrality is about. Cunningly, the telecoms companies frame this in terms of providing "superior" services for certain classes of data traffic - conveniently skating over the fact that creating a first class inevitably demotes everyone else to second class or worse.

The key point about network neutrality is that it ensures a level playing-field - a commons, no less, open to all - and does not attempt to second-guess the intentions of those who will exploit that commons. Those who fight against it forget all the history of the Internet - how none of the services that run across it was planned, but was simply able to take the basic infrastructure for granted.

This is not rocket science; and yet we can still have nominally insightful people writing stuff like this:

there's a huge analytical leap between preventing patently anticompetitive conduct and having the government tell operators how to manage their networks in the name of network neutrality. Unfortunately, as election politics loom large, many in Congress are ignoring this important distinction. They instead are seeking to rush through legislation that would essentially commoditize the Internet into a "stupid" network, without understanding the potential adverse consequences.

A commoditised, stupid network that gets out of the way is precisely what we want, for reasons that this excellent essay explains:

This ability to "just do it" liberates huge amounts of innovative energy. If I have a Stupid Network and I get an idea for a communications application, I just write it. Then I send it to my buddy, and my buddy can install it, too. If we both like it, we can send it to more people. If people really like it, then maybe we can charge for it - or even start our own company. Yahoo!

Or Google, or Amazon or eBay.

There are no "adverse consequences" if that stupidity is implemented in a technical sense. Equally, this is not a question of "having the government tell operators how to manage their networks": all they know - and all they need to know - is that every IP packet must be treated the same. It's a simple engineering-based condition. To say - or indeed ask for - anything else is just, well, stupid.

Pass the Sugar(CRM), Please

Some interesting figures on the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) sector in this item, which seems to predict rocky times ahead for Oracle. Well, I certainly concur with that, but there's a name that is conspicuous by absence in this analysis: SugarCRM.

Why is it important, given that it is currently way behind the leaders? SugarCRM is different from the others, because it's open source. This means that all those good dynamics of the open source world are starting to kick in, in terms of cost, in terms of customer loyalty and in terms of development. And as I've said before, you just can't buy open source companies as you might something like Siebel or PeopleSoft, and this poses a big problem not just to Oracle, but SAP and Microsoft too.

And if you don't believe me, you might care to look at BusinessWeek's thoughts on the matter: its analysis is not as bullish, but is strikingly upbeat.

Closing the Censorship Loop

Censorship is nothing new: ever since there has been power, it has feared knowledge. The trouble is, as people become more dependent on online information, it gets easier to censor, as well as easier to find out information. It all depends on the structure of information access.

That's what makes this story about the LA Times censoring the Internet feed into its newsroom deeply troubling. Since the censorship will naturally block out lots of uncomfortable things - like censorship - this closes the loop, at least in that environment. Journalists there might not even know that they don't know about something.

Let's just hope that the LA Times journalists have lots of fast Internet connections at home, and that they do plenty of Web wandering to find out alternative points of view.

Wireless Meshes and Net Neutrality

The recent brouhaha over net neutrality has emphasised how important it is to have a completely independent way of accessing the Internet. The obvious approach would be to use a wireless mesh: linking thousands of disparate wireless networks together to create a larger, wide-area coverage. TechDirt has an interesting meditation on this idea, pointing out that there are various obstacles to be overcome.

Nobody said it would be easy.

Craigslist: the Open Source Company

The Wall Street Journal has a good story on Craigslist:

One industry analyst has estimated that Craigslist could generate 20 times that $25 million just by posting a couple of ads on each of its pages. If the estimate is to be believed, that's half a billion dollars a year being left on the table. What kind of company turns up its nose at $500 million?

Well, an open source kind of company. And try this:

"It's unrealistic to say, but -- imagine our entire U.S. workforce deployed in units of 20. Each unit of 20 is running a business that tens of millions of people are getting enormous amounts of value out of each month. What kind of world would that be?"

An open source kind of world, perhaps. (Via Slashdot.)

Microsoft's Other Monopoly

I've often wondered about this.

Hakon Wium Lie, chief technology officer of Opera Software, has a positively wonderful post about "Microsoft's forgotten monopoly":

The story of how Microsoft used its monopoly in operating systems to acquire a dominant position in office applications and browsers has often been told. But there's another Microsoft monopoly that's rarely mentioned, even though most of us see it every day--right in front of our eyes.

Microsoft's fonts are used to display most Web pages on the planet. Even Linux and Mac users, who often have fled Windows to avoid dependence on Microsoft, read most of their content using Microsoft fonts.

His solution?

The time has come to break the Microsoft monopoly on fonts. This is easier than it sounds. There are thousands of font families on the Web--I call them Web fonts--that are freely available for anyone to use.

...

Just as the visual appearance of the Web changed dramatically when images were introduced by Mosaic in 1993, the Web can change yet again if browsers start supporting Web fonts. I believe it will benefit everyone on the Web.

Except, perhaps, the monopolist.

The Great Blog Carnival of the Vanities

Blogs are by their nature interactive and cross-referential. Their posts are often about other blog posts, and they encourage comments, which are then commented on, and may link to other blogs. But there is little in the way of formal structures gathering them together. Little, that is, apart from the blog carnival.

I first came across this concept when I took part in one - Tangled Bank number 51, to be precise. Carnivals are essentially self-selected groups of blog posts, submitted by the authors to a site that acts as a host for a particular topic. The host may be fixed or rotating. But the end-result is the same: a thought-provoking collection of items on a theme.

A good example that I came across today is the carnival Mendel's Garden, hosted at "The force that through..." (great blog name, Dylan). I especially liked the RNAi introduction that was included in the carnival, but then that's me all over.

If you want to find out more about carnivals, there's a whole site devoted to them. According to a page there, one of the first blog carnivals was called, appropriately enough, "Carnival of the Vanities". Alas, it seems to have slipped through the wormholes of cyberspace, but you can catch a glimpse of it frozen in time thanks to the Internet Archive.

Deliciously Open

It may be heretical to admit it, but I'm not a big user of bookmarks, either online or offline. Certainly, I have my del.icio.us account, but I find that this blog is a better place to dump my bookmarks (sorry, gentle reader).

Nonetheless, if you're going to use bookmarks, you may as well use an open bookmarking service like MarkaBoo. The man behind it is really trying:

My other number one priority tomorrow will be to get the seal of approval on a more conventional open source license. Right now I’m really only tossing around three possibilities: Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (dropping the non-commercial requirement), the GPL (de-facto open source standard), or just pulling out all the stops and going with the MIT license. What do you think?

Good question: which do you prefer? (Via TechCrunch.)

Wikis: the New Blogs?

It's interesting how more companies are hoping that wikis are the new blogs. Mr Wikipedia himself was an early player here, with his Wikia. Now here comes Wetpaint (where do they get these names?). TechCrunch reckons that:

The service is incredibly easy to use (Jotspot comes close, but isn’t as mass-user friendly) - and it may bring a much larger audience to wikis than are currently comfortable using them.

I can see why blogs have taken off: it's vanity writing - a chance for the world to enjoy your wit and wisdom. But wikis are almost anti-vanity, since you let people scribble all over your precious masterpiece. Can't see it being so big, myself.

Flashiness Beats Reality

Bad news according to this story: Flash has jumped ahead of Real to become the number 2 video format (after Microsoft's Windows Media). The rise of Flash is particularly tiresome given that there are good open alternatives like Theora and OpenLaszlo.

Podcasters of the World, Unite!

I'm no huge fan of the poddy world (with notable exceptions), which I think is something of a fad, currently; but I certainly wouldn't want it to disappear. So it's good to see the podcasters getting together to fight the underhand WIPO moves I've reported on before. Good luck podboys and podgirls. (Via Boing Boing and Blogger News Network.)

The Tragedy of the Tragedy of the Commons

So through bribes the Japanese have bought the passage of a shameful resolution that flies in the face of science and commonsense. They argue that since whales are more plentiful, they can be hunted. But the only reason whales are more plentiful is because they have not been hunted for 20 years: start hunting them again, and they will be forced to extinction, and there will be no whales for hunting - or anything else.

There's a name for this: it's called the Tragedy of the Commons, and was articulated more than 30 years ago in a famous essay by Garrett Hardin. Basically, it says that selfish use of a common resource leads to the loss of that resource - exactly as Japan seems hell-bent on proving. If the commercial whaling ban is indeed lifted, history will rightly judge them and their allies - including, surprisingly, the previously civilised Denmark - harshly.

The Commons: a Matter of Life or Death

According to the World Health Organisation (WHO):

An estimated 24% of the global disease burden and 23% of all deaths can be attributed to environmental factors.

In other words, the health of the environmental commons and of mankind are inextricably linked.

As WHO says:

These findings have important policy implications, because the environmental risk factors that were studied largely can be modified by established, cost-effective interventions. The interventions promote equity by benefiting everyone in the society, while addressing the needs of those most at risk.

Textop: Mashups and Strong Collaboration

Larry Sanger is beginning to emerge as one of the key players in the open content scene. As I've written before, he played an important, if disputed, role in the creation of Wikipedia. Currently, he is one of the driving forces behind the Digital Universe project.

I notice that he now has a blog (subtitle: "Constructing the Digital Universe"), which looks like it could become a must-read for those interested in the world of open content. Take, for example, this post about something called Textop, or the Text Outline Project. There is a summary of the project, as well as a more detailed explanation. This looks fascinating, and consists of several projects:

# The Collation Project, the flagship, will analyze various public domain works studied by scholars (e.g., Classics and history of philosophy) into approximately paragraph-sized chunks, summarize them, and place these chunks into a single outline. Each node of the outline will not have more than, say, a half-dozen chunks, so the outline will be constantly expanding. This will provide a single reference point for comparing the detailed content of scholarly works from throughout history and eventually, it is to be hoped, more recent works as well.

# The Analytical Dictionary Project will sort dictionary definitions and much other lexicographical data not by word but by concept, discussing and distinguishing the senses of words, introducing idioms and jargon, etc., all as part of the Collation Project's outline.

# The Debate Guide Project will describe the dialectical landscape, that is, it will provide fair but in-depth briefs on all sides of controversial issues, perennial and contemporary, academic and popular. The results will be located in the Collation Project's outline.

# The Event Summary Project will provide summaries of events or "stories," aggregating information from news articles and other sources and presenting it in the most neutral possible fashion. Event summaries will be appended to the end of the chronological portion of the Collation Project's outline.

The first of these, the Collation Project, is furthest along. Basically, it seems to be about chunking online texts for the purposes of overlaying extra information - a mashup, in effect. There's a sample screenshot of how this might work in practice.

What's interesting about this Textop project is the attempt to go down a level: that is, to produce not just texts, but a kind of Semantic Web within texts, with information about textual subunits. It's ambitious, but certainly worthwhile.

And I like Sanger's concept of "strong collaboration":

Strong, or radical, collaboration is crucially different from old-fashioned collaboration. Many people who have not worked much with open source software, or with Wikipedia, do not realize this.

Building on this idea, he has a couple of provocative suggestions:

First, speaking to the open source and open content community: I ask you to imagine if the Establishment were to use the methods and principles (including shared ownership and freedom) that you champion. Just imagine what fantastic results would come of that. Imagine that, and then ask yourselves what you can do, perhaps what in your processes and attitudes you can change, to help see to it traditional information producers adopt the really productive parts of your culture. And bear in mind that they love the efficiency collaborative systems display, and they aren't in principle opposed to freedom and openness.

Second, speaking to traditional information producers (including academics): imagine a world, after a new collaborative revolution, in which massive amounts of reliable information, nothing like today's Internet, is available free for all. Isn't that something you would want to use your influence to get behind, if it were possible? If such incredibly useful information resources might very well be created with low overhead, then isn't it worth it, at least as an experiment, to jettison top-down assignment and individual authorship, and to explore the creative possibilities of modest business models necessary to support the modest overhead? It may or may not make you rich; but it might well make the world rich in a way it has never been before.

Well, quite.

Will Geo Data Get Inspired and Go Open?

According to this post by Rufus Pollock, the INSPIRE proposal, the European Commission Directive on European Spatial Data Infrastucture, just might make European geo-spatial data available to the public for free.

I'm sure there's plenty of scope for things to go pear-shaped, and this isn't an area I know anything about, so I've no idea what the dynamics are. But at least there's hope. The place to find out whether that hope is realised or crushed is Public Geo Data. (Via Open Access News.)

Wengo: Open Source VoIP

One of the potential obstacles to adopting open source is the absence of important or even critical applications. A case in point is VoIP. Although, to its credit, Skype offers a client for GNU/Linux, it's not open source. So what do you do if you really need VoIP but also want to follow the path of light?

Enter Wengo, which not only offers the client, but makes all of the code available under the GPL. I've no idea what the VoIP is like, but Wengo is certainly doing the right thing as far as the software is concerned. (Via LXer and Free Software Magazine.)

Spread OpenOffice.org

A little while back I was calling for a spread of the SpreadFirefox meme. It looks like someone is now doing something along these lines with this attempt to spread the use of OpenOffice.org among New Yorkers.

The Balinese Commons

Well, this sounds like paradise: a conference about the commons taking place in Bali. As the press release puts it (no direct link because of the retrogressive use of frames):

Bali itself is a prime example of commons institutions. The subaks, or traditional irrigation systems have been built and managed by farmers that have lasted over centuries. Even the cultural heritage of the island--seen in the dance, music, and art - is a treasured commons.

Well, quite: kecak as commons, the gamelan as commons, wayang kulit as commons.... (Via On The Commons.)

OpenSolaris: Yes, And?

I'm as big a fan as the next geek of companies opening their code. So kudos to Sun for doing that with its Solaris operating system. But I can't help feeling that this move was about, oh, ten years too late. The stats after one year - 33,000 downloads (no, there are no zeros missing) - seem to confirm this. But I wish the OpenSolaris project well, nonetheless.

What's in a Name?

Digital Rights Network is reporting that as far as the dreaded broadcast treaty is concerned, the EU says protection can only go up. Well, of course, if something is protected, it must be good, so we should increase it.

Now try this: the EU says the monopoly can only be extended. Doesn't sound so good, does it? Monopolies are bad, and so should be decreased. Amazing what a change of terminology can do.

Why Analysts are a Waste of Skin, Part II

Patently.

Wanted: Visual Search Engine

Most people know about Google Images - the second element on the main Google search page. But it doesn't really find images that match the search string: it finds images that are near text that matches the string. Searching for images qua images is much harder.

Which makes this blog entry about Riya's future intentions in this respect intriguing. I've written about Riya a couple of times: but this move, if it happens, and if it works, is really the big one we've been waiting for. There's some interesting background to the move here. (Via TechCrunch.)

The Decline and Fall of the Microsoft Empire

The announcement that Bill Gates will "transition out of a day-to-day role" at Microsoft is no great shock: he was gradually inching in that direction. But once he has gone, and Steve Ballmer is left completely on his own, things are likely to go downhill pretty fast.

After all, Ballmer is not a man of vision (Gates may often have had the wrong vision, but at least he had one). He's a salesman. As this article suggests, he may well go soon too. That would leave the company even more adrift: it would simply become a huge, hugely-successful, convicted monopolist, adrift in a world very different from the one that it exploited so successfully.

The acme of the Microsoft empire was August 24, 1995, when Windows 95 was launched. Since then, it's been sliding. Soon it'll tank.

Update: It seems that Scoble has some related thoughts, together with a nice graph of the plunging share price.

The GNU and "L"-ephant in the Room

Nearly a great piece in The New York Times about Google's vertiginous expansion of its hardware platform:

Today even the closest Google watchers have lost precise count of how big the system is. The best guess is that Google now has more than 450,000 servers spread over at least 25 locations around the world.

Great, except for the fact that it misses out one key piece of information: that nearly all of those servers are running GNU/Linux. Kinda relevant, don't you think, John, baby?

Open Mobile Linux Platform

The success of GNU/Linux as a server operating system is well known. It's lack of success on the desktop is exaggerated. But what many tend to forget is that GNU/Linux is increasingly widely deployed in everyday devices - music players and mobile phones. Indeed, the overall use in such devices probably exceeds its appearance elsewhere.

Further proof of the importance of this sector - if any were needed - is provided by the creation of "the world's first global, open [GNU/]Linux-based software platform for mobile devices" as the press release puts it. And it has some serious support: Motorola, NEC, NTT DoCoMo, Panasonic Mobile Communications, Samsung Electronics, and Vodafone.

A Review of Open Peer Review

I've mentioned before the idea of going beyond open access, which generally employs traditional peer review of papers, to a totally open peer review system. One attempt to implement this is Biology Direct.

The chief movers behind this journal - Eugene Koonin, David Lipman, Ros Dignon and Laura Landweber - have now written an interesting commentary on the first six months' experience. They speak of "cautious optimism about the Biology Direct model". The piece forms part of Nature's continuing examination of peer review and its place in the modern scientific world.

Google, Wal-Mart and the Commons

It's funny how sometimes it all just comes together.

A few days ago, I was quoting approvingly an analysis of how the prices of cheap food at places like Wal-Mart do not reflect the true costs - in terms of damage to the environment, local economies, small farmers etc. And now here is the deeply incomprehensible, but clearly perceptive Umair with some cognate thoughts about Google, its business model and PageRank (inspired by Scott Karp's interesting but depressing posting on linkfarms):

But, of course, there's a loser in this game - there must be, since no attention value is created, but attention is being exchanged. In the end, it's consumers, and, to a much smaller extent, advertisers. Consumers pay by spending attention to which returns are essentially zero, and advertisers pay with clicks whose propensity to consume isn't very high (but not many of them will be so interested in that for another couple of years).

Put another way, It is the expected value of attention of consumers which PageRank is supposed to, somewhat accurately, compute. But as long as there's no real competition in search (and let's be honest - there really isn't), Google can keep shifting the costs of this arbitrage on to consumers.

As Scott puts it, "the media business has been reduced to pure transaction". That's a brilliant statement - he's exactly right. In fact, his statement parallels Mark Pincus's very nice analogy from a few months back - Google as Wal-Mart. The dynamics are very much the same: scale economies are achieved by shifting costs elsewhere; at the expense of consumers, quality, etc.

This naturally led me to the original Google as Wal-Mart posting:

in fact, google feels a like walmart today. once the excitement over trying out their latest release wears off we are left with the realization that they are going to ultimately put the corner grocer (being craigslist) out of business, and suck value out of an economy not add back. and while it's a beautiful day here in san francisco, it's a sad one for me to see a company with so much promise to help the world, primarily focus on helping itself.

do we really want this form of capitalism? where companies like msft, walmart and now google pacman up industries, turning founders into billionaires who then hopefully make big philanthropic donations back to the community. is this sustainable capitalism? yes we live in a free market and yes we can choose how to come together as ants. united we stand, divided we work for google and walmart.

(Lack of capital letters not mine).

And of course, it all fits together, it all makes sense. Commons sense, of course.

A Pox on Your Genomic Knowledge

Why is the Guardian (disclosure: yeah, lots of my stuff there, too) running this story - on the front page - about one of its journos ordering and receiving some partial sequences of the smallpox virus? This story already broke in 2002, when someone did the same thing for the polio virus - except that they went even further, and produced a complete pathogen.

And frankly, it wasn't even much of story then. After all, once you know the digital genome of an organism, it's just a matter of engineering to produce the analogue instantiation (a mathematician writes).

Oz Anti-DMCA Battle Begins

One of the most pernicious knock-on effects of the DMCA is that US is exporting it to other lands - notably through trade agreements. Australia is a case in point: thanks to the Australia-US Free Trade Agreement it is forced to enact "anti-circumvention" laws.

As this page from Linux Australia explains, worse may be in store:

Some large business interests are pressing for the government to restrict legitimate access to digital material, even though the treaty does not require us to do so.

The battle in Australia has begun: maybe we should follow suit and try to roll back some of the more inequitable elements of the EUCD.

Stallman and French PM in Argy-Bargy Shock

A great story: RMS took a petition of 165,000 signatures against the French equivalent of the DCMA to the official residence of the French Prime Minister, since the latter (strangely) refused to grant him an audience. There followed a bit of physical argy-bargy - don't miss the pix.

Great quote from a French version of the story:

Frederic Couchet, de la FSF France, aussi déçu qu'excédé, évoque illico la différence de traitement « entre la réception Bill Gates en chef d'Etat par le président de la République et celle de Richard Stallman par le chef de la sécurité de Matignon ». Stallman croit avoir l'explication : « Gates est l'empereur, nous ne sommes que des citoyens », lâche-t-il calmement.

Life would be so boring without RMS.

Open Source is More Secure - Official

Well, almost. At least the statement comes from someone who should know what he's talking about. Raimund Genes is chief technical officer for anti-malware at the anti-virus vendor Trend Micro, and this is what he had to say:

"Open source is more secure. Period. ... More people control the code base; they can react immediately to vulnerabilities; and open source doesn't have so much of a problem with legacy code because of the number of distributions."

Genes said open-source developers "openly talk about security," so patches are "immediate--as soon as something happens," whereas proprietary vendors with closed code have to rely purely on their own resources to push patches out.

It will be interesting to see how Microsoft responds to this. I predict some heavy leaning will ensue....

Re-Joyce: Lessig is on the Case

Here's a fine demonstration of why copyright last too long.

The grandson of James Joyce is apparently deeply unhelpful when it comes to giving permission for extracts from his ancestor's works and letters to be used by academics. In other words, copyright - which is meant to promote learning and all other good things - is directly responsible for impeding the advancement of knowledge.

Now, this is just the kind of thing that gets Larry Lessig riled, so he has decided to fight the good fight on behalf of scholars the world over.

The Stanford Center for Internet and Society’s Fair Use Project has filed a law suit against Stephen Joyce, who claims the right to control access to the papers and letters of James Joyce.

And he adds this interesting comment:

This is the first in what we expect will be a series of cases defending the boundaries of fair use. Stay tuned.

(Via Ars Technica.)

Update: Wow: and now the Steinbecks are at it, too.

Creative Commons Hits 140 Million

That's the latest estimate of total number of items released under a CC licence. Talk about an idea whose time has come....

The Great IP FUD

As if further proof were needed what a slippery and dangerous concept "intellectual property" - "IP" - is, read this article. Under the innocuous - and misleading - headline "Can Windows and Linux Learn to Play Nice?", Bob Muglia, the senior vice president of Microsoft's server and tools business, serves up the following choice Microsoftian views:

"Open source is a way of building software and, in its most basic sense, there is nothing incompatible [between] the concept of open source and commercial software. But the GPL has an inherent incompatibility that is, to my knowledge, impossible to overcome..."

A commercial company has to build intellectual property, while the GPL, by its very nature, does not allow intellectual property to be built, making the two approaches fundamentally incompatible, Muglia said.

Well, no, Bob, I think you're a little confused here.

A commercial company doesn't have to build intellectual property: it may choose to, it may not. It may choose to sell services, for example, and be jolly successful at that: IBM derives around $40 billion a year from services, and IP doesn't enter it (although it does elsewhere in the company's activities).

And the GPL, "by its very nature" not only allows intellectual property to be built, but actually depends on it: as I've written before, the GPL works thanks to copyright. In other words, the GPL depends on what is called "IP" (though neither I nor RMS like the term).

So, I'm afraid, Bob, that you are wrong on both counts. Your argument falls to pieces, and the whole eWeek interview emerges as yet another attempt to FUD-muddy the waters - to portray the GPL as that big, bad IP wolf driven to eat up all the innocent little commercial Red Riding Hoods.

Oh, and by the way, notice the subtle trick in the generous concession that "there is nothing incompatible [between] the concept of open source and commercial software" - as if open source and commercial software were somehow on different planets. Well, what about Red Hat's products, or SuSE's: are they commercial or are they open source? Answer: they're both. It's a false opposition that Muglia is trying to set up.

Amusingly, this was an approach that one of the top Microsoft bods in the UK tried with me a few years back, when I was "invited in" to "chat" about open source (i.e. have my brain picked for any useful ploys that might be used against open source). One of the first phrases that came out of the Microsoftie's mouth was something about "non-commercial" software - by which he meant open source. So, I was naturally forced to give him a hard time and point out that the implicit distinction he was making was false, and that our conversation would be a short one if we couldn't clear that up.

Unfortunately, it looks like Microsoft is still peddling this particular sophistry.

It's Apache, But Not as We Know It

From the "Because it's there" department: Nokia has ported the Apache Web server to the Symbian mobile phone platform.

Some of the thinking behind the move:

As a mobile phone contains quite a lot of personal data it is easy to semi-automatically generate a personal home page. And contrary to websites in general, a website on a mobile phone always has its "administrator" nearby and he or she can even participate in the content generation. For instance, we have created a web-application that prompts the phone owner to take a picture, which subsequently is returned as a JPG. That is, on a personal device the website can be interactive.

Further, that a website becomes mobile implies that certain properties of websites that hitherto have been mostly meaningless now need to be taken into account. As long as a website resides on a stationary server the physical location of that server lacks meaning, because it will never change. With a mobile website it does change and it is meaningful as the content that is shared may depend upon the current location and context. For instance, if you browse to a mobile website and ask the "administrator" to take a picture, the image you get depends upon the location of the website. Current search engines that update their indexes rather rarely may need modifications to be able to cope with the dynamism introduced by mobile websites.

Implications

We believe that being able to run a globally accessible personal website on your mobile phone has the potential of changing the Internet landscape. If every mobile phone or even every smartphone initially, is equipped with a webserver then very quickly most websites will reside on mobile phones. That is bound to have some impact not only on how mobile phones are perceived but also on how the web evolves.

(Via Technocrat.net.)

Of Bloggregation and Blortals

An interesting trend reported here:

Science Blogs, the compilation of science and health blogs run by Seed Magazine, has added 25 new blogs to their collection, which now features a total of 44 science voices.

Is this aggregation of related blogs into blog portals (blortals?) the next online publishing wave?

The Snake is Winding up the Tree

This story about the Berlin Senate opposing the call by the Berlin Parliament for a complete migration to GNU/Linux is so serpentine, and the battle between what seems a prelapsarian innocence and the forces of a wily cynicism so epic - nay, biblical - that I really have no idea what is going on.

To say nothing of the closing comments:

"The snake is winding up the tree," some are murmuring. After "three months of work by highly paid officials and external experts," the result is "not worth the paper it is printed on."

Er, right.

Wise Words of a Blog Heretic

"Thou shalt post at least once a day": that's the golden rule of blogging. Not according to this interesting post from Eric Kintz. The points he makes are good. But he skates over one of the main reasons why I, personally, go into manic multiple post mode (like today): because there are lots of interesting things I want to note for myself.

In effect, the blog becomes like a big online notebook - something I can access and refer to from anywhere. In a way, the premise is that I blog something if it's of interest to me, and relevant to my current concerns, in the hope that it might be of interest to others. So slowing down the blogging is actually something I don't want to do.

Well, not too often. Or, as St Augustine said: "not yet...." (Via C|net.)

Google Earth Moves - to GNU/Linux

Another excuse for not moving to open source on the desktop disappears.

Untangling FLOSS

LXer sent me to this story called "Brainstorming ways to push open source". I can't really see that it has much to do with brainstorming, but I notice that its about work done by Rishab Ghosh, from the Merit/Infonomics research institute in The Netherlands.

Ghosh is one of the leading European researchers on open source, although sadly he insists on calling it by the ridiculous name "FLOSS". Now, call me conventional, but floss is something I associate with cleaning my teeth, rather than with changing the world, so I find this a pretty silly name. Luckily, this doesn't detract from the value of the work Ghosh has done/is doing.

However, finding that work is another matter. The article mentioned above refers to equally daftly-name FLOSSpols site, which seems to be what the brainstorming refers to. However, in another feat of mind-bending misnaming, the work arising out of FLOSSpols is hidden away under the heading "deliverables" - what ordinary human beings would call reports. It might have been nice (a) to have used the word "report", and (b) to have a clear link to where they can be found.

All this persiflage is particularly sad because the reports look particularly good: I've not read through them completely, because they are long and detailed. But it would be a great pity is such valuable work did not reach a wider audience, but remained, instead, tied up in a tedious tangle of floss.

Why Analysts are a Waste of Skin

Social networks, mobile video and "Googlism" will continue to transform the Net in years ahead, Piper Jaffray analysts said Monday at the opening of its annual Global Internet Summit.

Just two questions:

(1) why did C|net squander valuable electrons to publish this?

And - well, the second one is rather like the quotation.

Microsoft's Bugs: Just Like Christmas

It's sad to see the generally solid BBC news reporting on the latest mega-patch from Microsoft with a real lack of context. It's as if Microsoft bugs were as natural and as inevitable as Christmas: both of them just keep coming around, and, well, it's that time again, so let's tell the readers.

This is so misleading: every time Microsoft issues these huge fixes should be an occasion to remind people that this is shoddy programming on a serious scale. Not only that, but a certain Bill Gates has already recognised it as a problem and pledged that he was really serious about solving it:

In the past, we've made our software and services more compelling for users by adding new features and functionality, and by making our platform richly extensible. We've done a terrific job at that, but all those great features won't matter unless customers trust our software. So now, when we face a choice between adding features and resolving security issues, we need to choose security. Our products should emphasize security right out of the box, and we must constantly refine and improve that security as threats evolve.

The date? 15 January 2002.

Four years later, and the situation is not one whit better, as this latest security update shows. Memo to BBC: next time it's Christmas, could we do a little more than simply hanging up the mistletoe?

Why, Yes, You Do Use Humour Effectively...

...to communicate your hints and tips about OpenOffice.org.