UK "Three Strikes": Please Write to Your MP

Yesterday I wrote a quick analysis of the insane U-turn effected by the UK government over "three strikes and you're out". Below I've posted the corresponding letter that I've sent to my MP on the subject. I urge you to do the same if you're a Brit, since it's the only way we have of influencing the situation. I'm not holding my breath waiting for a result, but I feel it's my duty....

I am writing to express my deep disquiet at the UK government's U-turn over disconnecting those accused of sharing copyright materials on the Internet.

For the eminently sane and well-balanced conclusions of Lord Carter and his Digital Britain team, based on many months of hard work, to be thrown away in this manner is extraordinary. In the place of a carefully-considered view that access to the Internet is a right not to be removed lightly, and that doing so on the say-so of media companies would be an inappropriate response to alleged copyright infringement, we now have a diktat from on high that proposes precisely this punishment.

As the indecent haste clearly demonstrates, this has not been thought through.

First, it is completely disproportionate. Cutting off people's Internet connection for allegedly swapping copyright materials is not just, any more than cutting someone's electricity supply would be for watching the TV without a licence, or cutting someone's water supply off would be for brewing illegal spirits.

Secondly, it represents a fundamental assault on due process in this country. If people can be cut off from the most important communication medium of the 21st century on the whim of media companies, who don't even need to prove their accusations in court, then things have reached a pretty sorry state in this country.

Thirdly, the approach won't work from a technical viewpoint. All it means is that the more tech-savvy will start encrypting their traffic; those who can't take this route will simply buy a few huge external hard discs – ones able to hold a quarter of a million songs cost around £50 these days – and swap files personally when they visit their friends.

Fourthly, the idea is at odds with European legislation. Amendment 138 of the Telecoms Package currently being finalised in Europe forbids the cutting off of users without judicial oversight. And that's even before the ISPs start taking legal advice on other ways in which it breaks relevant laws. Moreover, the European Court of Human Rights would probably have something to say about legislation that allows what Viviane Reding has explicitly called a “fundamental human right” (http://opendotdotdot.blogspot.com/2009/05/internet-access-is-fundamental-fight.html) to be taken away so easily.

What's particularly bizarre about this move is that those who will suffer the most are likely to be traditional Labour supporters. For it is the poor who cannot afford to pay for high-priced digital downloads, and may therefore look for material on P2P networks. It is the poor who may well share an Internet across several families using a wifi connection in a block of flats, for example. If one user is accused of swapping copyright materials, several families will be severely disadvantaged – hardly something that fits with Labour's historical mission to help precisely these people.

For all these reasons - assuming this truly is a consultation and not just another rubber-stamping – I urge you to join your colleague, Tom Watson (http://www.tom-watson.co.uk/2009/08/filesharing-revised-consultation/), in passing on to Lord Mandelson and Stephen Timms the comments of myself and others who may write to you on this subject.

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Another Reason for Open Access

Yet again, Cameron Neylon is daring to ask the unasked questions that *should* be asked:

Many of us have one or two papers in journals that are essentially inaccessible, local society journals or just journals that were never online, and never widely enough distributed for anyone to find. I have a paper in Complex Systems (volume 17, issue 4 since you ask) that is not indexed in Pubmed, only available in a preprint archive and has effectively no citations. Probably because it isn’t in an index and no-one has ever found it. But it describes a nice piece of work that we went through hell to publish because we hoped someone might find it useful.

Now everyone agreed, and this is what the PLoS ONE submission policy says quite clearly, that such a paper cannot be submitted for publication. This is essentially a restatement of the Ingelfinger Rule. But being the contrary person I am I started wondering why. For a commercial publisher with a subscripton business model it is clear that you don’t want to take on content that you can’t exert a copyright over, but for a non-profit with a mission to bring science to wider audience does this really make sense? If the science is currently unaccessible and is of appropriate quality for a given journal and the authors are willing to pay the costs to bring it to a wider public, why is this not allowed?

Why not, indeed? For as Neylon points out:

If an author feels strongly enough that a paper will get to a wider audience in a new journal, if they feel strongly enough that it will benefit from that journal’s peer review process, and they are prepared to pay a fee for that publication, why should they be prevented from doing so? If that publication does bring that science to a wider audience, is not a public service publisher discharging their mission through that publication?

Which is only possible, of course, in open access journals adopting a funder pays approach, since traditional publishers need to be able to point to the uniqueness of their content if they are trying to sell it - after all, why would you want to buy it twice? Open access journals have no such imperative, since they are giving it away, so readers have no expectations that the stuff is unique and never seen before.

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An Old Train of Thought

An analogy I and others frequently use in discussing the media industries' refusal to consider new business models is that of the transition to the motor car, particularly with reference to obsolete accoutrements for horse carriages. But I've just read an article from TorrentFreak that links to a rather interesting Wikipedia page about the Locomotive Act - the one that required a person to walk in front of a car with a red flag. It had this interesting paragraph:

Under pressure from motor car enthusiasts, including Coventry manufacturer Harry J. Lawson, the government introduced the Locomotives on Highways Act 1896, which became known as The Emancipation Act, which defined a new category of vehicle light locomotives, which were vehicles under 3 tons unladen weight. These vehicles were exempt from the 3 crew member rule, and were subject to the higher 14 mph (22 km/h) speed limit.[5] In celebration of the Emancipation Act Lawson organised the first London to Brighton run.

The relaxation of usage restrictions eased the way for the development of the British motor industry.

Nearly one and a half centuries later the motoring journalist and author L. J. K. Setright speculated that the Locomotive Acts were put in place to suppress motor car development in the United Kingdom, because of the financial interests that some members of government and other establishment personalities had in the development and viability of the railway industry.

So maybe a better analogy is motor cars and railways....

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'Foreign Policy' Should Stick to its Home Turf

Foreign Policy has published some good features; this isn't one of them:

Although the newest oil rigs, which cost upward of $1 billion apiece, might be loaded with cutting-edge robotics technology, the software that controls a rig's basic functions is anything but. Most rely on the decades-old supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) software, written in an era when the "open source" tag was more important than security, said Jeff Vail, a former counterterrorism and intelligence analyst with the U.S. Interior Department. "It's underappreciated how vulnerable some of these systems are," he said. "It is possible, if you really understood them, to cause catastrophic damage by causing safety systems to fail."

Sorry, old chap, but "open source" and "security" are orthogonal, independent axes. And this, from the same article:

"The worst-case scenario, of course, is that a hacker will break in and take over control of the whole platform," Jaatun said. That hasn't happened yet, but computer viruses have caused personnel injuries and production losses on North Sea platforms, he noted.

suggests we're talking about *Windows* systems, not "open source". So, pretty much 100% wrong. (Via @cdaffara.)

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SCO What?

I'm struck by the almost unanimous chorus of indifference that has greeted the news that a court has reversed one part of an ealier ruling regarding who owns the Unix copyright:

For the foregoing reasons, we AFFIRM the district court’s judgment with regards to the royalties due Novell under the 2003 Sun-SCO Agreement, but REVERSE the district court’s entry of summary judgment on (1) the ownership of the UNIX and UnixWare copyrights; (2) SCO’s claim seeking specific performance; (3) the scope of Novell’s rights under Section 4.16 of the APA; (4) the application of the covenant of good faith and fair dealing to Novell’s rights under Section 4.16 of the APA. On these issues, we REMAND for trial.

As well as Groklaw, others that are distinctly unimpressed are Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, Roy Schestowitz and Eric Bangemann.

And me to that list: SCO still has everything to prove, and very little money to prove it with. And even if it *did* prove anything, all it would gain would be the right to be ground into very fine particles of dust by IBM's legal department....

Open.gov: The Meme Spreads

It's really striking how the idea of open government has gone from nowhere a few months ago to hot meme of the moment. Here's the latest convert - Sweden:

Opengov.se is an initiative to highlight available public datasets in Sweden. It contains a commentable catalog of government datasets, their formats and usage restrictions. The percent figure on the start page indicates the share of datasets that are available with an open license and in at least one open format.

The goal is to highlight the benefits of open access to government data and explain how this is done in practice.

It's interesting that the site links to the US Open Government Working Group, which wrote:

8 december 2007 - This weekend, 30 open government advocates gathered to develop a set of principles of open government data. The meeting, held in Sebastopol, California, was designed to develop a more robust understanding of why open government data is essential to democracy.

The Internet is the public space of the modern world, and through it governments now have the opportunity to better understand the needs of their citizens and citizens may participate more fully in their government. Information becomes more valuable as it is shared, less valuable as it is hoarded. Open data promotes increased civil discourse, improved public welfare, and a more efficient use of public resources.

The group is offering a set of fundamental principles for open government data. By embracing the eight principles, governments of the world can become more effective, transparent, and relevant to our lives.

Since Sweden currently holds the presidency of the EU, it would be good if it spread a little of that openness there, too.

More details on what exactly Sweden is up to from the Open Knowledge Foundation Blog.

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Why We Must Call Them "Intellectual Monopolies"

As long-suffering readers of this blog will know, I insist on calling patents and copyrights "intellectual monopolies". That's mainly because it is a better description of what they are; but there's another reason, which becomes clear from this post by a pro-monopolist who is conducting an revealing exchange with William Patry on his new copyright blog:

Bill --

You want to redirect the conversation to the question "why do copyright owners insist on describing copyright as a property right, rather than say as a regulatory privilege or a tort?" Fair enough. If I took a bit more time for research, I could probably come up with a very sophisticated answer, digging up 18th Century texts to support my position. But instead I'll give you a much simpler one, one that might not satisfy the philosophers, historians, and economists among your readers, but one that happens to be accurate (and will probably work for most lawyers): Because pretty much everyone refers to copyright as a form of property. Contrary to the premise of your post, it's not just "copyright owners" who use the term "property" in this context; it's exceedingly common for those on all points of the copyright spectrum.

There we have it: the more opponents collude by using the "eye-pea" term, the more the monopolists can point to this as "proof" that copyright and patents are property, not monopolies.

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The Perils of Following @glynmoody

Ha!:

just unfollowed @glynmoody; not cause he's nothing interesting to say, the opposite, too much interesting stuff; will stick to his blog now

You have been warned, people....

PLoS Reinvents Publishing and Saves the World

As someone who has been writing about open access for some years, I find myself returning again and again to the Public Library of Science. That's because, not content with pioneering open access, PLoS has time and again re-invented the broader world of scientific publishing. Now, it's done it again:

Today, after several months of work, I’m delighted to announce that PLoS is launching PLoS Currents (Beta) – a new and experimental website for the rapid communication of research results and ideas. In response to the recent worldwide H1N1 influenza outbreak, the first PLoS Currents research theme is influenza.

Note the emphasis on "rapid": this is absolutely crucial, as I've noted before. The current system of publishing papers is simply too slow to deal with pandemics, where speed is of the essence if we're to have a chance of nipping them in the bud. It's good to see PLoS stepping in to help address this major problem.

It's doing it in a very interesting way:

PLoS Currents: Influenza, which we are launching today, is built on three key components: a small expert research community that PLoS is working with to run the website; Google Knol with new features that allow content to be gathered together in collections after being vetted by expert moderators; and a new, independent database at the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) called Rapid Research Notes, where research targeted for rapid communication, such as the content in PLoS Currents: Influenza will be freely and permanently accessible. To ensure that researchers are properly credited for their work, PLoS Currents content will also be given a unique identifier by the NCBI so that it is citable.

...

The key goal of PLoS Currents is to accelerate scientific discovery by allowing researchers to share their latest findings and ideas immediately with the world’s scientific and medical communities. Google Knol’s features for community interaction, comment and discussion will enable commentary and conversations to develop around these findings. Given that the contributions to PLoS Currents are not peer-reviewed in detail, however, the results and conclusions must be regarded as preliminary. In time, it is therefore likely that PLoS Currents contributors will submit their work for publication in a formal journal, and the PLoS Journals will welcome these submissions.

PLoS Currents: Influenza is an experiment and a prototype for further PLoS Currents sites. It reflects our commitment to using online tools to the fullest extent possible for the open sharing of research results. As with any new project, we will be listening carefully to the reactions within and beyond the scientific and medical communities and welcoming suggestions for improvements.

This is really exciting from many viewpoints. It's pushing the ideas behind open access even further; it's reshaping publishing; and it may even save humanity. (Via James Boyle.)

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Lessig Does it Again...

...surprises, that is:

So my blog turns seven today. On August 20, 2002, while hiding north of San Francisco working on the Eldred appeal, I penned my first (wildly and embarrassingly defensive) missive to Dave. Some 1753 entries later, I'm letting the blog rest. This will be the last post in this frame. Who knows what the future will bring, but in the near term, it won't bring more in lessig.org/blog.

The main reason is that he's too damn busy with other projects, although I suspect the imminent arrival of his third child also was a big factor.

Lessig surprised me before by moving from CC work to his transparency gig. I thought he was bonkers then...and I was wrong, he was just - as usual - prescient. Maybe his move away from blogging is the same: but I hope not.... (Via John Naughton.)

KMyMoney Will Make the World Go Round

One of the perennial reasons people give for not using free software is that it is lacking some key piece of software. High on that list is personal finances management, a sector dominated by Intuit in the closed source world. So the following is great news:

The KMyMoney development team is pleased to announce a major step forward for what has been described as "the BEST personal finance manager for FREE users". KMyMoney 1.0 has been released. With over 3 years of development, this new stable release has many new features and a refreshed user interface.

...

Since our latest stable release, 0.8.9, a lot of effort has been put in by the developers and the community to add new features and test them to ensure a rock-solid release. Over 2 years of development have resulted in the addition of budgets, a forecast feature, many new reports, report charts, a complete redesign of the import feature, which allows for a much easier migration from other application and a swifter synchronization with online banking. The support of PGP encryption for the KMyMoney files has been improved too, including the option to have multiple keys for a single file, so no one can access your financial records. The summary view has been revamped to show more and more useful information, allowing you to have an overview of your financial situation at a glance. Also, there are now translations for 22 languages, though not all of them are as complete as we would like. We have users wherever KDE3 is installed. That results not only in a greater quality application, but also in one that can be customized to fit the needs of a wide range of users. In between all that work, we have fixed a lot of bugs and little annoyances to make this the best KMyMoney release ever.

Let's hope that the word gets out about KMyMoney, and that more people realise that free software really can cover all their needs.

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Cor! - UK Pirate Party's Smart Move

The UK Pirate Party has published its "core beliefs":

1. The reform of Copyright and Patent Laws

2. The protection of our Right to Privacy

3. The protection of our Right to Freedom of Speech

What's interesting is how tightly focussed the Pirate Party is. I think that's wise: otherwise it would just become another Raving Monster Loony Party. By restricting its message to an area that it understands, and which is crying out for reform, I'm sure it will benefit in the long run. It will also, usefully, force the other parties to frame their own responses in this domain.

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The Pain in Spain Falls Mainly in the Plan

in January 2010, Spain will take over the Presidency of the European Community. Spanish Government has already announced that one of their flagships will be reinforcing the control of the Internet and criminalizing the sharing culture in the digital environment. The consequences of those decisions will be noticed in the rest of the world.

This is the first I've heard of this: bad news if true. Anyone have any more details?

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DNA Database Doomed: It Works Too Well

This is something I've been saying (without proof, admittedly) for a while: the UK's insane DNA database is doomed not because it doesn't work well, but because it works *too* well in a sense - in that it lets you frame anybody with perfect efficiency:

Scientists in Israel have demonstrated that it is possible to fabricate DNA evidence, undermining the credibility of what has been considered the gold standard of proof in criminal cases.

The scientists fabricated blood and saliva samples containing DNA from a person other than the donor of the blood and saliva. They also showed that if they had access to a DNA profile in a database, they could construct a sample of DNA to match that profile without obtaining any tissue from that person.

“You can just engineer a crime scene,” said Dan Frumkin, lead author of the paper, which has been published online by the journal Forensic Science International: Genetics. “Any biology undergraduate could perform this.”

This is actually an argument against expanding the database: what you want are just the real criminals, not all those who might possibly one day be one. The bigger the database, the more likely you will get a match with fake DNA.

Needless to say, our great and glorious government will ignore completely this inconvenient truth, and go on stuffing its database with DNA - the reason being this isn't about crime, but about control.

Still, looking on the bright side, it will be trivially easy to spread Gordon Brown's DNA at any crime scene in the future - all we need is a discarded coffee cup....

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Of Mephistopheles and Poodles

I was always under the impression that Lord Mandelson was dark, Machiavellian and very sharp; apparently not:

Lord Mandelson launched a crackdown on internet piracy just days after meeting a leading Hollywood critic of illegal file sharing.

The business secretary plans to criminalise the estimated seven million people - one in 12 of the population - who illicitly download music and films over the internet.

In what critics describe as a gross attack on civil liberties, those flouting new laws could see their internet accounts suspended and face fines of up to £50,000.

Parents could even be thrown off the net even if it is their children are caught downloading tracks upstairs in their bedrooms, not them.

Lord Mandelson ordered officials to draw up the draconian regulations days after dinner with David Geffen, who founded the Asylum record label which signed Bob Dylan.

The pair dined on 7 August at the Rothschild family villa on Corfu, while Mandelson was holidaying on the Greek island.

I've heard of poodles turning into Mephistopheles, but never the other way round.... (Via Techdirt.)

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Big Bounteous Blue, or Big Bad Blue?

One of the perennial teasers in the world of computing concerns IBM. On the one hand, you have a company that has embraced open source widely across its product line, and made major donations of code (to Eclipse, for example); on the other, it is a massive supporter of software patents, and also sells large amounts of proprietary software. So which is it: Big Bounteous Blue, or Big Bad Blue?

I think this submission [.pdf] to the court concerning the important Bilski case answers that question definitively:

In the months since the Federal Circuit issued its opinion, and to IBM’s great concern, a number of administrative and judicial decisions have rigidly applied the “machine or transformation” test to question—in some cases explicitly—the patentability of software per se. Software technology is vital in addressing society’s most pressing challenges. IBM is committed to ensuring that such technology is and remains patentable.

There we have it: "IBM is committed to ensuring that such technology is and remains patentable" - no two ways about it.

But wait - IBM goes even further, claiming that software patents are so desirable in part because they actually *powered* the rise of free software:

Given the reality that software source code is human readable, and object code can be reverse engineered, it is difficult for software developers to resort to secrecy. Thus, without patent protection, the incentives to innovate in the field of software are significantly reduced. Patent protection has promoted the free sharing of source code on a patentee’s terms—which has fueled the explosive growth of open source software development.

Well, actually, free software is produced *despite* software patents, in the teeth of their deleterious effects, as every one of your highly-paid engineers and lawyers understands full well.

So, no, IBM, that's a load of cobbler's, and it's disgraceful you should even try to pass off this apology of an argument that patents are somehow precursors of true "free sharing" in a submission to a court considering such an important matter, for self-proclaimed selfish reasons. This is clearly an attempt to head off the criticism that software patents harm free software, the most vibrant sector of computing today, and should therefore be scaled back by the US Supreme Court. Cynical ain't in it.

At least we know where we stand, now, with Big Bad Blue... (Via @zoobab.)

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DVD Copying Software is "Illegal", but Copying?

In a decision that shows how ridiculously unclear the situation around copying DVDs is:

A federal judge ruled here late Tuesday that it was unlawful to traffic in goods to copy DVDs.

U.S. District Judge Marilyn Hall Patel’s ruling came in a decision in which she declared RealNetworks’ DVD copying software was illegal. She barred it from being distributed.

Patel said the RealDVD software violates the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 that prohibits the circumvention of encryption technology. DVDs are encrypted with what is known as the Content Scramble System, and DVD players must secure a license to play discs. RealDVD, she ruled, circumvents technology designed to prevent copying.

But the decision, although mixed, left open the door that copying DVD’s for personal use “may well be” lawful under the fair use doctrine of the Copyright Act, although trafficking in such goods was illegal.

Making backup copies etc. is so eminently reasonable that it needs spelling out by the courts. Paradoxically, not spelling it out is worse for the film industry, since the boundary of what is and is not (morally) acceptable are ill-defined, letting people make it up as they go along.

The Curious Case of Karoo

Remember Karoo? They were the strange ISP in Hull that was going to put in place a *one* strike and you're out scheme for *alleged* copyright infringement. Then they changed their minds. Now it looks like they've thought about this some more:

“We will no longer suspend a customer’s service unless we receive a court order from a copyright owner taking legal action. As a result it is the responsibility of the legal system, not Karoo, to ensure the accuracy of the information provided by the copyright owners.”

I predict that this will happen increasingly, as ISPs realise the implications of what the content industries are demanding with their "three strikes and you're out" insanity. They would clearly be on very dodgy legal ground if they carried out this threat based on mere accusations. Yahoo for Karoo.

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Open Access Piles on the Pressure

Interesting:

it is not open access per se that is threatening Elsevier (High Energy Physics since long have had almost 100% open access uptake, so critical mass has long been reached in this special field, quite different from other physics areas), but that they are loosing the battle for authors, possibly due to their reluctance to support SCOAP3. As I wrote, they have lost between 30% to 50% in submissions from authors during the last 4 years for their HEP journals. With such a massive reduction in size, prices also had to come down. In the new open access scholarly publishing market, journals will compete for authors even more than now. SCOAP3 certainly raised the awareness for both the scientific community's expectation to fully convert these journals to OA and the unsustainable prices that had risen to absurd record prices. It is clear that subscriptions are now under even more pressure because of the global economic crisis that especially hit american libraries very hard.

High energy physics (my old discipline) is certainly in the vanguard, but is probably just the first of many to follow this path. Go, open access.

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Patenting the Barcode of Life

Talking of DNA, another brilliant use of it - and brilliantly obvious like all great ideas - is DNA Barcoding:

DNA barcoding is a new technique that uses a short DNA sequence from a standardized and agreed-upon position in the genome as a molecular diagnostic for species-level identification. DNA barcode sequences are very short relative to the entire genome and they can be obtained reasonably quickly and cheaply. The "Folmer region" at the 5' end of the cytochrome c oxidase subunit 1 mitochondrial region (COI) is emerging as the standard barcode region for almost all groups of higher animals. This region is 648 nucleotide base pairs long in most groups and is flanked by regions of conserved sequences, making it relatively easy to isolate and analyze. A growing number of studies have shown that COI sequence variability is very low (generally less than 1-2%) and that the COI sequences of even closely related species differ by several percent, making it possible to identify species with high confidence.

However, readers of this will probably have guessed the fly in the ointment here: DNA barcoding is such a powerful idea that the parasites have moved in, and started trying to *patent* bits of the idea:

Systematic and phylogenetics, indeed much of evolutionary science, has long and great tradition of making resources and knowledge freely available to other resources. Instead of cash, all an author asks for is a citation or a credit. Therefore, it sounded incredulous to me that one researcher was trying to patent a DNA barcode snippet for a plant gene that was being worked on over several years by a large group of researchers.

It's a classic situation: not only are scientific techniques being patented, they are techniques that are well established and have been used for years - something that is explicitly excluded even in the most deranged patent regimes. And people say the system is working just fine... (Via Jonathan Eisen.)

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The Real Hope for Nanotechnology

Nanotechnology is one of those subjects that seem to veer between hope and hype. DNA-based solutions look among the most promising, because of the fact that the material has evolved to solve many of the same problems as nanotechnology; more subtly, it is inherently digital, which makes its manipulation much easier - and promises structures of almost infinite complexity under computer control.

To do that, or course, you need software, so it's great to see that there is already free software that lets you create DNA-based nanostructures:

caDNAno is open-source software based on the Adobe AIR platform for design of three-dimensional DNA origami nanostructures. It was written with the goal of providing a fast and intuitive means to create and modify DNA origami designs. You can learn how to use it, download a copy of the program and some example designs, or even modify the source code.

The software makes heavy use of several fantastic open-source libraries and resources, especially Papervision3D for 3D rendering, Michael Baczynski's AS3 data structures and tutorials, the Tango Desktop Project for icons, and the Blueprint CSS framework for this website. Additional people and resources are acknowledged on the links page.

As you can see from this, there's already quite a rich ecosystem of free code in this area, which augurs well for the future. The last thing we need is for nanotechnology to turn into the smallest black box ever made.

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The Most Hated Man Online?

Well, not quite, but it's clear somebody really dislikes the Twitter user @cyxymu: it seems that the coordinated attack on Twitter, Facebook and LiveJournal were to silence him:

A Georgian blogger with accounts on Twitter, Facebook, LiveJournal and Google's Blogger and YouTube was targeted in a denial of service attack that led to the site-wide outage at Twitter and problems at the other sites on Thursday, according to a Facebook executive.

The blogger, who uses the account name "Cyxymu," (the name of a town in the Republic of Georgia) had accounts on all of the different sites that were attacked at the same time, Max Kelly, chief security officer at Facebook, told CNET News.

"It was a simultaneous attack across a number of properties targeting him to keep his voice from being heard," Kelly said. "We're actively investigating the source of the attacks and we hope to be able to find out the individuals involved in the back end and to take action against them if we can."

Sounds pretty incredible, but the chap himself confirms it on his Twitter account:

да, меня ДДоСили

which roughly means "yup, I was DDoS'd", and he also opines:

this hackers was from Russian KGB

Supporting this view is the fact that his LiveJournal blog is still unreachable.

Fascinating, of course, to see how events in the Caucasus - today's the first anniversary of the ill-advised attack of Georgia on South Ossetia, and Russia's gleeful counter-attack on Georgia - reach and affect even global online worlds like Twitter and Facebook. Interesting times.

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UK ID Card Technology Cloned...

...in 12 minutes:

Embedded inside the card for foreigners is a microchip with the details of its bearer held in electronic form: name, date of birth, physical characteristics, fingerprints and so on, together with other information such as immigration status and whether the holder is entitled to State benefits.

This chip is the vital security measure that, so the Government believes, will make identity cards 'unforgeable'.

But as I watch, Laurie picks up a mobile phone and, using just the handset and a laptop computer, electronically copies the ID card microchip and all its information in a matter of minutes.

He then creates a cloned card, and with a little help from another technology expert, he changes all the information the card contains - the physical details of the bearer, name, fingerprints and so on. And he doesn't stop there.

With a few more keystrokes on his computer, Laurie changes the cloned card so that whereas the original card holder was not entitled to benefits, the cloned chip now reads 'Entitled to benefits'.

No surprises there, of course; but what's significant is that it's the Daily Mail that's pushing this jolly news out to its assembled readers. This means the message is going out to groups beyond the obvious Guardian greeny-lefties and Telegraph Tories.

The UK government will presumably just carry on blithely ignoring these inconvenient demonstrations of the deep lack of security at the heart of this lunatic project. Worryingly, it comes in a week where UK High Court ruled that the government's not liable for the consequences of its errors, which means that when your ID card is cloned and abused, *you* will have to foot the bill....(via Ray Corrigan.)

Rupert's Roller-Coaster

It's hard keeping up with Rupert Murdoch's fortunes on the Internet.

First, he blew it: he ignored the Net, declaring it of no interest. Then he hit the jackpot, buying MySpace for what seemed an incredibly low price: just $580 million, when Facebook was being valued at billions. That's looking expensive today:

News Corp specifically blames MySpace for a loss of $363 million to the company’s bottom line

And now, it looks like Rupert has really lost it:

"Quality journalism is not cheap," said Murdoch. "The digital revolution has opened many new and inexpensive distribution channels but it has not made content free. We intend to charge for all our news websites."

Good luck with that, Rupe.

I think it's interesting that I almost never quote from or link to News International titles: there's simply too little there of interest. By contrast, I *do* link quite often to New York Times and Guardian stories, both of which offer stuff not covered elsewhere. So I don't think I'm going to miss Mr Murdoch's titles when they suddenly fall off the digital radar...

Opencast Matterhorn

Daft name, great idea:

As a growing number of worldwide learners log on, free of charge, to video and podcast lectures and events at the University of California, Berkeley, the campus is leading an international effort to build a communal Webcasting platform to more easily record and distribute its popular educational content.

Dubbed "Opencast Matterhorn" and funded with grants from the Andrew W. Mellon and William and Flora Hewlett foundations totaling $1.5 million, the project will bring together programmers and educational technology experts from an international consortium of higher education institutions, including ETH Zürich in Switzerland, University of Osnabrück in Germany, Cambridge University in the United Kingdom and Canada's University of Saskatchewan.

..

The software will support the scheduling, capture, encoding and delivery of educational content to video-and-audio sharing sites such as YouTube and iTunes, so that learners can access lectures when and where they need it. With additional funding, expertise and labor from other members of the consortium, the Opencast Matterhorn platform is scheduled to be up and running by summer 2010.

They've got a new word for it (well, new to me):

Coursecasting is a growing trend in educational technology, enabling students and the general public to download audio and video recordings of class lectures to their computers and portable media devices.

Daft names aside, it's great to see institutions working together on a common platform like this; it should give a real boost to opencourseware - and may be even coursecasting. (Via Open Education News.)

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Level Playing-Fields and Open Access

Yesterday, I wrote elsewhere about open standards, and how they sought to produce a level playing field for all. Similar thoughts have occurred to Stuart Shieber in this post about open access:

In summary, publishers see an unlevel playing field in choosing between the business models for their journals exactly because authors see an unlevel playing field in choosing between journals using the business models.

He has an interesting solution:

To mitigate this problem—to place open-access processing-fee journals on a more equal competitive footing with subscription-fee journals—requires those underwriting the publisher's services for subscription-fee journals to commit to a simple “compact” guaranteeing their willingness to underwrite them for processing-fee journals as well.

He concludes:

If all schools and funders committed to the compact, a publisher could more safely move a journal to an open-access processing-fee business model without fear that authors would desert the journal for pecuniary reasons. Support for the compact would also send a signal to publishers and scholarly societies that research universities and funders appreciate and value their contributions and that universities and funders promoting self-archiving have every intention of continuing to fund publication, albeit within a different model. Publishers willing to take a risk will be met by universities and funding agencies willing to support their bold move.

The new US administration could implement such a system through simple FRPAA-like legislation requiring funding agencies to commit to this open-access compact in a cost-neutral manner. Perhaps reimbursement would be limited to authors at universities and research institutions that themselves commit to a similar compact. As funding agencies and universities take on this commitment, we might transition to an efficient, sustainable journal publishing system in which publishers choose freely among business models on an equal footing, to the benefit of all.

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Wolfram Alpha Does Not Understand Copyright

Remember Wolfram Alpha? That super-duper search engine - sorry, "computational knowledge engine" - that was going to change the way we looked for and found information, and also cure the common cold (OK, I made that last one up)? Seems to have disappeared without trace, no? I'm not surprised, if it misunderstands copyright as badly as this post suggests:

Try cutting and pasting from the results page. You can't, and with good reason. According to Wolfram Alpha's terms of use, its knowledge engine is "an authoritative source of information," because "in many cases the data you are shown never existed before in exactly that way until you asked for it." Therefore, "failure to properly attribute results from Wolfram Alpha is not only a violation of [its license terms], but may also constitute academic plagiarism or a violation of copyright law."

Copyright, as Wolfram seems not to understand, is a bargain between creators and their public. As an *incentive* to create, the former are given a time-limited monopoly by governments. Note that it is *not* a reward for having created: it is an incentive to create again.

Now consider Wolfram Alpha. This is essentially a computational process - remember, it's a "computational knowledge engine". So, it is simply a bunch of algorithms acting on data. Algorithms don't need incentives to create: outputting is what they do if they're useful. So copyright is completely inappropriate, just as it would be for the output of any other program processing information on its own (obviously, if that information is words fed in by a human, copyright would exist in those words because they were created by someone).

Wolfram's ridiculous claim to copyright in its results does have the virtue of providing a nice illustration of the real limits of this intellectual monopoly. For the rest, it might try finding out a bit more about copyright so that it can amend its licence accordingly - I suggest using a good search engine like Google.

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If You Have Nothing to Hide...

Er, shouldn't this utter insanity be sounding one or two alarm bells...please?

Thousands of the worst families in England are to be put in “sin bins” in a bid to change their bad behaviour, Ed Balls announced yesterday.

The Children’s Secretary set out £400million plans to put 20,000 problem families under 24-hour CCTV super-vision in their own homes.

They will be monitored to ensure that children attend school, go to bed on time and eat proper meals.

Private security guards will also be sent round to carry out home checks, while parents will be given help to combat drug and alcohol addiction.

Desite certain protestations to the contrary, isn't this rather clearly a total surveillance society, complete with jack-booted "security" guards? Why not just call them "Security Services" - "SS" for short - and be done with it?

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Glad They Chose Windows?

I doubt it somehow:

Many potential buyers of laptops priced under $300 in the U.S. had an unpleasant surprise over the weekend: The machines would not be eligible for a free upgrade to Microsoft's upcoming Windows 7 operating system.

Wal-Mart and Best Buy attracted plenty of buyers during a promotional offering of laptops priced under $300. Some of those laptops sold out just one day after the offers began. The prices were respectable considering the generous features, including large screens, better graphics and DVD drives, which are not typically found in most low-cost netbooks.

However, the laptops came preloaded with the Windows Vista Home Basic operating system, which does not include a free upgrade to Windows 7 in the U.S. Instead, consumers will have to shell out about $120 to upgrade the operating system.

So, that's a $120 hidden cost of choosing Windows: nice move.

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Hell Goes Sub-Zero, Sony Does Open Source

For me, Sony has always been the antithesis of open source. So this comes as something of a shock:

Sony Pictures Imageworks, the award-winning visual effects and digital character animation unit of Sony Pictures Digital Productions, is launching an open source development program, it was announced today by Imageworks' chief technology officer, Rob Bredow. Five technologies will be released initially:

* OSL, a programmable shading language for rendering
* Field3d, a voxel data storage library
* Maya Reticule, a Maya Plug-in for camera masking
* Scala Migration, a database migration tool
* Pystring, python-like string handling in C++

Imageworks' production environment, which is known for its photo-real visual effects, digital character performances, and innovative technologies to facilitate their creation, has incorporated open source solutions, most notably the Linux operating system, for many years. Now the company is contributing back to the open source community by making these technologies available. The software can be used freely around the world by both large and small studios. Each project has a team of passionate individuals supporting it who are interested in seeing the code widely used. The intention of the open source release is to build larger communities to adopt and further refine the code.

OK, so it's only a tiny, non-mainstream bit of Sony, but it's surely a sign of the times....

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Why Single Sign On Systems Are Bad

Wow, here's a really great article about identity management from, um, er, Microsoft. Actually, it's a rather remarkable Microsoft article, since it contains the following sentences:

On February 14, 2006, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates declared that passwords would be gone where the dinosaurs rest in three to four years.

But as I write this in March 2009, it is pretty clear that Bill was wrong.

But it's not for that frisson that you should read it; it's for the following insight, which really needs hammering home:

The big challenge with respect to identity is not in designing an identity system that can provide SSO [Single Sign On], even though that is where most of the technical effort is going. It's not even in making the solution smoothly functioning and usable, where, unfortunately, less effort is going. The challenge is that users today have many identities. As I mentioned above, I have well over 100. On a daily basis, I use at least 20 or 25 of those. Perhaps users have too many identities, but I would not consider that a foregone conclusion.

The purist would now say that "SSO can fix that problem." However, I don't think it is a problem. At least it is not the big problem. I like having many identities. Having many identities means I can rest assured that the various services I use cannot correlate my information. I do not have to give my e-mail provider my stock broker identity, nor do I have to give my credit card company the identity I use at my favorite online shopping site. And only I know the identity I use for the photo sharing site. Having multiple identities allows me to keep my life, and my privacy, compartmentalized.

Yes yes yes yes yes. *This* is what the UK government simply does not want to accept: creating a single, all-powerful "proof" of identity is actually exactly the wrong thing to do. Once compromised, it is hugely dangerous. Moreover, it gives too much power to the provider of that infrastructure - which is precisely why the government *loves* it. (Via Ideal Government.)

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Open Source Cognitive Science

A new site with the self-explanatory name of "Open source cognitive science" has an interesting opening post about Tools for Psychology and Neuroscience, pointing out that:

Open source tools make new options available for designing experiments, doing analysis, and writing papers. Already, we can see hardware becoming available for low-cost experimentation. There is an OpenEEG project. There are open source eye tracking tools for webcams. Stimulus packages like VisionEgg can be used to collect reaction times or to send precise timing signals to fMRI scanners. Neurolens is a free functional neuroimage analysis tool.

It also has this information about the increasingly fashionable open source statistics package R that was news to me, and may be of interest to others:

R code can be embedded directly into a LaTeX or OpenOffice document using a utility called Sweave. Sweave can be used with LaTeX to automatically format documents in APA style (Zahn, 2008). With Sweave, when you see a graph or table in a paper, it’s always up to date, generated on the fly from the original R code when the PDF is generated. Including the LaTeX along with the PDF becomes a form of reproducible research, rooted in Donald Knuth’s idea of literate programming. When you want to know in detail how the analysis was done, you need look no further than the source text of the paper itself.

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Transparency Saves Lives

Here's a wonderful demonstration that the simple fact of transparency can dramatically alter outcomes - and, in this case, save lives:

Outcomes for adult cardiac patients in the UK have improved significantly since publication of information on death rates, research suggests.

The study also found more elderly and high-risk patients were now being treated, despite fears surgeons would not want to take them on.

It is based on analysis of more than 400,000 operations by the Society for Cardiothoracic Surgery.

Fortunately, people are drawing the right conclusions:

Experts said all surgical specialties should now publish data on death rates.

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Profits Without Intellectual Monopolies

Great interview with Mr Open Innovation, Eric von Hippel, who has these wise words of advice:

It is true that the most rapidly developing designs are those where many can participate and where the intellectual property is open. Think about open source software as an example of this. What firms have to remember is that they have many ways to profit from good new products, independent of IP. They’ve got brands; they’ve got distribution; they’ve got lead time in the market. They have a lot of valuable proprietary assets that are not dependent on IP.

If you’re going to give out your design capability to others, users specifically, then what you have to do is build your business model on the non-design components of your mix of competitive advantages. For instance, recall the case of custom semiconductor firms I mentioned earlier. Those companies gave away their job of designing the circuit to the user, but they still had the job of manufacturing those user-designed semiconductors, they still had the brand, they still had the distribution. And that’s how they make their money.

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RIAA's War on Sharing Begins

Words matter, which is why the RIAA has always framed copyright infringement in terms of "piracy". But it has a big problem: most people call it "sharing"; and as everyone was told by their mother, it's good to share. So the RIAA needs to redefine things, and it seems that it's started doing just that in the Joel Tanenbaum trial:

"We are here to ask you to hold the defendant responsible for his actions," said Reynolds, a partner in the Boulder, Colorado office of Holme, Robert & Owen. "Filesharing isn't like sharing that we teach our children. This isn't sharing with your friends."

Got that? P2P sharing isn't *real* sharing, because it's not sharing with your friends; this is *evil* sharing because it's bad to share with stranger. Apparently.

Watch out for more of this meme in the future.

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It's Not Open Science if it's Not Open Source

Great to see a scientist come out with this in an interesting post entitled "What, exactly, is Open Science?":

granting access to source code is really equivalent to publishing your methodology when the kind of science you do involves numerical experiments. I’m an extremist on this point, because without access to the source for the programs we use, we rely on faith in the coding abilities of other people to carry out our numerical experiments. In some extreme cases (i.e. when simulation codes or parameter files are proprietary or are hidden by their owners), numerical experimentation isn’t even science. A “secret” experimental design doesn’t give skeptics the ability to repeat (and hopefully verify) your experiment, and the same is true with numerical experiments. Science has to be “verifiable in practice” as well as “verifiable in principle”.

The rest is well worth reading too.

(Via @phylogenomics.)

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Why Hackers Will Save the World

For anyone that might be interested, my keynote from the recent Gran Canaria Desktop Summit is now online as an Ogg video.

Bill Gates Shows His True Identity

And so it starts to come out:

Microsoft is angling to work on India’s national identity card project, Mr. Gates said, and he will be meeting with Nandan Nilekani, the minister in charge. Like Mr. Gates, Mr. Nilekani stopped running the technology company he helped to start, Infosys, after growing it into one of the biggest players in the business. He is now tasked with providing identity cards for India’s 1.2 billion citizens starting in 2011. Right now in India, many records like births, deaths, immunizations and driving violations are kept on paper in local offices.

Mr. Gates was also critical of the United States government’s unwillingness to adopt a national identity card, or allow some businesses, like health care, to centralize data keeping on individuals.

Remind me again why we bother listening to this man...

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Why the GNU GPL v3 Matters Even More

A little while back, I wrote a post called "Why the GNU GPL Still Matters". I was talking in general terms, and didn't really distinguish between the historical GNU GPL version 2 and the new version 3. That's in part because I didn't really have any figures on how the latter was doing. Now I do, because Matt Asay has just published some plausible estimates:

In July 2007, version 3 of the GNU General Public License barely accounted for 164 projects. A year later, the number had climbed past 2,000 total projects. Today, as announced by Google open-source programs office manager Chris DiBona, the number of open-source projects licensed under GPLv3 is at least 56,000.

And that's just counting the projects hosted at Google Code.

In a hallway conversation with DiBona at OSCON, he told me roughly half of all projects on Google Code use the GPL and, of those, roughly half have moved to GPLv3, or 25 percent of all Google Code projects.

With more than 225,000 projects currently hosted at Google Code, that's a lot of GPLv3.

If we make the reasonable assumption that other open-source project repositories Sourceforge.net and Codehaus have similar GPLv3 adoption rates, the numbers of GPLv3 projects get very big, very fast.

This is important not just because it shows that there's considerable vigour in the GNU GPL licence yet, but because version 3 addresses a particularly hot area at the moment: software patents. The increasing use of GPL v3, with its stronger, more developed response to that threat, is therefore very good news indeed.

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Pat "Nutter" Brown Strikes Again

To change the world, it is not enough to have revolutionary ideas: you also have the inner force to be able to realise them in the face of near-universal opposition/indifference/derision. Great examples of this include Richard Stallman, who ploughed his lonely GNU furrow for years before anyone took much notice, and Michael Hart, who did the same for Project Gutenberg.

Another of these rare beings with both vision and tenacity is Pat Brown, a personal hero of mine. Not content with inventing one of the most important experimental tools in genomics - DNA microarrays - Brown decided he wanted to do something ambitious: open access publishing. This urge turned into the Public Library of Science (PLoS) - and even that is just the start:

PLoS is just part of a longer range plan. The idea is to completely change the way the whole system works for scientific communication.

At the start, I knew nothing about the scientific publishing business. I just decided this would be a fun and important thing to do. Mike Eisen, who was a post-doc in my lab, and I have been brain-storming a strategic plan, and PLoS was a large part of it. When I started working on this, almost everyone said, “You are completely out of your mind. You are obviously a complete idiot about how publishing works, and besides, this is a dilettante thing that you're doing.” Which I didn't feel at all.

I know I'm serious about it and I know it's doable and I know it's going to be easy. I could see the thermodynamics were in my favor, because the system is not in its lowest energy state. It's going to be much more economically efficient and serve the customers a lot better being open access. You just need a catalyst to GET it there. And part of the strategy to get it over the energy barrier is to apply heat—literally, I piss people off all the time.

In case you hadn't noticed, that little plan "to completely change the way the whole system works for scientific communication" is coming along quite nicely. So, perhaps buoyed up by this, Brown has decided to try something even more challenging:

Brown: ... I'm going to do my sabbatical on this: I am going to devote myself, for a year, to trying to the maximum extent possible to eliminate animal farming on the planet Earth.

Gitschier: [Pause. Sensation of jaw dropping.]

Brown: And you are thinking I'm out of my mind.

Gitschier: [Continued silence.]

Brown: I feel like I can go a long way toward doing it, and I love the project because it is purely strategy. And it involves learning about economics, agriculture, world trade, behavioral psychology, and even an interesting component of it is creative food science.

Animal farming is by far the most environmentally destructive identified practice on the planet. Do you believe that? More greenhouse production than all transportation combined. It is also the major single source of water pollution on the planet. It is incredibly destructive. The major reason reefs are dying off and dead zones exist in the ocean—from nutrient run-off. Overwhelmingly it is the largest driving force of deforestation. And the leading cause of biodiversity loss.

And if you think I'm bullshitting, the Food and Agricultural Organization of the UN, whose job is to promote agricultural development, published a study, not knowing what they were getting into, looking at the environmental impact of animal farming, and it is a beautiful study! And the bottom line is that it is the most destructive and fastest growing environmental problem.

Gitschier: So what is your plan?

Brown: The gist of my strategy is to rigorously calculate the costs of repairing and mitigating all the environmental damage and make the case that if we don't pay as we go for this, we are just dumping this huge burden on our children. Paying these costs will drive up the price of a Big Mac and consumption will go down a lot. The other thing is to come up with yummy, nutritious, affordable mass-marketable alternatives, so that people who are totally addicted to animal foods will find alternatives that are inherently attractive to eat, so much so that McDonald's will market them, too. I want to recruit the world's most creative chefs—here's a REAL creative challenge!

I've talked with a lot of smart people who are very keen on it actually. They say, “You have no chance of success, but I really hope you're successful.” That's just the kind of project I love.

Pat, the world desperately needs nutters like you. Let's just hope that the thermodynamics are in your favour once more.

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No Patents for Circuits? Since You Insist...

I love this argument:

Arguments against software patents have a fundamental flaw. As any electrical engineer knows, solutions to problems implemented in software can also be realized in hardware, i.e., electronic circuits. The main reason for choosing a software solution is the ease in implementing changes, the main reason for choosing a hardware solution is speed of processing. Therefore, a time critical solution is more likely to be implemented in hardware. While a solution that requires the ability to add features easily will be implemented in software. As a result, to be intellectually consistent those people against software patents also have to be against patents for electronic circuits.

People seem to think that this is an invincible argument *for* software patents; what the poor darlings fail to notice is that it's actually an invincible argument *against* patents for circuits.

Since software is just algorithms, which is just maths, which cannot be patented, and this clever chap points out that circuits are just software made out of hardware, it follows that we shouldn't allow patents for circuits (but they can still be protected by copyright, just as software can.)

So, thanks for the help in rolling back what is patentable...

Has Google Forgotten Celera?

One of the reasons I wrote my book Digital Code of Life was that the battle between the public Human Genome Project and the privately-funded Celera mirrored so closely the battle between free software and Microsoft - with the difference that it was our genome that was at stake, not just a bunch of bits. The fact that Celera ultimately failed in its attempt to sequence and patent vast chunks of our DNA was the happiest of endings.

It seems someone else knows the story:

Celera was the company founded by Craig Venter, and funded by Perkin Elmer, which played a large part in sequencing the human genome and was hoping to make a massively profitable business out of selling subscriptions to genome databases. The business plan unravelled within a year or two of the publication of the first human genome. With hindsight, the opponents of Celera were right. Science is making and will make much greater progress with open data sets.

Here are some rea[s]ons for thinking that Google will be making the same sort of mistake as Celera if it pursues the business model outlined in its pending settlement with the AAP and the Author's Guild....

Thought provoking stuff, well worth a read.

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Building on Open Data

One of the great things about openness is that it lets people do incredible things by adding to it in a multiplicity of ways. The beatuy is that those releasing material don't need to try to anticipate future uses: it's enough that they make it as open as possible Indeed, the more open they make it, the more exciting the re-uses will be.

Here's an unusual example from the field of open data, specifically, the US government data held on Data.gov:

The purpose of Data.gov is to increase public access to high value, machine readable datasets generated by the Executive Branch of the Federal Government. Although the initial launch of Data.gov provides a limited portion of the rich variety of Federal datasets presently available, we invite you to actively participate in shaping the future of Data.gov by suggesting additional datasets and site enhancements to provide seamless access and use of your Federal data. Visit today with us, but come back often. With your help, Data.gov will continue to grow and change in the weeks, months, and years ahead.

Here's how someone intends to go even further:

Today I’m happy to announce Sunlight Labs is stealing an idea from our government. Data.gov is an incredible concept, and the implementation of it has been remarkable. We’re going to steal that idea and make it better. Because of politics and scale there’s only so much the government is going to be able to do. There are legal hurdles and boundaries the government can’t cross that we can. For instance: there’s no legislative or judicial branch data inside Data.gov and while Data.gov links off to state data catalogs, entries aren’t in the same place or format as the rest of the catalog. Community documentation and collaboration are virtual impossibilities because of the regulations that impact the way Government interacts with people on the web.

We think we can add value on top of things like Data.gov and the municipal data catalogs by autonomously bringing them into one system, manually curating and adding other data sources and providing features that, well, Government just can’t do. There’ll be community participation so that people can submit their own data sources, and we’ll also catalog non-commercial data that is derivative of government data like OpenSecrets. We’ll make it so that people can create their own documentation for much of the undocumented data that government puts out and link to external projects that work with the data being provided.

This the future.

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British Library Turns Traitor

I knew the British Library was losing its way, but this is ridiculous:

The British Library Business & IP Centre at St Pancras, London can help you start, run and grow your business.

And how might it do that?

Intellectual property can help you protect your ideas and make money from them.

Our resources and workshops will guide you through the four types of intellectual property: patents, trade marks, registered designs and copyright.

This once-great institution used to be about opening up the world's knowledge for the benefit and enjoyment of all: today, it's about closing it down so that only those who can afford to pay get to see it.

What an utter disgrace.

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Patents *Are* Monopolies: It's Official

As long-suffering readers of this blog will know, I refer to patents and copyrights as intellectual monopolies because, well, that's what they are. But there are some who refuse to accept this, citing all kinds of specious reasons why it's not correct.

Well, here's someone else who agrees with me:

A further and more significant change may come from the President's nomination of David Kappos of IBM to be the next Director of the Patent Office. While in the past, IBM was a prolific filer of patent applications, many of them covering business methods and software, it has filed an amicus brief in Bilski opposing the patentability of business method patents. However, and perhaps not surprisingly, IBM defends approval of software patents.

Mr. Kappos announced his opposition to business method patents last year by stating that "[y]ou're creating a new 20-year monopoly for no good reason."

Yup: the next Director of the USPTO says patents are monopolies: it's official. (Via @schestowitz.)

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Harvard University Press on Scribd

This sounds like a great move:

It’s a recession. Save the $200,000 you were going to spend on that Harvard education and check out some of the books Harvard University Press is selling on Scribd starting today.

It's so obviously right: saving trees, and making academic materials more readily available, thus boosting the recognition achieved by the authors - exactly what they want. Plus readers can buy the books much more cheaply, allowing many more people to access rigorous if rather specialist knowledge.

Or maybe not: a quick look through the titles shows prices ranging from mid-teens up to $45. Come on, people, these are *electrons*: they are cheap. The whole point is to use this fact to spread knowledge, reputation and joy more widely.

When will they (HUP) learn?

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Gadzooks - it's ZookZ from Antigua

I've been following the rather entertaining case of Antigua vs. US for a few years now. Basically, the US government has taken a "do as I say, not as I do" attitude to the WTO - refusing to follow the latter's rules while seeking to enforce them against others. The net result is that plucky little Antigua seems to have won some kind of permission to ignore US copyright - up to a certain point - although nobody really knows what this means in practice.

That's not stopping an equally cheeky Antigua-based company from trying to make money from this situation:

ZookZ provides a new way to get pure movie and music enjoyment. We deliver unlimited, high-quality movies and music through a safe, legal and secure platform for one low monthly subscription fee.

ZookZ makes it simple for any to enjoy digital entertainment. Our user-friendly interface provides access to all our digital assets. We offer unlimited downloads of all movies and music for one low monthly price. Files are delivered in MP3 and MP4 formats that are compatible with most mobile devices and players so you can enjoy your entertainment when, where and how you want. ZookZ is changing the way people use and enjoy digital entertainment. Unlike other companies, once you download the file, you can view or listen to it on any medium of your choice­ –without restrictions.

ZookZ is not a peer-to-peer file sharing system and prohibits that use of its product. Customers directly download safe content from our secure database, not from an unknown third party. ZookZ guarantees that all our digital media is free from viruses, adware and spyware. We are dedicated to providing high-quality, safe and secure digital files.

ZookZ operates under the parameters of the 2007 WTO ruling between Antigua and the United States, and is the only website that can legally offer members unlimited digital entertainment.

The FAQ has more details.

I doubt whether the US media industries will sit back and let ZookZ try to implement its plan, and I suspect that this could get rather interesting to watch.

Why Most Newspapers are Dying

This is something that's struck me too:

as is oh-so-typical in these situations, Osnos does nothing at all to engage or respond to the comments that call out his mistakes. You want to know why newspapers are failing? It's not because of Google, it's because of this viewpoint that some journalists still hold that they're the masters of the truth, handing it out from on high, wanting nothing at all to do with the riff raff in the comments.

This is perhaps the biggest single clue that newspaper do not understand how the Internet has changed relationships between writers and readers. Indeed, one of my disappointments with the Guardian's Comment is Free site is that practically *never* do the writers deign to interact with their readers. Given that the Guardian is probably the most Web-savvy of the major newspapers, this does not augur well...

(Open) Learning from Open Source

As regular readers of this blog will know, I am intrigued by the way that ideas from free software are moving across to different disciplines. Of course, applying them is no simple matter: there may not be an obvious one-to-one mapping of the act of coding to activities in the new domain, or there may be significant cultural differences that place obstacles in the way of sharing.

Here's a fascinating post that explores some of the issues around the application of open source ideas to open educational resources (OER):

For all my fascination with all things open-source, I'm finding that the notion of open source software (OSS) is one that's used far too broadly, to cover more categories than it can rightfully manage. Specifically, the use of this term to describe collaborative open education resource (OER) projects seems problematic. The notion of OSS points to a series of characteristics and truths that do not apply, for better or worse, to the features of collaborative learning environments developed for opening up education.

While in general, open educational resources are developed to adhere to the letter of the OSS movement, what they miss is what we might call the spirit of OSS, which for my money encompasses the following:

* A reliance on people's willingness to donate labor--for love, and not for money.

* An embrace of the "failure for free" model identified by Clay Shirky in Here Comes Everybody.

* A loose collaboration across fields, disciplines, and interest levels.

Open educational resources are not, in general, developed by volunteers; they are more often the product of extensive funding mechanisms that include paying participants for their labor.

Unusually, the post does not simply lament this problem, but goes on to explore a possible solution:

an alternate term for OERs designed in keeping with the open source ideals: community source software (CSS)

Worth reading in its entirety, particularly for the light it sheds on things we take for granted in open source.

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Now You Too Can Contribute to Firefox...

...with your money:

This pilot allows developers to request an optional dollar amount for their Firefox Add-on. Along with requesting this amount, we’re helping developers tell their stories with our new “About the Developer” pages, which explain to prospective contributors the motivations for creating an add-on and its future road map. Since contributions are completely optional, users will have ample time to evaluate an add-on to determine whether or not they want to help a developer.

Some details:

How will payments work?

We are working with PayPal on this pilot to provide a secure and international solution for facilitating payments. Developers can optionally create a PayPal ID for each of their Firefox Add-ons. Users will be presented with a “Contribute” button that gives them the option of paying the suggested amount or a different amount.

This is a nice touch, too:

Why did you call this “Contributions” and not “Donations”?

At Mozilla, we use the word “Contributor” for community members who contribute time and energy to our mission of promoting choice and innovation on the Internet. Our goal is that users who contribute money to developers are supporting the future of a particular add-on, as opposed to donating for something already received.

Quite: this isn't just about getting some well-deserved dosh to the coders, but also about giving users a way to feel more engaged. Great move.