It would be hard to overstate the contribution of Richard Stallman to the digital world. The founding of the GNU project and the creation of the GNU General Public License laid the foundations for a wide range of free software that permeates computing from smartphones to supercomputers. Free software has also directly inspired like-minded movements based around sharing, such as open access and open content (Wikipedia, notably).
As a search through the Techdirt archives shows, Phorm's behavioral advertising service based on watching your Web activity was beset by problems in its early days. One of the last Techdirt posts on the company from a couple of years ago explained how Phorm was planning to expand overseas, and here's some news on how that's been going:
The arguments against open access have moved on from the initial "it'll never work" to the "maybe it'll work, but it's not sustainable" stage. That raises a valid point, of course: who will pay for journals that make their content freely available online?
The Internet is under attack – but not, as politicians would have us believe, from hordes of cyber criminals, but from the politicians themselves. Alongside national legislation like E-PARASITE and international treaties such as ACTA, there is this proposal that a UN body should take over the running of the whole system:
One of the favorite assumptions of industries based around copyright used to be that every pirated copy is a lost sale. More recently, that rhetoric has been moderated somewhat, as a review of the area in the report "Media Piracy in Emerging Countries" shows, but a variation of that fallacy lives on, expressed now as vague "losses" caused by piracy.
Just under a month ago, the "Chaos Computer Club" (CCC), which styles itself as "the largest European hacker club", had some disturbing news for Germans:
The largest European hacker club, "Chaos Computer Club" (CCC), has reverse engineered and analyzed a "lawful interception" malware program used by German police forces. It has been found in the wild and submitted to the CCC anonymously. The malware can not only siphon away intimate data but also offers a remote control or backdoor functionality for uploading and executing arbitrary other programs. Significant design and implementation flaws make all of the functionality available to anyone on the internet.On Techdirt.
One of the pernicious effects of once-obscure legal issues surrounding copyright and patents seeping into everyday life is the belief that even the vaguest ideas can be owned, and that such ownership is a thing worth fighting over. Here, for example, is a sorry tale from Christchurch in New Zealand, which suffered a massive earthquake in which 181 people died back in February of this year:
Microsoft is currently engaging in some incredible rewriting of history. Here's Horacio Gutiérrez, deputy general counsel at the company, trying to defend Microsoft's evolution into a patent troll that is unable to make a smartphone that anyone wants, and thus seeks to tax those who can:
Creative Commons (CC) has been with us for nearly a decade, so you would have thought people might understand it by now. Apparently not, judging by the title of this blog post: "How Creative Commons Can Stifle Artistic Output."
As we've noted, the US has been using multilateral and bilateral negotiations conducted in secret as a way to craft some very one-sided trade treaties. They seem to offer pretty raw deals to the other nations involved – and correspondingly great ones for the US copyright and pharma industries. But could they turn out to have direct negative consequences for US citizens as well?
It seems so long ago now, but for those of us lucky enough (and old enough) to have been there, the launch of Netscape's 0.9 version of its Netscape Navigator browser in October 1994 was clearly the beginning of a new era. For a few years, Netscape was the centre of the Internet universe - it's home page was the first you checked each morning for news about what was happening on this strange new Web thing that the company was doing so much to define.
As a recent Techdirt post noted, France's HADOPI "three strikes" policy has effectively criminalized vast swathes of that country. Despite widespread opposition, the law was pushed through in 2009 by the current French President, Nicolas Sarkozy, as one of his pet projects - it's probably no coincidence that he is married to a pop singer.
One of the key inspirations for the free software movement was the scientific tradition of sharing information and building on the work of others. That arose a few hundred years ago, at a time of rapid scientific progress:
The term "shanzhai" literally means a fortified mountain village, and originally meant those places in China that were outside government control, and hence not subject to its law. Today, by extension, it refers to Chinese outfits producing counterfeit goods that ignore intellectual monopolies like patents.
"Think of the children" has become the rallying cry of politicians around the world trying to push for ever-increasing Internet surveillance powers. Since nobody wants to run the risk of being branded as soft on crimes like paedophilia, resistance to such measures is greatly reduced as a result.
One of the key arguments used by companies who want to see the end of net neutrality is that with growing use of high-bandwidth services like video on demand, or video telephony, there isn't enough bandwidth to go around, and that other services will suffer as a result. This leads them to call for differential pricing, charging more for such services.
Last month I wrote about the UK government's "Making Open Data Real" consultation. That's actually just the first part of a double-headed enquiry into open government data. The other part concerns "Data Policy for a Public Data Corporation" (PDC).
Techdirt has reported on a number people accused of murder googling for things like "neck snap break" or "how to commit murder" beforehand, and leaving these suggestive details on their computers. Those were some years back, and since then there has been plenty of attention given to the idea that your search histories provide a great deal of information about what you were thinking - and possibly even what you were thinking about doing.
One of the recurrent recent themes of IT in the UK has been how moves to open source by local and central government have been stymied by Microsoft - the most famous example being the Newham Council saga. Of course, that's not a problem unique to the UK: it's a pattern repeated around the world, as some recent stories highlight.
The Olympic Games are not just about sporting success, but also legal excess – in particular, taking laws to extremes in order to "protect" sponsors, who are routinely elevated to the level of Greek gods during the games, with similarly superhuman rights over lesser beings like you and me.
Techdirt has already written about the UK police getting special powers to enter homes during the 2012 games, as well as free speech being curtailed. Now there are plans to suspend the presumption of innocence too:
The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) has now been signed by several nations – even if its actual status is by no means clear. But that doesn't mean governments have finished with their trade negotiations behind closed doors. As Techdirt reported earlier this year, the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement is, in some ways, even worse than ACTA, and looks to be a conscious attempt to apply the tricks developed there to circumvent scrutiny yet further.
Last week we learned the UK government has precisely no evidence to support its plans for stricter copyright enforcement, which include disconnection upon repeated accusation. Instead, the best it could come up with was:
The office suite has occupied a very strange position in the world of open source. As a key software tool used by practically everyone on a daily basis, it was vital for free software to be able to offer one. And yet what came to be the leading office suite - OpenOffice.org - was widely recognised as deeply unsatisfactory. Its early versions were barely usable, and even in its later incarnations it was hard to get enthusiastic about it.
There have been a number of stories on Techdirt recently about governments diminishing the public domain - not just by extending copyright for future works, but also by putting works currently in the public domain back under copyright, both in the US and EU. Reversing that trend – by pushing back copyright's term closer to the original 14 years, say – will be challenging, to put it mildly.
Last week Techdirt wrote about a draft of a civil rights-based framework for the Internet that is being considered by lawmakers in Brazil. It seems like the Brazilian Radio and Television Association didn't get around to reading it, because they want the government there to "regulate" foreign web content flowing into the country (Brazilian news report):
The launch of Amazon's Kindle Fire at a price well below expectations has naturally focused people's attention on the e-book side of Amazon's operations, and the likely effect of the extended Kindle family on other publishers trying to go digital. But something else is happening at the other end of the publishing chain that could well disrupt the industry just as much, if not more: Amazon is becoming a major publisher in its own right.
A few weeks back, Techdirt posted a story about a European campaign group called "Europe vs. Facebook", which is trying to find out exactly what information Facebook holds about its users. It is doing this using European data protection laws, thanks to the fact that Facebook' s international headquarters are in Ireland.
The unprecedented public outpouring of grief in the technical community at the death of Steve Jobs seems to go well beyond the fact that he was an undeniably important and powerful figure in that world for several decades. Perhaps it's because the people involved in technology are disproportionately young compared to most other industries: death often seems very far away at that age. The demise of the charismatic Jobs comes as brutal reminder that even leaders of the most successful companies must, one day, die. And hence, by implication, that we too will die.
One of the striking changes at Microsoft over the last twenty years is how savvy it has become in terms of lobbying and influencing political opinion. There was a time when, like most serious tech companies, it regarded this kind of sneaky activity as beneath it - something that only tobacco companies would stoop to. No more; today, it bombards everyone and anyone with a constant stream of carefully-crafted policy papers and posts designed to achieve its goals.
The Netcraft Web Server Survey, which appears each month, is usually viewed as offering the spectacle of a two-player fight between the open source Apache and Microsoft's IIS. Actually, that's giving Microsoft too much credit, since it's never really been a fight: IIS has occasionally tried to claw its way closer to Apache's market share, failed dismally, and then started sinking back again. But there's another story in these graphs.
A couple of weeks ago, I was talking about the striking success of the Pirate Party in the German local elections. Since then, an opinion poll has suggested that, currently at least, the party enjoys a similarly wide support throughout the country - around 8%
Microsoft has just released its 2011 Annual Financial Report. But alongside that document's dry facts about its $69.9 billion turnover, and the operating income of $27.2 billion, Dj Walker-Morgan pointed us to a more interesting publication, Microsoft's 2011 Citizenship Report:
If you go to the Italian version of Wikipedia, you will not find a gateway to 847,000 articles in that language, but (at the time of writing, at least) an unusual letter to the reader:
As do many nations, England likes to put images of its great and good on banknotes. In a somewhat quixotic attempt to stem the decline of what little manufacturing remains in the country, the governor of the Bank of England has come up with the following idea:
One of the striking features of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement is that it is mainly being signed by Western/“developed” countries – with a few token players from other parts of the world to provide a fig-leaf of nominal inclusiveness. That's no accident: ACTA is the last-gasp attempt of the US and the EU to preserve their intellectual monopolies – copyright and patents, particularly drug patents – in a world where both are increasingly questioned.
One of the most noticeable trends in copyright law around the world is the way countries tend to adopt similar approaches. So after the "three strikes" law was introduced in France, the UK followed suit, and other nations are at various stages of doing the same. A cynic might almost suggest the whole thing was coordinated somehow.
There seems to be something in the air (maybe it's the crazy weather): everyone is making “declarations”.On Open Enterprise blog.
As Bessen and Meurer's book "Patent Failure" points out, one of the biggest problems with software patents is their lack of well-defined boundaries. This makes it very hard to tell whether newly-written code is infringing on existing patents or not. The threat of treble damages for wilful infringement removes any incentive to try to find out.On Techdirt.
Started in 1997 by Floor64 founder Mike Masnick and then growing into a group blogging effort, the Techdirt blog uses a proven economic framework to analyze and offer insight into news stories about changes in government policy, technology and legal issues that affect companies ability to innovate and grow.The dynamic and interactive community of Techdirt readers often comment on the addictive quality of the content on the site, a feeling supported by the blog’s ~800,000 RSS subscribers, 45,000+ posts, 600,000+ comments and a consistent Technorati Technology Top 100 rating.
Last week I went along to OpenForum Europe, where I had been invited to give a short talk as part of a panel on “Tackling “Societal Challenges” through Openness”. Despite my attendance, the conference had some impressive speakers, including the European Commission's Neelie Kroes and Google's Hal Varian.
The Pirate Party has hovered on the edge of politics for a while now, acting as a kind of gadfly to traditional parties - annoying but not able to inflict much damage. Its seats in the European Parliament have proved important in terms of raising issues and obtaining access to hitherto restricted information. But last week's events in Germany are perhaps even more significant:On Open Enterprise blog.
It has been a recurrent theme of these pages that the UK government
is miles behind other administrations when it comes to adopting open
source. Recently, we have had some encouraging words on the subject -
but no buttered parsnips as yet.
We need a campaign to get this really moving, but you can't have a
campaign without some catchy slogan (or a good #hashtag). I think Mark
Taylor, that open source stalwart, has just come up with both as part of
a throwaway tweet:
OSS Please!
This sums up brilliant what we want, and does it memorably and
politely - a kind of more positive "Atomkraft? Nein Danke", updated for
the 21st century. Now all we need is a logo...
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I've written a number of pieces about the inherent flaws of patents, especially in the field of software. Those are mostly to do with how the good intentions of patents are not realised. But alongside those who try to use patents as they were supposedly intended are another group who are essentially parasites - those who seek to game the system, and extract money from its weaknesses: the patent trolls.On Open Enterprise blog.
Aside from the patent trolls themselves, few have a good word for them, since it's pretty obvious to everyone that they suck money out of companies that make stuff, and thus act as a brake on real innovation. But those feelings have been largely unquantified. Now, thanks to recent work of the authors of the seminal book “Patent Failure”, James Bessen and Michael Meurer, along with a third author, Jennifer Laurissa Ford, we have perhaps the first rigorous estimate of the damage they cause. It's even worse than we thought:
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the “Making Data Real”consultation, promising to post my response. I have to admit that replying to the questions it asks has been far harder for this than for any other consultation that I've responded to.
I should hasten to add that this is not from any failing in the consultation itself. Indeed, it is commendably thorough both in its exposition of the issues, and in terms of the questions posed. But that's almost the problem: it is asking very deep questions in an area where few people - myself included - have really managed to frame anything like coherent responses.
The ideas that "copyright theft" is widespread, and that people are "stealing" digital content from creators, are favourite tropes of the copyright maximalists. It's total rubbish, of course. The law clearly states that if it is anything it is copyright infringement, and simple logic tells us that digital copies aren't stealing, because they do not take away, but add.
Yes, there is a question of whether that unauthorised duplication leads to a loss of revenue, but the answer is by no means as clear-cut as people would have you believe. A range of studies shows that such sharing actually boosts sales, acting as unofficial - and free - marketing.
That's why I've long been advocating independent research into this area - after all, if the copyright industries are so sure that file sharing is leading to revenue loss, what have they to fear from objective research into this area? And yet strangely they seem reluctant even to countenance the idea.
But whatever your views on that particular issue, it seems likely that the following will only exacerbate the problem [.pdf]:
The [European] Council today adopted by qualified majority a directive extending the term of protection of the rights of performers and phonogram producers on music recordings within the EU from 50 to 70 years.
What this means, in practical terms, is that there is very little chance that I - or any of my more musical contemporaries - will ever be able to use today's music recordings to create new works. As with the other media, contemporary recorded music will live in a closed, antiseptic bubble that no one is allowed to penetrate for nearly a hundred years or so.
That's all very distant and theoretical; it's hard to see what the problem is, perhas. So let's look a little more closely at what has happened here by imagining a strange parallel world, remarkable like our own until yesterday, when the following happened:
The [European] Council Council today adopted by qualified majority a directive reducing the term of protection of the rights of performers and phonogram producers on music recordings within the EU from 50 to 30 years.
As you can see, this is almost exactly the same as our world, with the very minor difference that the copyright term for music recordings was reduced by 20 years, instead of being increased. Pretty minor, you might think - after all, what's 20 years plus or minus? If it can be increased, it can be decreased, no?
But in that parallel world, imagine the howls of anger and pain that would be issuing forth from the music industry at this outrageous and unjustified appropriation of their rightful dues. Musicians would be marching in the streets, and the companies that live off them would be lobbying as never before to get this terrible result reversed.
Luckily for them, that was in a parallel world. But thanks to the symmetry of copyright - that it represents a bargain between creators and the public, with grants of a temporary monopoly to the former in return for the passage into the public domain of the work after that monopoly has expired - that very same expropriation has taken place - from you, me and everyone that goes to make up that nebulous "public". The only really difference is that no one is marching in the streets to reverse it.
When the musicians recorded their songs, the deal was that they would receive copyright for 50 years (or maybe less, depending on when they recorded it). In return for that 50 years, they agreed that the public domain would be enriched so that we, the public, could do as we wished with that music.
That compact, freely entered into by both sides, has just been broken. The recordings will no longer enter the public domain on the agreed date; instead, we must wait yet another 20 years. In effect, then, we have had 20 years public domain use stolen from us, since nothing was given in return for this sudden loss.
There can be no quibbling here about whether this is really theft, because something we had before has been taken away without our permission. Yes, the European Council may theoretically be acting in our name, but I don't remember being asked at any point whether I agreed to this. The fact is that the Council acted unilaterally, at the behest of the music industry that wanted something for nothing - not because we, the public, were begging politicians to change the law in this way and to make us poorer than we were before.
This is what *real* copyright theft looks like: the stealing from the public by yet another unjustified and undemocratic extension of copyright.
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It's no secret that businesses built around open source tend to favour one model in particular - that involving dual licensing. The basic idea is simple.
A company acquires the copyright of the main codebase, which might begin life as a small-scale, single-coder project, and is then “taken commercial” thanks to a little greasing of palms (providing a well-earned payback for all those hours of lonely coding.)
As regular readers of this column will know, one of the key issues for open source - and openness in general - is what is meant by open standards. Too loose a definition basically allows the other kinds of openness to be undermined from within the citadel.
I frequently cover the subject of copyright on this blog because increasingly it is impacting the lives of readers, both as individuals and as people working in companies, in an adverse way. But these problems of accessing texts, say, are even greater for a particular subset of readers: those who are visually impaired.
I am sure that everyone reading this blog who is not visually impaired would agree that this group of people deserves extra consideration to help them overcome any obstacles that get in the way of accessing information - so vital in the modern world. In a humane society, then, our political representatives would bend over backwards to aid this and similar groups through legislation and treaties designed to make things at least a little easier.
We do not live in that world, and the following disgraceful copyright saga is the proof.
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