Back in October last year, in the context of India showing itself increasingly sceptical about pharma patents that drive up drug prices beyond the reach of its citizens, we wrote about an important court battle over Novartis's drug Gleevec, sold as Glivec in India. The definitive judgement from India's Supreme Court was announced today, reported here by The Guardian:
Last week I made a couple of urgent pleas to readers to complete the major EU IPRED consultation, which was being conducted on the Web. Since I needed to be able to refer to my own answers, I saved these as a draft online so that I could go back to them, polish them, and then submit them.
Last year, Techdirt wrote about an interesting article suggesting that we should welcome "cyberwar" since it would be so much less painful than the ordinary kind. Of course, that begs the question what we actually mean by "cyberwar", since some forms are probably less humane than others. As we have pointed out, the use of the totally embarrassing "cyber" prefix is really just an excuse for more government controls and for security companies to get fat contracts implementing them.
As Mike noted a couple of days ago, international trade agreements often have the effect of constraining the power of national legislatures. Indeed, that's doubtless one of the reasons why they have become so popular in recent years: they allow backroom deals between politicians and lobbyists to set the agenda for law-making around the world, without the need for any of that pesky democratic oversight nonsense. In particular, the trade agreement between South Korea and the US is turning out to be a key limiting factor for both TPP and what US politicians might try to do about phone unlocking. This makes two recent moves to loosen South Korea's harsh copyright laws potentially important far beyond that country's borders.
Yesterday I mentioned the important consultation on IPRED, how it was closing soon, and what a good idea it would be if you applied to take part immediately. I also noted there's a helpful guide to filling in the consultation, from EDRI, but I omitted to mention that there is an equally great one from the Pirate Party MEP Amelia Andersdotter, which I thoroughly recommend.
Although the European Union finally approved the continent-wide Unitary Patent in December 2012, after decades of discussions, the story is by no means at an end. Science describes the root of the problem:
Today is Document Freedom Day:
It is a day for celebrating and raising awareness of Open Standards and formats which takes place on the last Wednesday in March each year. On this day people who believe in fair access to communications technology teach, perform, and demonstrate.
IPRED is not that well known, even among the Net-savvy. And yet it's one of the most important EU directives that affects the online world, and a consultation on its future closes at the end of this week, on 30 March. Here's the background from EDRI:
Hackers and hacking have been much in the news recently - for all the wrong reasons, unfortunately. The most dramatic case, perhaps, was the suicide of Aaron Swartz. He was threatened with 35 years in prison, partly for this:
Techdirt has been following the rapid rise and current problems of the various Pirate Parties in Europe for some time. Both their success and difficulties flow in part from the fact that they do not fit neatly into the traditional political categories. This makes them attractive to those who are disenchanted with established parties, but also makes it hard for Pirate Parties to devise a coherent political program that they can seek to implement, for example through alliances with others.
As you may have heard, there's been an election in Rome recently. These kind of events tend to bring out the crowds, and NBC had the clever idea of finding a couple of pictures showing roughly the same view, but eight years apart. They look very similar, except for one rather striking detail: in the first, from 2005, there are a few mobile phones visible; in the second, taken recently, tiny screens are visible everywhere in the crowd -- it seems as if practically everyone is using their phone to take a picture.
It would be something of an understatement to say that people have strong opinions about patents. But as Techdirt has reported, there's a growing consensus that software patents in particular aren't working -- James Bessen and Michael J. Meurer have written an entire book, "Patent Failure", about how bad things are there, and why it's happening in this area rather than elsewhere.
Techdirt has been pointing out for years that more patents is not the same thing as more innovation, even though many around the world would have us believe otherwise. It seems the message is finally getting through: here's a remarkable statement from India on the subject of innovation and small- and medium-sized companies, made at a TRIPS Council meeting:
Although the use of open source by the UK government has an unhappy history (and one that certainly isn't finished), one ray of hope comes from Gov.uk, as I've noted before. The driving force behind that site is the Government Digital Service (GDS), and on its blog there's a particularly interesting post by Mike Bracken, who rejoices in the splendid title of "Executive Director of Digital in the Cabinet Office."
Regular readers of this column will know that I am not overly enamoured of the European Patent Office, since it has effectively introduced software patents by the back door, in direct contravention of the will of the European Parliament. No surprise, then, that the EPO's Annual Report has plenty to worry about. For example, in his foreword, the EPO's President writes:
Librarians can play an important role in any society that depends increasingly on access to information to function. One of their jobs is to help people find what they are looking for, in a neutral, objective way, without imposing their own ideas or values in the process. Sadly, it looks like that won't be possible in Canada any more, now that librarians are expected to sign up to a new Code of Conduct imposed on them by the Canadian government. Here's one problematic section:
In 2001, I published a history of free software, called "Rebel Code: Inside Linux and the Open Source Revolution." One of the people I interviewed for the book was Eben Moglen, for many years the General Counsel for the Free Software Foundation, and one of the main architects of the later versions of the GNU General Public License. He had the following interesting thoughts on the delivery of digital media:
Two years ago, Techdirt wrote about the major report "Media Piracy in Emerging Economies", which explored how media and software piracy in emerging countries is largely a question of economics: people and companies there simply cannot afford Western-style pricing, and resort to alternative sourcing. That hasn't stopped media and computer companies from demanding that governments around the world should inflict ever-more harsh punishments on their own people.
A couple of weeks ago I wrote about how the irony-immune IT department of the European Parliament was censoring emails complaining about censorship. Now it seems they have a kindred spirit here in the UK:
One of the slogans of the copyright industries is that you can't make money from giving things away. Unfortunately for them, examples just keep coming up showing that's simply not true. Techdirt wrote about the interesting case of the London Evening Standard back in 2009, shortly after its new owner decided to turn it from a (loss-making) paid-for newspaper, into one that was given away. So, three years later, how did that work out?:
Last week we wrote about the important news that Mexico is asking to join what began as a bilateral trade agreement between the US and Europe, with the suggestion that Canada might follow suit. Now, via @FFII, we learn that even before Mexico's announcement, the US has been encouraging other countries to join:
One of the initiatives gaining momentum around the world is open data -- the idea that, for example, non-personal data affecting the public should be made freely available. That's partly to improve transparency, so that citizens are more informed about what is happening, and partly to stimulate new kinds of business that build products and services based on that data.
Back in January, I wrote about what I called the "Trans-Atlantic Partnership Agreement", by analogy with the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement, TPP, whose negotiations have already dragged on for several years. The formal announcement of what is now variously called the Trans-Atlantic Free Trade Agreement (TAFTA) or Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), took place just over a month ago, but already Mexico has stated that it wishes to join, and there are rumours Canada might tag along too.
The UK is famous for its tabloid newspapers and their particular brand of journalism. Here's a fine example from the Daily Express, under the headline "EU attempts to brainwash children with 'sinister Soviet-style propaganda'":
Over the last few years, Techdirt has been reporting on a steady stream of victories for open access. Along the way publishers have tried various counter-attacks, which all proved dismal failures. But there are signs that they have changed tack, and come up with a more subtle -- and increasingly successful -- approach.
If you were online late last night - and especially if you were on Twitter - you may have noted an enormous wave of pain and anger sweeping across the network. Here's what caused it:
Things are moving fast with the proposed US-EU transatlantic free trade agreement (TAFTA). It was only a few weeks ago that the formal announcement was made, and already another country wants to join, as pointed out by @PostActa (original in Spanish):
Most sane human beings have stopped trying to keep up with the interwined legal actions arising out of the smartphone patent wars between Apple, Google, Motorola, Nokia, Microsoft and all the rest. The cases, though, are still grinding through the courts, which periodically throw out their verdicts. According to Florian Mueller, one such decision in Germany is imminent:
Now that the US and EU have officially announced the start of talks on a new bilateral free trade agreement -- sorry, a "trade and investment partnership" -- groups in both regions are trying to work out what this will mean for them and their constituents. Arguably the most important constituency of all is the public, and yet it is also the one that until now has been systematically shut out of previous negotiations for things like ACTA or TPP. One representative of that huge group -- though not, obviously, the only one -- is the Transatlantic Consumer Dialogue (TACD), which describes itself as follows:
I've been writing quite a lot about the current Data Protection regulation that is being considered in the European Parliament. As I've noted, this has led to an unprecedented level of lobbying from US companies, who are keen not to have to follow strict EU rules when it comes to our privacy. So far, I've not singled out any particular company in this context, but having read somewhat belatedly this post by the privacy expert Simon Davies, I feel a need to talk about one that is clearly right at the heart of this battle: Google.
There is an extremely dangerous trend to remove proper judicial review from cases involving alleged copyright infringement. Sometimes that means "voluntary" actions by ISPs -- the SOPA and ACTA approach. Sometimes, it means appearances before tribunals by members of the public without adequate legal representation, as is happening under New Zealand's "three strikes" law. And sometimes it might involve a judge, but consist of the latter simply agreeing to requests from the copyright industry, without anyone challenging the grounds for doing so.
There have been many posts on Techdirt about the copyright industry's hatred for new technologies that eventually turned out to be important sources of additional revenue -- the VCR being perhaps the most famous example. Here's a splendid column from Adam Turner in the Sydney Morning Herald about the same thing happening again in Australia.
It began last week, with an article by the Pirate Party MEP Christian Engström, who wrote about a vote that will take place in the European Parliament (possibly tomorrow):
A few weeks ago we wrote about Iceland's thoroughly daft idea of trying to block porn there. Bad proposals for the Internet always seem to spread, and so it should perhaps come as no surprise that the European Parliament will be considering a similarly unworkable proposal, but in a rather more covert way, as the Pirate Party politician Christian Engström noted on his blog:
For obvious reasons, stories about drones concentrate on what they can do while they are airborne. But they have to come down at some point, and sometimes emergency landings mean that they cannot return to base. An interesting story from Italy recounts what happened there in these circumstances:
Lots of news regarding file-sharing has come out of Sweden over the years, but as TorrentFreak points out, until now, there's never been a prosecution for alleged unauthorized sharing using BitTorrent. The current case is unusual in a number of other respects:
One of the core areas that Mozilla is working on is user privacy, and one important aspect of this is controlling cookies. Most people are now aware that sites they visit seek to place cookies - small strings of information - on their systems as a way of tracking when and what they visit on that site. What many may not know is that so-called "third-party" cookies are also widely used: these allow people to be tracked as they move from site to site, and effectively enable a detailed picture of their use of the Web to be built up.
In an implicit acknowledgement that the Europe-wide protests against ACTA indicated that there was a problem with copyright in the digital age, the European Commission announced back in December what it called "an orientation debate on content in the digital economy." This is what that meant, apparently:
One of the richest seams of open data concerns transport. After all, by their very nature, transport systems generate huge amounts of new data every day -- times, routes, travel options. Similarly, huge numbers of people use multiple means of transport, which means there is a big potential audience for analyses of that data. And it's definitely in the interest of transport operators to make that information freely available so that developers can use it in new ways, since that is likely to make traveling easier, and lead to increased custom.
There are dozens of free software and open source licences -- many would argue rather too many. Different licenses impose different conditions. For example, the best-known and most widely-used is the GNU General Public License, which is designed to ensure that anyone building on GPL'd software and distributing it should make the modified program available under the same license. Others, such as the BSD license simply require the copyright and license notices to be included with any code that is used.
For a year now, Techdirt has been following the sorry saga of Germany's attempt to make search engines and others pay for licenses to show even small excerpts from online newspapers. The main motivation seems to be to take money from Google for being successful, and to give it to the German publishers that are struggling.
As I noted recently in the context of the BBC inexplicably supporting the introduction of DRM into the HTML5 specification, openness lies at the heart of the Web and the Internet. One of the problems with true openness is that it has to be at every level: if any part of a system is closed, it interferes with the openness of the whole.
We wrote a couple of weeks ago how some were arguing that Spain ought to go back on the "naughty" Special 301 list for failing to show any "positive developments" on the copyright front recently. By an interesting coincidence, the Spanish Internet Association has just published a leaked draft of proposals to make digital copyright law in Spain even harsher. Here's how the Web site ADSL Zone describes them (original in Spanish):
If it is to be true to its name, the World Wide Web ought to reflect the planet's full cultural and linguistic diversity. Currently, though, many sites and tools remain optimized for English and its character set, although that's gradually changing as other countries with different languages and writing systems come online in greater numbers.
The Internet as a mass medium is still relatively young, so it's no surprise that its function in society and in our daily lives is still being defined. One important question concerns the nature of our actions online: to what extent are they public? Here's one rather extreme view, expressed by Jürgen Maurer, vice-president of Germany's Federal Criminal Police Office, as reported by Der Spiegel (original in German):
As Techdirt noted last year, France has a regrettable habit of dreaming up really bad ideas when it comes to the Internet, most famously with the three-strikes scheme, now known there by the name of the body the oversees it -- Hadopi. Guillaume Champeau points us to a piece in the French newspaper Libération, which contains yet more appalling possibilities (original in French).
Long-time readers will remember the appalling way in which the UK's Digital Economy Act was brought in - with no research, no debate, and no democracy. At its heart lies the infamous "three strikes" idea: if you are alleged - not proved, but merely alleged - to have shared files online on three occasions you will be subject to some punishment. Originally that was cutting off your hand, er, your Internet connection, but as the discussions over implementing this unjust and punitive law have dragged on, it's become less clear how it will actually work.
Techdirt has been writing for a while about China's policy of providing incentives to file patents -- regardless of whether those patents have any worth. That's led to a naïve celebration of the large numbers now being granted, as if more patents corresponded to more innovation.
I've written a number of posts about Mozilla's rise and fall and rise: how it went from saving the open Web and open standards in the face of the stagnation brought about by Internet Explorer 6's long dominance; to losing its way somewhat, with the upstart Chrome threatening to supplant its role as the "other" browser; and finally finding a role once more as it concentrated on what it called Web apps.
New Zealand has the unhappy distinction of being in the vanguard of using the "three strikes" approach of punishment for people accused of sharing unauthorized copies online. As in France and the UK, this was brought in without any preparatory research to ascertain its effectiveness, and without any real thought about the practical implications. That makes a post by Susan Chalmers on the blog of InternetNZ, a "non-profit open membership organisation dedicated to protecting and promoting the Internet in New Zealand", particularly valuable.
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