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Here on Techdirt we've had stories about how the ubiquity of digital cameras is changing the way we look at public events and art.
But as has also become clear, the ability to take photos of more or
less everything we see brings with it certain problems -- especially if
what we see are police.
So it was perhaps inevitable that the politicians would start to get
involved, in order to "solve" some of those problems. Here's a rather extreme example from Sweden, as reported by TechHive:
On
Techdirt.
Techdirt readers may recall that over three years ago, the UK's Digital Economy Act was passed in totally disgraceful
circumstances. Since then, almost nothing has been heard about it, as
British civil servants grapple with the fact that this poorly-drafted
law is almost impossible to implement in any sensible way. If you were
wondering what is going on behind the scenes, James Firth has put
together a fascinating post piecing together the information that he was
able to glean. The main point is that the UK's "three-strike" warning letters won't be going out for years:
On
Techdirt.
One of the problems with the debates around copyright and patents is
that they too often assume that intellectual monopolies are necessary in
order to promote innovation or even basic economic activity. But that
overlooks all kinds of domains where that's not true. In the field of
technology, free software and the other open movements based on sharing
are familiar examples of this kind of thing. Less well known so are the
so-called "informal economies" found in many parts of the world.
On
Techdirt.
So the revelations from Edward Snowden keep on coming, exposing
ever-more profound attacks on privacy and democracy in the UK and
elsewhere. News that GCHQ is essentially downloading, storing and searching
through the entire flow of Internet traffic that comes into and goes
out of the UK without any specific warrant to do so is one side of that.
That seems to be taking place through an extremely generous
interpretation of the out-of-date RIPA law
that is supposed to bring some level of accountability to just this sort
of thing. The fact that it doesn't shows that we must reform RIPA and make it fit for the Internet age.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
The last couple of weeks have been full of the revelations about NSA spying
on a massive scale. What has been slightly disconcerting is that the
agency and its defenders have essentially tried to argue that the spying
doesn't matter because it's only aimed at "foreigners". But that's us:
which means that we are the target of this spying, even if others get
caught up in it too.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
Irrespective of the details of the current revelations about US
spying being provided by Edward Snowden in the Guardian, there is
already a huge collateral benefit. On the one hand, the US government
is falling over itself to deny some of the allegations by offering its
own version of the story. That for the first time gives us official
details about programmes that before we only knew through leaks and
rumours, if at all. Moreover, the unseemly haste and
constantly-shifting story from the US authorities is confirmation, if
anyone still needed it, that what Snowden is revealing is important -
you don't kick up such a fuss over nothing.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
Remember the Digital Economy Act, surely one of the most disgraceful
episodes in recent British political history? It was "passed" back 2010
- I use inverted commas, since it was actually rammed through an almost
empty House of Commons in the guttering hours of the previous
government, with no scrutiny, riding roughshod over all those pointing
out it was both unjust and unworkable.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
The extraordinary revelations about the NSA's global spying programme Prism
have only just started - was it really just last Thursday that things
began? So it would be extremely rash to attempt any kind of definitive
statement about what is going on. But that doesn't preclude a few
preliminary comments, as well as initial thoughts on what action those
of us in Europe might take in response.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
It's been a while since I wrote about net neutrality, but of course
it's never gone away as an important theme. Indeed, it was inevitable
that it would start to rear its ugly head again, since so many powerful
companies have vested interests in destroying it. For example, in
Germany the telecom giant Deutsch Telekom (DT) has already made a move
to kill net neutrality by giving preference to its own IPTV platform. This has led to a heated debate about net neutrality in that country (for those who read German, the site hilf-telekom.de offers some hilarious satire of DT on the subject.)
On
Open Enterprise blog.
Mozilla and its central Firefox project are themes that I have
returned to often on this blog. That's not so surprising: Mozilla is
one of the oldest free software projects, starting back in 1998 when Netscape stunned the world by announcing that it would open up its key product, Netscape Navigator.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
"Law is the operating system of our society ... So show me the
manual!" Not alas, my witty words, but those found on the site
Public.Resource.Org, run by the redoubtable Carl Malamud.
The basic idea is simple: that laws can only be obeyed if they are
truly public, which means freely available, not hidden behind paywalls.
After all, how can the phrase "ignorance of the law is no excuse" have
any validity when key documents are only available to those with pockets
deep enough to afford them?And not just laws: we need case law and
associated government regulations too.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
I love the spring. Not, of course, because of the glorious weather,
since we don't have any. But because it's time for the annual BSA report
on piracy, which is guaranteed to provide me with hours of innocent fun
as I go through finding its methodological errors and dodgy data.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
I've written a number of posts looking at less-familiar advantages of
open source over closed source, and here's another one. Proprietary
systems can't be forked, which means that it's not possible to change
the underlying ethos, for example by tweaking the software or using code
on a different platform. But you can with open source, as this
interesting example shows.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
I've written
a few times about open data in the context of clinical trials - the
information that must be provided when new drugs seek approval. As I
noted, there is a growing movement
to make such basic safety data freely available, the idea being that it
could then be analysed by third parties, perhaps finding new
applications of drugs, overlooked problems, or even wilful concealing of adverse effects.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
The revelations of Edward Snowden about the NSA's snooping of citizens
both inside and outside the US are posing more questions than they
answer at the moment. One key area is whether the use of encryption --
for example for email -- is effective against the techniques and raw
power available to the NSA (and equivalents in other countries). That's
something that has come up before in the context of the UK's Snooper's
Charter. When a top official there was asked whether the proposed
surveillance technology would be able to cope with encrypted streams, he
replied: "it will." Snowden's claims about massive, global spying makes the issue even more pertinent.
On
Techdirt.
As we've noted before, Hadopi has been a colossal failure
on just about every metric, and now seems on the way out. But French
taxpayers' money is still being wasted on the scheme, which continues to
send out huge numbers of warnings. Ironically, given its imminent
demise, Hadopi seems to have finally claimed its first disconnection
victim, as PC Inpact reports (original in French.)
The person involved has been sentenced to disconnection for 15 days,
and must pay a €600 fine. Strangely, it seems that he or she shared
only a couple of works, so even that brief period seems harsh. However,
there is still scope for an appeal, so the sentence is not yet definite.
On
Techdirt.
News that the NSA has unfettered access to most of the leading Internet
services inevitably has an international dimension. After all,
Microsoft, Yahoo!, Google and the rest of the Naughty Nine
all operate around the world, so spying on their users means spying on
people everywhere. Indeed, as Mike explained earlier today, the NSA is
actually trying to quell criticism by selling this news as something
that purely concerns non-Americans (although that's clearly rubbish.)
On
Techdirt.
Techdirt has been writing about investor-state dispute resolution
(ISDR) mechanisms in international trade treaties like TPP and
TAFTA/TTIP for two main reasons. First, because of the scale involved:
ISDR allows companies to sue entire countries for huge sums, alleging loss of future
profits. And secondly, because few seem aware of this growing threat
to the national sovereignty of many countries around the world. That
finally seems to be changing, with a number of articles warning about
the dangers of ISDR appearing recently.
On
Techdirt.
One of the key flaws with the data retention schemes being proposed by
the UK and elsewhere, supposedly to catch terrorists and serious
criminals, is that they won't work. It is trivially easy to avoid
surveillance by using encrypted connections, for example those provided
by The Onion Router (Tor). This means that the only people who are likely to end up being spied on are innocent members of the public.
On
Techdirt.
You might have hoped that the extensive discussions that took place
around SOPA a year or so ago would have warned off governments elsewhere
from replicating some of the really bad ideas there, like DNS blocking,
but it seems that Taiwan didn't get the message, as Global Voices reports:
On
Techdirt.
Back in February we reported on a worrying
attempt by the European Commission to reframe the discussion about
modernizing copyright in Europe purely in terms of licensing, reflected
in the name of the initiative, "Licences for Europe". Although originally a series of discussions
were promised to "explore the potential and limits of innovative
licensing and technological solutions in making EU copyright law and
practice fit for the digital age," in practice moderators shut down
discussions of things like exceptions or even Creative Commons
licensing. As far as the Commission was concerned, it seemed the answer
to updating copyright for the modern age was just old-style licensing
and nothing else.
On
Techdirt.
Recent news that Angelina Jolie underwent a preventive double mastectomy because of her elevated risk of developing breast cancer has drawn attention to the Myriad Genetics
case currently before the US Supreme Court, and to the whole area of
gene patents. Myriad's monopoly has allowed it to set a high price for
its tests -- $3000 -- and this is bound to have acted as a disincentive
for those who were unable to afford such a sum. It is therefore quite
likely that people have died as a result of Myriad's patents.
On
Techdirt.
As readers of this blog will have noticed, much of the most
innovative work in the field of openness is taking place in open data.
One of the largest stores of data is held by government, and the
argument for opening it up where possible is strong: after all, we, the
public, paid for this data, so it is only right that we, the public,
should have access to it.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
Open Enterprise mostly writes about "obvious" applications of open
source - situations where money can be saved, or control regained, by
shifting from proprietary to open code. That battle is more or less
won: free software is widely recognised as inherently superior in
practically all situations, as its rapid uptake across many markets
demonstrates. But there are also some circumstances where it may not be
so obvious that open source is the solution, because it's not always
clear what the problem is.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
One of the more disgraceful examples of the inherent selfishness of
the copyright world is that it has consistently blocked a global treaty
that would make it easier for the blind and visually impaired to read
books in format like Braille. The thinking seems to be that it's more
important to preserve copyright "inviolate" than to alleviate the
suffering of hundreds of millions of people around the world.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
One of the amazing things about free software is how it has managed
to succeed against all the odds - and against the combined might of some
of the world's biggest and most wealthy companies. That shows two
things, I think: the power of a simple idea like open collaboration, and
how individuals, weak on their own, collectively can achieve miracles.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
I've written many times about why FRAND licensing
is not an option for open source projects, and should therefore be
replaced by Royalty/Restriction-Free (RF) terms when it comes to
defining open standards to create a level playing field. That's simply a
fact arising from the nature of free software licences. But it turns
out that FRAND is fundamentally flawed anyway, for reasons the following press release
from the European Commission, on its "Statement of Objections to
Motorola Mobility on potential misuse of mobile phone standard-essential
patents", makes clear:
On
Open Enterprise blog.
For the last few months, Techdirt has been following the surprisingly
rapid embrace on both sides of the Atlantic of the proposed
transatlantic free trade agreement, known variously as TAFTA or TTIP. Coming out of nowhere, the agreement is being talked about as if its success and benefits are more or less guaranteed.
On
Techdirt.
As we've pointed out in a few stories, drones aren't necessarily
something to worry about. Like any technology, they can be used for good and bad purposes, and shouldn't be dismissed out of hand. But determining where exactly the line between acceptable and unacceptable lies is tricky, as the following story from the Capitol Hill Seattle blog shows:
On
Techdirt.
A recurrent theme here on Techdirt is the lack of transparency when
international agreements and treaties are being drawn up. That's
increasingly recognized not just as problematic, but simply unacceptable
in an age when the Internet makes it easy to provide both access to
draft documents and a way for the public to offer comments on them.
On
Techdirt.
A couple of days ago Techdirt wrote about how Murong Xuecun, a
well-known user of the Chinese microblog Sina Weibo with over a million
followers, had his account closed down suddenly. Murong has now written a fine article about the background to what happened:
he points out that the deletion of his account looks to be part of a
larger clampdown on the use of microblogging services by well-known
figures who are critical of the Chinese government. The problem for the
latter is that these services are becoming a real channel for free
expression and less-than-perfectly-censored information:
On
Techdirt.
Although New Zealand's decision not to allow patents for programs "as such"
was welcome, other moves there have been more problematic. For
example, after it became clear that the New Zealand intelligence
service, the Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB), illegally
wiretapped and spied on Kim Dotcom, the New Zealand government
announced that it would change the law so as to make it legal in the
future to snoop
on New Zealanders as well as on foreigners. Judging by a major new
bill that has been unveiled, that was just the start of a thoroughgoing
plan to put in place the capability to spy on every New Zealander's
Internet activity at any moment.
Here's an excellent analysis of what the bill proposes, from Thomas Beagle, co-founder of the New Zealand digital rights organization Tech Liberty:
On
Techdirt.
The UK's new orphan works legislation allows works to be classed as
orphans only after a "diligent search" has been conducted to find the
owner. The fear expressed by some is that this "diligent" search won't
be very diligent, allowing publishers to use materials that aren't
orphans. That's actually wrong
for a number of reasons, as Techdirt explained recently, but the
continuing furor from photographers in particular has been such that the
UK's Intellectual Property Office (IPO) felt compelled to issue a
document entitled "The Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Act 2013 –Your photos and you" (pdf) explaining how the system would work, and why the fears were unjustified.
On
Techdirt.
If there's one clear trend that has emerged in recent years, it's that
those who download and share unauthorized copies of files the most also
tend to be the most avid purchasers of similar material. This
completely negates the copyright industry's rhetoric that people who
share files are just a bunch of freeloaders, suggesting instead that
it's more a matter of sampling materials before going on to buy. It also
implies that instead of seeking to punish such downloaders, the
copyright companies should actually try to nurture them as potentially
their best customers.
On
Techdirt.
If you wanted an indication of just how much copyright has moved on from
being a dry and boring topic of interest only to a few specialist
lawyers to an exciting area full of surprising twists and turns worthy
of a soap opera, you could do worse than look at what's been happening
in Colombia recently.
On
Techdirt.
A couple of weeks ago, we wrote about the growing importance of investor-state dispute resolution
in so-called free trade agreements (FTAs). One of the most troubling
aspects is how potentially it can be used to undo the hard-won gains for
important areas like access to medicines. The US law professor Brook K.
Baker, whose work we discussed last year, has written an excellent exploration of this under-appreciated risk. After an introduction running through the recent wins in the field of access to medicines -- a topic
that we've covered extensively here on Techdirt -- he explains how big
pharma could employ investor-state dispute resolution to thwart these
and similar moves to protect health:
On
Techdirt.
Few patent sagas have been as fraught as New Zealand's attempt to revise its laws to exclude software. Techdirt first wrote about this move in March 2010, and again
in June 2010, when it seemed that lobbyists had convinced the New
Zealand government to reverse its position and allow software patents.
Then, a month after that, word was that software would indeed be unpatentable. Things went quiet for a while, until a new version of the proposed law was unveiled by New Zealand's Commerce Minister Craig Foss, apparently weakening the bill once more:
On
Techdirt.
There's a worrying trend around the world for governments to extend
online surveillance capabilities to encompass all citizens -- often
justified with the usual excuse of combatting terrorism and/or child
pornography. The latest to join this unhappy club is India, which has
put in place what sounds like a massively intrusive system, as this article from The Times of India makes clear:
On
Techdirt.
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