One of the heartening trends that I've noted in recent years is a gradually opening up of government around the world - in both directions. As well as making more data available, the UK government too is also beginning to realise that the public wants - and can - help by providing input on the things that affect and matter to them.
On Open Enterprise blog.
Here's a fascinating item:A new EU-funded report has declared that it is OK to buy fake designer goods.
The study, co-written by a Home Office adviser, says consumers benefit from the market for knock-off designer clothes at knock-down prices.
It also rejects the complaints of designer companies, claiming that losses to the industry as a result of counterfeiting are vastly exaggerated – because most of those who buy fakes would never pay for the real thing – and finding that the rip-off goods can actually promote their brands.
The report adds that the police should not waste their time trying to stop the bootleggers.
It disputes claims that the counterfeiting of luxury brands is funding terrorism and organised crime, and argues there is little public appetite for tough law enforcement measures as consumers enjoy the bargains offered by the illegal trade, which has been estimated to be worth £1.3 billion in the UK.
Professor David Wall, who co-authored the report and advises the government on crime, said the real cost to the industry from counterfeiting could be one-fifth of previously calculated figures.
There are a number of interesting points here.
First, is the obvious one of what the research claims about the difference between the real threat of fakes and the, er, fake threat that the industry likes to proclaim.
Secondly, there is the similarity between what is going on here and what the content industries claim about the extent and damage of piracy.
But in many ways the most striking thing about this story, which effectively declares fake goods to be socially acceptable these days, is its provenance. It appeared not in some lefty rag, but in the The Daily Telegaph, not known for its whacky, pinko leanings.
My reading of this is that whatever the industries concerned might say about how awful, deceptive and damaging fakes and piracy are to the economy, ordinary people - and the newspapers that try to mirror their views - know that the true picture is rather different. It also means that ACTA is even more wrong-headed than even I thought.
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One of the things that warms the cockles of my heart is the widening ripple of open source. Starting, as it did, with core system software, it is now moving ever further into more specialised areas. Take Mahara, for example:an open source e-portfolio system with a flexible display framework. Mahara, meaning 'think' or 'thought' in Te Reo Māori, is user centred environment with a permissions framework that enables different views of an e-portfolio to be easily managed. Mahara also features a weblog, resume builder and social networking system, connecting users and creating online learner communities.
This is part of the power of free software: however good it is today, it will be *even* better tomorrow, because old programs are never discontinued (even if they are no longer actively supported).
Don't you just love monotonicity?
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As I've noted before, it's pretty well established that the GNU GPL stands up in the courts: gone are the days when detractors of copyleft could claim it would “never work”. But the GPL is still under attack, only in more subtle ways, so the open source world can't just sit back and relax.
On Open Enterprise blog.
I'm am currently staggering to the end of Neal Stephenson's The Confusion, loving every minute of this impossible, wandering, hyperbolic, anachronistic, shaggy-dog story. So I was naturally delighted to see that he (along with a band of fellow creators) is not only working on yet another huge, outrageously-ambitious epic, The Mongoliad, but one that pushes story-telling in new directions by using technology:Our story unfolds in weekly installments over the course of a year. We've planned out a true epic—the last great epic of the middle ages, in fact--and written a fine chunk of the tale, but much depends on you. We’re hoping you’ll ultimately interact with our artists and writers and share in the story’s creation.
When we can, we'll include extra tidbits of art, video, music and history. Those extras will be made available to premium subscribers, an excellent value--less than the price of a hardback book for a year's worth of story and mixed-media entertainment. We’ll soon be taking subscriptions for app delivery to some of the most popular mobile devices and are working hard to add more.
The user-editable Foreworld 'Pedia is the ultimate repository of all information about our world. Some of it coincides with the world you know. Some does not. We welcome your additions.
I was particularly heartened to find the following intelligent approach to DRM - or lack of it:
We put in a lot of effort on an ongoing basis to ensure that the best value our fans can get out of our stuff is by participating interactively with us and each other, and enjoying our interwoven content in context, in the way it was meant to be enjoyed. So, we think that if people take our content without our permission, their experience will be suboptimal, and given our modest prices, we think most people will be happy to pay us, thereby enabling this experiment to keep evolving. That said, the bits that can be copied and pasted and put into a torrent are still going to be fun, and people are going to end up redistributing those bits without our permission and against our wishes. However, we still don't use DRM.
The reasoning is absolutely spot-on:
The biggest reason is that DRM is futile, and we don't like to waste our time doing things that aren't going to be effective, and which are just going to annoy our legit supporters. Our concentration is on providing great experiences and great customer service to our customers, and we trust that those people who really appreciate what we are doing will become our customers. Because it's part of our ethos to be constantly producing and expanding and improving our work, the pirated content people may find elsewhere online will be static and out-of-date copies; we think that when people find this stuff it may give them a taste of what the full experience is like; hopefully, that taste will be enough that they'll want more, and in seeking out more, will become happy (and paying) customers of ours. We like that.
That is, piracy isn't a real problem if you *out-innovate* the pirates, making your paid-for offering better than their free one. Indeed, if you do, pirated copies become like tasters, encouraging people to upgrade and pay for the full, latest version. Similarly, by the sound of it, part of the strength of this project will be the interweaving of other elements into the text - again, something that pirates can't offer.
But I think this is slightly off the mark:However, we don't believe that pirates are doing us any favors, and our not using DRM is not an invitation to cadge our stuff. Because of the way intellectual property law in this country (and most other jurisdictions) works, we are obligated to defend our copyrights, trademarks, and other IP--otherwise we lose them: if we find piracy we will try to stop it; if we find unauthorized use of our IP at commercial scale and/or commercial intent, we will come after it with vigor, because we have to.
That may be true for trademarks, but not, I think, for copyright: it's not something you have to "defend". Still, quibbles, aside, I'm looking forward to seeing what Stephenson and his fellow creators get up to here. I also hope that this new Foreworld proves something of a foretaste of future extended novels - not least in terms of dropping DRM.
As for reading it, well, I have the small matter of The Baroque Cycle to finish first: I may be gone some time...
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I've been writing for a while about Russia's on-off idea of creating its own GNU/Linux distro. It looks like Ukraine is following suit. Via Google Translate:its purpose is to optimize the expenditure of budgetary funds and the solution using unlicensed software in state bodies.
According to estimates from officials, the savings of switching apparatus to free software can be 87%.
Among the expected outcomes of the program - improving the legal framework of research on creation and use of open software infrastructure for its development, creation and dissemination, and coordination of state infrastructure using open source software in the bodies derzhvlady, a basic set of localized distribution, adapted to the needs of public authorities.
Let's hope it doesn't get so bogged down as the Russian one.
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At first sight, this extraordinary legal action against most of the digital world's leading lights might seem one of a kind:
Interval Licensing LLC ("Interval"), a Paul G. Allen company, filed a complaint today in the U.S. District Court of the Western District of Washington against major internet search and e-commerce companies alleging that they have infringed on four patents held by Interval. The eleven defendants are AOL, Apple, eBay, Facebook, Google, Netflix, Office Depot, OfficeMax, Staples, Yahoo, and YouTube.
On Open Enterprise blog.
A little while ago, I noted that Ofcom was seeking input on the subject of Net neutrality. I also promised to post my own submission, which I've included below.
Ofcom has put together a very useful discussion paper [.pdf], and invites comments via an online form. Alternatively, you can send comments directly to traffic.management@ofcom.org.uk. In either case, responses need to be in by 9 September.
On Open Enterprise blog.
This was bound to happen, of course. Things were going too well. At a time when Google is activating 200,000 Android phones a day, and Android has overtaken the iPhone in terms of US market share, Oracle decided to drop the bomb:
On Open Enterprise blog.
The global environmental catastrophe that we all face is, of course, a typical tragedy of the (analogue) commons. Resources that are held in common like the atmosphere, or water, or fisheries are exploited for short-term gain by powerful players able to push to the front.
But it's often hard to grasp these tragedies because of their vast scale; what we need is something smaller, more human in dimension that pits personal gain against common weal to make obvious what should be the outcome of that struggle if we want to survive as a species. Something like this:It's hard to imagine a more agriculturally vibrant place than Russia's Pavlovsk Experiment Station near St. Petersburg. The "station," part of the N.I. Vavilov Research Institute of Plant Industry, really isn't a laboratory at all — it's a global seed vault holding tens of thousands of living, growing plants. As USA Today recently reported, "there are apples from 35 countries, 1,000 varieties of strawberries from 40 countries, black currants from 30 countries, plums from 12 countries and multiple other crops."
And what do they propose to do with that wonder of the seeds commons? This:Last year, the Russian Ministry of Economic Development transferred the rights to two of Vavilov Research Institute's tracts of land to the Russian Federal Fund of Residential Real Estate. A Russian court will likely rule on Wednesday whether developers can move forward with development plans for the land. If real estate developers succeed, all those thousands of varieties of crops — 90 percent of which are not found anywhere else in the world — will be bulldozed to make way for luxury homes.
In fact:The fate of the collection at the Pavlovsk Experimental Station, which includes more than 70 hectares planted with 5,500 different varieties of apples, pears, cherries, and numerous berry species -- most of which occur nowhere else on Earth and were developed over hundreds of years by farmers in northern Europe, Scandinavia and Russia -- was decided in Russia's Supreme Arbitration Court at 10:30 AM, Moscow time.
The result? Send in the bulldozers: who cares about the future of food?
If the proposal seems utterly outrageous, the reasoning behind it is utterly insulting:the property developers argue that because the station contains a "priceless collection", no monetary value can be assigned to it and so it is worthless. In another nod to Kafka, the government's federal fund of residential real estate development has argued that the collection was never registered and thus does not officially exist.
What's particularly galling is that the sums involved are quite small:the developer, the Housing Development Foundation, would pay 92 million rubles (more than USD $3 million) to acquire a special, five-year leasing license on the 70 hectares. After that five-year period, they'd have the opportunity to own the land outright.
Surely, then, this would be a great way for one of those high-profile modern philanthropists - hello, Bill Gates - to do something amazingly powerful for the world at minimal effective cost to their foundations.
Failing that, little people like you and mean can send a couple of tweets, and sign a petition. That's not much, but sadly it's all we can do to prevent this all-too graspable tragedy of the commons.
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In the early days of free software, the struggle was just to get companies to try this new and rather unconventional approach, without worrying too much about how that happened. That typically meant programs entering by the back door, surreptitiously installed by in-house engineers who understood the virtues of the stuff - and that it was easier to ask for forgiveness after the event than for permission before.
On Open Enterprise blog.
Every now and then, a shiver runs through the Linux community as people realise afresh that the entire edifice has a single point of failure: Linus Torvalds. These episodes usually manifest themselves as concerns about the scalability of said individual – whether he can continue to oversee and manage the amazing distributed development model as it grows ever bigger and more ambitious. To counter those fears it is probably worth looking at what happened as a result of the first – and by far the most frightening - “Linus does not scale” episode, not least because it led to multiple positive outcomes.
On The H Open.
The first time I was really impressed by Microsoft was back in the 1980s. I was being given a private demonstration of a hot new program for the Macintosh. I was struck not just by the beta's cool new graphical interface - a clear advance on existing DOS programs like 1-2-3 - but also by the infectious enthusiasm of the Microsoftie showing me around the beta. The program, as you've probably guessed, was Excel; the person doing the demo was Bill Gates.
On Open Enterprise blog.
Net neutrality is turning from a boring, irrelevant issue that few people thought about much into one of the key issues for today's Internet. Sadly, that's because a few powerful industry groups in the US have started spending lots of money to bolster their weakening positions in a shifting world, and that means obscure technicalities like Net neutrality become collateral damage in the collective stampede to get to the feeding troughs.
On Open Enterprise blog.
Videos are proving to be a key element in ensuring that policing is fair and honest, as recent events in the UK have demonstrated. But there's a subtlety here that I hadn't realised until reading this:More worrying is the way in which CCTV is being used by the police. Demonstrator Jake Smith was charged with two counts of violent disorder. These charges were later dropped when Smith's solicitor, Matt Foot, viewed the original CCTV footage and discovered that the police video had been edited to show events out of sequence, at one point implying another man was Smith while omitting footage showing Smith being assaulted by a police officer without provocation.
Considering the potential for abuse of power, the control that the police have had over the use of CCTV is frightening. Foot warns, "We should be both curious and suspicious about how the police use CCTV footage in these cases."
Foot's concern extends to how police have dictated the use of their edited material. Solicitors representing the protesters were told to sign an undertaking by the Met that prevented them sharing their police videos with anyone but their client. This stopped defence solicitors working together to establish a wider picture of the protests and their context. This worked hand in hand with the decision to charge all the protesters individually rather than collectively.
The first point is obvious enough: those charged with offences need to be able to see the *full* video footage that includes the parts used by the police. But the second is just as important: in order to obtain a full, rounded picture of what *really* happened - or a good approximation thereto - people must be able to pool video resources. Both of these need to be enshrined as explicit rights if we are to nip in the bud the tendency for the Boys in Blue to get selective in their editing, and for true justice to be done.
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One of the interesting trends over the last few months has been the increasing activity in the field of open data. In the UK, this has been given new impetus by the incoming government, which has promised to make much more government data available (although to what extent that will actually happen remains to be seen).
On Open Enterprise blog.
Understandably, commentators are getting excited over the fact that according to one survey Internet Explorer has gained browser market share for the second month running. Not only that, but Firefox has lost market share for the third month running. Should Mozilla be worried?
On Open Enterprise blog.
As regular readers will know, I regard the concept of the commons as an increasingly important one, not least because it pulls together threads found in many disparate areas. But one consequence of that richness and broad reach is that a unitary idea of the commons is not enough: we need a taxonomy of the many different kinds of commons to help us tease out their particular characteristics in different situations.
Here's one such attempt:The Five Commons constitutes an evolving vision of the emerging 21st Century economy. Each of the five commons represents a key area in which transition is apparent.
The Forward Foundation hopes that by sharing this vision, people will find clues and insights into new ways of structuring human activity and sustainable living.
Five Commons Presentations
Here are links to presentations of each of the Five Commons.
* Thing Commons
* Culture Commons
* Energy Commons
* Food Commons
* Access Commons
The associated presentations are well-worth watching - they're quite short.
Those are interesting choices, but I can't help feeling they're somewhat arbitrary. I also miss there any sense of the key differences between certain commons.
For example, there is a huge gulf between non-rivalrous digital commons, and rivalrous analogue ones. Where the latter can suffer the "tragedy of the commons", the former cannot. Similarly, there's a big difference between environmental commons like air, sea or forests, and artifical commons - the "Thing Commons" mentioned above. I'm also a little unsure whether the "Access Commons" - which is "access to infrastructure and services (i.e. politics)" - is really best construed as such.
Still, this is all thought-provoking stuff, and as such, to be welcomed. I shall certainly be pondering more as a result.
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As a former publisher (no, really) I am fascinated by, and sympathetic to, efforts to come up with new models for profitable publishing in the age of digital abundance. Clearly, part of that must include making digital text available for free (because if you don't do it, someone else will); the question is, what's the best way of doing that?
Against that background, I was intrigued to come across something calling itself OpenBook Publishers:Open Book is an independent publisher run by academics for academics and for the readers of academic work. We are a Social Enterprise (CIC) company that publishes high quality, peer-reviewed monographs in the humanities and social sciences and ensures the widest possible distribution of its publications.
Open Book makes the whole publishing process in academia fairer, swifter and more affordable by utilizing three important technological advances: the digital medium, the Internet and print-on-demand.
Open Book:
* Provides free online access to read digital versions of all publications.
* Retails high quality paperback editions at around £12, and hardback editions at around £25.
* Enables printable digital versions of both the entire book and individual book chapters to be downloaded online.
* Allows authors to maintain copyright on their own works.
* Makes publication decisions on academic merit alone through a rigorous peer review and editorial process.
* Requires no publication payment by the author.
* Speeds up the refereeing and printing processes.
That sounds pretty promising, so I thought I'd explore a title that seemed rather appropriate in the context: Privilege and Property. Essays on the History of Copyright:What can and can’t be copied is a matter of law, but also of aesthetics, culture, and economics. The act of copying, and the creation and transaction of rights relating to it, evokes fundamental notions of communication and censorship, of authorship and ownership – of privilege and property.
Sounds just up my street. Interestingly, it uses print on demand for its analogue copies:Open Book Publishers uses print on demand technology, so your books(s) will be printed rapidly once we have received your order.
That seems absolutely right to me - no huge cost upfront, no bulky stock to store, and lower cover prices as a result. But I'd prefer to take a look at the free digital version, if I may; so where's that "printable digital versions of both the entire book and individual book chapters to be downloaded online"?
Well, it's there as a PDF - but it costs £4.95 - not quite what I was expecting. It's true that you can read the title on Google Books, but it's a painful experience.
But wait, it says here:Privilege and Property. Essays on the History of Copyright edited by Ronan Deazley, Martin Kretschmer and Lionel Bently is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.
Which means that once I - or anyone - has bought a copy of the PDF, it can be freely shared, subject to those conditions. Which means that it *will* be available online, sooner or later (assuming it's worth reading, and hence sharing), and that all the search engines will find it. So why slow down that process of discoverability by forcing someone to buy one copy? Is it really worth losing all that free marketing and visibility in the intervening days or weeks for the sake of £4.95?
This is a perfect example of well-meaning venture that hasn't quite thought through what publishing means today, and is still penny wise but pound foolish about those digital downloads....
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One of the many arguments against allowing patents for software (alongside the principle argument that software is made up of algorithms, which are essentially mathematics, which is pure knowledge and hence is not patentable) is the fact that software is anyway covered by copyright law. This means that others cannot simply copy your code, just as a novelist cannot simply copy large chunks of someone else's writing. But whether copyright law prevents others from copying the underlying ideas of that code by re-implementing them independently is another matter.
On The H Open.
The content management company Day Software may not be the world's most famous outfit making money from open source – perhaps a function of the fact that it is located in Basel, hardly known as a hotbed of hackers – but it's certainly an important one, particularly in the Apache part of the open source ecosystem.
On Open Enterprise blog.
Recently, there was an interesting rumour circulating that Oracle had a war chest of some $70 billion, and was going on an acquisition spree. Despite the huge figure, it had a certain plausibility, because Oracle is a highly successful company with deep pockets and an aggressive management. The rumour was soon denied, but it got me wondering: supposing Oracle decided to spend, if not $70 billion, say $10 billion in an efficient way: how might it do that? And it occurred to me that one rather dramatic use of that money would be to buy up the leading open source companies – all of them.
On Open Enterprise blog.
Talking of commons, I was reading David Bollier's Viral Spiral recently, probably the best book about the rise of the commons as a new force (and I want to emphasise that I am not at all bitter about the fact that he didn't mention Rebel Code once in his description of the early days of free software - nope, not bitter in the slightest.)
I bought a dead tree version, but it's freely available online under a CC licence (sadly not an option when Rebel Code came out...for the simple reason Creative Commons was being formulated at the same time I was writing it.) That's appropriate, since the book is largely about the evolution of the CC licences - and a fascinating tale it is, too.
One particularity of those licences is the way that they try to give users different flavours (in fact there were originally more than there are now - some were later dropped). In many ways the ability to specify exactly which freedoms you are passing on is the most revolutionary - and contentious - part of the CC project.
Against that background, I was therefore delighted to come across Move Commons (MC), "a simple tool for initiatives, collectives and NGOs to declare the core principles they are committed to." It works in almost the same way as the CC licences, allowing you to specify exactly what your "core principles" are:
MC helps these initiatives to declare the core principles they are committed to, allowing others to understand the initiative’s insight with the first glance. The idea is to choose the MC that fits your initiative, and place the generated logo (a combination of four icons) in your webpage.
Once done that, when the next websurfer reaches the initiative’s webpage, it’ll be very easy to understand your initiative’s approach and immediatly answer several questions (Is this a Non-Profit? Are they transparent? Can I use part of their content for my blog? How are they organized internally? Do they expand the Commons with their actions?), before even clicking here and there.
But not only that. By choosing your MC you are connecting with other collectives using MC. Thus, anyone can come to movecommons.org and search for “non-profits that are sharing their contents, and are interested in environmentalism and education“, and if your initative fits that description, it’d appear there. You can thus link with other similar initiatives, regardless of their geographical location. Besides, volunteers could easily find you when they are searching with initiatives like yours… independently of how much you have invested in marketing
The page of options gives an idea of how this works, complete with dinky little logos representing things like profit/non-profit and hierarchical/non-hierarchical.
It's a clever idea, although I'm not sure they've got the key categories worked out yet - for example, it's not clear what the "Reproducible" option really means in terms of content licensing. Still, it's great to see people building on the CC ideas, just as Creative Commons built on the GNU GPL's original breakthrough.
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As its name suggests, a commons is an outgrowth of things held in common, like common land. This has been extended to the digital sphere with great success - notably in the world of free software. But here's an interesting move that takes the commons back to its common-land roots: the Austrian city of Linz is creating an "open commons region":Die Leitlinien für die Realisierung der »Open-Commons-Region Linz« fordern unter anderem die Einrichtung eines Open-Commons-Beirates, den Aufbau einer Koordinationsstelle, Initiativen für Angebote in den Bereichen Bildung (Open Courseware) und öffentliche Datenbestände, wie zum Beispiel Stadtinformationen oder Stadtkarten (Open Data), Überarbeitung des magistratsweiten Intranets mit Einsatz von Open-Source-Software für das Betriebs-, Redaktions- und Datenbanksystem und Prüfung des Einsatzes von weiteren freien Softwareprodukten in Teilen der Unternehmensgruppe Stadt Linz.
[Via Google Translate: The guidelines for the implementation of the "open-commons Region Linz 'demands include the creation of an open-Commons Advisory Board, the establishment of a coordination center, initiatives for deals in the areas of education (Open Course Ware) and public databases, such as city information or maps (Open Data), revision of the magistratsweiten intranet with the use of open source software for the industrial, editorial and database system and audit of the use of other free software products in parts of the group Linz.]
which ticks most of the open boxes. The expected benefits are also wide ranging:Die Initiative soll Kosten reduzieren, Abhängigkeiten vermeiden, Eigeninitiative fördern, die Wirtschaft stärken, Wertschöpfung erzeugen, Transparenz herstellen und Rechtssicherheit schaffen.
[The initiative aims to reduce costs, avoid dependency, initiative to promote, strengthen the economy, create value, establishing transparency and legal certainty.]
Sadly, it seems that it won't cure the common cold, despite the affinities of name.
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It began, perhaps, with SCO's insane attempt to obtain money from IBM and others for alleged infringements of its code. It proceeded with the music recording industry's increasingly vicious but fruitless threats to ordinary users, expanding more recently into the film business. Now, the Troll Economy has now come to the world of words:
Borrowing a page from patent trolls, the CEO of fledgling Las Vegas-based Righthaven has begun buying out the copyrights to newspaper content for the sole purpose of suing blogs and websites that re-post those articles without permission.
Strangely, perhaps, I think this is a great development. As the world of music shows, once rights-holders start making unreasonable demands, the implicit compact with the public is broken, and people no longer respect a copyright system that does not even attempt to treat them fairly.
The Troll Economy will simply lead to more people rejecting intellectual monopolies altogether, sowing the seeds of its own destruction. Troll away, chaps....
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