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Yesterday I was reviewing
Mozilla's current position in the browser sector and its wider
achievements in the Web world. One thing I omitted to mention there was
that even if it did nothing more for the rest of its existence -
unlikely given its current fecundity - it would still deserve our
thanks for what it managed to accomplish in the early years of its life.
On
Open Enterprise.
One of the many problems with the "guilty until proven innocent"
approach to tackling unauthorized filesharing is that it's not clear
exactly who should get the punishment. For example, in France, we saw
someone convicted
not for infringement that he had committed, but something his then-wife
had done and even admitted. And it's not just spousal activity that is
problematic, as TorrentFreak reports in this interesting case from Germany:
On
Techdirt.
The rapid uptake of ebooks by the public shows that there is a
widespread recognition of their advantages. This would be good news for
the publishing industry as it faces the transition from analog to
digital formats, were it not for the fact that some publishers keep
finding new ways of making ebooks less attractive than physical versions.
On
Techdirt.
Mozilla is now something of a venerable institution in the open
source world - the first release of browser code by Netscape took place
back in 1998. Even Firefox is eight years old, which seems pretty incredible.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
Last week, Techdirt wrote about a US teenager being banned
from using the Internet until his 21st birthday as punishment for his
involvement with some Web site break-ins. That seems incredibly harsh,
and as Mike noted, earlier bans have been tossed out on the grounds that they were unreasonable.
On
Techdirt.
Techdirt has been following the worsening censorship situation in Russia for some time. Back in July, the country's parliament passed a new law ostensibly designed to "protect the children". It took only a couple of weeks before it was used to shut down
the whole of LiveJournal for part of the country. That was apparently
because a neo-Nazi blog had been found among the thousands of others
hosted there -- an indication of just how blunt this new instrument of
censorship is.
On
Techdirt.
One of the rationales behind opening up government data is that it
provides greater transparency. That's particularly true in the field of
procurement: too often in the past it has been hard to find why exactly
all that money was spent, and on what. One of the undoubted
achievements of the present UK government is to require much of that
data to be made freely available for people to inspect, analyse and
query.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
Last week I wrote a piece suggesting that FRAND is dying. It was written in the wake of the major UK decision on open standards, and was mostly based on odd bits of anecdotal evidence. So I was rather pleased to learn from Techrights that Spain made a similar decision some years back, something I missed at the time.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
Just over a year ago Techdirt wrote about Brazil's Marco Civil
-- essentially a civil-rights based framework for the Internet. At the
time, we dubbed it an "anti-ACTA", since it seemed to protect many of
the things that ACTA sought to attack. It all seemed a little too good
to be true, and the post concluded by questioning whether it would
survive in its present form.
On
Techdirt.
Last year, I interviewed
the head of the Linux Foundation, Jim Zemlin, about his own career, and
about his organisation. That interview took place at the first
European LinuxCon, which was held in Prague. This year, it took place
in Barcelona, and I took the opportunity to catch up with Zemlin on what
had happened in the intervening time (disclosure: the Linux Foundation
paid for my travelling and accommodation while I was there.)
On
Open Enterprise blog.
Last week's big announcement
by the UK government was principally about procurement, detailing the
new rules that will apply when government departments acquire software.
Naturally, then, it concentrated on the details of that approach, and
how it would be deployed and enforced. A key part of that was using
open standards to create a level playing field for all companies,
regardless of whether they offered open source or proprietary code.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
In the wake of the news that Android sales now represent around 75% of the global smartphone market
during the most recent quarter, there's still some surprise that this
has happened. After all, this was a sector that Apple absolutely
dominated just a few years ago. Some find it hard to understand how
Android has pulled this off in just five years.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
A little while back, Techdirt wrote about a rather brave French company that tried to trademark the Anonymous logo. Now Der Spiegel is reporting that someone wants a German "wordmark" on the "@" sign (original in German). The company involved has the rather unusual name "@ T.E.L.L.",
where the initials apparently stand for "Tradinghouse for Exclusive
Luxury Labels". Although it's not really clear what the connection is,
it is seeking to protect its use of the @-symbol for various classes of
luxury goods (application in German), including the following:
On
Techdirt.
The laws governing intellectual monopolies in the UK are in a state
of flux at the moment. After the previous government in its dying hours
rammed through
the shoddy piece of work known as the Digital Economy Act, the present
coalition government took a more rational approach by commissioning the Hargreaves Review
into the impact of digital technologies on this area. One of its key
proposals was that policy should be based on evidence, not
"lobbynomics"; the fact that this even needs to be mentioned says much
about the way laws have been framed until now.
On
Techdirt.
One of the main forces driving the move to open access is the idea
that if the public has already paid for research through taxation or
philanthropy, then it's not reasonable to ask people to pay again in
order to read the papers that are published as a result. The strength
of this argument is probably why, in part, open access continues to gain
wider acceptance around the world.
On
Techdirt.
In a huge win for open standards, open source and the public, the
long-awaited UK government definition of open standards has come down
firmly on the side of RF, not FRAND. The UK government's approach is enshrined in an important new document defining what it calls Open Standards Principles.
Annex 1 provides definitions and a glossary, including the following
crucial definition of what is required for a standard to be considered
open:
On
Open Enterprise blog.
Although crowdsourcing is all the rage at the moment, there has to be
a worry that this is just the latest fad in the world of technology,
and will soon follow portals and the blink tag into justified oblivion.
Occasionally, though, an application of crowdsourcing appears that
seems to address a real problem in a way that would be otherwise
intractable.
On
Techdirt.
I've been noting "hopeful" moves towards the wider use of open source
by the UK government for so long that I daren't do it again. But the following is certainly worth mentioning:
On
Open Enterprise blog.
One of the premises of this blog is that the success and methodology
of open source are not one-offs, but part of a larger move towards open,
collaborative activity. Thus, by observing what open source does well -
and not so well - lessons can be learned that can be applied in quite
different fields.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
There is a natural tendency to accentuate the negative when it comes
to drones -- concentrating on how these "spies the sky" represent a
threat to privacy and civil liberties. But as Techdirt has reported before, there are other applications that many might find not just acceptable but welcome. And that's not surprising: like the Internet, drones are just a neutral tool, and as such can be deployed for both good and bad purposes.
On
Techdirt.
As you may have gathered, I'm a big fan of consultations: if they are
asking us what we think, we really ought not pass up the chance of
telling them. Sometime those consultations concern extremely specific
and urgent matters, like surveillance or net neutrality, and sometimes
they are more general. Here's an example of the latter:
On
Open Enterprise blog.
Whatever your views on the value of Wikileaks, one of its useful
side-effects has been the appearance of other sites that have tried to
do a similar job of calling the powerful to account using leaked
information, but at a more local level. One of the most successful of
these is BalkanLeaks, created
by the Bulgarian investigative journalists Atanas Tchobanov and Assen
Yordanov. In fact, it's been rather too successful for some, and is now on the receiving end of some legal threats, as a column in Forbes explains:
On
Techdirt.