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Back in November last year, I wrote
about a particular class of open data - that regarding clinical trials
data. I pointed out that of all open data, it is arguably the most
important, because it can literally save lives - huge numbers of them.
That post was by way of a taster for future columns - like this one -
which touch on this area, since I believe it will become one of the most
important battlegrounds for openness in the next few years.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
One of the reasons Techdirt rails against exaggerated responses to
supposed terrorist threats is that it has caused police forces around
the world to lose all sense of proportion -- literally, in the case of
this UK story from the Daily Mail.
On
Techdirt.
Recently, Techdirt noted that the European "database right" could pose a threat
to releasing public data there. But that assumes that central
governments are at least trying to open things up. A splendid piece by
Sebastian Haselbeck on the Open Gov Germany blog, with the
self-explanatory title "German government screws up open data," underlines that things can fail because the government itself sabotages transparency moves.
On
Techdirt.
The open source programming language Python
-- named after the British comedy series "Monty Python" -- became
popular in the 1990s, along with two other languages beginning with "P":
Perl and PHP. Later, they formed a crucial part of the famous "LAMP"
stack -- the GNU/Linux operating system + Apache Web server + MySQL
database + Python/Perl/PHP as scripting languages -- that underpinned
many of the most successful startups from this time.
On
Techdirt.
It seems like every other headline is about drones these days
-- drones being used in battle, drones being used by the police, drones
as a threat to privacy. As we've noted
before, it's easy to get the impression that drones are inherently
evil, and should be made illegal or something (good luck with that.)
But drones are simply a new kind of technology, largely made possible by
Moore's Law and the dramatic reductions in size, weight and cost it has
brought with it for electronic control devices. Like any other
technology, drones can be used for all kinds of purposes, both good and
bad. It's just that we have heard mostly about the more dubious ones.
To remedy that, here's a heart-warming tale of how drones could tackle one of the most serious threats facing wildlife around the world: poaching.
On
Techdirt.
Last week I wrote about the revelation (to me, at least - maybe other people knew this was going on) that MEPs
were simply cutting and pasting from lobbyists' proposals and
presenting them as amendments to the important Data Protection
regulation. I also suggested that readers might like to write to the UK
MEPs involved, and ask about this. Several
kindly did so, and sent me the reply, which came from Malcolm Harbour.
Here's what he wrote:
On
Open Enterprise blog.
Trademarks are a problem for free software, because there is a
tension between a desire to encourage sharing of the software, and a
need to ensure that people are not misled over what exactly that
software is. For example, you don't want people distributing modified
copies of your code claiming that it is your code, or that it is
approved by you - in the worst cases, it might contain malware, for
example.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
The Web is one of the most dramatic demonstrations of the power of
openness, alongside free software, which not coincidentally runs most of
it and the rest of the Internet. At the heart of that openness lies HTML, a
completely open way of sharing information. So what would be a really
stupid thing you could do to try to throttle that openness and
innovation? Why, yes: adding DRM to HTML so that you can lock down Web page elements:
On
Open Enterprise blog.
Here on Techdirt, one of the things we look forward to each year is
the comedy production known as the 301 Report, where the US makes the
world line up in a row, and then names and shames all the naughty
countries whose intellectual monopoly laws aren't outrageous enough. In
advance of the official naughty list, there are helpful suggestions
from the fans of monopoly maximalism, including the International Intellectual Property Alliance
(IIPA), which has just released its 2013 demands. Mostly it's the
usual suspects -- China, India, Russia etc. But there's an interesting
change from the previous year's list: Canada has moved from the really naughty "Priority Watch List" to the only slightly naughty "Watch List".
On
Techdirt.
Techdirt covered the WCIT circus in Dubai in some depth last year,
since important issues were at stake. As many feared, after a moment of
farce, it became clear that a serious schism
in the ITU was opening up -- between those who wanted the Internet
largely left alone to carry on much as before, with the possibly naïve
hope that it might act as a vehicle of freedom, and those who wanted it
regulated more closely, certain it could become an even better
instrument of control.
On
Techdirt.
The European Patent Office (EPO) is a curious body. Despite its
name, it is not the patent office for the European Union (EU) in the
same way that the USPTO handles patents in the US. As its history page explains:
On
Techdirt.
It's hardly a surprise these days that Chinese Internet companies
routinely self-censor what appears on their services: the world knows
there's not much it can do about what happens within China's borders.
But here's a disturbing story about how that censorship has started spreading further afield.
On
Techdirt.
Everyone knows that politicians are lobbied, sometimes massively.
But it's rare to be able to track directly the detailed effects of that
lobbying. That's why a new site called LobbyPlag is so interesting: it allows people to do precisely that in the case of the controversial data protection rules in the EU,
which aim to regulate how personal information harvested from users of
online services can be used. Naturally, many large Net companies --
mostly in the US -- are unhappy about these moves; some US diplomats are even talking of a possible "trade war"
if the proposals go through in their current form. That's unlikely,
not least because the lobbying is starting to pay off, as LobbyPlag's
analysis makes clear.
On
Techdirt.
The Spratly Islands
are some 750 reefs, atolls and islands in the South China Sea that are
claimed variously by Brunei, the People's Republic of China, the
Republic of China (Taiwan), Malaysia, the Philippines and Vietnam.
That's largely because of the rich fishing grounds that surround them,
and the possibility of significant oil and gas reserves nearby.
On
Techdirt.
It's becoming clear that the lobbying around the proposed EU
directive on Data Protection is some of the most intense ever seen -
some activists have said it's even worse than during ACTA, while on the US side there's mutterings about starting a "trade war" if it's passed in its present form.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
Maybe it's just me, but this year's annual meeting of the global elite at the World Economic Forum in Davos
seemed particularly irrelevant. In fact, all those movers and shakers
had packed up and flown off in their private jets before I had even
noticed that they had flown in, and it's hard to detect much of a ripple
from anything that happened there (or maybe I just move in the wrong
circles....)
On
Techdirt.
An increasingly problematic aspect of free trade agreements (FTAs) is
the inclusion of investor-state provisions that essentially allow
companies -- typically huge multinationals -- to challenge
the policies of signatory governments directly. The initial impulse
behind these was to offer some protection against the arbitrary
expropriation of foreign investments by less-than-democratic
governments. But now corporations have realised that they can use the
investor-state dispute mechanism to challenge all kinds of legitimate
but inconvenient decisions in any signatory nation. Here's a good
example of how this provision is being invoked to contest a refusal by Canadian courts to grant a patent on a drug, as explained on the Public Citizen site:
On
Techdirt.
Just over a year ago, I reported on a remarkable speech by the UK Education Secretary Michael Gove that contained the following words:
On
Open Enterprise blog.
As Techdirt reported a few months back, the Supreme Court Justices seem rightly concerned about the "parade of horribles"
-- things that would happen if the decision in the Wiley v. Kirtsaeng
copyright case over whether or not you have the right to resell a
foreign-made product you bought were applied generally. In the oral
arguments, the line of Wiley's lawyer was essentially: nothing bad will
happen, because copyright holders would never dream of using the
decision to make outrageous demands.
On
Techdirt.
As many know, copyright had its origins in censorship and control.
But over the last few hundred years, that fact has been obscured by
the rise of the powerful publishing industry and the great works it has
helped bring to the public. More recently, though, laws and treaties
like SOPA and ACTA have represented a return to the roots of copyright,
posing very real threats to what can be said online. That's not because
their intent was necessarily to crimp freedom of expression, but as a
knock-on effect of turning risk-averse ISPs into the copyright
industry's private police force.
On
Techdirt.
Back in 2011, I noted
that one of the most significant achievements of the Hargreaves report
was its shockingly revolutionary suggestion that copyright policy
should be based on the available evidence, not "lobbynomics". The fact
that this even had to be said shows to what depths policy-making had
sunk - something clearly demonstrated by the disgraceful Digital Economy
Act, or the extension of copyright term for musical performances, both of which were passed despite the evidence, rather than because of it.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
Linux has a problem: it's running out of platforms to conquer. It's already the top operating system for smartphones and supercomputers,
and is widely used in embedded and industrial systems. It's true the
Year of the GNU/Linux desktop continues to be five years in the future,
but the rise of tablets makes up for that in part.
On
The H Open.
It would be something of understatement to say that the spiralling
cost of healthcare has become a highly-charged political issue in the US
(and elsewhere). But wherever people stand on the funding of medicine,
there is an implicit assumption that it works, and is worth even the
exorbitant prices that pharmaceutical companies may charge. Sadly,
that's often not true.
On
Techdirt.
As Techdirt reported last year, some copyright maximalists in the UK seem to be against the whole idea of basing policy on evidence. Last week saw the launch of CREATe: Creativity, Regulation, Enterprise and Technology,
a new UK "research centre for copyright and new business models in the
creative economy." One of the things it hopes to do is to bring some
objectivity to the notoriously contentious field of copyright studies by
looking at what the evidence really says; so it was perhaps inevitable
that it too would meet some resistance from the extremist wing of the
copyright world. What's surprising is that it seems to have happened during the launch itself, as Paul Bernal, an academic who was there, reports:
On
Techdirt.
Back in March last year, the Indian government announced that it was granting its first compulsory license,
for the anti-cancer drug marketed as Nexavar, whose $70,000 per year
price-tag put it out of reach of practically everyone in India.
Nexavar's manufacturer, the German pharmaceutical giant Bayer, naturally
appealed against that decision, and the hearing before the India
Intellectual Property Appeals Board (IPAB) has now begun. Jamie Love has provided a useful report on the proceedings; here's his summary of what's at stake:
On
Techdirt.
As regular readers of Computerworld UK know, the UK government has
repeatedly said that it wishes to move on from the past patterns of
procurement that have seen the UK spending far more on IT than
comparable governments elsewhere. For years the UK has been the IT
industry's dream: a rich but gormless customer that believes everything
it is told by suppliers, and happy to pay through the nose for projects
that consistently fail to deliver, assuming they are even completed.
Indeed, the UK government has become proverbial in the IT world for its
inefficiency and incompetence in this area.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
Five years ago, I wrote
an article about the relatively new class of netbook computers. I
suggested the ultra-low price machines running GNU/Linux posed a problem
for Microsoft. That's because it needed to charge something for
Windows, pushing the price of Windows-based netbooks above similar
systems running free software. As I wrote:
On
The H Open.
Copyright is sometimes described as a bargain between two parties:
creators and their public. In return for receiving a government-backed
monopoly on making copies, creators promise to place their works in the
public domain at the end of the copyright term. The problem with that
narrative is that time and again, the public is cheated out of what it
is due.
On
Techdirt.
Licenses lie at the heart of open source -- and many other kinds of
"open" too. That's because they are used to define the rights of users,
and to ensure those rights are passed on -- that the intellectual
commons is not enclosed. Their central importance explains in part the
flamewars that erupt periodically over which license is "best" -- many
people have very strong feelings on the subject.
On
Techdirt.
As a recent post noted, net neutrality
is under threat in France, with ISPs like Free asking Google to pay
extra for delivery of its traffic. According to this post on the Forbes
Web site, Google has already agreed to pay the French telecoms company Orange in precisely this way. As well as damaging the whole principle of net neutrality, something that Google has been championing for many years,
this would seem to be a pretty bad business decision. After all, if
Orange is now getting paid to carry Google's traffic, why shouldn't
every other telecom company out there also receive money for delivering
Google's services?
On
Techdirt.
Krita
is a fine sketching and painting program, but few would claim that it
is one of the big names in the open source world, such as Firefox or
LibreOffice. That makes the following recent announcement noteworthy:
On
The H Open.
As I mentioned
a couple of weeks ago, 2013 is already shaping up to be a year in which
data protection is a key battleground. That's been confirmed by a
flurry of stories around Data Privacy Day, which was yesterday in case you missed it.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
You would have thought by now that people would understand that DRM is not only a bad idea, but totally unnecessary: Apple dropped DRM from music downloads in 2009 and seems to be making ends meet.
Despite these obvious truths, the stupidity that is DRM continues to
spread. Here, for example, is a particularly stupid example of DRM
stupidity, as revealed by Manu Sporny:
On
Techdirt.
Back in April last year, we wrote about Colombia's own SOPA, the "Ley Lleras 2"
copyright bill (it's version 2, because an earlier attempt to pass it
failed.) This was rushed through by the Colombian government using an
emergency procedure so as to have it ready as a grovelling welcome gift
when President Obama came calling shortly afterwards.
On
Techdirt.
As Techdirt has reported over the last ten days, the death of Aaron
Swartz has provoked an outpouring of grief from friends and colleagues,
who understandably wish to express their shock and anger at what
happened. You'd expect that. What you might not expect is for a
Vice-President of the European Commission to add her voice, but that's exactly what Neelie Kroes did this week. Her post is short, and worth reading in its entirety:
On
Techdirt.
It's generally accepted that one of the reasons Barack Obama was
re-elected as US President last year was the superiority of the IT
system his campaign team used. It will come as no surprise to readers
of this blog that it was built on open source foundations, as this
fascinating article in The Verge explains:
On
Open Enterprise blog.
Abuse of the DMCA takedown process to remove material that is awkward
or embarrassing for a company is a common enough topic on Techdirt.
But here's one with a slight twist. It concerns hardware security
modules (HSMs), which manage the cryptographic keys and PINs used to
authenticate bank card transactions. These were generally regarded as
pretty secure -- until researchers started analyzing them, as Ross Anderson, head of the Security Research Laboratory at Cambridge University, explains:
On
Techdirt.
Not content with giving the world the "three strikes" approach to
copyright enforcement, France has recently shown signs of wanting to
undermine one of the Internet's foundations: net neutrality. This has
come about as a consequence of the French ISP Free's decision to block
ads on its service. As Mike noted,
this was essentially an attempt to persuade Google to pay the ISP an
extra fee to carry its traffic, even though Free's customers already do
that. That was resolved, at least for the moment, when France's Digital Economy minister Fleur Pellerin stepped in and persuaded Free to restore the ads.
On
Techdirt.
As Techdirt has been reporting, the idea of providing open access to
publicly-funded research is steadily gaining ground. One of the key
moments occurred almost exactly a year ago, when the British
mathematician Tim Gowers announced that he would no longer have anything
to do with the major academic publisher Elsevier. This then turned
into a full-scale boycott: today, over 13,000 academics have pledged not to work with the company.
On
Techdirt.
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