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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interpretation of the out-of-date RIPA law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.
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