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Remember back in 2009, when Techdirt reported
that Rupert Murdoch hated Google so much he had decided to block the
search engine from indexing his titles, even though this would
inevitably cut down their visibility and online traffic? He obviously
thought that he would put this upstart technology in its place, showing
that mighty media moguls don't need this Internet thing in order to
flourish just like they did 50 years ago. According to this story in
paidContent, it seems that strategy hasn't worked out too well:
On
Techdirt.
Neelie Kroes is not your average European Commissioner. Before she
became the European Commissioner for Digital Agenda, her current post,
she was European Commissioner for Competition, and in that capacity made
a speech about open standards in 2008, which included the following statements:
On
Open Enterprise blog.
As Tim Cushing rightly noted earlier this week, the UK's "Free Speech" laws are more about the many things you can't say. As if to back up that view, in the last few days, there's been yet another case of somebody being arrested there for "an offensive Facebook page."
On
Techdirt.
A recent scandal in the UK concerned the country's worst sporting
disaster, when 96 football/soccer fans were crushed to death at a
stadium in Hillsborough in 1989. Prime Minister David Cameron issued an official apology to the families of the victims
for the fact that the safety measures at the ground were known to be
inadequate, and that police and emergency services had tried to deflect
the blame for the disaster onto fans.
On
Techdirt.
Large-scale surveillance of private communications is becoming depressingly routine, even in supposedly enlightened democracies. In less freedom-loving locations, Internet cafes are viewed with particular suspicion, and subject to tight controls. But it looks like Cambodia is taking surveillance of Internet cafes in particular, and communications in general, to new heights/depths:
On
Techdirt.
The debate is still raging whether Bitcoin is a brilliant idea that will revolutionize business and society, a high-tech money laundering scheme, or just a fad that will soon pass into history. But in a fascinating post, Jon Matonis points to a problem that doesn't really seem to have been considered before:
On
Techdirt.
Back in February we wrote
about the ominously-named "Clean IT" project in Europe, designed to
combat the use of the Internet by terrorists. At that time, we
suspected that this would produce some seriously bad ideas, but a leaked document obtained by EDRI shows that these are actually much worse than feared
(pdf), amounting to a system of continuous surveillance, extrajudicial
removal of content and some new proposals that can only be described as
deranged.
On
Techdirt.
As Techdirt observed
back in 2007, Brazilian artists were some of the first to recognize
that piracy can be a positive force that helps get the word out about
their creations. That was part of a larger openness to new ideas about
copyright that was symbolized by the appointment of the well-known
Brazilian musician Gilberto Gil
as Minister of Culture, a post he held from 2003 until 2008. However,
more recently, things have gone into reverse on the copyright front.
Ana de Hollanda, the Minister of Culture appointed by the current
President, ordered the CC license to be removed from the Ministry of
Culture's website, and there were indications that harsher copyright laws were coming.
On
Techdirt.
One of the depressing things about net neutrality is that it is a
battle that must be won again and again. It's becoming increasingly
clear that another effort will be made by telecoms companies to destroy
net neutrality at the big World Conference on International
Telecommunications (WCIT). Here's how it describes itself:
On
Open Enterprise blog.
Remember that sweet octogenarian lady in Spain who tried to restore a 19th-century fresco
"Ecce Homo" and ended up producing something that the BBC's Europe
correspondent described as "a crayon sketch of a very hairy monkey in an
ill-fitting tunic"? Remember how the poor woman had an anxiety attack as a result of the criticism she received, but that everything worked out fine when her work became an Internet meme, and sightseers started flocking to see it?
On
Techdirt.
Techdirt has had many posts pointing out that the huge and vibrant fashion industry is a perfect demonstration that you don't need monopolies to succeed, and that bringing in copyright for clothes and accessories now would be positively harmful. One of the people who's been making that point for years is Kal Raustiala (co-author of this month's Techdirt book club choice, The Knockoff Economy). NPR Books has just posted a short interview with him that succinctly explains why copyright would be a disaster for the fashion industry. Here are a couple of the key points.
On
Techdirt.
Techdirt has written about earlier moves
by India to block Web sites and censor Twitter accounts. The central
concern seems to be that inflammatory online activity might stoke or
provoke local outbreaks of violence of the kind seen recently in Assam. Now The Times of India is reporting that the Indian government wants to go further, and actively monitor who's saying what by setting up a new agency:
On
Techdirt.
Julia Schramm is one of the rising stars of the German Pirate Party:
in April, when she was just 27 years old, she was elected to the
national party's executive committee. No surprise, then, that she is
against copyright: in a podcast she described intellectual property as
"disgusting" (original in German.)
More surprising is that, despite this, she signed a contract with
Knaus-Verlag, part of the publishing giant Random House group, to write a
book. Perhaps the $130,000 advance had something to do with it.
On
Techdirt.
Reports about open source tend to be rather one-sided: either
polemics against, or propaganda for, depending on who's paying for them.
That makes a new report written by Jim Norton, former President of the
BCS, with the rather unoriginal title "Open for Business", particularly welcome, since it has been sponsored by Amadeus, which describes itself as follows:
On
Open Enterprise blog.
Police and security forces around the world -- and that includes in
the West -- hate being recorded when they're overstepping the mark in
the execution of their duties, since it allows the public to challenge
official accounts, and even to use videos to seek redress.
But there's one thing worse than being recorded, and that's being
livestreamed: even the most nimble authorities can't confiscate the
recording from its creator, since it's already been uploaded for the
world to see.
On
Techdirt.
As Techdirt has reported,
open access (OA) is scoring more and more major wins currently. But
the battle to gain free access to academic research has been a long one.
One of the key moments was the launch of the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) ten years ago, which saw the term "open access" being defined for the first time:
On
Techdirt.
Well, here's a nice contrast: just when a judge in the US has ruled
that users there have no obligation to lock down their wifi
connections, a court in France decides the exact opposite. What makes
the story even more significant is that the individual concerned is the
first person to be convicted under France's 3-strikes law, generally
known as HADOPI.
On
Techdirt.
Open data continues to spread around the world - here's a great recent summary
of what's happening where. But simply making government data available
is no longer enough: now we need to move on to the far trickier job of
doing something with it.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
The negotiations behind closed doors of major treaties like ACTA and
TPP, and the refusal of participants to release official drafts or to
engage in any kind of substantive dialog, has meant that activists and
observers have been obliged to seize upon even the smallest signs and
hints emerging from those talks in an attempt to guess what is going on.
In a way, we are witnessing the birth of a new form of Kremlinology, which Wikipedia explains as follows:
On
Techdirt.
When we talk of free software, we typically think of things like GNU/Linux,
Apache or Firefox. But one aspect that often gets overlooked is that
of multimedia codecs. There's a good reason for this: most of them are
patent-encumbered, which makes using them with free software hard -
well, hard if you want to do it legally. In practice, most people have
employed implementations of dubious legality, and the licensors have
taken the sensible view that they are hardly losing millions from this
kind of activity, and have turned a blind eye.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
As Techdirt reported,
the European Commission is conducting a major consultation on the
"procedures for notifying and acting on illegal content hosted by online
intermediaries" that could radically affect the liability of online
service providers in the European Union. Other parts of the world are
doubtless examining this area too, and one at least -- Chile -- has
already come up with a novel approach.
On
Techdirt.
Despite the absence of credible studies supporting the idea, part of
the copyright maximalist dogma is that the wider the reach of copyright,
and the stricter the application, the better. As a corollary,
copyright exceptions are anathema, which is why the US and EU are still
shamefully resisting
an international treaty that would enable more books covered by
copyright to be produced in versions suitable for the visually impaired,
since it would create a minor exception to help make that happen.
On
Techdirt.
Back in July, I warned
about the imminent threat of software patents sneaking into Europe
thanks to horse-trading over the proposed EU Unitary Patent. Nothing
happened then, but purely because MEPs turned to far more important matters - their summer holidays. Now that those balmy days are over, MEPs are back at work, and the Unitary Patent rears its misbegotten head again.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
For the last year, it seemed like the German Pirate Party could do no wrong. In November 2011, it won 9% of the vote in the Berlin parliamentary elections, then 7.4% in Saarland in March, 8.2% of the vote in Schleswig-Holstein in May, and a similar level in North Rhine-Westphalia shortly afterwards. There was a little pushback from copyright maximalists, but after ACTA's defeat
in July, you might have expected the Pirates to be riding even higher
in the public's favor. A recent article in the German news magazine Der
Spiegel reveals that's far from the case:
On
Techdirt.
The term "open source" was coined back in February 1998, and
initially it applied only to software. But as the power of open,
collaborative development became apparent, other spheres have adopted
the "open" tag along with the underlying approach. Here's the latest
example -- open source planes:
On
Techdirt.
The draft bill of the UK's "Snooper's Charter",
which would require ISPs to record key information about every email
sent and Web site visited by UK citizens, and mobile phone companies to
log all their calls, was published back in July. Before it is debated
by politicians, a Joint Committee from both the House of Commons and
House of Lords is conducting "pre-legislative scrutiny."
On
Techdirt.
As long-standing readers will know, alongside ACTA, the other main theme of this blog over the last year or so has been the battle for the soul of open standards,
which culminated in the UK government's consultation on the subject.
We don't yet know what the outcome there will be, but whatever it is,
the issue of open standards will only increase in importance.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
In the UK there is currently a campaign and associated petition from
the organization "Safety Net: Protecting Innocence Online", which calls
for mandatory Net filtering of pornography -- people would need to opt
out of the system if they wanted to view this material. The
justification -- of course -- is the usual "won't someone think of the
children?" Here's the pitch:
On
Techdirt.
The BitTorrent protocol is an extremely efficient way of moving files
around the Internet, especially big ones. That makes it highly popular
with those seeking to download unauthorized copies of music and films,
for example. But the clever approach that enables BitTorrent to do
that, which involves downloading fragments of a file from a shifting
swarm of fellow peers holding some or all of it, is also a weakness from
these users' point of view: it means that downloads take place in
public, rather than as a private transaction from a client to a server
(as with cyber lockers.)
On
Techdirt.
Nathan Myhrvold is trying to rustle up a little positive PR for Intellectual Ventures (IV) by appointing a VP of Global Good
(although it's hard to see how anyone lumbered with such a daft job
title is going to be taken seriously anywhere.) You can gauge just how
touchy Myhrvold is on this topic by his rather waspish response to some
commentary on that move.
On
Techdirt.
This year saw two huge victories for digital activism: against SOPA
in the US, and against ACTA in the EU. The big question is now: what
will be the next moves of those behind SOPA and ACTA as they seek to
regain the initiative? For SOPA, we've had a clue in the call for a "Son of SOPA" from the US Chamber of Commerce. But what about the European Commission?
On
Techdirt.
Even after ACTA was rejected
by the European Parliament on 4 July this year, the European Commission
was still refusing to admit that the treaty was misguided and
dangerous. To this day, it's not clear what it is planning in terms of
trying to bring it back in another form, or by negotiating some kind of ACTA Lite with the other signatories.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
As part of the seemingly endless round of consultations (I'm not
complaining - this is how it should be done), the UK government is
asking about parental internet controls:
On
Open Enterprise blog.
The reaction to the jury's decision in the US patent infringement
case between Apple and Samsung has been rather remarkable. I've seen it
called all kinds of turning and inflection points for the
computing/mobile world, as if we are entering some strange new era whose
landscape is weird and unknown to us. This is utter nonsense. I don't
think Apple's "stunning" or "total" victory - all phrases I've seen
bandied about - is particularly stunning, or even a victory.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
As promised, here is my submission to the Joint Parliamentary
Committee considering the UK government's Draft Communications Bill:
On
Open Enterprise blog.
The Draft Communications Bill [.pdf]
is one of the most controversial pieces of UK legislation proposed in
recent years - not least because it represents a betrayal of election
promises by the coalition to roll back state surveillance in the UK.
As usual, the government is attempting to claim that current plans are
"different" because the databases are distributed, not centralised; but
the fact that searches will be possible across all the decentralised
holdings means that there is no practical difference. This is quite
simply another example of politicians promising one thing to get
elected, and then doing its opposite.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
One of the most important messages in the history of free software – and computing – was posted 21 years ago, on 25 August 1991:
On
The H Open.
It seems a long while ago now, but June was a pretty hectic month in this neck of the woods, since it saw the final push to get ACTA rejected
in the European Parliament. But of course, plenty of other things were
happening then, and one in particular that I wanted to cover was the
release of this UK Open Data White Paper entitled "Unleashing the Potential".
On
Open Enterprise blog.
Although the following is a little outside the mainstream of Open
Enterprise, it does have a very clear moral with direct relevance to
this blog's readers. It concerns the proprietary program Sibelius,
which describes
itself as "the world’s best-selling music notation software". It only
runs on Windows and Macintosh, and comes with an oppressive DRM that
places it about as far away from free software as is possible.
Nonetheless, it seems widely-loved by most of its users, presumably
because it does what they want it to.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
As I noted recently, net neutrality is back in the spotlight, so I
thought it would be useful - and maybe entertaining - to look at an
anti-net neutrality article for the insights it gives us about how the
other side views things. It's called "Pick Up On One and Let The Other
One Ride", and appears in the Huffington Post. Here's how it frames the discussion:
On
Open Enterprise blog.
As the old joke goes, standards are wonderful things, that's why we
have so many of them. But who would have thought that ETSI, the
European Telecommunications Standards Institute, has already produced a
draft standard on how European governments can snoop on cloud-based
services like Facebook and Gmail -- even when encrypted connections are
used?
On
Techdirt.
Recently we wrote about how copyright rules designed for an analog
age were causing problems when transposed without modification to the
digital world. Here's another example, this time from Australia, where
the Brisbane Times' site reports on an increasingly difficult situation in education as a result of outdated copyright approaches:
On
Techdirt.
At the end of last year, I wrote about the great service Barnes & Noble had performed by drawing back the curtain on one of Microsoft's patent lawsuits.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
When the UK Hargreaves Review of intellectual monopolies in the digital age came out last year, Techdirt noted
that one of its innovations was an emphasis on basing policy on
evidence. The fact that this was even notable shows how parlous the
state of policy-making has become. One important way to gather evidence
is through public consultations, and in the wake of the Hargreaves
Review, the UK government conducted a major exercise in gathering views and information in this field.
On
Techdirt.
I have been writing about the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, ICANN, since its birth in 1998 (see the ICANN entry
on Wikipedia for a good summary of how that came about, and the
evolution of the organisation since then.) That move was contentious at
the time, since it saw the running of the Internet's basic
infrastructure taken out of the hands of the geeks, personified by Jon Postel,
and put in the hands of the business world. As a fully intended
side-effect of that move, it also placed the system fully under the
control of the US, rather than allowing a more distributed, global approach to evolve.
On
Techdirt.
Last year Techdirt wrote about the almost unbelievable Meltwater
decision in the UK, where the courts said that viewing a Web page
without the owner's permission was copyright infringement. In November last year, leave was granted to Meltwater to make an appeal against the ruling to the UK's Supreme Court.
However, that still leaves the inconvenient matter of the infringement
by tens of millions of UK Web users hundreds of times every day in the
meantime.
On
Techdirt.
I've written a couple of articles
recently about Ofcom's consultation on the implementation of the
Digital Economy Act. That consultation has closed now (it was only open
for a month), but I'm conscious that in those posts I was making quite a
lot of technical claims about Internet security, an area in which I am
certainly no expert.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
It's something of a truism that the courts take time to catch up with
technology, especially in the fast-moving world of the Internet, but Thomas Steen
points us to a recent court decision in Norway where the gulf between
law and life is particularly wide. The case concerns a blogger called
Eivind Berge who was arrested recently on account of some statements on
his blog that allegedly "glorified and encouraged the killing of policemen" as a report on the Dagbladet newspaper site puts it (Norwegian original.) Moreover:
On
Techdirt.
Yesterday I wrote that I hoped to post here my submission to the
important EU consultation on net neutrality that is currently open.
However, there have been some important developments in this area that
need to be covered first.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
The implicit justification for various new copyright enforcement
laws, such as the "three strikes" approach, is that they will encourage
people to buy more authorized digital goods and thus support artists and
their works. Naturally, those in favor of this logic like to produce
figures that purport to show that it is working.
On
Techdirt.