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One of the heartening recent developments in the world of digital
copyright is that we have moved on from manifestly biased surveys about
the evils of piracy and how the solution to everything is harsher
punishment for infringement and longer copyright terms, to independent
analyses that seek to understand rather than judge and lecture. There's
also been a new focus on learning what the public thinks might be an
appropriate balance for modern copyright -- something that nobody cared
about in the past.
On
Techdirt.
One of the myths perpetuated by governments taking part in major
international treaty negotiations like ACTA, TPP and TAFTA/TTIP is that
somehow no national sovereignty is given up during the process, and that
therefore the public shouldn't worry about what goes on in those secret
meetings. That's clearly absurd, because negotiations involve
concessions, usually by the weaker parties, which often touch on
national competences.
On
Techdirt.
As a recent DailyDirt noted, opinions on the safety of genetically modified organisms (GMOs)
are sharply divided. But that heated argument tends to obscure another
problem that Techdirt has often written about in other fields: the use
of patent monopolies to exert control, in this case over the food chain.
By inserting DNA sequences into plants and animals and obtaining
patents, the biotech industry is granted surprisingly wide-ranging
powers over how its products are used, as the Bowman case made clear. That's potentially problematic when those products are the foods that keep us alive.
On
Techdirt.
Techdirt has run a number of posts about David Cameron's dangerous plans to apply default online censorship and make porn opt-in in the UK, supposedly to "protect the children". Now it looks like Peru is following suit (original in Spanish):
On
Techdirt.
Two massive trade agreements currently being negotiated -- TPP and
TAFTA/TTIP -- could potentially affect most people on this planet,
either directly or indirectly through the knock-on effects. Like all
such agreements, they have been justified on the grounds that everyone
wins: trade is boosted, prices drop, profits rise and jobs are created.
That's why it's been hard to argue against TPP or TAFTA -- after all,
who doesn't want all those things?
On
Techdirt.
There are few areas in tech policy where the waters are so muddied as
those swirling around net neutrality. That's as true for the EU as it
is for the US. The latest statement by the person responsible for this
area in the European Commission, Neelie Kroes, does little to clarify things.
On
Techdirt.
Last week Mike wrote how frustration at the unremitting secrecy
surrounding TPP, and the refusal to allow members of the public in
whose name it is being negotiated to express their views, has led to the
creation of a new participatory Web site by the "Fair Deal Coalition."
Many of the best-known groups fighting for more balanced copyright laws
in the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand have signed up, including
Techdirt.
On
Techdirt.
A year ago, we wrote about a Russian law
that introduced a blacklist designed to block access to information on
drugs, suicide and child pornography (all for the children, of course.)
Strangely, that same law was then used to silence leading reporters who dared to criticize the government (bet nobody saw that coming....)
On
Techdirt.
The story of open data in the UK has been fairly uplifting in recent
years, as more and more public datasets are released under liberal
licences. Even the big holdouts - things like Ordnance Survey - have
gradually loosened their grip. The same is true for the Postcode
Address File (PAF), which has a surprising long history:
On
Open Enterprise blog.
At the start of this year I flagged up
the likelihood that hugely important trade negotations between the EU
and US would start in due course. A few months later, I gave some more background to that move, as well as the text of a document calling for the participants to avoid repeating the grave mistakes of ACTA, which ultimately led to that agreement being rejected in the European Parliament on July 4 last year.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
Yesterday I wrote
about the slide into censorship and self-censorship that the UK
government's misbegotten plans to impose a default set of Net blocks
could bring about. Of course, the UK is not alone in seeking to
introduce disproportionate schemes. Here's one from Russia:
On
Open Enterprise blog.
Unless you have been living under the proverbial rock, you will have
heard and probably read plenty about the UK government's grandstanding
proposals to make pornography opt-in. I won't waste your time by going
through the many reasons why that is a foolish idea and won't achieve
the things the government says it will. Instead I'd like to concentrate
on some disturbing hints about where this could be going, and why we
need to start fighting any such plans now.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
In the wake of Microsoft's dire
financial results, it might seem a little unsporting to draw attention
to more of the company's problems. But its continuing stranglehold on
companies and governments around the world means that such measures are
justified, not least because people are suffering as result - millions
of them.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
I've been trying to fathom what exactly Neelie Kroes, Vice-President
of the European Commission with responsibility for the Digital Agenda,
intends to do about net neutrality in Europe for a while. Back in
January of this year, I asked: "Will Neelie Kroes Defend or Destroy EU Net Neutrality?", and in June I was still wondering: "What's the Net Net on Neelie Kroes's EU Net Neutrality?"
On
Open Enterprise blog.
Back in March, I wrote about the odd little attack
by the European arm of the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) on
Mozilla's plans to put control of cookies firmly in the hands of users.
Alas, the IAB seems not to have come to its
senses since then, but has instead doubled down, and launched one of the
most bizarre assaults on Mozilla and the open Web that I have ever
read. I warmly recommend you to read it - I suspect you will find it as
entertaining in its utter absurdity as I do.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
About a month ago, I wrote
about the extraordinary fact that Microsoft routinely hands over
zero-day exploits in its applications to the US government for the
latter to use in the short window before they are announced and plugged.
On thing that allows is for "foreign" governments and companies to be
targetted and various levels of access to be gained in a way that is
hard to protect against.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
A year ago the European Parliament rejected ACTA -
a real milestone in the fight to bring some balance to copyright, since
it was the first time that a major international treaty was thrown out
in this way, largely because of its one-sided and disproportionate
approach to that area.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
As you will have noticed, European politicians have suddenly become rather interested in the revelations about NSA spying now that it seems that they, too, have been targeted.
This led to a three-hour long debate in the European Parliament
yesterday, which was striking for the number of speakers calling for the
imminents TAFTA/TTIP trade negotiations to be
postponed until after the US has responded to the allegations - and
promised to behave better in the future.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
The UK is famous for its abundant CCTV cameras, but it's also pretty
keen on the equally intrusive Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR)
cameras that can identify cars and hence their owners as they pass.
Here, for example, is what's been going on in the town of Royston, whose
local police force has just had its knuckles rapped by the UK's Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) for the over-enthusiastic deployment of such ANPR systems there:
On
Techdirt.
At the beginning of last year we reported on a Swedish study that showed that streaming services had halved
the number of people who were downloading music illegally in
Scandinavia. That's a pretty stunning figure, but of course is only one
data point, which means that people can always argue that it's not
possible to generalize. So it's good that not just one but two new
reports confirm and broaden that finding.
On
Techdirt.
A few months ago we wrote about the extraordinary -- and worrying --
case of Eli Lilly suing Canada after the latter had refused to grant a
pharma patent. Eli Lilly's contention was that by failing to grant its
patent (even if it didn't meet the criteria for a patent in Canada),
Canada had "expropriated" Eli Lilly's property -- and that it should be paid $100 million as "compensation".
On
Techdirt.
One of the striking features of the Snowden story is that there has been
no serious attempt to deny the main claims about massive, global
spying. Instead, the fall-back position has become: well, yeah, maybe
we did some of that, but look how many lives were saved as a result.
For example, the day after the first leaks appeared, it was suggested
that PRISM was responsible for stopping a plot to bomb the NYC subways.
However, further investigation showed that probably wasn't the case.
On
Techdirt.
Two of the key arguments during the Myriad Genetics
trial were that gene patent monopolies stifle innovation by preventing
others from building on and extending key knowledge, and that they can
cause unnecessary suffering and even death by driving up prices for
medical treatment beyond the reach of many people. Even though the
Supreme Court struck down Myriad's key patents, reducing those issues
for DNA, a new technology with major ramifications for health runs the
risk of suffering from precisely the same problems.
On
Techdirt.
One technique in the world of pharma that has started appearing here
on Techdirt is "evergreening" -- making small changes to a drug, often
about to come off patent, in order to gain a new patent that extends its
manufacturer's control over it. The advantages for pharma companies
are evident, but what about the public? What economic impact does evergreening have? That's what a fascinating new paper in the open access journal PLoS Medicine seeks to establish:
On
Techdirt.
As we've noted before, many publishers have the crazy attitude that
ebooks shouldn't be lent by libraries, and that it should be made harder for people to access literature in these places if it's in a digital form. Over in the Netherlands, public libraries have had enough of this, and are taking legal action over the issue, as an article in Future of Copyright reports:
On
Techdirt.
Today, the European Parliament held a three-hour long debate on PRISM,
Tempora and what the EU response should be. Many wanted TAFTA/TTIP put on hold;
others didn't. But one theme cropped up again and again: the need for
strong data protection laws that would offer at least some legal
protection against massive and unregulated transfer of Europeans'
personal data to the US.
On
Techdirt.
As the growing number of Techdirt stories on the subject testify, drones
are becoming a more familiar part of modern life. But their presence
can add a new element to situations. An obvious example is during
demonstrations, where drones can be used to monitor those taking part --
but also the authorities' reaction. As with cases where members of the
public have used smartphones to capture police abuse, so drones offer the possibility of revealing questionable police activity that might in the past have gone unrecorded.
On
Techdirt.
In the past, Iran has provided plenty of light relief here on Techdirt, whether because of plans to build its own Internet, or thanks to weird stuff like this. But it looks like those days are over
following the election of a surprisingly-moderate President, Hassan Rouhani. Here, for example, are his thoughts on Net filters, as reported by The Guardian:
On
Techdirt.
Open standards has been a recurring theme here on Open Enterprise.
It's also been the occasion of one of the most disgraceful U-turns by
the European Commission. That took place in the wake of the European Interoperability Framework v1, which called for any claimed patents to be licensed irrevocably on a royalty-free basis. But when EIF v2 came out, we found the following:
On
Open Enterprise blog.
On Wednesday I wrote
about the Houses of Parliament deciding to use cloud computing
solutions, despite the fact that we now know - not just surmise - that
this is like handing your documents to the NSA.
As I noted, that may not be problematic if your documents were going to
be in the public domain anyway. But of course, that's only the case
for a tiny fraction of most companies' documents. And for those, it is
clearly the height of irresponsibility to place them with cloud-based
systems that are wide open to demands from the US government for any and
all data to be handed over, decrypted where possible.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
Last week I wrote about the perils
of using proprietary software, where companies regularly hand over
zero-day vulnerabilities to the US authorities who then go on to use
them to break into foreign systems (and maybe domestic ones, too, but
they're not owning up to that, yet....). Of course, cloud-based
solutions are even worse, as we've known for some time.
There, you are handing over all your data to the keeping of a company
that may be on the receiving end of a secret US government order to pass
it on to them - perhaps with necessary encryption keys too.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
At the end of last year, we wrote about an extraordinary attempt by the University of California (UC) to resuscitate the infamous "Eolas" patents that were thrown out
earlier by a jury in East Texas. Clearly, the University of California
likes patents, and the way that they can be used to extract money from
people with very little effort. In fact, it likes them so much it is
trying to privatize research produced by taxpayer-funded laboratories so
that even more patents can be taken out on the work, and even more
money obtained through licensing them. The background to this new approach,
implemented via a new entity provisionally entitled "Newco", is
described in a fantastic feature by Darwin BondGraham that appears in
East Bay Express:
On
Techdirt.
In the wake of the news that spies at GCHQ -- the UK equivalent of the NSA -- have been tapping
into every fiber optic cable that comes into and goes out of the
country, downloading and storing phone calls and Internet traffic for up
to 30 days, you might think the British authorities have enough
information at their disposal, without needing to turn to other sources.
But it seems not, according to the latest revelations in The Guardian:
On
Techdirt.
As we've noted before, when it comes to the Internet, governments around
the world have an unfortunate habit of copying each other's worst
ideas. Thus the punitive three-strikes approach based on accusations,
not proof, was pioneered by France, and then spread to the UK, South
Korea, New Zealand and finally the US (where, naturally, it became the
bigger and better "six strikes" scheme). France appears to be about to abandon this unworkable and ineffective approach, leaving other countries to deal with all the problems it has since discovered.
On
Techdirt.
It's hard to believe that the heady times that saw SOPA's rise and fall are only a year and a half ago. Of course, SOPA didn't die, but was merely "delayed". But if you've ever wondered what happened to it, wonder no more; it emigrated to Russia, as TorrentFreak reports:
On
Techdirt.
There finally seems to be a growing recognition in many countries that
copyright is not fit for the digital age. In the US, the Copyright Registrar
has spoken on this; in the UK, the Hargreaves Review delineated many
problems; and more recently, Australia, too, is starting to address the
question. As part of the process of implementing Hargreaves'
recommendations, the UK government is carrying out a consultation on
whether the UK should adopt the full list of copyright exceptions that
are laid out in the EU Copyright Directive, which provides the
overarching framework for copyright in Europe. It has now published some questionnaires seeking input in this area:
On
Techdirt.
It is extraordinary how companies have failed to grasp three basic facts
about DRM: that DRM only needs to be broken once, and it is broken
everywhere, thanks to the Internet; that DRM is always broken at
least once; and that once DRM is broken, anything still with that DRM is
effectively worth less than zero -- since copies freely available
online never have DRM. Despite these inconvenient truths, copyright
companies continue to hope that there is some magic technology that will
"protect" them from the pirates. Here's the latest forlorn attempt to do that, as reported by paidContent:
On
Techdirt.
Here on Techdirt we've had stories about how the ubiquity of digital cameras is changing the way we look at public events and art.
But as has also become clear, the ability to take photos of more or
less everything we see brings with it certain problems -- especially if
what we see are police.
So it was perhaps inevitable that the politicians would start to get
involved, in order to "solve" some of those problems. Here's a rather extreme example from Sweden, as reported by TechHive:
On
Techdirt.
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