B2fxxx

      Wednesday, October 07, 2009

 

From CNet News:

"Eolas Technologies, a company that ground through a years-long patent infringement lawsuit against Microsoft, now has sued a large swath of corporate powers for infringement of that same patent and another related patent concerning interactive programs on Web sites.

The list of defendants includes many high-profile companies inside and outside the tech world: Adobe Systems, Amazon, Apple, Blockbuster, Citigroup, eBay, Frito-Lay, Go Daddy, Google, J.C. Penney, JPMorgan Chase, Office Depot, Perot Systems, Playboy Enterprises, Staples, Sun Microsystems, Texas Instruments, Yahoo, and YouTube.

Eolas' suit is not to be taken lightly. Although the earlier Microsoft case took many years to resolve, and Eolas by no means won a complete victory, the patent involved did overall withstand heavy legal challenges despite many on the Web rallying to Microsoft's aid. Microsoft and Eolas won't describe terms of their 2007 settlement of the patent case"

Update - apologies for losing the CNet link, hopefully now fixed.

Ray 3:18 PM [ Permalink ] 0 comments [ Links to this post ] Make a New Post

 

Monica Horten reports that details of the UK government's proposed three strikes plans have been drafted by the music industry.

"Parking-fine style Internet suspension may be proposed by the British government, as a sanction for against peer-to-peer users who are alleged to have infringed  copyright...

The new element is that the users will get a final warning, telling them that a "technical measure" will be applied. The warning notice will give  them  opportunity to appeal before the measure is applied. The appeal will be made to a panel of adjudicators. The panel will comprise legally-trained people, but it is not envisaged that they will be judges, and it is not even clear whether it will be a formal institution or a call centre.

The "parking fine" element is that users would receive a lesser technical measure if they do not appeal, or conversely, they would risk a more severe measure - possibly a longer period of being cut off the Internet - if they do appeal and lose...

It's  understood that the new  proposals were drawn up by the  British music industry at the request of the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS). The request was apparently made because Amendment 138 in the EU Telecoms Package is a problem."

Update: Meanwhile the Council of Ministers in negotiation with representatives of the EU parliament has proposed an addendum to the original amendment 138 to the telecoms package.

"Proposition for Article 1.3.a of the Framework directive.

"Measures taken by Member States regarding end-users' access to or use of services and applications through electronic communication networks shall respect the fundamental rights and freedoms of natural persons, including in relation to privacy, freedom of expression and access to information and due process and the right to effective judicial protection in compliance with the general principles of Community law. Any such measures shall in particular respect the principle of a fair and impartial procedure, including the right to be heard.

This paragraph is without prejudice to the competence of a Member State to determine in line with its own constitutional order and with fundamental rights appropriate procedural safeguards assuring due process. This may include requirements of a judicial decision authorising the measures to be taken and may take account of the need to adopt urgent measures in order to assure national security, defence, public security, and the prevention, investigation, detection, and prosecution of criminal offences.""

 It's the standard political move - declare the basic freedoms fundamental and provide a universal get out clause for governments which wish to ignore the requirements - and there's a fairly good chance the parliament reps will buy it.  We'll just have to wait and see.

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The pilot municipal elections done using evoting machines in Finland have recently been nullified by the country's Supreme Administrative Court.  There's a nice Flash animation of how the machines work at the Finnish Ministry of Justice website. Ed Felten has a succinct report.

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      Tuesday, October 06, 2009

 

Ed Felten reports on the latest civic technology project at Princeton.

"Today we are rolling out FedThread, a new way of interacting with the Federal Register. It's the latest civic technology project from our team at Princeton's Center for Information Technology Policy.
The Federal Register is "[t]he official daily publication for rules, proposed rules, and notices of Federal agencies and organizations, as well as executive orders and other presidential documents." It's published by the U.S. government, five days a week. The Federal Register tells citizens what their government is doing, in a lot more detail than the news media do.
FedThread makes the Federal Register more open and accessible. FedThread gives users:

• collaborative annotation: Users can attach a note to any paragraph of the Federal Register; a conversation thread hangs off of every paragraph.
• advanced search: Users can search the Federal Register (going back to 2000) on full text, by date, agency, and other fields.
• customized feeds: Any search can be turned into an RSS feed. The resulting feed will include any new items that match the search query. Feeds can be delivered by email as well.

I think FedThread is a nice tool, but what's most amazing to me is that the whole project took only ten days to create. Ten days ago we had no code, no HTML, no plan, not even a block diagram on a whiteboard. Today we launched a pretty good service."

 He also explains that there were 3 primary reasons for them being able to produce such a service in such a short period of time.  Firstly the government provided access to the data in an open standard format, xml, that was easy for the software to handle.  Secondly there a great tech. tools available and thirdly they had a group of smart individuals.  This is right in Tony Hirst writetoreply territory and the potential for these kinds of services built on open access to government data is huge. Congratulations to the Princeton team and hopefully FedThread will get widely used.

Ray 12:51 PM [ Permalink ] 0 comments [ Links to this post ] Make a New Post

 

From the BBC:

"Websites that help people find jobs or hospitals have been hit by legal action threatened by the Royal Mail.

The threat was issued against the company supplying them, and many other sites, with postcode data.
Royal Mail said the legal action was threatened to stop "unauthorised access" to the postcode data.
Ernestmarples.com, which supplied the address data, said it did not have the resources to fight a legal battle so has turned off its feed...

Commenting on its action the Royal Mail said: "We have not asked anyone to close down a website.
"We have simply asked a third party to stop allowing unauthorised access to Royal Mail data, in contravention of our intellectual property rights," it added in a statement."

Ray 12:27 PM [ Permalink ] 0 comments [ Links to this post ] Make a New Post

      Monday, October 05, 2009

 

According to La Quadrature du Net some representatives from the EU parliament are to get together with counterparts from the Council of Ministers to sort out their differences over a technical amendment to the EU telecoms package.  Amendment 138 would effectively block the implementation of 3 strikes regimes without judicial oversight in member states.

IP geeks will recall that Commissioner Reding released the Commission's official views on the parliaments amendments to the package at the end of July.  Copyfighters were concerned about the penultimate paragraph in that document

"Concerning Amendment 138 the Commission accepted it in its amended proposal after the European Parliament's first reading but supported the European Parliament-Council compromise text afterwards as a balanced solution. The Commission could, therefore, accept the amendment, but will do its utmost to facilitate the emergence of a compromise between the co-legislators on this issue."

Prior to the issuing of that opinion there had been significant manoeuvrings behind the scenes. The amendment was variously dropped and re-worded and the parliament had voted overwhelmingly on two occasions to support it, for example.  There remains considerable mutual animosity between those who support it and those against.  So it will be interesting to see where these latest discussions lead, especially since the French have passed their latest attempt at 3 strikes legislation in mid September and the UK government have indicated a committment to doing likewise.

The amendment itself (now confusingly Amendment 46 (scroll down to page 41/93 in the amendments) reads

"Council common position – amending act
Article 1 – point 8 – point fb (new)

Directive 2002/21/EC
Article 8 – paragraph 4 - point fb (new)

Council common position

Amendment

(fb) in paragraph 4, point (fb) shall be
added:
“(fb) applying the principle that no
restriction may be imposed on the
fundamental rights and freedoms of endusers,
without a prior ruling by the
judicial authorities, notably in accordance
with Article 11 of the Charter of
Fundamental Rights of the European
Union on freedom of expression and
information, save when public security is
threatened in which case the ruling may
be subsequent.”

Justification

This AM restores AM 138 adopted in first reading by Parliament on 24 September 2008,
T6/0449/2008 (Rule 62(2)(a))."

The compromise position referred to the in Commission's official views, I believe facilitated the terminations of suspected copyright infringers' internet services but left open a possible right of appeal to an independent tribunal, not necessarily the courts, after the event.  As to the notion of 3 strikes itself, it trips over so many legal, technical and economic hurdles it's difficult to know where to start but I can't beat Lilian Edwards condemnation of the idea at the Musicians Fans and Online Copyright event last year.

Update: The latest French 3 strikes law HADOPI 2 has apparently been referred to the Constitutional Council which declared its predecessor unsconstitutional.

Ray 5:11 PM [ Permalink ] 0 comments [ Links to this post ] Make a New Post

 

Page 3 of this morning's Guardian laments how legal delays have blown a hole in UK's digital heritage.

"Digital literature, online scientific research and internet journalism that should have been saved in the nation's main libraries over the past five years may have been lost because ministers have failed to give them the legal power to copy and archive websites, the Guardian has learned.
Senior executives at the British Library and the National Library of Scotland (NLS) are dismayed that legislation giving them the right to collect online and digital material is still not in force, more than six years after it was passed by parliament.

The omission has meant the libraries – which are legally required to archive books, newspapers and journals – have failed to record online coverage of major events such as the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, the release of the Lockerbie bomber and the MPs' expenses scandal."

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      Saturday, October 03, 2009

 

One of the best pieces of career advice I ever heard was to do something you're interested in.  Comparative biomechanist Adam Summers discovered this by accident.

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      Friday, October 02, 2009

 

I also learn from the Enlightened Economist that I'm not the only one who has been arguing recently for a 'restoration of the wildlands' or space for the public domain to roam free or find safe harbours. Apparently Berkeley professor of economics, Suzanne Scotchmer, at the Global Economic Symposium, called "for international negotiation on what forms of knowledge should form a global public domain and be kept out of the international arms race towards ever-tougher (and probably ever-less enforcable) protection of IP via ludicrous patents and copyright terms."

Ray 6:21 PM [ Permalink ] 0 comments [ Links to this post ] Make a New Post

 

I did a seminar for some respected colleagues at the OU yesterday on James Boyle's book, The Public Domain.

Boyle is an exceptional scholar, activist and storyteller.  Needless to day I can't recommend the book highly enough.

In The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind, he eloquently and passionately argues that our culture, science and democracy depend on a delicate balance between ideas that are controlled by intellectual property and those that are freely available in the public domain.  He tells a terrific series of engaging stories about, for example, why the building blocks of synthetic biology, business methods, pairs of musical notes are now owned, why blues, jazz or soul music would probably be illegal if it were invented today, why most of 20th century culture is legally unavailable to us, and why the World Wide Web would, most likely, have been killed at birth if lawyers, commerce and policymakers could have reacted quickly enough.

This all adds up to what Boyle calls a 'second enclosure movement' – except that on this occasion we’re not facing an enclosure of the grassy commons of olde Englande but rather an enclosure of the 'commons of the mind' and a serious erosion of the public domain, a state of affairs future generations will rightly condemn us for allowing to happen; at the very point that we have the technical and economic capacity to facilitate universal access to recorded human knowledge, a digital library of Alexandria.

The book, destined to become the standard text in the area, also serves as the Silent Spring of the information society – a clarion call to understand and protect the public domain through scholarship, communication, articulation and recognition of shared interests and values that allow that notion - the public domain - to come into public consciousness and a diverse ecology of activism to support all this. A kind of "environmentalism for information" and the public domain.

Sadly I can't put the slides on Slideshare since I included some audio and video sequences of the evolution of some songs James mentions in the book and a parody animated sequence of Disney characters explaining copyright, fair use and the public domain.

My thanks to John Naughton, who very kindly attended on his first day of  long overdue study leave and recorded proceedings, despite having endulged my rants about IP for more years than he would care to remember.  So John had already heard the stories and my views on them on mulitple occasions previously.  Thanks also to Doug Clow who made a valiant attempt, live blogging, to make some sense of my incoherent ramblings during the afternoon.

In the final chapter of the book James makes a persuasive and heartfelt plea for a politics of the public domain. Although I'm pessimistic about his vision coming to pass I was just thinking in preparing for the seminar and following on from my presentation at the Gikii conference recently, wouldn't it be nice to have a visual representation of the erosion of the public domain equivalent to the kind of work James Balog does with the Extreme Ice Survey on glaciers.



Update: Just a PS for policymakers. When you do get round to reading The Public Domain and you should, pay particular attention to what Professor Boyle calls the "Jefferson warning" and its corrolary the "Sony axiom".

Update 2: Diane Coyle aka the enlightened economist posted a terrific review of the book at more or less the same time as I was discussing it yesterday.

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