NO2ID campaigners arrested

According to the BBC, 6 people associated with the NO2ID campaign have been arrested this morning. The six were on their way to protest outside a summit of European ministers on Tyneside. The BBC says:

The NO2ID group said they were arrested on Thursday morning on the grounds they may cause a breach of the peace.

The campaigners, who were going to wear orange boiler suits and bar codes on their foreheads, had created a massive ID card to highlight what they see as an increasing restriction on civil liberties.

A spokesman for NO2ID said:

"It is shocking that we could not have a peaceful protest in a peaceful country but this is what these ministers want."

A spokeswoman for the police said:

"Four men and two women have all been arrested on suspicion of conspiracy to commit criminal damage and are currently in custody."

Update: Spy Blog is not impressed.

Authoraid

From Jamais Cascio,

"Although a good case can be made for the idea that science has an important role to play in the process of global development and the abolition of poverty, scientific journals quite often focus upon subjects and research of greater interest to the developed world than to the developing regions. To an extent, this is not at all surprising: the bulk of the research happens in the West and in Japan, and scientists do tend to work on issues that are important and interesting to them. Yet there are large numbers of working scientists in the developing world, too; how can their voices be better heard?

That's the goal of AuthorAid (PDF), a proposal from the editors of the Journal of Public Health Policy (JPHP), with the backing of the Canadian Coalition for Global Health Research and the Council of Science Editors' (CSE) Task Force on Science Journals, Poverty, and Human Development."

The originators of the idea have written about it at SciDevNet.

"A global 'publishing gap' condemns efforts at reducing poverty to suffer from the shortsightedness of the rich. This is because the health and science researchers closest to poverty and poor health in the developing world are the least likely to publish their work and ideas in the academic journals that influence policymakers.

Various proposals to address this problem have been made. We would like to suggest an additional strategy, which would link developing-world authors with promising work to voluntary editor/scientist mentors anywhere in the world, on a manuscript-by-manuscript basis.

The mentors could then help the authors prepare submissions that science and policy journals will accept and publish."

Smart.

BBC opens TV archive to remixers

BBC opens TV archive to remixers

Newscasters finally start snarling

Jack Shafer at Slate at the end of last week: The Rebellion of the Talking Heads
Newscasters, sick of official lies and stonewalling, finally start snarling.

BREIN free software

A Dutch antipiracy group are planning to release "free" software to enable parents to detect P2P file sharing programmes on their computers.

I doubt that anyone lacking the skills to check whether there computer has Kazaa or the like (usually involving looking for the desktop icon, or clicking start-programs) will have the skills to download this software. But even if they did, wouldn't it be better if the parent spoke to the child?

Hellkom v Tellkom

From IPKat: "South African telephone company Telkom has settled its dispute with Greg Stirton, the owner of the hellkom.co.za domain name."

UK ORG Launched

A UK "Open Rights Group" has been launched.

Spy Blog and ID card disinformation

Spy Blog is irritated about a new government leaflet on identity fraud suggesting ID cards will solve the problem. They won't.

IP Scholars Papers

Justin Hughes has put the papers from the IP Scholars conference online.

Great resource.

6 year old rescues babies in New Orleans

From the LA Times:

In the chaos that was Causeway Boulevard, this group of refugees stood out: a 6-year-old boy walking down the road, holding a 5-month-old, surrounded by five toddlers who followed him around as if he were their leader.

They were holding hands. Three of the children were about 2 years old, and one was wearing only diapers. A 3-year-old girl, who wore colorful barrettes on the ends of her braids, had her 14-month-old brother in tow. The 6-year-old spoke for all of them, and he told rescuers his name was Deamonte Love.

Thousands of human stories have flown past relief workers in the last week, but few have touched them as much as the seven children who were found wandering together Thursday at an evacuation point in downtown New Orleans.

Potter at iTunes

JK Rowling has finally agreed to allow the Harry Potter books to be sold as downloadable audio files from iTunes.

What Greenspan Can't See

A thoughtful and thought provoking essay by Jonathon Rowe On the Commons about the limitations of measuring even just economic value purely through monetary flows.

The era of blaming government could be over. Not only that, the era of portraying environmental concerns as the self-indulgence of tree-hugger elites is over too. If Katrina proved nothing else, it is that this thing called the “environment” isn’t a matter of sentimentality and aesthetics. It is about life support, and economics in the most elemental sense – that is, the mustering of available resources to meet urgent human need.

Alan Greenspan and his fellow divines have been hunched over their calculators trying to work out the consequences of Katrina to what they call “the economy.” Their computations are warped from the git-go, and not a little sick. They fixate on the part of life that is transacted through money. Thus anything that increases the slosh of dollar bills – or of some other currency -- is by definition “good for the economy.”

Where this thinking leads was apparent in a recent article on Forbes.com entitled (I’m not kidding) “Katrina’s Silver Lining.” Here’s the key passage.

“When a hurricane comes, count on large-cap investors to snap up stocks of not only home improvement companies, but also discount retailers (everyone's running for flashlights and other supplies and will be replacing losses from flood damage), home builders (all those houses need to be rebuilt) and oil companies (damage to refineries down in the Gulf sparks supply worries and kicks up prices)...

The worse things are the better they are, so long as someone is making money from the distress. In this way of thinking, obesity, stress, car crashes and divorce also are great for “the economy” because they occasion the expenditure of a great deal of money. Toxics in the air and water are a double gain: once when the corporation makes money by producing them, and then when people have to spend additional amounts on cancer treatments and the like. (By the way, what does it say about Vice President Cheney that Haliburton, his former company, ends up cashing on both the disasters of the Bush years – Katrina and 9/11. Just a coincidence I guess.)

As I said it’s a little sick. And myopic too. Greenspan et al are staring at an economic failure of epic proportions, and they can’t even see it because it’s beyond the focal plane of money. I’m talking about the economy of nature, the natural life support system that is no less important than the monetized economy and – as Katrina has shown – often is much more important.

Katrina was a man-made disaster even more than a natural one. It was not the hurricane alone that caused the devastation in New Orleans. It was the hurricane plus the absence of the wetlands that should have buffered the city from the storm. Every 2.7 miles of wetlands reduces a storm surge by about one foot. Louisiana has been losing wetlands equal to the size of Manhattan every year. You don’t need a slide rule to see where that calculus leads.

It’s not malls and vacation homes that are destroying these wetlands, as in other parts of the country. In Louisiana it’s largely oil. Offshore drilling has required the dredging of large canals, which enable salt water to flow into the marshes and cause land to sink. The other culprit is the extensive system of levees built to protect New Orleans from the Mississippi floods. These floods used to carry sediment into the marshlands which nourished and replenished them.

No floods means no replenishment. What used to be a buffer zone is now just open water, and a clear shot for the hurricane that experts have been warning of for years...

This includes the stupidity in the way the nation measures “growth” -- ie the GDP. How can they say the economy is “growing”, if it is cannibalizing the commons economy upon which our very lives depend? When the oil industry destroys wetlands, shouldn’t that be a subtraction from growth rather than an addition? When it takes billions of dollars to dig out from a man-made disaster – a growth-made disaster – then should those expenditures count towards growth at all?

John Battelle Book Published

John Battelle's book, The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture is apparently now available from Amazon (though not the UK store yet).

Be careful about blogging when job hunting

Ivan Tribble advises bloggers to be careful about what they write, especially if they are looking for a job. He has previously written a piece about this for the Chronicle of Higher Education where he "gave a sharp warning to bloggers on the academic job market" based on his own recruiting experience. The column generated a big response from bloggers. He's been thinking about the responses.

"Among the more outraged responses to my column, the biggest issue seemed to be freedom of speech. There appears to be some confusion about what the Constitution guarantees. "Hello officer, the stolen goods are in my trunk," is one example of free speech that can get you incarcerated. Telling a bank officer you plan to skip town with the cash will certainly cut your chances of getting a loan.

Likewise, there's plenty of constitutionally protected speech that has no place in an interview. Try telling an interviewer, "Kinda heavy, aren't you?" Or "Man, these undergrads are so hot!" It's not hard to conjure up examples.

If "be careful what you say," is good general advice for the job seeker, why is it so controversial to add the word "online"? Maintaining the privacy of comments broadcast to the entire computerized world seems disingenuous. Public speech, while certainly free, is still public...

Getting hired, then, is much like hitting the lottery. How does a candidate get the winning combination? The best advice I've heard says, by being who you really are. Some people will be alienated by who you really are, while others will find you appealing.

A job seeker must consider: Does that online projection (some would say construction) of yourself present you as you wish to be seen...

As my original column made clear (and many amid the outcry reiterated) when it comes to blogging, I just don't "get it." That's right, I don't. Many in the tenured generation don't, and they'll be sitting on hiring committees for years to come.

If that's bad news, I'm sorry. But would it really be better if no one bothered to mention it? Shooting the messenger may make some feel better, but heeding the warning might help them get jobs."

Monsanto bitter about Bitter Greens Journal

Journalist, farmer and blogger, Tom Philpott, has upset Monsanto to the extent that their trademark lawyer ("Barb Bunning-Stevens
Assistant General Counsel - Trademarks") has sent him a cease and desist notice.

After thinking about it for a few days he responded:

Dear Ms. Bunning-Stevens,
Although it's comical for a corporation with upwards of $5 billion in annual revenue to harass an obscure blogger who helps run a 2.5-acre farm, the tone of your letter is earnest; so I will reply earnestly.

Your arguments seem specious to me, and I therefore I must refuse to cease using "Roundup, ready" as the title for an occasional feature on my Web log.

You write that "[t]his use of the term could cause your readers to think that your journal is in some way sponsored by Monsanto or that Monsanto supports the positions set out in your journal." Yet my journal clearly presents itself as a "running critique of industrial agriculture," and from its first post on has made no secret of its distaste for Monsanto and its particular style of industrial agriculture.

I doubt you will be able to dig up a single reader who, after perusing a "Roundup, ready" post, will think to himself, "Now this fellow must be on the Monsanto dole!"

To further clarify my position on Monsanto, and to underline my institutional, financial, and ideological independence from it, I'm considering placing a new feature along the left-hand side of my blog. Titled "Bitter Greens on Monsanto," it would be a compilation of clickable headlines to the 15 or so posts that have mentioned your company. Would that go some way toward distancing our two entities?

Nor am I persuaded by the claim that my use of a comma in "Roundup, ready" somehow "weakens [Monsanto's] trademark rights." If I were in the business of genetically altering seeds so that they could withstand copious applications of herbicides, and I were marketing my product under the brand "Roundup, ready," cheekily trying to leverage Monsanto's marketing might and hoping the comma would protect me from copyright troubles, I would certainly tremble in fear on being contacted by a Monsanto attorney. And I would immediately cease and desist that dubious practice.

However, I am selling nothing. I am a polemicist employing (in the case of "Roundup, ready") satire to advance the cause of locally based, organic agriculture. If I'm able with my writing to stop a farmer from buying your product, then it will be due to the force of my arguments, not to any confusion regarding your trademark.

With all due respect, it seems to me that rather than protect your trademark from any serious threat, what you're really trying to do is intimidate a political opponent into ceasing what is surely Constitutionally protected speech. And so, as I stated above, I must decline your request. And I will redouble my efforts to study and write about the practices of your company.

Respectfully,
Tom Philpott

Thanks to Overlawyered for the pointer to the story.

Ernie the attorney out of New Orleans

I hadn't appreciated that Ernie the Attorney (Ernest Svenson), whose blog I occasionally refer to here, lived in New Orleans.

A story from a survivor in New Orleans

This story from one of the survivors of hurricane Katrina's devastation of New Orleans is an horrific indictment of the actions of some officials in the aftermath of the tragedy.

Microsoft sue the Commission

Microsoft have sued the European Commission.

Google Print and copyright

Jonathan Band has produced a useful paper on "The Google Print Library Project: A Copyright Analysis"

It explains the project (there is a fair bit of confusion around about exactly what Google are doing) and looks at the copyright and fair use issues.

Lexmark and analog DRM

The Free Culture blog has an eminently readable rant about Lexmark winning

their recent case.

The case was about whether Lexmark could offer a “prebate” on some of its ink cartridges with the stipulation that ink cartridges bought under this prebate (that is, a discounted price) would carry a contractual obligation on the part of the customer to mail back the empty cartridges to Lexmark — and not reuse them by using an ink-syringe kit to refill them or sending them to a company that refills cartridges for you (such companies being the ones represented by ACRA, a trade association for such things).

There’s no actual contract, of course. The reason companies don’t make you do this random crap most of the time is because, before, it would require railroading you into signing something, which most customers won’t do.

But now apparently by generalizing from the way shrinkwrap licenses or “Click to Accept” EULAs on software work, hardware is falling under similar rules. The Court has ruled that if a box reads “Single Use Only”, then buying the product and opening the box constitutes a contract of sale that says you will only use the product once and not find some third-party way to reuse it...

I mean, come on — we’re not talking about electronically stored data here anymore, not about information, not about complex technology. We’re talking about your right to buy a container filled with fluid, use up the fluid and fill it up again with fluid. What’s next, Evian refusing to allow you to fill their containers with non-Evian water? When you can’t own something as mundane as an ink cartridge — when a simple physical object that fulfills a simple physical function is licensed rather than being sold the old-fashioned way, when companies absolutely refuse to allow us to have the right of resale and reuse and creative retooling that we’re used to with actual physical objects that we actually physically buy and take home to our houses to use –

Well, damn. This fight’s just gotten a lot bigger than cyberspace. This is now a meatspace fight. This fight is now about the right to own anything.

Hybrid cars the true cause of congestion!

From David Bollier,

If there’s one thing that drives free marketeers nuts, it is the idea that people just may have the capacity and desire to make moral judgments for themselves, and to apply them for the collective betterment of society. Libertarians argue instead that the Invisible Hand is the only moral capacity we’ll ever really need. This issue arises because now that John Tierney has stepped into the libertarian slot at the Times (quotas, anyone?), the obligatory columns celebrating the free market have become predictable rants against fuzzy-headed do-gooders. Say what you will about William Safire (Tierney’s illustrious predecessor), he was a columnist of political sophistication and writerly flair.

Libertarianism has apparently come to such a sad turn that it now needs to recycle the strawman arguments of yesteryear in order to affirm the moral infallibility of The Market. Last week’s column (August 30) was a classic. Tierney explained the real culprit for congested highways and air pollution is not the SUV, sprawl or the highway lobby, but…. environmental elitists who drive hybrid cars! The headline captures the cultural resentment disguised as policy analysis: “The Road to Hell is Clogged with Righteous Hybrids.”

Apparently John Tierney, the NYT columnist Bollier is criticising, said:

As traffic slows down [due to the swell of righteous hybrid owners in lanes reserved for carpooling], there’ll be more idling cars burning more gas and emitting more pollution, but politicians will be reluctant to offend hybrid owners by revoking their privilege.

Evidence-free ranting. There's a 6 month waiting list to buy a Toyota Prius in the US and relative ownership volume of hybrid cars is miniscule...

Hogwarts Security

Bruce Schneier has been thinking about security at Harry Potter's school, Hogwarts. (To Potter fans: There are plot spoilers in the comments, though, so don't read if you haven't read the most recent book)

Clarke confronts judges on terror law

Clarke confronts judges on terror law, says Alan Travis at The Guardian.

"The home secretary, Charles Clarke, has given a fresh warning to judges not to frustrate his decision to deport terror suspects by insisting the courts respect human rights deals struck with countries such as Jordan."

Quote of the day

Quote of the day:

"The larger any organization, the higher the probability that its top management lives in a totally imaginary world." (Source unknown).

Ideal Government Europe

William Heath's Ideal Government is going pan European - see Ideal Government: Europe.

Groklaw on Balmer's threat to kill Google

Pamela Jones has been ruminating on Microsoft CEO Steve Balmer's alleged threats to kill Google and bury the company's CEO, Eric Schmidt.

I await with eager anticipation the cries of moral outrage from Rob Enderle and Laura Didio and Darl McBride and everyone else who has accused the FOSS community of verbal extremism.

That may be quite a wait, so let me be the first to call on the proprietary software community to condemn in no uncertain terms such violent speech coming from their community. Death threats are never acceptable, don't you agree?

Such threats coming from the CEO of the largest software company in the world are far more serious than they would be coming from some teenage Slashdotter, because Ballmer surely has the means to follow through, does he not, should he actually mean it?

If you were Mr. Schmidt, how safe would you be feeling today? It was a metaphor, you say. Likely it was, but are you positive? And let's say you answer yes, it was a metaphor. Is it all right for a convicted monopolist to threaten to "kill" a competing company?

Concept wars

William Heath has been thinking about a paper by a David Bewley-Taylor. US Concept Wars, civil liberties and technologies of fortification characterises the "widespread introduction" of "invasive technology" in the wake of 9/11 not as a break from the open society many believe the US to be, but rather "the next organic phase of an ongoing process of fortifying the United States." The US, he says, "has long been characterized by exclusion." The paper also charaterises technology as a tool of exclusion.

Hmmm. Social exclusion is certainly not exclusive to the US and technology is most certainly enabling when designed, deployed and regulated appropriately.

Chief Justice Rehnquist dies

US Supreme Court Justice, William H. Renhquist, died on Saturday last. Howard Bashman has links to all the tributes. President Bush has now decided to appoint John Roberts as Chief Justice, having nominated him earlier in the summer to replace the retiring Justice Sanda Day O'Connor.

Jurispedia

Jurispedia is a great idea and hopefully is will take off, though it is a bit light on content at the moment.

SAR 11

I'm in environmental decision making thinking mode today, reading a wonderful (near final) draft of colleagues Chris Blackmore's and Andrea Berardi's first book in our new masters course due on stream next year; and I came across this fascinating snippet on a group of bacteria I had never heard of, "Pelagibacter ubique", also called SAR 11. Apparently it has the most efficiently coded genome on earth and is crucial to the operation of the carbon cycle.

Kazaa lose in Australia

An Australian court has finally ruled in the long running case brought by the record industry against Sharman Networks, owners of the Kazaa file sharing software. From the BBC:

The judge dismissed as "overstated" accusations that Kazaa's owners were infringing copyright themselves.

"The more realistic claim is that the respondents authorised users to infringe the applicants' copyright in their sound recordings," he said.

Kazaa's owners were ordered to modify the software within two months to include filters designed to stop the sharing of copyright material.

A fresh round of hearings will now be held to determine the level of damages, which could run into the millions of dollars.

Kim Weatherall, who has done the most comprehensive analysis of the decision that I've seen so far, reckons the judge has been "brave" in insisting that Sharman attempt to implement some kind of filtering process to cut copyright infringement. "Brave" because this will mean in practice a constant series of hearings where Sharman and the record companies complain about how each party is not doing enough (just like the Napster case in the US). She's probably right.

Google extend book search operations

Google have extended their book searching operations, according to this report from internetnews.

EU Net regulation IMIS reponse

A paper with the rather dry title, "Response to the European Commission Issues paper on the Rules applicable to Audiovisual Content Services from the Institute for the Management of Information Systems (IMIS)" takes a rather unconventional, though enlightening approach to critiquing an EU Commission proposal.

The hypothetical review from the perspective of a future historian is very effective and is introduced with a relatively standard, if extremely damning, criticism of the proposal, thus:

Over the past two decades IMIS members have seen the European information
industries first stagnate and then begin to atrophy. This process has been
expedited by a series of ill-judged regulatory initiatives, including under
the banner of "harmonisation". In consequence over half the IMIS membership
now lives and works outside Europe, many in those nations to which UK and
EU-based information systems and service jobs, including content creation
and electronic publishing have been relocated over recent years.

The surreal thought processes behind this issues paper exemplify a mindset
that looks set to expedite that process by helping drive away what is left
of our content creation and publication industries, while failing to protect
children or consumers from abuse.

The absence of any analysis by the Commission of the economic consequences
of past EU policies with regard to the regulation of information society and
e-commerce products and services, let alone of those likely to follow from
this initiative, led one of our members to consider how a future historian
might view the likely consequences of this initiative. We believe that his
short paper will be more effective in helping open up constructive debate
than would a conventional response

The essay that follows, The Day the Internet Stopped, is well worth reading in full (it only runs to about 2 pages). I'm not necessarily subscribing to the political vision outlined here but it is very very cleverly done. Congratulations to the IMIS for taking the approach given the serious risk that it might be ignored or marginalised in the consultation for doing so. And well done to the author for convincing the IMIS to run with it.

HMV get into online music sales

HMV have been slow getting to market but are launching a service today in partnership with Microsoft offering a catalogue of 1.3 million songs.

Publishers oppose UK Open Access

From last Tuesday's Guardian,

"Publishers and learned societies are fighting a last ditch action to stop the research findings of thousands of British academics being made freely available online."

Evoting security specified in California

The California State Senate has passed a law specifying minimum security requirement for electronic voting machines, including a ban on linking the machines to the Internet. This may well be a sensible interim measure, depending on the specific security problems at issue in California but although I have serious concerns about previous and planned design, regulation and deployment of electonic voting machines all round the world, I'm not sure a ban on connecting them to the Net will be sustainable or sensible in the longer term.

Schoolkid tinkerers offered deals

The 13 schoolchildren in Pennsylvania who bypassed the filters on school issued laptops have apparently been offered deals which avoid them getting criminal records.

Switching jobs a problem?

Microsoft's argument in their legal case against former executive Kai-Fu Lee and Google has taken an interesting turn.

"The high-profile dispute largely hinges on a noncompete agreement Lee signed with Microsoft. But in court filings, the software giant has also mentioned the theory of "inevitable disclosure," which holds that in some circumstances people can't avoid sharing or relying on trade secrets from their former employer when moving to a competitor."

I wonder how far that can be pushed?

They knew what to expect in New Orleans

From Wired,

Virtually everything that has happened in New Orleans since Hurricane Katrina struck was predicted by experts and in computer models, so emergency management specialists wonder why authorities were so unprepared.

"The scenario of a major hurricane hitting New Orleans was well anticipated, predicted and drilled around," said Clare Rubin, an emergency management consultant who also teaches at the Institute for Crisis, Disaster and Risk Management at George Washington University...

Underlying the situation has been the general reluctance of government at any level to invest in infrastructure or emergency management, said David McEntire, who teaches emergency management at the University of North Texas.

"No one cares about disasters until they happen. That is a political fact of life," he said.

"Emergency management is woefully underfunded in this nation. That covers not only first responders but also warning, evacuation, damage assessment, volunteer management, donation management and recovery and mitigation issues."

Update: John's been thinking about FEMA, the US federal agency in charge of emergency management and its absorption into the Department for Homeland Security. "It’s clear that FEMA had always ranked the flooding of New Orleans as one of the three biggest disasters that could befall the US. In the old days, the head of FEMA had a seat at the Cabinet table and might even have had the ear of the President. But now, advice and information from FEMA has to be filtered through another layer of bureaucracy — the Homeland Security Secretary, who is probably obsessed with terrorism."

RSS Feed for B2fxxx at last

I've finally got round to adding an RSS feed to this blog, courtesy of Feedburner.

Customer is always wrong with DRM

Derek Slater has produced a guide to the DRM restrictions in the most popular legitimate online music services.

"There is an increasing variety of options for purchasing music online, but also a growing thicket of confusing usage restrictions. You may be getting much less than the services promise.

Many digital music services employ digital rights management (DRM) — also known as "copy protection" — that prevents you from doing things like using the portable player of your choice or creating remixes. Forget about breaking the DRM to make traditional uses like CD burning and so forth. Breaking the DRM or distributing the tools to break DRM may expose you to liability under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) even if you're not making any illegal uses.

In other words, in this brave new world of "authorized music services," law-abiding music fans often get less for their money than they did in the old world of CDs (or at least, the world before record companies started crippling CDs with DRM, too)."

The wonderful swizz of the cards

Starring Tony Blair as Dorothy and others you may well recognise in supporting roles, from the folk who brought you the very model of a modern labour minister... (Thanks to Ian Brown at FIPR for the link)

Meanwhile, according to Donna, on the IP front Lexmark have succeeded in doing with contract and patent law what they failed to do with the DMCA, excluding customers from using cheap generic replacement printer cartridges.

DMCA v The darknet

There's a fascinating discussion between a who's who of commentators on developments in technology and law, on the effectiveness (or lack thereof) of the DMCA in tackling unauthorised copying via the Net, over at Picker Moblog.

Playlouder sign Sony BMG P2P deal

ISP Playlouder have signed a deal with Sony BMG to allow their subscribers to swap the label's music. Because the swapping will be done over the Playlouder network they can track which files get swapped and endure the label gets paid its cut. It's probably only a matter of time before we see other similar deals with the other major labels, and other ISPs getting in on the act. No details of the small print on the deal yet but it will be interesting to see these.

John Borland has a profile of another label backed P2P service, Mashbox due to get launched separately.

Thanks to Ian Brown of FIPR and Michael Geist for the links.

Google print debate

I'm working on a paper on the economics of copyright for the World Economics journal with my colleague Mark Rogers at Oxford University's Harris Manchester College. When I mentioned the copyright complications associated with Google's decision to suspend the scanning of books for their Google Print project until November, Mark asked me to write a short piece to be included in the paper. Here's a rough first draft.

The complex issues surrounding the huge Google Print project go some way towards illustrating the point as well as throwing a light on how complicated the concept of "?fair use"? can be. Google has a mission to "organise the world'?s information" in such a way as to make it accessible via Google's Internet search engine. As part of this they have embarked on a project hoping to digitise all the books that have ever been published and to make the contents of these books searchable, in a way that would bring a book to the attention of the information searcher which they might never otherwise come across e.g. a long since out-of print title. In some ways it is a bit like the Amazon "?search inside"? feature. Google are not going to make the entire contents of the books accessible to searchers, just sufficient to enable people to figure out whether accessing (through borrowing or purchasing) that book would be useful to their endeavours. The benefits to searchers are fairly obvious. The ability to track down an old treasure of a book that may no longer be commercially available or comprehensively catalogued in a library would be of tremendous use. The benefits to publishers are also clear. Books in back catalogues suddenly become visible and commercially viable again, particularly given the availability of print production technology that allows profitable production and sales of low volumes of particular titles.

However, in scanning and digitising all these books, unless the copyright has expired, Google is engaging, prima facie, in massive copyright infringement. Google are getting the books directly from the publishers and from a number of major libraries such as Oxford University's? Bodleian Library. They have been copying millions of library books in their entirety without the publishers'? permission in some cases since the beginning of the year. Google have decided to temporarily suspend the copying of books until November to give publishers an opportunity to contact them to opt out of having their books scanned and this has led to a renewed debate in the media about the merits and otherwise of the Google project.

Under the "fair use"? doctrine is it ok for Google to copy these books without permission in order to use them for a "?transformative"? purpose i.e. to make them electronically searchable? It is not competing commercially with publishers and arguably could be enhancing the market for their books but perhaps a publisher might like to create its own comprehensive contents searchable index, drawing searchers to their own websites? What happens if Google gets into the publishing business further down the line? They could potentially bias search results towards their own material.

Reasonable people and copyright scholars, interpreting the language of the copyright statutes and the precedent setting cases, can disagree about whether the Google copying is either "transformative"? or "fair use."? Some cases in the US might point towards the Google activity being permissible e.g. Kelly v. Arriba Soft Corp./Ditto.com (decision in 2003 in a dispute over making digital thumbnail copies of images available via a Web search engine). Others e.g. the MP3.com case (in 2000, a dispute over copying thousands of CDs to make them available via the Internet to people who could prove they had a legitimately acquired copy) suggest not and Google might be held liable for copyright infringement.

In the EU, unless the activity is specified as permissible, arguably it is prohibited. Under articles 2 and 5 of Copyright Directive 2001/29/EC on the harmonisation of certain aspects of copyright and related rights in the information society, the Google project does not appear in the list of exceptions (art.5) of permitted activity, so is presumably not allowed.

So we will not find out whether the Google Print project is permissible in law until it gets challenged through the courts, if that ever happens.

I'd be grateful for any feedback, especially on my interpretation of how the mechanics of copyright law applies here. Although I'm fascinated by the Google Print project and I think it is an excellent initiative, I'm a technologist, not a lawyer.

UK government consultancy costs

Apparently the UK government pay "IT consultants from top global firms charge on average £1,400 per day for work on UK government contract assignments"

Finance consultants get £2000 a day. At the bottom of the pile, bog standard ICT support consultants get £750 a day.

"However, as the analysis points out, the variation in average rates could also come from the amount of senior resources needed for each project. Categories demanding more senior input would attract higher rates.

For a partner or director in a global IT consultancy, the average rate is £2,258 per day, the official figures show. Their equivalent in a 'second tier' IT consulting firm would cost £1,766. A similar comparison for the average day rate of a principal consultant is £1,532 and £1,149."

I'd be happy to fill in for those senior resources for, say, £2000 a day. That's an 11.4% saving. You can't say better than that.

Secure Flight reverting to CAPPSII

Bruce Schneier, who is on the working group evaluating the security and privacy implications of the US Secure Flight passenger screening program, is very critical of the expanding scope of the program is his latest Cryptogram.

He also has a perspective on the London's Metropolitan Police shoot-to-kill policy when dealing with suspected suicide terrorists.

"The London police are now sorry they accidentally killed an innocent they suspected of being a suicide bomber, but I can certainly understand the mistake. In the end, the best solution is to train police officers and then leave the decision to them. But honestly, policies that are more likely to result in living incarcerated suspects who can be interrogated are better than policies that are more likely to result in corpses, especially when most suspects will be found innocent."

Lot's more besides, Cryptogram is always a good read.

Open Source convergence with open access

John Willinsky at the University of British Columbia has an interesting article in First Monday, on open source software, open access to research and scholarship, and open science.

Are universities currently re–entering the world on the side of a greater openness among intellectual properties or are they getting in on a greater share of knowledge–based property rights? Up to this point, the universities have fostered open science, and advanced open source software, even if both originated off campus in large measure. With the more recent of these open initiatives — open access — it falls almost entirely to the universities and their faculty to take the lead. Universities "re–entering the world" with the intent to "serve the world" would do well to support faculty participation in open access archives and journals. Open access to research and scholarship would foster a global exchange of public goods. It would extend and sustain an open, alternative economy for intellectual properties. It would strengthen the links between open source software — which is vital to providing open access to research — and the university’s long–standing tradition of open science. Given the encroachments, not to mention the temptations, of the knowledge business, this is no time to take the commonwealth of learning for granted. It falls to the members of that commonwealth to recognize and support the current convergence of open initiatives that represent dedicated efforts to ensure the future of that learning.

This is no time to take the commonwealth of learning for granted. I like that.

$100 laptop

Chinese eye $100 wireless laptop

UK game mod chip seller pursued by ESA

The founder of a UK-based games console modification company has pledged to fight the US software industry's attempt to shut down his business.

Still not buying it

Donna Wenthworth is still not buying drm.

Home Office ID shopping list

William Heath has the Home Office ID shopping list.

The Home Office has come out with plans to spend our money on an ID system. It reckons it's in the market for building and maintaining a National Identity Register; recording and matching biometrics; registration processes; IT & comms; the actual cards; plus office space, FM, corporate support systems/ services, call centre, ID verification services, accreditation of user organisations, account management and marketing (all subject to the law being passed). If you want to sell such services keep an eye on the hardcore ID web site http://www.identitycards.gov.uk

Microsoft beat Apple to the iPod patent!

Pamela Jones has been thinking about the patent reform proposals proceeding through Congress that mean it will be the first to file a patent that owns an invention, not the first to invent. And about Microsoft sniggering about getting to the Patent Office before Apple to patent an element of key iPod technology.

"Now, I don't know all the ins and outs of this particular case, but let's assume that the reports are 100% accurate, although that would be a media first, and things happened just that way, and let's think about the situation under the first-to-file rule. Microsoft wins hands down, then, despite Apple being the earlier inventor. Are you sure you like that result? Not you, Microsoft. We know you are chortling. The rest of you.

The Patent Office may look deeper and realize what they've done, and hopefully justice will be done there, or in court later, but the only reason that can happen is because so far the US is a country with a law whereby a patent can be invalidated by prior art or proof of prior invention. While nothing is right about a system where Apple will have to spend maybe millions to straighten this out, at least they have the hope of being able to do so under the current system.

My question is, how could something like this happen under the current system? The Patent Office examiner never saw an iPod? And more pertinently, Microsoft didn't know about iPods, when it filed its patent? Puh-lease. And yet, do you feel 100% sure that Apple will win? The US patent system is an unholy mess, and the law in practice has become so bizarre and arbitrary and out of sync with the way the system was set up to work that you can't even predictably rely on a just outcome. Laws are supposed to at least be *trying* to bring about a just result.

Here's my next question... did Microsoft list the iPod, like they are supposed to, when they filed for their patent? You're not allowed to hide prior art. When you are applying for a patent, you have a duty of candor, as they put it, to list all prior art you know about. iPods. We're talking iPods. Is there anyone left on the planet who hasn't heard of iPods?

It's an affirmative defense in any patent infringement lawsuit, if the patent was gained by knowingly concealing prior art. It's called inequitable conduct, and it can result in a patent that isn't enforceable. What? Microsoft? Inequitable conduct?"

EU Commission to sue premier league

Looks like the European Commission are going to take legal action against the Premier League over the lack of competition in televising games. More power to them.

When my six year old excitedly told me Arsenal were playing yesterday and asked if we could watch it "on our television" (we don't have BskyB), he was a bit put out to hear we wouldn't be able to see the match.

"Aaawww. It's not right Dad. I'm very annoyed. They shouldn't do it like that. They're naughty. They should make it so that we can watch it on our television too."

I could only respond to his determined little frown by telling him he was absolutely right.

Mind you, when we sat down to watch Match of the Day (recorded from Saturday evening for Sunday morning viewing) he was less than impressed with the quality of the football served up on the opening day of the new season. At least the earlier frown was replaced by his sparkling grin when he discovered later in the day that the Gunners had secured a comforable two-nil win against Newcastle.

To ecourage creativity get rid of the suits

Jonathan Rowe wants to get rid of the suits in the creative industries.

"We’ve all heard the justifications for the emerging property police state – the copyright term extensions, the international jihad on infringers, the government mandating of anti-copying technology and the rest. It’s to protect the “creative process,”, the inspired artist laboring away in a basement or garage.

To listen to the whining from the film and recording industries, it is a wonder that a Charlie Chaplin ever bothered to pick up a camera, or Frank Sinatra to croon a song, seeing that the term of copyright was much shorter in their days than it is now...

Once in a while the truth slips out, which it did recently in GW Magazine, which is published by George Washington University in D.C. The magazine (Spring/Summer 2005) did a profile of Dan Glickman, the former Congressman and Agriculture Secretary and a G.W. alum, who has succeeded Jack Valenti as head of the Motion Picture Association of America. The piece quotes Glickman on the industry’s crackdown on copying. “The average movie today costs $103 million to make,” he says, “and six out of 10 of them don’t make that money back. Making movies has become incredibly expensive — and that’s why preventing piracy has become so crucial.”

It’s not about a creative process but rather a non-creative one, with bloated budgets and overpaid and often under-talented stars. The push in other words comes from the business side of the house – the side that often pulverizes the very talent the lobbyists in Washington are claiming to nurture."

The 2004 election conspiracy theory

Project censored have a report from an academic in California, Dennis Loo, who believes that George Bush won the 2004 election with the help of widespread fraud. There certainly were anomalies in the vote but I'm not convinced there was the kind of centrally orchestrated fraud theorised here. Some very smart evoting experts monitored the election and picked up on most of the issues mentioned and others. In spite of the problems, though, the likes of Ed Felten, Avi Rubin and Bruce Schneier have never suggested that the election was stolen, as believed by Dennis Loo.

Certainly there remain unanswered questions and the explanations thus far offered for some of the inconsistencies don't hold water. The sum of a series of unexplained difficulties does not always amount to a central conspiracy, however. Though there would seem to be plenty of merit in investigating local anomalies in order to track down the real causes. Complex processes will always exhibit complex localised problems and folks like Rubin and Felten have gone to great lengths to explain the issues with introducing electronic voting machines into the election process. Their predictions the the kind of problems we would see following the inappropriate deployment poorly designed version of these machines will to some extent have been borne out in the 2004 election. Getting to the root of the actual causes in the various localities in the live election will be important so that the process can be repaired for the next time.

Teachers first for ID cards

According to the Sunday Times, the government are considering making ID cards compulsory for teachers and childcare workers "years before they become mandatory for everyone else"

Da Vinci Code film

John's been thinking about the secrecy surrounding the making of the film version of Dan Brown's bestselling book, the Da Vinci Code.

"There are rumours of strong pressure on the film-makers to change the plot of the book (thereby, it seems to me, missing the entire point of the book).

Here’s how things stack up: on the one hand, there are all those Da Vinci Code fans out there (37 million copies sold, so far); on the other, all those devout Christian fanatics. Which way will Sony jump? Watch this space…"

Google better at searching gov sites

From what's new on the UK legal web,

"you will generally get a more helpful result set using a Google site search of government sites (ie prefix the search terms with site:gov.uk) than you will by just searching within Directgov."

Minority report on the identity trail

Hilary Young on the indentity trail confesses she doesn't care much about informational privacy and companies collecting details about her so they can target appropriate offers in her direction.

"Now before you revoke my membership in the On the Identity Trail project, let me defend myself. I think one of the most important things this project is doing is imagining the implications of various future legal, policy and technological changes so that we as a society can make informed decisions about what we want to happen. If, knowing the consequences, people want to live in a Minority Report-type world where ads are targeted to specific individuals, that's fine by me. The problem is that we risk ending up in such situations, not because we've chosen them, but because we have made a number of incremental decisions that led to an undesirable result only because we didn't have the foresight to avoid it."

Incremental ill-informed decisions that lead to undesirable results are, unfortunately, all too common in the technology arena.

DMCA v Darknet

Ed Felton is amongst the participants in an online discussion next week on the balancing the benefits of developments in technology against the downside that those technologies can also be used towards less than ethical ends. Promises to be lively with a cast of very smart thinkers on the issues.

Open access and the academy

Heather Morrison has been thinking about the positive feedback she's got recently on one of her articles available in an open repository and the benefits more generally of open access.

Timeliness: by archiving a preprint, I am able to reach potential readers in a much more timely fashion.

Impact: by sharing the article openly, more people are reading it, and acting on the ideas. Others have demonstrated the academic impact advantage of open access (increased citations) through research. This is real world impact - most likely to be relevant for faculty in the professional programs. This makes professional practice informed by research possible, illustrated by the trend towards evidence-based medicine.

Access: people whose libraries do not have subscriptions are much more likely to read the article.

Prestige: for those who do write and present a fair bit, this is a way to show off. This is not (entirely) self-serving; read on...

The description of her blog also gives you an idea of her perspective on all this:

Imagine a world where anyone can instantly access all of the world's scholarly knowledge - as profound a change as the invention of the printing press. Technically, this is within reach. All that is needed is a little imagination, to reconsider the economics of scholarly communications from a poetic viewpoint.

Google Print scans on hold until November

Google's effort to digitise all the world's out-of-copyright books is suspending the scanning of books until November to give publishers and authors an opportunity to opt out of having their books included in the project.

Update: Aaron Swartz is not pleased. And Siva and Derek Slater have entered that particular debate.

Isenberg on the new FCC approach to the Net

David Isenberg is concerned at the change in approach of the FCC, since Michael Powell stepped down and former FCC commissioner Kevin Martin took over as chairman.

Powell: Freedom to access content.
Martin: Consumers are entitled to access the lawful Internet content of their choice.

Powell: Freedom to run applications.
Martin: Consumers are entitled to run applications and services of their choice, subject to the needs of law enforcement;

Powell: Freedom to attach devices.
Martin: Consumers are entitled to connect their choice of legal devices that do not harm the network.

Powell: Freedom to obtain service plan information.
Martin: Consumers are entitled to competition among network providers, application and service providers, and content providers.

And the Martin FCC adds an important footnote:

All of these principles are subject to reasonable network management.

Some of the people commenting on his posting disagree and see little difference between the new chairman and the old.

Thought thieve$

From the EFF:

"Never afraid to reach new heights on the unintentional
comedy scale, Microsoft UK debuted its "Thought Thieves"
film competition in May. Microsoft called for original
videos "about people stealing the ideas in your head"
and "intellectual property theft."

To counter this misleading campaign, a few good souls
"stole" the idea and started the "Thought Thieve$" film
competition "about big companies stealing and profiting
from the knowledge commons." Reads the announcement:

"Think about it: how would you feel if you saw your
cultural traditions, collective creativity,
thousands-year-old seed strains, indigenous medicinal
knowledge, or even your very genetic code being passed
off as the property of some multinational corporation?
What would you do?"

EFF is an affiliate of the competition, so we're helping
to spread the word! If you have a story to tell about corporate piracy, send your short film in by September
16, 2005. You may win prizes and be included in an
international distribution and screening series.

Check out the contest website for details: http://thought-thieves.org"

Clever. It will be interesting to see how the entries in the rival competitions compare!

Court dismiss Jet Blue privacy suit

A court in New York has thrown out a privacy lawsuit against JetBlue airways over their controversial disclosure of passenger details to the government as raw material to test a data mining system. EPIC have some background information on their involvement in chasing the government for details of why the information was handed over and how it was used.

In September 2003, JetBlue Airways confirmed that it had provided 5 million passenger itineraries, without the passengers' consent, to defense contractor Torch Concepts to test the feasibility of an Army data mining project. Torch Concepts added to the JetBlue data information it purchased from Acxiom, a large consumer research company. This information included passengers' Social Security numbers, occupations, income, gender, home ownership, car ownership, and the number of adults and children living in the passengers' households.

On February 20, 2004, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Privacy Office released a report (pdf) on the JetBlue disclosure which said that in 2002 officials of Torch Concepts met with Transportation Security Administration (TSA) officials. After this meeting, a TSA employee sent JetBlue a written request asking the airline to provide passenger data to the Defense Department for use in the Torch Concepts study. The report found that TSA employees involved "acted without appropriate regard for individual privacy interests or the spirit of the Privacy Act of 1974," but that no violation of the law had occurred.

In April 2004, American Airlines' parent corporation issued a press release admitting that an American Airlines vender had turned over passenger travel data to four research companies vying for contracts with TSA.

In April 2004, EPIC received documents from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in response to a FOIA request. One document (pdf) stated that Northwest Airlines "gave the FBI one year's [passenger] data on 6000 CDs."

To learn the extent of the government's passenger data collection scheme, and to determine whether passenger data might have been collected for purposes of developing the controversial second-generation Computer Assisted Passenger Prescreening System (CAPPS II), EPIC ultimately sent four expedited Freedom of Information Act requests to TSA and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) seeking information on passenger data disclosure from any airline since September 11, 2001, as well as records relating to Acxiom, Torch Concepts, and SRS Technologies (the primary contractor in the Defense Department project).

Ridiculous lawsuits

I'm currently writing a book about decision making in the realm of the development, deployment and regulation of technology but I'm thinking about writing another one about ridiculous lawsuits in a similar context. This is partly because we've all heard stories, like this one, about silly cases that should never get anywhere near a busy courtroom, let alone resulted in that daft outcome.

What may seem funny to the casual external observer, however, is rarely a funny experience for the parties on the receiving end, who have had the misfortune of making a mistake in crossing the path of serial, sometimes even unknowing (I doubt Fed Ex management knew about this in advance) or opportunistic litigants with smart or equally opportunistic lawyers. The other problem is that lawyers live in a completely different world to the rest of us - a world where it seems a perfectly reasonable thing to do to protect the interests of your client by threatening to sue someone for making furniture out of their cardboard boxes.

A variation on a theme is the vengeful litigant intent on extracting their requisite pound of flesh from someone who has outwitted them, as is the case with school district pressing charges against teenagers who bypassed the filters on school issued laptops. It wasn't difficult, since the admin password was apparently taped on the back of all the machines. Some of the children involved have been expelled from school and we don't know the details of what each individual did with their filter-free freedoms but trying to ensure they all end up with a criminal record is not sensible course of action. Even the police chief caught up in expediting the felony charges doesn't seem to think the kids did anything malicious, (though that could be journalistic interpretation to fit in with the rest of the piece). Whatever happens in the end, very few people will come out of this one unscathed. The parents of the 13 charged have set up a website on the case. They don't want the " kids to get off without appropriate consequences" but the looming consequences are disproportionate.

Thanks to Michael Geist for the links to both stories.

LSE respond to government criticism on ID cards

The LSE have produced a 30 page response to the government's criticisms of their Identity Project report. This press release gives a brief overview,

The Home Office document contains some interesting elements and we welcome the fact that the project team are engaging more fully with critics. But we are disappointed that the HO response contains substantial material errors and misrepresentation of fact. It also sets out rebuttals that cite material which is not relevant to the points in question. On a number of critical issues, HO's response rebuts aspects of the LSE report without providing alternative data (for example, on assumptions relating to population data, card loss and damage rates and the card replacement rates due to change in personal circumstances).

It is equally disappointing that the Home Office has chosen to disregard the vast majority of the LSE report. Comprehensive sections on identity fraud, policing, crime, national security, counter-terrorism, discrimination, international obligations and the UK IT environment have been ignored. Even within the two narrow areas that were chosen for rebuttal (cost projections and the alternative blueprint) 80 per cent of the relevant parts of the LSE report - some 25,000 words of analysis of costings and alternative approaches - are not commented upon.

FFII site takedown

From the excellent EDRI-gram, "The long running legal fight between the German software company Nutzwerk (Leipzig) and the Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure (FFII, best known for its extensive lobby against software patents) has culminated in the takedown of the FFII.org website on 1 August 2005."

The latest EDRI-gram also brings news of the long running Napster case in Norway regarding whether linking to sites with copyright infringing material could constitute making the material available to the public and hence bring on liability.

"The Court states that it is beyond doubt that making a web-address known on a website does not constitute a 'making available to the public', regardless of whether or not the link refers to a web-address containing legally or illegally published material. Whether a web-address is expressed on the Internet or in a newspaper is immaterial."

Another IT system hiccough

The Telegraph is reporting that the government's " much-vaunted "prison without bars" system of electronic tags for sex offenders has suffered severe technical problems" and the Home Office press office, not surprisingly, "strongly advised against any publicity." Naturally the news leaked.

Real ID mess

Anita Ramasastry of the University of Washington School of Law thinks the Real ID Act in the US is a real mess. Having been voted down as a substantive piece of legislation last year it was then tacked on spending plans for the war on terror and the tsunami relief and sneaked through without debate. Ramasastry says it will be a nightmare for state governments who have to fund the technical infrastruture, without any extra financial support from the federal government.

"No wonder, then, that more than 600 organizations have expressed concern over the Real ID Act. Organizations such as the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators, the American Library Association the Association for Computing Machinery, the National Council of State Legislatures, the American Immigration Lawyers Association and the National Governors Association are among them."

Here in the UK, the government's original plans to fund the ID cards through fees have taken a hammering as people have begun to realise how much they will cost and support for the scheme drops off. So the Home Office have promised to cap the fee in an attempt to ease concerns, though I doubt Gordon Brown and the treasury will be keen on that idea. £5billion to £19 billion is going to have to be found somewhere and with fuel prices shooting through the roof I suspect the prospect of forking out hard earned income to help build a large public IT white elephant will become an even less attractive prospect for many.

IT robber barons

Andrew Cringely on IT as an offensive weapon in business.

Intelligence Officer Investigated over Spy Blog contact

A field intelligence officer is apparently being investigated over contacts with Spy Blog.

2nd amendment for the digital era

John Robert Behrman has a thought provoking treatise over at William Heath's Ideal Government blog. He's a supporter of the US contitutional right to bear arms. Now though he is a fan of guns, it's his extension of this right to cryptography in the digital context that's really interesting:

"In the digital era each and every one of us needs to secure his or her personal identity with strong, trusted cryptographic resources, yes, including military-grade technology now scheduled on the Department of Commerce “Munitions List”.

We need to do this …

(a) To protect ourselves and our property from identity theft; …

(b) To assert our individual civil and property rights, without being preyed upon by oppressive government or piratical business agents; …

(c) To add value in all manner of professional and commercial transactions that depend on authentic credentials and reputation; and, …

(d) Yes, to uphold our largely private civic order and complement other, mostly public means, of collective security that, together, make the criminals, insurgents, or terrorists in our midst conspicuous, unsafe, and unbalanced -- not you or me.

Political extremists love to present the public and private, the individual and collective, order and disorder in stark, radical, and simple rhetorical, even Manichean, terms, as if we have to choose one over the other. Those are false choices offered by those as would steal your and my freedom of action. Such people love to claim “everything has changed!” meaning they want to repudiate something we might hold dear."

He goes on to attack the Texas incantation of the Help America Vote intitiative, which he describes as the latest excuse to build a " giant, centralized, database for near real-time political-economic surveillance of everybody in this country, everywhere, all the time."

Read the whole thing. I nearly didn't because I intially thought it was a "gun-nut" (as Berhman describes another friend) sounding off. You may or may not agree with him but he'll make you stop and think.

Thrash day at Politech

Declan McCullagh is having a thrash day at Politech, following his recent concerns about the rules allowing law enforcement authorities access to peoples' rubbish without a warrant. He's pointed out at an interesting story at Willamette Weekly Online. The local paper, following the police chief's, the mayor's and the district attorney's support for the right to search a suspect's rubbish without judicial oversight, decided to do a little rubbish trawling themselves. Reporters from the paper went through the garbage left by the roadside, by each of these three officials, for refuse collection. The public prosecutor was the only one of the three who saw the funny side. The mayor's threatening to sue.

"Each, in his or her own way, has endorsed the notion that you abandon your privacy when you set your trash out on the curb. So we figured they wouldn't mind too much if we took a peek at theirs.

Boy, were we wrong.

Perched in his office on the 15th floor of the Justice Center, Chief Kroeker seemed perfectly comfortable with the idea of trash as public property.

"Things inside your house are to be guarded," he told WW. "Those that are in the trash are open for trash men and pickers and--and police. And so it's not a matter of privacy anymore."

Then we spread some highlights from our haul on the table in front of him.

"This is very cheap," he blurted out...

If the chief got overheated, the mayor went nuclear. When we confessed that we had swiped her recycling, she summoned us to her chambers.

"She wants you to bring the trash--and bring the name of your attorney," said her press secretary, Sarah Bott...

...her office issued a prepared statement. "I consider Willamette Week's actions in this matter to be potentially illegal and absolutely unscrupulous and reprehensible," it read. "I will consider all my legal options in response to their actions."

In contrast, DA Mike Schrunk was almost playful when we owned up to nosing through his kitchen scraps. "Do I have to pay for this week's garbage collection?" he joked...

It's worth emphasizing that our junkaeological dig unearthed no whiff of scandal...

But if three moral, upstanding, public-spirited citizens were each chewing their nails about the secrets we might have stumbled on, how the hell should the rest of us be feeling?"

Gateway Review - three quarters may fail

Under a Freedom of Information Act request the UK Government have provided the list of 271 major IT projects that have been subject to the Office of Government Commerce Gateway Review process, revealing that more than three quarters are not progressing according to plans.

Cracking the Books

From Donna

"Princeton University, intellectual home of Edward Felten and Alex Halderman, has evidently begun to experiment with DRM'd textbooks."

The crackdown

The crackdown from yesterday's Observer. A report on the prime minister's latest round of anti-terrorism proposals.

The Shout on Ciscogate part 4

Jennifer Granick has posted her final episode of the story about a young researcher getting sued by Cisco and his former employer for revealing security vunerabilities with Cisco products.

A Society Drunk on Technology

Frank Work, the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Alberta, has been blogging on the Identity Trail.

We sometimes lack the willingness to think and analyze before we act. In a world where we become impatient if it takes more than a second to download a two thousand page document, where we expect an immediate reply to our email, where we expect someone to answer their cellphone wherever, whenever we call, where we demand instant credit and immediate gratification of our wants, we tend to look for the immediate fix to problems. And, we usually adopt the techno-fix, so strongly do we believe in the power of technology. But the techno-fix, the quick-fix, is not always the best fix: there is, after all, the law of unintended consequences. There is an old Luddite saying: “Act in haste, repent at leisure.”

He's right of course: We sometimes lack the willingness to think and analyze before we act.

The Rubbish and 1984

Declan McCullagh is concerned that it is legal for the law enforcement authorities to be able to trawl through people's rubbish for evidence. Justice James C. Nelson in an opinion confirming such activity as legal is also concerned:

"In short, I know that my personal information is recorded in databases, servers, hard drives and file cabinets all over the world. I know that these portals to the most intimate details of my life are restricted only by the degree of sophistication and goodwill or malevolence of the person, institution, corporation or government that wants access to my data.

I also know that much of my life can be reconstructed from the contents of my garbage can.

I don't like living in Orwell's 1984; but I do. And, absent the next extinction event or civil libertarians taking charge of the government (the former being more likely than the latter), the best we can do is try to keep Sam and the sub-Sams on a short leash."

Declan includes Justice Nelson's concurring opinion from the relevant recent case at the end of his article.

Copy protected Sony CDs don't work with iPods

Furdlog has picked up a story saying Sony's copy protected CDs don't work with iPods.

Skip the border guard

Skip the border guard, fast-track the IT - security, UK style John Lettice in full flow

"So shall we just sum that up? A terror suspect appears to have fled the country by the simple expedient of walking past an empty desk, and the Government's reaction is not to put somebody at the desk, or to find out why, during one of the biggest manhunts London has ever seen, it was empty in the first place. No, the Government's reaction is to explain its abject failure to play with the toys it's got by calling for bigger, more expensive toys sooner."

It's a wide ranging article, well worth reading in full.

New EU IP crime directive proposed

The EU have proposed a new directive on criminal measures aimed at ensuring the enforcement of intellectual property rights. A html version is also available. Pamela Jones at Groklaw is concerned that it is the kind of legal framework that companies like SCO would have a field day with. Looks to me at first glance like an adjunct to the IPR enforcement directive passed in the Spring of 2004.

Schneier on Ciscogate

Bruce Schneier turns his usual sensible take on all things to do with security to the Cisco v Lynn dispute.

"I've written about full disclosure, and how disclosing security vulnerabilities is our best mechanism for improving security -- especially in a free-market system. (That essay is also worth reading for a general discussion of the security trade-offs.) I've also written about how security companies treat vulnerabilities as public-relations problems first and technical problems second. This week at BlackHat, security researcher Michael Lynn and Cisco demonstrated both points...

The security implications of this are enormous. If companies have the power to censor information about their products they don't like, then we as consumers have less information with which to make intelligent buying decisions. If companies have the power to squelch vulnerability information about their products, then there's no incentive for them to improve security...

Full disclosure is good for society. But because it helps the bad guys as well as the good guys (see my essay on secrecy and security for more discussion of the balance), many of us have championed "responsible disclosure" guidelines that give vendors a head start in fixing vulnerabilities before they're announced."

Ciscogate

Jennifer Granick has the inside story on Cisco suing security researcher Mike Lynn over his talk explaining a Cisco security vunerability at the Black Hat conference recently. She represented Lynn in the legal negotiations which were eventually settled out of court.

Shocking Orwell

Victor Keegan in the Guardian thinks George Orwell would be shocked at present day support for surveillance technologies.

UK minister apologises for overselling ID cards

The UK government are trying new kinder, gentler tactics to persuade people about the need for ID cards now that public support for the idea is dropping off. Home Office minister Tony McNulty who is in charge of the scheme has admitted that the government got a bit carried away in implying that the ID cards might

"be a panacea for identity fraud, benefit fraud, terrorism, and entitlement and access to public services...

Perhaps we ran away with it in our enthusiasm. I apologise for our overselling the case for ID cards ..."

That's a bit of a turn up for the books but the cynic in me sees it as little more than more politicking, since they are going ahead with the scheme anyway and they're still going on the attack against the LSE and other critics. The Guardian article seems to be suggesting that the sudden realisation of the existence of a procedural blockage could be behind the softer approach. Apparently the House of Lords will be able to stop the cards being made compulsory because the government intended to slip this through in secondary legislation. But if the Lords say no to this there will be nothing the government can do about it.

This is a classic example of where arcane but supremely important constitutional procedures, of almost no interest to all but the dedicated few, have a real, direct, practical effect on the lives of every citizen. If that's what it takes to kill the ID card proposals currently on the table then more power to those Lords' elbows.

Canadian ISP blocks 766 sites

In it's efforts to block access to a union website, Canadian ISP, Telnus also inadvertently blocked out another 766 websites, according to the OpenNet Initiative run jointly by the Citizen Lab at the Munk Centre for International Studies, University of Toronto, the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard, and the Advanced Network Research Group at Cambridge University.

Blocked sites included those of an engineering company, a breast cancer charity and a recycling company. Because they chose to filter on the basis of the IP address, it resulted in this extensive "collatoral filtering".

Crude filtering can and does result in unnecessary censorship. In one case the ONI discovered that South Korean ISPs attempting to block access to 31 North Korean sites, also blocked 3167 sites hosted on the same servers as the sites targeted. This blog is regularly blocked, as crude filters assume that the treble x in the title means that it must be some sort of porn site. I've been at conference centres where I can't access my own blog in order to check something out because of this and even when I am successful at getting a block lifted, the next automatic trawl puts my b2fxxx ramblings right back on that black list again.

Euro infringing my patent

The European Central Bank have been sued for patent infringement. The patent in question concerns the anti-counterfeiting measures used in Euro bank notes.

"Document Security Systems Inc. said in a lawsuit filed Monday in Luxembourg that all 30 billion euro bank notes in circulation infringe on a patent it acquired this year that was issued by the European Patent Office in 1999. It is seeking unspecified royalties from the European Central Bank in Frankfurt, Germany."

Mowry v Viacom

William Patry recommends a copyright decision issued by judge Andrew Peck last week, Mowry v Viacom. Mowry complained that the Jim Carey film, "The Truman Show", infringed the copyright in his unpublished script. If you're into legalese it's certainly a clear, thoughful, thorough and sensible ruling. Given the amount of copyright litigation (including volumes of threatening cesae and desist letters) that goes on these days, what's interesting is the judge's clear exposition of the burden of proof on the plaintiff, which is higher than critics of copyright laws might have been led to expect.

For example, in respect of proving the alledged infringer's access to the infringed work, in the US "Access means that an alledged infringer had a 'reasonable possibility' - not simply a 'bear possibility' - of hearing [or seeing] the prior work; access cannot be based on mere 'speculation or conjecture.'" He goes on to explain what this means in real terms in relation to the relevant precedents.

There's even a bit of humour, in relation to the expert witness evidence Mowry used to demonstrate the similarity of the scripts:

"Mowry points to no case in which an expert using cladistic or phylogenetic tree analysis has been used to show striking similarity (or even substantial similarity) between literary works, and the Court's research has found no such cases. While it is true that there must be a first time for an expert methodology to be accepted by the courts, this is not the case."

No, I don't know what "cladistic or phylogenetic tree analysis" is either but full marks to Mowry for trying and to the judge for a clear, sensible decision. Sometimes the little guy loses for the right reasons.

BPI take 5 to court

The British Phonographic Industry are taking five people to court for P2P music swapping. They've already settled out of court with about 60 people according to this Guardian report but failed to reach a settlement with the folk they are suing. One woman has claimed she doesn't have the means to pay the £4000 the BPI are asking. In a familiar story, the teenage daughter was alledgedly involved in the copyright infringement and her mother has no computer skills and doesn't use the machine at all but "just pays the bills."

JISC £15 million for IT and open content

The Joint Information Systems Committee, JISC, have been given an "extra £15m to invest in IT initiatives to support learning, teaching and research." (on top of £25 million they got earlier in the year).

According to the announcement,

The funds, totalling £40m, will be used for a range of activities and represents a significant investment to support and enhance further the UK’s digital infrastructure, access to online content and the development of digital repositories...

The funding, which covers the years 2006 – 2008, will be invested in the following areas of activity:

continued development of the JANET network, including the incorporation of the UKLight testbed network, which links communities of researchers around the world, to JANET;

further digitisation of major scholarly collections;

enhancement to a range of e-learning programmes, including e-assessment, e-portfolios and e-learning tools;

development of the e-infrastructure, including the development of collaborative environments, such as virtual research environments;

development of a shared infrastructure to support the growing use of institutional repositories."

WiFi freeloading now crime in the UK

EdFelton draws my attention to a BBC story

"A British man has been fined and given a suspended prison sentence for connecting to a stranger’s WiFi access point without permission, according to a BBC story. There is no indication that he did anything improper while connected; all he did was to park his car in front of a stranger’s house and connect his laptop to the stranger’s open WiFi network. He was convicted of “dishonestly obtaining an electronic communications service”...

Another part of the BBC article is even scarier:

“There have been incidences where paedophiles deliberately leave their wireless networks open so that, if caught, they can say that is wasn’t them that used the network for illegal purposes,” said NetSurity’s Mr Cracknell.

Such a defence would hold little water as the person installing the network, be they a home user or a business, has ultimate responsibility for any criminal activity that takes place on that network, whether it be launching a hack attack or downloading illegal pornography."

I doubt this is true. If it is, everybody who runs a WiFi network is at risk of a long jail sentence. "

Rule by fools

Bryan Caplan, Associate Professor of Economics at George Mason University, reckons Rule By Fools Is the Rule,

"democratic rule by fools is perfectly normal. Or to be more accurate, in a democracy our rulers are older versions of the popular kids from high school. The only difference is that politicians are champions in the Olympics of popularity contests. They are painfully weak on substance, but have an amazing ability to make people like them. And if they have to choose between being right and being popular, they don't think twice. They're Olympians; their overriding priority is winning...

We're ruled by fools election after election because the majority habitually prefers affable fools to disagreeable pedants."

Wonderful!

Cory to drop Apple?

Cory Doctorow has been using Apple computers simce 1979. If they build drm into their new architecture, though, he's going to look for another vendor.

"I've been an Apple user since 1979. I've owned dozens -- probably more than a hundred -- Macintoshes. When I worked in the private sector, I used to write purchase orders for about a quarter-million dollars' worth of Apple hardware every year. I've stuck with the machines over the years because the fit-and-finish of the OS and the generally kick-ass hardware made them the best choice for me. I've converted innumerable people to the Mac (most recently I got my grandmother's octogenarian boyfriend to pick up a Mac Mini, which he loves). Hell, I even bought half a dozen Newtons over the years...

The Trusted Computing people say that they intend on Trusted Computing being used to stop the unauthorized distribution of music, but none of them has ever refuted the Darknet paper, where several of Trusted Computing's inventors explain that Trusted Computing isn't fit to this purpose.

The point of Trusted Computing is to make it hard -- impossible, if you believe the snake-oil salesmen from the Trusted Computing world -- to open a document in a player other than the one that wrote it in the first place, unless the application vendor authorizes it. It's like a blender that will only chop the food that Cuisinart says you're allowed to chop. It's like a car that will only take the brand of gas that Ford will let you fill it with. It's like a web-site that you can only load in the browser that the author intended it to be seen in...

So that means that if Apple carries on down this path, I'm going to exercise my market power and switch away, and, for the first time since 1979, I won't use an Apple product as my main computer. I may even have my tattoo removed.

My data is my life, and I won't keep it in a strongbox that someone else has the keys for."

Missing digital music

The Wall Street Journal has a nice article today about why so many old music albums are not available in digital form.

"while most pop new releases are a click away, some artists' "back catalogs" are frustrating patchworks, with albums unavailable because of rights issues, because clearing those rights isn't a priority for a record label, or maybe just because they're way down on an awfully long list. Think of them as the digital-music revolution's missing in action."

Part of the problem is that when the music was produced there was no digital rights smallprint in the contracts. There are also publishing rights issues and the music labels own policies on releasing back catalogue material (it's low priority).

Yet when this is all sorted out, these WSJ journalists seem to think that the labels back catalogue is "found money", just as CDs were in their early days, as people bought CD versions of their favorite albums.

Disney fingerprints

Ed Felten alerts me to the fact that Disney World are fingerprinting customers, almost certainly to effect price discrimination.

" Disney sells multi-day tickets at a discount. They don’t want people to buy (say) a ten-day ticket, use it for two days, and then resell the ticket to somebody else. Disney makes about $200 more by selling five separate two-day tickets than by selling a single ten-day ticket. To stop this, they fingerprint the users of such tickets and verify that the fingerprint associated with a ticket doesn’t change from day to day."

WIPO development meeting fails

The third WIPO Development Agenda meeting has ended without agreement. There are concerns noted here by the EFF that the US and Japan have undermined a useful process by insisting that the work of the committee tasked with "providing the WIPO General Assembly with specific recommendations for reform" should be transferred to another "moribund advisory committee called the Permanent Committee for Cooperation Related to Intellectual Property (PCIPD)."

Government v LSE continues

The UK government have released an 11 page response to the LSE's critical report on their ID card scheme. It says the LSE report

uses inaccurate assumptions producing inflated cost estimates

and that the LSE's proposed alternative scheme is

insecure
puts personal information at risk
is not costed
is likely to be expensive
would not gain public trust
facilitates identity theft and fraud
has a high risk of failure
is based on insufficient stakeholder consultation
and misrepresents the government's prosed scheme

No pulling of punches there then. They've decided the best form of defence is attack.

Professor Ian Angell of the LSE says:

"We are encouraged that the government has responded to the LSE report. This is an important step forward in nurturing a meaningful debate.

We have not been given an opportunity to scrutinise the government's document. We will comment substantively when we have had time to digest the points made.

We are concerned, however, that the Home Office document contains material errors and appears to contain false assumptions about the alternative blueprint proposed. We will clarify and correct these aspects in our response."

Expect this one to run and run.