XVIII International AIDS Conference: patents and access to medicines

The XVIII International AIDS Conference has been taking place this week in Vienna and I would recommend a terrific talk by Ellen ‘t Hoen, Senior Advisor UNITAID Medicines Patent Pool, 'A proposal for change: Managing patents to ensure access to AIDS medicines for all'

"Ten years ago, the world prepared to gather in Durban, South Africa, for the first International AIDS conferenceto be held on the continent most devastated by this terrible disease. At the time, the statistics were grim: only one in a thousand African people in need could get access to AIDS treatment, because the drugs were only available from originator companies who owned the patents on these medicines.  They came with a paralysing price tag of US$10,000 to US$15,000 per patient per year.

Through an immense joint mobilization of people living with HIV/AIDS and their organisations, their doctors and nurses, civil society, dedicated ministries of health, donor governments, and pharmaceutical companies, we have achieved today what most delegates at Durban thought impossible: access to AIDS treatment for more than 4 million people in the developing world...

The AIDS crisis and all its actors have caused a radical change in how we approach intellectual property in the field of medicine. This is reflected in legislative and policy changes, and changes in pharmaceutical companies’ business practices...

Before TRIPS, pharmaceutical patent policies and practices were diverse. For example, many countries did not consider patents on products such as medicines and food to be in the public interest and half of the countries actively excluded pharmaceutical (product) patenting altogether. This included a number of European countries such as Spain and Norway.

The WTO rules put an end to this when it required all member countries to introduce 20 year patents on medicines. As part of the WTO package, it was not possible for countries to opt out of TRIPS while becoming a member of the WTO, and the following years saw a wave of IP reforms in most developing countries to meet the requirements of the TRIPS Agreement. The policy space countries once enjoyed to design IP systems in line with their own development needs and priorities was rapidly shrinking...

In the late nineties, the potential effect of the changing IP rules on access to medicines was little understood, and interest in IP issues among the public health community was still rare.

A couple of things changed that:

In 1998, 39 drug companies and their representative body sued the new democratic South African government over amendments to its Medicines Act, which aimed to make low cost medicines more readily available. The companies asserted it was both unconstitutional and not compliant with the TRIPS Agreement...

Big Pharma vs. Nelson Mandela provided shock therapy. It was a call to action that pulled many different actors onto the stage.

In 1999 at the UN in Geneva, a group of NGOs and AIDS activists held a conference titled ‘compulsory licensing of AIDS drugs.’...

This caused a great deal of concern among the patent holders.

Thailand and Brazil were the first developing countries with AIDS treatment programmes that embraced the notion of universal access. They both heavily relied on the ability to produce low cost medicines in government facilities, illustrating the enormous cost reductions that could be achieved. (e.g., Thai fluconazole for 0.29 USD vs. 11 USD Guatemala negotiated price from originator, a 38-fold difference)...

Then, in April 2001 after a global and domestic public outcry under the leadership of the South African Treatment Action Campaign, the 39 drug companies dropped their case against the South African government. The landscape had dramatically changed. Access to medicines and the need to revisit the patent rules that govern them had become part of a larger political agenda and was no longer the exclusive domain of trade negotiators.

In November 2001, governments at the WTO Ministerial Conference – in an unprecedented move – adopted the Doha Declaration on TRIPS and Public Health. The Doha Declaration made clear that the TRIPS Agreement “can and should be interpreted and implemented in a manner supportive of WTO members' right to protect public health and, in particular, to promote access to medicines for all.” This represented the first significant push back to the relentless march to strengthen private IP rights without regard for societal consequences in poor countries...

The 500-word Doha Declaration on TRIPS and Public Health has been essential in making low cost medicines available on a large scale...

When India became compliant with TRIPS in 2005, it incorporated public health safeguards in its Patents Act...

The AIDS crisis has been an engine for change – not only in thinking about IP and Health -

• but also in the way health care is delivered through task shifting...
• in the role of civil society in decision making in global health...

Market competition for the early generation of generic ARVs resulted in prices per patient per year dropping by 99% over the past decade. Drugs that used to cost $10,000 per year are now widely available for $67 per year.

So, what is the problem?

First, the cost of treatment is increasing again because new AIDS medicines are likely to be patented in developing countries and thus more expensive. Even in India, the new ARVs are likely to be patentable...

Second, increasing numbers of people will need access to new generation treatments. These treatments in general are more widely patented and more expensive...

Third, we still need to expand access to first line medicines to people that do not benefit from them today...

Fourth, we need to be able to respond to new scientific knowledge and evidence; we need to find ways of making key products affordable and available on a wide scale...

Fifth, we are faced with a serious financial crisis that risks setting back the treatment achievements of the last 10 years."

It's a complex and hugely important story, very well told. We often hear of the "copyright wars" and entertainment industry struggles to protect their revenues. Indeed I've been pretty focussed on just that for the past couple of weeks, drafting a chapter on the Digital Economy Act for a book on the nature of information (a substantive draft of which I finally despatched to the editors yesterday, though all the tedious tidying up and formatting of references and bibliography etc. still need to be done). Yet this question of access to medicines is an illustration that the need for a balanced intellectual property landscape transcends stories of the hordes of the mass unwashed 'music thieves' on the internet and really can be a question of life or death. Highly recommended.

Mark Thomas on the then Digital Economy Bill

I'm writing a chapter on the Digital Economy Act for a book on the nature of information and was reminded of Mark Thomas's excellent assessment of the then bill in February this year:

ORGCON

Just a reminder that the first Open Rights Group conference is only a couple of weeks away. ORG say:

"We'll have training sessions about how to lobby your MP and more volunteer workshops. There'll also be discussions on the state of UK politics after #GE2010 and why this is a key moment to push harder for reform on digital issues from surveillance to copyright to DRM. The keynote speaker will be James Boyle, a founder of the modern movement to recognize, protect, and grow the intellectual commons. Sessions will include

• James Boyle on the future of copyright, in London especially for this talk
• Thriving in the Real Digital Economy: Cory Doctorow talks and then chairs a panel of artists.
• Digital Economy Act: What's Next? (Tom Watson, Eric Joyce, Julian Huppert)
• What is the 'Right to Data'? (Heather Brooke, Rufus Pollock)
• Opening up the Data Protection Directive: Can of Worms or Opportunity
• Dismantling the Database State (NO2ID, ARCH, Big Brother Watch) 
• Theft! A History of Music (Jennifer Jenkins)
• ACTA: A Shady Business (La Quadrature du Net, Becky Hogge)

Directions
The central London venue is well-served by public transport. These pages will help you travel to ORGCON by bus, underground (tube) and rail.

Accommodation
We want to help delegates with places to stay in London so let us know your needs. For now, you could try couch surfing!"

That's an impressive line up and I wish I could be there but personal committments dictate otherwise. They have 300 delegates booked up already to hear a very impressive range of speakers including James Boyle, Cory Doctorow and Tom Watson, Jennifer Jenkins and there'll be contributions from Liberty, NO2ID and Big Brother Watch.

Curing maths phobia

I've stuck the software version of the maths phobia cure I spoke about at GikiiV in Google docs.

http://docs.google.com/leaf?id=0B_aUKTaSgbLJMWM5ZjgxZTItYjZjOC00MWQzLTgwMzMtY2ZlYjhkMTliYTc1&hl=en&authkey=CKrbsvoI

http://docs.google.com/leaf?id=0B_aUKTaSgbLJZmU4MjExYmUtYTUzMC00MmRiLThiZDUtYzlhZmI4MjA5YWE1&hl=en&authkey=COPy1fgJ

and Andres will hopefully be making it available on the Gikii website shortly too.

It comes with a creative commons attribution, non commercial, share alike licence.  Tony Nixon developed the game and Karen Shipp produced the software. Both are gifted teachers.

I'm afraid it's Windows based (the OU was exclusively WinTel in the days we produced this stuff) but we'd be delighted if someone wants to adapt for Mac and Linux and other platforms.

In addition to the algebra game that I demonstrated at GikiiV it also covers a few extra things like circles, radians, degrees, angles and triangles, discounted cash flow and interest, brackets and substitution - basic numeracy we used to teach in our old Open University T102 Living with Technology course.

To try it you just need to download the zipped files, extract them (with WinZip or equivalent) to a single folder on your PC, double click on num3.exe and away you go.

The pre-test covers a range of stuff - it does a basic assessment of where the user is and then recommends parts of the old T102 course the student should study and which parts of the (CAL) software they should work through.

If you just want to start straight in with the counters game, then click on 'Section' and '1 Introduction to the game' and off you go.  We've been using this game at the Open University to cure algebra phobias for many years and as far as I know it has never failed in the classroom. I'd be interested in hearing readers experiences with it

Creative Commons Director hits back at ASCAP attack

Eric Steuer has hit back at the American Society of Composers Authors and Publishers campaign to fight creative commons.

"Dear Creative Commons supporter, 

Last week, ASCAP sent a fundraising letter to its members calling on them to fight "opponents" such as Creative Commons, falsely claiming that we work to undermine copyright.*

Creative Commons licenses are copyright licenses – plain and simple. Period. CC licenses are legal tools that creators can use to offer certain usage rights to the public, while reserving other rights. Without copyright, these tools don't work. Artists and record labels that want to make their music available to the public for certain uses, like noncommercial sharing or remixing, should consider using CC licenses. Artists and labels that want to reserve all of their copyright rights should absolutely not use CC licenses.

Many musicians, including acts like Nine Inch Nails, Beastie Boys, Youssou N'Dour, Tone, David Byrne, Radiohead, Yunyu, Kristin Hersh, and Snoop Dogg, have used Creative Commons licenses to share with the public. These musicians aren't looking to stop making money from their music. In fact, many of the artists who use CC licenses are also members of collecting societies, including ASCAP. That's how we first heard about this smear campaign – many musicians that support Creative Commons received the email and forwarded it to us. Some of them even included a donation to Creative Commons.

If you are similarly angered by ASCAP's deceptive tactics, I'm hoping that you can help us by donating to Creative Commons – and sending a message – at this critical time. We don't have lobbyists on the payroll, but with your support we can continue working hard on behalf of creators and consumers alike.

Sincerely,

Eric Steuer

Creative Director, Creative Commons

* For background on ASCAP's anti-Creative Commons fundraising campaign, see Boing Boing, Techdirt, ZeroPaid, and Wired."

Well said.

Gikii V: the voyage home

The Gikii conference returned to its birthplace in Edinburgh University this year. The ever amusing (and now Professor) Burkhard Schafer has understatedly described Gikii as the conference without any of the boring papers; and I have to say that in five years of being privileged to participate in this ecclectic and thought provoking cyberlaw gathering I don't recall a single dud talk. The event, the company and the engagement are always terrific value.

The B2fxxx award (the Gikii BAFTA?) for the best Gikii comedy performance of the year this year gets shared between:

(The now Dr.) Daithí Mac Síthigh for his "What We Talk About When We Talk About Google" on the places Google reaches from social conversation through to the courts and how the YouTube v Viacom decision caught us by surprise

and

Trevor Callghan for "GOOGLE WANT FREND!" or thoughts on Google and social networking and the contrast between Google and social networking giants - Google is all about data, Facebook is about people.

The situation comedy award goes to:

Hugh Hancock for "Stories for Laws: the narratives behind the Digital Economy Bill, which ones worked, and most importantly: why?"

The 'I hadn't thought of it like that before' award goes to Steven Hetcher for "Conceptual Art, Found Art, Ephemeral Art, and Non-Art: Challenges to Copyright's Relevance" on  the need to lose the fixation requirement in copyright law to avoid discrimination against non fixated art creators e.g. mime or nature artists.

The 'painting a fuller educational picture of the effects of policies in practice' award goes to Andrew Cormack, ("When a PET is a Chameleon") and Nicolas Jondet, ("The French Copyright Authority (HADOPI), the graduated response and the disconnection of illegal file-sharers").

The current affairs award goes to Lilian Edwards ("The Revolution will not be Televised: Online Elections and the Future of Democracy?").  (Since widely respected Lilian independently confirmed many of the conclusions I came to in a talk I gave on the Digital Economy Act recently, I can now use that talk with more confidence as the basis of a book chapter I need to complete on information policymaking next month.  So Lilian also gets the bonus 'thank goodness I now realise I'm not nuts, the world really does work like that' award).

Lilian Edwards and Hugh Hancock share the 'thanks for helping refine my ideas on the DEA' award.In fact I hope Hugh won't mind too much if I add one of his key lessons about the power of narrative to my conclusions.  He spoke very engagingly about how people get convinced by stories.  The Digital Britain Report he felt had potentially some sensible ideas about how to tackle file sharing but the unelected Lord Mandelson having met media mogul David Geffen decided to ignore the report and railroad the Digital Economy Bill through parliament.

Hugh explained how Lilian Edwards had been very active in advance of the passing of the DEA, explaining the unintended consequences of doing so.  How opposition grew in parliament because MPs had an unprecedented amount of mail about it.  How amendments were proposed in the House of Lords.  How the Open Rights Group and others objected.

And yet the good guys got pummeled because the government passed the bill with the agreement of the other two main front benches in the wash up of legislation before the dissolution of parliament.

Why?

Well before the law comes public good and before that you have to tell MPs stories.  In the case of the DEA some stories they believed, some they didn't.

Music industry story: 1000s of stuggling young artists are having their work stolen and the DEA will fix it.

Good guys story: Record labels scared of the Net, so lobbying to save themselves and don't care about side effects

Photographers story: s43 on orphan works will let big corporations steal from little photographers so have to kill s43. (They got their wish).

The thing about stories is some play better than others.  All need a protagonist.  The person who suffers most in the story. If your audience doesn't empathise with your protagonist your story is dead.

The music companies' protagonists (Pete Wishart 'protect the human rights of young artists') are instantly attractive and easy to sympathise with.

The good guys protagonist is you, the audience and this doesn't translate well into a story.  It's too esoteric and you can't really empathise with yourself.

IF you want to grab your audience it also helps if something bad happens to your protagonist at the start.

The music labels hit the ball out of the park on this!

It also helps if your protagonist is pretty.  Geeks are not pretty.

In addition you have to be able to explain how the story is really important before your audience wander off and, largely, people who aren't geeks don't see the DEA as a priority. The impact is too abstract and too far in the future.

Finally you need an emotional payoff.  The emotional payloads for the 3 DEA stories are different.  In the case of the music companies and the photographers you have the righteous defence of justice for the vulnerable little guy - the young artist and photographer both getting ripped off.  This plays well to politicians, most of whom, at least in the early days, get into politics with honorable intentions.  The extra bonus is in relation to the dealing with the envy of people who dare to take for free something these vulnerable creators have had to work so hard to produce.

The good guys story had two emotional payoffs:
- fear (people will get cut off the Net, people will be censored)
- anger (corrupt music labels are distorting our legal structures)
Unfortunately the fear message has to compete nowadays with loads of other fear messages (terror, immigration, think of the children, crime, etc.) for attention and this one is nowhere near some of the others in terms of potency.  The anger message plays really well with geeks but not much with anyone else.

So the bottom line was the good guys lost because the music companies told a better story.

In any case, GikiiV was as ever a great conference.  Makes me realise again that I should spend a lot more time than I do on this stuff.  The day job is calling so I have to sign off but final honable mention goes to Andres who got the biggest laugh of day 1 with his Norton Anti-Virus mirror which tells you what you're suffering from in the morning; and Burkhard who talked (joint paper with Wiebke Abel and Radboud Winkels) about Google 2001 (don't be evil), Google 2010 (be good our way or else) and an understanding of databases as part of the problem, but realising we can make them part of the solution, of privacy in a digital age.  Privacy is a collective good – privacy protection should be a collective effort.

Privacy needs you!

PS My own contribution was on curing people with a phobia for mathematics. I'll be making a software version available to Gikii organisers when I get back to my office later in the week.  A copy of my earlier DEA talk slides is below:

Dea dangerous downloaders act

View more presentations from rcorrigan.

World cup sponsorship lock in

Football pundit Robbie Earle got sacked from ITV last week for passing on World Cup tickets to third parties, although he apparently didn't make any money from the process and paid for the tickets provided to him by ITV.

In 2006 FIFA expressed "disapproval" when world cup tickets allocated to FIFA vice president Jack Warner were sold on at a reported profit of £37,000 and then declared the matter closed. (Some newspapers reported the money made at £500k).

Unfortunately for Earle some of his tickets got passed on to a Dutch brewing company, Bavaria, who sent about 36 pretty young women in orange mini dresses (with no logo) to the Holland v Denmark game. The women were ejected from the stadium for "ambush marketing", questioned by police and threatened with jail. Bavaria is not one of the approved paid up sponsors of the world cup and presumably that means the colour orange is banned, in case it might be associated with an 'illegal' commercial interloper. It might be worth asking if any other colours require official approval before being brought into stadiums.

FIFA have history with Bavaria customers. At the last World Cup in Germany up to a thousand fans waiting to gain entrance to stadium for the Holland v Ivory Coast game were made to remove their orange (this time logoed, I believe) trousers before being allowed in.

FIFA says:

"In the world of football, fair play is a principle that has an important role to play both on and off the pitch. The beautiful game's incredible success story, particularly in terms of the FIFA World Cup ™, not only attracts fans and official partners, but also the ambush marketing activities of companies seeking to secure themselves a slice of the rewards illicitly without offering any financial support in return, thus jeopardising the viability of organising a privately financed sporting event of the magnitude of the FIFA World Cup with its cumulative worldwide TV audiences of over 26 billion...

FIFA itself decides if infringements are to be pursued and determines the appropriate way to do so. Before and during the 2006 FIFA World Cup ™, inaccurate reports frequently appeared in the media claiming that the sale of World Cup buns or World Cup bread by small local bakers was outlawed by FIFA and that the governing body was taking vigorous action against each and every infringement. These reports were, of course, complete nonsense, because there were no instances of FIFA taking such steps against a small business. In fact, FIFA's primary objective is to put a stop to the systematic, commercial abuse of its event marks on a wide scale in order to safeguard the rights of its partners. "

The commercial rights protectionism that resulted in the detention of the women at the Holland v Denmark game just seems wrong, more so in a country where most of the indigenous population can't even afford the cheapest tickets to see the matches. But South Africa passed a law in the run up to the World Cup that made ambush marketing a criminal offence.  That's right, creative one-upmanship against a commercial competitor (Budweiser, I guess, in Bacaria's case) that happens to have forked out sponsorship money to FIFA is a crime.

Commercial sponsors and FIFA want their pound of flesh and associated rights protection but when it is excessively enforced by the host nation's police authorities, and there are similar plans to do so at the 2012 Olympics in London, then a line has been crossed.  The criminalization of the act of gathering together 36 cheerful people in a football stadium is just beyond a joke.  If a FIFA sponsor has a legitimate legal dispute with a competitor then let their lawyers fight it out in the civil courts or through negotiation, not through the police and criminal justice system. 

As it stands the two women who organised the gathering of the 36 have had their passports confiscated and are now facing jail terms. Robbie Earle has lost his job.  Ordinary South Africans can't afford World Cup match tickets. Jack Warner remains on the FIFA executive committee.

EU Parliament event on censorship and freedom of expression

The video of the session at the EU parliament on freedom of expression in Europe earlier this week is now available.

9 things you need to know about the Internet

John has written a terrific preview of his forthcoming book in this week's Observer, The internet: Everything you ever need to know. It's not quite everything you need to know about the Net but it covers nine things that provide a really sound intellectual framework for thinking about it. So what are the nine things?

1. It's too early to deduce the long term impact of the Internet and the closest historical analogy we have regarding a technology that transformed the world, in ways beyond imagining, is the printing press.

2. The Web is only one kind of traffic on the infrastructure (signals and tracks) that is the Net.

3. Disruption - like the Web and Napster - is a feature (not a bug) of the neutral architecture of the Net designed by Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn. It was a design choice to disable central control through simple TCP/IP protocols.

4. Ecology is a better model through which to view the Net than economics. (I couldn't agree more and even gave a talk at Gikii last year about this).

5. The Net makes the world more complex. We and our private and public institutions are not great at dealing with complex systems.

6. The Network is now the computer i.e. cloud computing is here to stay and we haven't thought through the implications of this in any depth.

7. The Web is evolving towards Web 3.0 (Berners Lee's semantic Web) and beyond.

8. Huxley (we'll be destroyed by what we love) and Orwell (we'll be destroyed by what we fear) may both have been right. Will Google make us stupid and will the Net become a perfect totalitarian surveillance tool?

9. Our intellectual property landscape is out of sync with reality and in desparate need of reform.

John reckons the first five are things any reasonably informed individual should know, just as we would expect people to have a basic grasp of important issues like politics, economics or the environment. Items 6 and 7 additionally are base level knowledge for information and related professionals. I'd argue that practioners and policymakers should equally have a deep working understanding, similarly, of 8 and 9. Unfortunately these latter two, the surveillance society and intellectual property, currently reside in the esoteric walled garden realms of academics, civil rights activists and a few narrow bands of specialist professionals. I have little hope that policymakers will get this stuff any time soon. (Witness the unfortunate decision of Ofcom last week to approve BBC HD DRM).

Essential reading.

RSA Animate - Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us

This, from RSA Animate, is very clever:



Thanks to Glyn Moody and Ray Dowd for the pointer.

Ofcom approve BBC's move to attach DRM to HD

Ofcom have sadly approved the BBC's application to add DRM restrictions to their HD signal.

In an open letter to Ofcom and a follow up letter to Michael Lyons, the Chairman of the BBC Trust, Open University academics pointed out why this was a really bad idea for

• licence payers
• the disabled
• UK industry
• innovation
• education

The BBC scheme involves not the scrambling of the audio and video signals themselves but of the accompanying digital instructions for decoding these signals. The 'free' broadcast signal will now merely come locked behind a DRM shield that people will need specially licensed equipment to view. Ofcom's approval of the BBC proposal will undermine the organisation's public service obligations under the BBC Charter, and it is difficult to reconcile Ofcom's repeated past declarations that a broadcast flag DRM regime would be inappropriate for the BBC with the decision now declaring that they approve of it!

The heart of the summary of the decision is at paragraphs 1.5 and 1.6:

"1.5 Our aim in assessing the BBC's proposed licence amendment has been to determine whether this change would deliver net benefits to citizens and consumers by ensuring they have access to the widest possible range of HD television content on DTT, whilst not unduly restricting their ability to make use of content or the range of receiver equipment available in the DTT receiver market.
1.6 In response to the Consultation the BBC, ITV and Channel 4 provided confidential details on the acquired HD content that would be affected if an effective content management framework was not provided on the DTT platform, including the need to 'blank out' some HD content. This evidence was supported by the views expressed by representatives of rights holders. Based on this information, and the increasing use of content management on other digital TV platforms, we have concluded that the BBC's proposal would widen the range of HD content available on the DTT platform, in particular high value film and drama content, and that this would bring positive benefits to citizens and consumers and also help ensure that the DTT platform is able to compete on similar terms with other digital TV platforms for HD content rights."

Now if you read that carefully, it is saying the reason for the decision to approve DRM was that they seriously considered 'confidential', i.e. secret, information provided by BBC, ITV and Channel 4, as well as the story spun by rights holders.  Even in the US where intellectual property privileges are handed out on request like smarties, the regulators rejected such a broadcast flag.  Yet somehow, within a period of less than a year Ofcom goes from being totally opposed to approving of it.

They have completed ignored our representations that such a move:

• Undermines the BBC's obligations under their charter
• Discriminates against those those who are visually- and hearing-impaired
• Does not protect the content of rights holders - that's right it doesn't prevent copyright infringement
• Undermines backwards compatibility
• Introduces barriers to education
• Is anti-competitive

(See the OU letter for details of all of these).

The Communications Act 2003, Part 1, section 3, outlines the General duties of OFCOM:

(1) It shall be the principal duty of OFCOM, in carrying out their functions—
(a) to further the interests of citizens in relation to communications matters; and
(b) to further the interests of consumers in relevant markets, where appropriate by promoting competition.

The Ofcom get out clause for their u-turn on BBC DRM is that "Ofcom's role in relation to content management is limited" (para 1.10).  They have, through this weak excuse, and the BBC DRM decision attempted to avoid their obligations under the Communications Act.  It is completely unacceptable.

The Open Rights Group get it spot on:

Ofcom have also dealt their credibility a serious blow by justifying their decision by saying this “will allow broadcasters to control the multiple copying of HD content and its retransmission over the internet”.
They accepted the spurious argument that HD content may not be provided in the UK without copy protection – despite the fact that unencrypted broadcasts occur in every other major HD market. In addition, the BBC has failed to name a single programme that would be withdrawn without the application of DRM to its broadcast.
Restrictive technologies create two results: they rig markets, removing competition and innovative technologies; and they encourage people to find ways round them. The results will harm competition and will not further either BBC or Ofcom's legitimate aims. But it will bring calls for more restriction once these measures fail.
They have taken a decision which pushes technology further towards a copyright-centric model of control, where only copyright holders have the right to decide how everyday devices are allowed work.
In this new regime, people with hearing problems will be prevented from modifying their equipment to deal with their problems. Software developers will be stopped from making your TV, computer and mobile phone work properly with each other. Your choice of operating system will determine whether or not you can enjoy BBC HD broadcasts to their full extent. And HD devices will have to be built to work in the UK alone, reducing competition and pushing prices up.
Ofcom’s remit is to protect consumer interest and competition. They have failed to do either."

 I believe it is time for the BBC Trust to intervene on the grounds of public interest. Failing that a judicial review and/or recourse to the EU?  This story has only just begun.


(I did make a CamStudio video about my reaction to the decision earlier this morning but there are odd audio synchronisation problems with it - the audio and video are initially in sync but gradually the video gets further and further ahead of the audio.  There's a cumulative offsetting problem but I've haven't been able to locate the source of it.  If anyone has any ideas I'd appreciate it.  I'm using CamStudio lossless codec 1.4 compression; playback rate 25 frames/sec, frame capture every 41 milliseconds; MPEG layer 3 audio compressed format, video & audio interleave 41 milliseconds; and 44.1 kHz, mono, 16-bit recording format.)

Update: I've amended the link to our letter above because Ofcom have moved it to http://stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/binaries/consultations/content_mngt/responses/Blaine_Price.pdf

World Cup song, sampling and Bridgeport Music

I've been meaning to write about the World Cup song by Shakira recorded and distributed by Sony.  And though I'm supposed to be somewhere else at the moment am prompted to these few thoughts by an email from a colleague on the subject.  Shakira's song is up on YouTube:



It samples/copies a well known song, Zangalewa, by Cameroonian band Golden Sounds from the mid 1980s.



Cameroonian blogger, Dibussi Tande, who I learn of via the Langaa Research and Publishing Common Initiative Group (Langaa RPCIG) got there ahead of me, however, and proved to be much more eloquent and comprehensive about the issue that I would have been.

"In 1985 the Golden Sounds, a group composed primarily of members from Cameroon’s Presidential Guards released an album whose title track Zangalewa was based on a parade song which was popular with the rank and file of the Cameroonian army and whose origins could be traced back Cameroonian riflemen who took part in the Second World War.Zangalewa became an international hit which transformed Emile Kojidie, Victor Dooh Belley and group leader Ze Bella into celebrities (to the dismay of the army brass who subsequently created the conditions that led to the disbanding of the group a few years later – but that is another story). The group also included a few members who were not in the military such as Annie Anzouer who with Ze Bella performed some of the group’s most popular tunes such as Maladie difficile à soigner and the Un bébé, and who later went on to have the most successful solo career among all Golden Sounds members. Fast forward to 2010. Ze Bella who had retired from the Presidential Guards in 2002 was enjoying a quiet retirement in his village when he got a call from an acquaintance in France informing him that Shakira had just released a version of Zangalewa. This information was soon confirmed by Emile Kojidy another Golden Sounds alum now living in the United States. They were both right...

To Cameroonians and many African, the origins of the song was no mystery as they instantly recognized it as a remix of “Zangalewa”. Thus began a frenzied online campaign to alert the world that this was not a Shakira original but a remix. The task was made all the more easier thanks to videos of the Golden Sounds performing Zangalewa that were available on the web. The campaign picked up steam as the international media began taking an interest in the story...

Faced with the barrage of worldwide negative publicity Sony and Shakira (probably with the prodding of FIFA which did not want anything that could mar the World Cup) quickly settled. They agreed to credit Zangalewa and began working out details for a financial compensation. Thus, when on May 5, Fifa officially confirmed that Zaminamina, which was now called “Waka Waka (This Time for Africa)”, was indeed the anthem of the 2010 World cup, it also stressed that “The song was written by Shakira, the world-famous singer from Latin America...The chorus is similar to that of a popular Cameroon song made famous by Golden Voices in particular”."

Just one final thought - how would Shakira's sampling of Zangalewa stand up to the US Court of Appeals decision in the Bridgeport Music case in 2006, when the judge said that sampling a single note might be acceptable but anything more is not permissable.

First ever ORGCon 24 July

Unfortunately I'm not going to be able to make it due to a wedding but Jim Killock has alerted me to the first ever ORG Conference:

"James Boyle, Cory Doctorow and Tom Watson are heading up the first ever conference dedicated to digital rights in the UK. Top of the agenda at ORGCon is tackling the Digital Economy Act and the new Government.
Book your ticket now for the first ever ORGCon on 24 July
Sessions will include

• James Boyle on the future of copyright, in London especially for this talk
• Cory Doctorow talk and panel on how artists can make copyright work for them
• What MPs are doing about Digital Economy Act (Tom Watson, Eric Joyce, Julian Huppert)
• What does the 'Right to Data' mean? (Heather Brooke, Rufus Pollock)
• Opening up the Data Protection Directive: Can of Worms or Opportunity (Privacy International)
• Dismantling the Database State (No2ID) 
• Theft! A History of Music (Jennifer Jenkins)

There are a limited number of tickets for this bonanza event.
Book now to avoid disappointment! Special discount rates for new and existing supporters."

£10 is an absolute bargin given that line up, so sign up and enjoy!

Lessig kenote at CC Asia

Lessig expresses anxiety about the growth of controlled platforms like Facebook and Apple in his keynote address to the CC Asia conference.

Irritatingly, when I click for the embed code, YouTube notes "Embedding disabled by request".

By whose request might I ask?

Lessons on copyright from the fashion industry

Johanna Blakley of www.readytoshare.org has done a terrific TED talk on intellectual property in the fashion industry and the lessons it might provide for other creative industries, or as TED billed it Lessons from Fashion's Free Culture. It's an updated version of the talk she did at iSummit 2008 in Sapporo and the Creativity & Copyright: The Surprising Tale of the Fashion Industry at the Lear Center, also in 2008, but it is still hugely relevant. Thanks to Glyn Moody via twitter for the link to the TED talk.



Blakley speaks engagingly about the vibrant ecology of creativity in the fashion industry despite the fact that fashion is not protected by copyright.  The only IP protection they have is trademarks - they can own their names and trademark signs etc. but not prevent someone from stealing each others' seams, colours, shapes, hemlines, trends.  And in fact fashion trends exist and move quickly precisely because of the ability to copy without having to ask permission.

Many fashion designers complain about this copying and have resorted to lawsuits to prevent it but the courts, even in the US, have consistently declared that 'apparel is too utilitarian'  to qualify for copyright protection.  Designers can own a copyright in a drawing of a dress but can't own a copyright in the dress - the dress is out there to be copied.

So how can the high end (ie expensive) fashion companies stay in business when a mulititude of knockoffs (including counterfeits with the trademarked logo) in cheaper stores and market stalls?  Well though it's not rocket science to it figure out, Tom Ford an ex Gucci guru, has said "the counterfeit customer is not the Gucci customer."  Imagine that.

The thing that jumps out from Blakley's talk, though, is her graph of the gross sales of goods from copyright intensive industries (film, music and books) compared with that of the low copyright industries (automobiles(can't copyright look and feel of a car), food (can't copyright a recipe in theory i.e. set of instructions), fashion and furniture (3 dimensional utilitarian objects can't be copyrighted etc.).  I've done a rough version of the graph below:

Comparatively speaking the copyright intensive part of the entertainment industry represented by movies, books and music is tiny in relation to the output of industries not protected by copyright.

Other things, btw, that can't be copyrighted include jokes (eg one liners though it hasn't stopped folks like Ashley Brilliant registering the copyright in more than 7000 aphorisms and Leo Stoller claiming to own words like "stealth" and "hoax" - no, I'm not kidding), hairstyles, magic tricks, fireworks, the rules of games (eg rules of monopoly), perfume (though you can patent the chemical combinant and trademark the smell).  And interestingly enough though they are entitled to copyright tatoos, tatoo artists find that socially unacceptable - the subculture values sharing.  Yet there is very little scholarship or policymaker interest in thriving low IP industries which might give us a clue to the business models for the entertainment industry of the 21st century.

Blakley essentially wants us to have a deeper understanding of what facilitates creativity and innovation and the importance of sharing, openness, fair use doctrine and the lessons of free culture from the low IP industries.  Most of us have a very vague grasp of all of these things and until we stop equating sharing with theft and treating openness and valueless, she doesn't believe we're going to make a lot of progress.  On the contrary, if we keep buying into the "property is good, therefore more property is better matra" crativity and innovation will get increasingly controlled and stifled.

Interesting.

Update: Apologies for the formatting problem with the gross sales graph which hopefully are now corrected.

Conversations with seven Science 2.0 pioneers

The New York Academy of Sciences has been interviewing pioneers of science 2.0, including James Boyle.

NYAS: What do you see as the current problem with access to science knowledge?

Boyle: Science knowledge generation has gone digital, but our method of knowledge processing is still analog. Most scientific literature is behind pay walls. You may be able to find it with Google, but you probably can't read it. That's Science 1.0: You don't have access unless you're sitting in a great research university where it's free, and you certainly can't send a robot to crawl the literature to create a mini index of all the articles, and cross index them and see whether, for example, a particular gene known by multiple names is referenced by them.

NYAS: Is the prestige attached to publishing with closed journals part of the problem?

Boyle: Right now, if your article gets into Nature or Science it's a big help in getting tenure and grants and retaining grad students. That's important—we should encourage people to publish. But perhaps we could refine the incentives so that you get more of a bump for publishing openly. I would like to see people's resumes say when their database has been downloaded more than 1,000 times. You want the prestige economy to reward the pro-social behavior, not the anti-social behavior.

NYAS: So, how can incentives be changed?

Boyle: When you've got centrally funded science, it should be a pretty easy cascade to start. The funders get much more bang for their buck if they do this. You're actually saving the public money and increasing the yield of every research dollar.
Once the idea can be explained to people, it makes an enormous amount of sense. I tell scientists, "There are a billion people connected to the, the Web. At least one of them has a smarter idea about what to do with your data than you do."
Their first take, though, is "Oh, great. You're going to force me to annotate my data, and put everything out there. You're going to troll it and publish ahead of me. I'm going to get no credit, I'm not going to get tenure, and I'm going to end up living under a Dumpster. And you're going to win the Nobel Prize." That mindset is the big obstacle.
We need funders to say that a condition for the funding is data deposit in an open, accessible format. That's beginning to happen—the public-access mandate from NIH is beginning to make the literature openly available. But we're just at the beginning.

NYAS: Beyond social/cultural issues, what else needs to change?

Boyle: Nobody ever wants to fund infrastructure because it's boring, but enabling Science 2.0 is the Eisenhower freeway system of the mind. And then we need to get past the legal restrictions so that we can have technologies that troll for data, make sense of it, and import it mechanically.

NYAS: How is Science Commons addressing those issues?

Boyle: We're sort of the public interest lawyer to the sciences. Say you want to use a database which was generated in Europe. We come up with a data protocol, a legal tool, which says "this gets your data free to the greatest extent possible in every jurisdiction in the world that we have lawyers in" (and we have lawyers pretty much everywhere, because a lot of really smart lawyers have volunteered to produce this high-quality tool).
We're also attempting to show people what it might look like if you could wire together all this open stuff. We have a project called the Neuro Commons which is putting all the publicly available neurological literature and open databases together in a vast, open network that anyone can download, use, or build upon.
We've had high-throughput arrays, robotization, in silico studies, genetic sequencing, and the personal genome. All of these were supposed to catapult us off into a scientific revolution, but didn't. It reminds me of what people were saying about the personal computer in 1985: "This thing's just a paperweight. What does it do for me?" The answer was, "Nothing until it's wired together with all of the other ones." Then suddenly you can't imagine being without it.

Open University Academics Object to BBC DRM Proposals

Following up on our recent open letter to Ofcom on the BBC HD DRM proposal, a large group of Open University academics has written to the Michael Lyons, the Chairman of the BBC Trust, notifying him of our objections to the idea. The full text of the letter is below.

We write in connection with the BBC’s current application to Ofcom to vary the terms of its licence for its HDTV service by encrypting signals using DRM. We have written separately to Ofcom to oppose this proposal but write to you now because we believe it raises several important issues for the BBC Trust.

First, and procedurally, the BBC management’s application to Ofcom raises the question (interestingly identified by Diana Coyle and Chris Woolard in their book for the Trust, 'Public Value in Practice') whether a new application should be made to the Trust, analogous to that for the “bookmarking” function of the iPlayer. We believe that the encryption proposal is so fundamental a change from the original HDTV proposal, and one which raises such fundamental issues for the BBC, that it should be the subject of a new Public Value Test. You will be aware that DRM is a kind of encrypted digital lock used to control access to digital files and signals.  In order to access the BBC HD signal a viewer will require equipment containing the relevant decryption key.

Second, and substantively, the proposal to encrypt the HDTV signal using DRM breaks the clear and, seemingly unequivocal, undertaking made in the BBC’s Building Public Value (published in 2004), and underwritten by the last Chairman of the BBC Governors, Mr Michael Grade, that the BBC would not encrypt its services. Building Public Value stated (p 10) that “the BBC will always be on the side of universal provision, open access and unencryption”.

Third, and also substantively, the proposals to use DRM in the BBC’s HDTV signals breaks from the Trust’s policy, stated (at p 9) in the PVT authorisation of the HDTV proposal, that “Any move from the currently proposed HD standards on picture resolution should not disadvantage consumers who invest in HD equipment which meets the current standards”.

We believe that implementation of the proposals currently before Ofcom will have the effect of disadvantaging viewers who already have bought an integrated HD receiver (TV) and who have a separate PVR. It appears that the DRM proposed will permit recording only when the PVR is "integrated" with the HD receiver. It appears that the regime proposed will require purchase of a new PVR and the use of that tuner, rather than the one in the TV. This, we believe, not only breaks with the terms on which the Trust has authorised the BBC’s HDTV service but also sets an important, and very unfortunate, precedent whereby the interests of rights holders (and if the BBC's Strategy Review is to be believed, the interests of, at most the suppliers of 2.5% of BBC spend) are prioritised over the interests of UK viewers and licence fee payers.

We therefore urge the Trust to undertake a new PVT in respect of the HDTV proposals which are currently before Ofcom and which we believe depart radically from the terms of the authorisation you earlier granted, break with the undertakings made in 2004 in Building Public Value and undesirably and disproportionately prefer the interests of rights holders over those of licence fee payers.


A fuller statement of our analysis is to be found in our evidence to Ofcom at http://www.ofcom.org.uk/consult/condocs/content_mngt/responses/a-e/Blaine_Price.pdf Please contact Blaine Price begin_of_the_skype_highlighting     end_of_the_skype_highlighting (b.a.price@open.ac.uk) and/or Ray Corrigan (r.corrigan@open.ac.uk) in the first instance should you wish to respond to or seek more information in respect of this letter.

Disclaimer: The views expressed are those of the undersigned and do not necessarily reflect those of the Open University.

Yours sincerely

Update: Ofcom have changed the link to our submission to http://stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/binaries/consultations/content_mngt/responses/Blaine_Price.pdf

Will Clegg's promises stand the test of time

The Independent considers yesterday's promises from Nick Clegg to dismantle Nu Labour's surveillance state to be some long-awaited cheer for liberal hearts.

"There is much to cheer liberal hearts in the Deputy Prime Minister's programme. He sounded the death knell for ID cards, the national identity register, biometric passports and the database of 11 million children. None of these will be missed...

Such innovations represented the very worst of the former Labour government. Successive Home Secretaries introduced criminal justice bill after criminal justice bill – creating some 3,500 new offences – not to serve the public interest but to broadcast their "toughness" on crime. Labour believed that technology offered a quick solution to just about every social problem. They behaved as if the threat of terrorism justified taking a wrecking ball to ancient civil liberties...

The real test of the liberal credentials of this coalition will come when the right-wing media starts to demand illiberal solutions from the Government on everything from drugs to anti-social behaviour and terrorism...

As the months go by and ministers get used to living in the bubble of government security, the temptation to acquiesce to the illiberal suggestions of the police and intelligence services on dealing with the terror threat will inevitably grow."

Update: The latest published coalition agreement provides no further details on the promising promises on civil liberties.

Deputy Prime Minister Speech on great reform bill

More promising promises, from the Deputy Prime Minister in the new UK coalition government, on dismantling the Nu Labour surveillance state.

"I'm talking about the most significant programme of empowerment by a British government since the great reforms of the 19th Century.
The biggest shake up of our democracy since 1832, when the Great Reform Act redrew the boundaries of British democracy, for the first time extending the franchise beyond the landed classes...

Three major steps, that will begin immediately:
One: we will repeal all of the intrusive and unnecessary laws that inhibit your freedom.
Two: we will reform our politics so it is open, transparent, decent.
Three: we will radically redistribute power away from the centre, into your communities, your homes, your hands.

Big, sweeping change.
Not incremental, not bit by bit.
Our democracy has suffered at the hands of encroaching centralisation and secrecy for decades.
Take citizens' rights: eroded by the quiet proliferation of laws that increase surveillance, quash dissent, limit freedom.
Take executive authority: consistently increased by successive administrations to the point that we now have a neutered parliament and government that enjoys almost untrammelled control - over precisely the people who are meant to keep it in check...

Three steps to new politics.
First, sweeping legislation to restore the hard won liberties that have been taken, one by one, from the British people.
This government will end the culture of spying on its citizens.
It is outrageous that decent, law-abiding people are regularly treated as if they have something to hide.
It has to stop.
So there will be no ID card scheme.
No national identity register, a halt to second generation biometric passports.
We won't hold your internet and email records when there is just no reason to do so.
CCTV will be properly regulated, as will the DNA database, with restrictions on the storage of innocent people's DNA.
Britain must not be a country where our children grow up so used to their liberty being infringed that they accept it without question.
There will be no ContactPoint children's database.
Schools will not take children's fingerprints without even asking their parent's consent.
This will be a government that is proud when British citizens stand up against illegitimate advances of the state.
That values debate, that is unafraid of dissent.
That's why we'll remove limits on the rights to peaceful protest.
It's why we'll review libel laws so that we can better protect freedom of speech.

And as we tear through the statute book, we'll do something no government ever has:
We will ask you which laws you think should go.
Because thousands of criminal offences were created under the previous government...
Taking people's freedom away didn't make our streets safe.
Obsessive lawmaking simply makes criminals out of ordinary people.
So, we'll get rid of the unnecessary laws, and once they're gone, they won't come back.
We will introduce a mechanism to block pointless new criminal offences.
And, we will, of course introduce safeguards to prevent the misuse of anti-terrorism legislation.
There have been too many cases of individuals being denied their rights...
And whole communities being placed under suspicion.
This government will do better by British justice.
Respecting great, British freedoms...
Which is why we'll also defend trial by jury...

We will regulate lobbying in parliament.
Not all lobbying is sleazy.
Much of it serves a hugely important function, allowing different organisations and interests to make representations to politicians.
But let's get real: this is a £2bn industry, where, according to some estimates there are MPs who are approached by lobbyists a hundred times every week....
And that activity needs to be regulated properly and made transparent.
Which we'll do, for example, by introducing a a statutory register of lobbyists.
As long as money plays such a big part in our politics, we are never going to curtail the tyranny of vested interests.

So, the repeal of illiberal laws, the reform of politics, and the redistribution of power.
Our very own Great Reform Act.

Not everyone will like it.
Not every MP...
Not the vested interests that want government to stay closed, opaque, easily captured.
But this new government, this new kind of government, creates an enormous opportunity for those of us who have spent our lives fighting for political reform..
This is a moment to step back and look at every shortcoming in our democracy...
Before we launch into the most radical programme of reform, empowerment, enfranchisement in over a century.
A programme so important to me personally that I will take full responsibility for seeing it through."

All very encouraging and possibly even Churchillian, apart from the populist, dare I say it 'Blairite', bit that says "We will ask you which laws you think should go." Nu Labour were big on "consultation", better described as collecting opinions and ignoring all but the privileged few that, amazingly enough, coincided with their own worldview.  The "nothing to hide nothing to fear" brigade are already swamping the broadcast airwaves with their anger at the audacity of Nick Clegg's plans.

Promising but now let's see the detail and the energy to follow it through by a government that is, very shortly, likely to become extremely unpopular when the spending cuts start biting, and when the law and order junkies start screaming about the liberal Clegg being a friend of terrorists and criminals and the "nothing to hide nothing to fear" brigade come marching on again .

The Lib Con forces of Liberty

Henry Porter believes we got lucky with new UK government at least on civil liberties.

"The pernicious laws of the last 13 years are to be swept away in a repeal act thanks to a chance electoral result.

One of the great pleasures of last week was hearing Jack Straw speaking on the Today programme in that patient, reasonable way of the true autocrat, and suddenly realising that I never have to pay attention to him again...

This is not merely a hopeful inference drawn from the change of government. The coalition agreement makes an explicit commitment to liberty and privacy, rolls back state intrusion, restores freedoms and puts a brake on the erosion of rights. There are omissions, of course, but overall this is a moment to cherish because along with specific guarantees, it is clear that the tone of government has changed and that the influence of the new administration may extend right down to the rude and officious exercise of petty authority that flourished under New Labour.
The Queen's speech, now being drafted, will establish a Freedom or Great Repeal bill – the title has not yet been chosen – as a major part of the coalition's legislative programme. All the areas detailed in the agreement between the Liberal Democrats and Conservatives, such as the abolition of ID cards and the children's database (ContactPoint database??), the further regulation of CCTV and the restoration of right to protest will be in it. Measures that weren't in the published agreement will reassert the right to silence and protect people against the huge number of new powers of entry into the home allowed by Labour.
Separate from this will be a complete review of terror legislation that will assess 28-day detention, control orders, section 44 stop and search powers, the harassment of photographers, the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, and its amendments, which sanctioned 650 agencies and local authorities to carry out undercover surveillance...

Clearly, this all has to be watched very closely indeed – a lot has yet to be decided and there will be pressures from the civil servants, police, GCHQ and MI5 on such things as internet surveillance and phone intercepts. European plans for data collection and surveillance are a particular worry. But the essential point is that this exciting turn of events would not have been possible under a Labour-Lib Dem coalition or a Conservative minority government. It is a rare stroke of luck for the interests of liberty that the coalition allows the prime minister, David Cameron, to embrace this Lib Dem policy with open arms and ignore the reservations of the law-and-order nuts on his right...

Thinking about the five years of this campaign, I realise that the most agonising part of it was the sense that few people were really paying attention, and that Labour politicians could dismiss those who were as cranks and hysterics. This fear was behind the setting up of the Convention on Modern Liberty last year by Anthony Barnett and me, and the commission of a survey of all the laws that attacked liberty by University College law students, which we published as he Abolition of Freedom Act. The same fear compelled David Davis MP to resign during the previous summer and campaign against 42-day pre-charge detention and the database state, a gesture that cost him politically but which was critical in the defence of liberty.
This vindication is almost as much fun as not listening to Jack Straw. The programme of measures listed in the agreement between the governing parties "to reverse the substantial erosion of liberties under the Labour government" proves for once and all that we weren't making it up. We are very fortunate that the election played out the way it did."

Very well said.  As I said a few days ago, the promises of the new regime on civil liberites are promising but it will be interesting to see the details.  As Henry Porter rightly says, the most agonising part of Nu Labour's systematic destruction of liberty was the sense that few people were really paying attention.  The reversal of the damage the previous government has done in this area is a massive undertaking but here's hoping they have political will and energy to carry it through even when Sir Humphrey advises "that's a brave decision minister."

Producing content like we develop software: Felten

Ed Felten thinks that writers might have a lot to learn from software developers. 

"There is something distinctive about how computer scientists write: we tend to use software development tools to "develop" our texts. This seems natural to us. A software program, after all, is just a big text, and the software developers are the authors of the text. If a tool is good for developing the large, complex, finicky text that is a program, why not use it for more traditional texts as well?
Like software developers, computer scientist writers tend to use version control systems. These are software tools that track and manage different versions of a text. What makes them valuable is not just the ability to "roll back" to old versions -- you can get that (albeit awkwardly) by keeping multiple copies of a file. The big win with version control tools is the level of control they give you. Who wrote this line? What did Joe write last Tuesday? Notify me every time section 4 changes. Undo the changes Fred made last Wednesday, but leave all subsequent changes in place. And so on. Version control systems are a much more powerful relative of the "track changes" and "review" features of standard word processors.
Another big advantage of advanced version control is that it enables parallel development, a style of operation in which multiple people can work on the text, separately, at the same time. Of course, it's easy to work in parallel. What's hard is to merge the parallel changes into a coherent final product --- which is a huge pain in the neck with traditional editing tools, but is easy and natural with a good version control system...

While version control and parallel development have become standard in computer science writing, there are other software development practices that are only starting to cross the line into CS writing: issue tracking and the release early and often strategy.
Issue tracking systems are used to keep track of problems, bugs, and other issues that need to be addressed in a text. As with version control, you can do this manually, or rely on a simple to-do list, but specialized tools are more powerful and give you better control and better visibility into the past...

"Release early and often" is a strategy for rapidly improving a text by making it available to users (or readers), getting feedback, and rapidly turning out a new version that addresses the feedback. Users' critiques become issues in the issue tracking system; authors modify the text to address the most urgent issues; and a new version is released as soon as the text stabilizes. The result is rapid improvement, aligned with the true desires of users. This approach requires the right attitude from users, who need to be willing to tolerate problems, in exchange for a promise that their critiques will be addressed promptly.
What does all of this mean for writers who are not computer scientists? I won't be so bold as to say that the future of writing will be just exactly like software development. But I do think that the tools and techniques of software development, which are already widely used by computer scientist writers, will diffuse into more common usage. It will be hard to retrofit them into today's large, well-established editing software, but as writing tools move into the cloud, I wouldn't be surprised to see them take on more of the attributes of today's software development tools."

Content producers, including my own wonderful employer, the Open University, should take note.

Astroturfing net neutrality

Cory Doctorow is fuming over telcos secret plans to kill net neurality.

"ThinkProgress has a leaked copy of a telcoms industry PowerPoint presentation laying out their plans to use astroturf to kill Network Neutrality. The industry is hiring the same turfers who work with the Tea Party movement to carry their message to the people.

What the telcos want to do is reduce your access to websites and services unless those services have paid a bribe for "premium carriage" to you. So Google buys its bandwidth from its ISP. You buy your bandwidth from your ISP. Then your ISP goes to Google and says, "If you want to send your bits to our customers when they ask for them, you'll have to pay us too." If Google doesn't pay, the ISP slows down its bits when you ask for them.

They call this "free and unregulated internet access for content flow and connectivity speed free and unregulated internet access for content flow and connectivity speed."

Here's how I see it: the telcos and cable operators got a huge public subsidy when we agreed to let them use our public sewers, tunnels and streets (not to mention our houses and basements) for their wires. We give them all this for free or far below the market costs. They put their wires in our dirt.

Now they're saying they don't want to give us the service we want. Literally. That's what fighting Net Neutrality is about: it's ISPs fighting for the right to slow down or discard the bits you, the customer, ask for.

I say, it's our dirt, so we make the rules. If they don't like those rules, let them get their goddamned wires out of our dirt, off our streets, out of our basements. Let's give them 60 days, and if they haven't pulled up their wires by then, we'll buy them for the scrappage price of the copper. Then we'll turn over those wires to companies that are willing to give us the bits we want in exchange for the billions (trillions?) worth of public subsidy these greedy corporate welfare bums are currently enjoying.

Nowhere in the Constitution does it say, "Congress shall give away the public's priceless assets to companies and then sit around sucking its collective thumb while the companies screw the public." If AT&T and Comcast don't want to give us the service we want, let them buy every inch of conduit and right-of-way at market prices. Until then, they can STFU and give us the network we demand."

Update: ThinkProgress on same.

Electronic voting insecure

After the shambles last week of many people being turned away from the polls we have the inevitable call for electronic and internet voting.  We know however that the electronic voting systems currently deployed are seriously insecure. Hari K. Prasad, J. Alex Halderman, Rop Gonggrijp have reinforced this with a study of India's evoting machines which they demonstrate are vulnerable to fraud.



From the team's press release:

"Says Gonggrijp: "Never mind what election officials say, this research once again shows that the longstanding scientific consensus holds true—DRE voting machines are fundamentally vulnerable. Such machines have already been abandoned in Ireland, the Netherlands, Germany, Florida and many other places. India should follow suit."
Gonggrijp continues: "In order to have any transparency in elections, you need to have votes on paper. Computers can be programmed to count votes honestly, but since nobody can watch them, they might just as easily be programmed to count dishonestly. How is the voter supposed to tell the difference?""

Alex Haldemann comments:

"I've studied electronic voting machines for years, but I've never had such a strong sense that actual fraud might be taking place. There have been dozens of reports from around India that politicians have been approached by engineers offering to manipulate the machines to steal votes. My Indian coauthor, Hari Prasad, was himself approached by a prominent party and asked to help them with such manipulations! It's just too easy, thanks to the simple design of the machines and the lack of adequate safeguards, and there are probably a million people in India with the necessary electronics skills.
Many people believe that using a simple design makes these machines safer than the complex machines used in the U.S. (which sometimes contain almost a million lines of code), but simple machines are much easier to attack via hardware, and simplifying too much means giving up standard security techniques like strong cryptography. Essentially, you're left with a system that depends entirely on the physical security of the machines, just like paper ballots depend on the security of the ballot box, but with much less transparency than paper voting. What India and other democracies need is a system that's both secure *and* transparent, so that voters can have well-founded confidence their votes count."

Ed Felten says:

"The independent Electoral Commission of India, which is generally well respected, has dealt poorly with previous questions about EVM security. The chair of the Electoral Commission has called the machines "infallible" and "perfect" and has rejected any suggestion that security improvements are even possible. I hope the new study will cause the EC to take a more realistic approach to EVM security.
The researchers got their hands on a real Indian EVM which they were able to examine and analyze. They were unable to extract the software running in the machine (because that would have required rendering the machine unusable for elections, which they had agreed not to do) so their analysis focused on the hardware. They were able to identify several attacks that manipulated the hardware, either by replacing components or by clamping something on to a chip on the motherboard to modify votes. They implemented demonstration attacks, actually building proof-of-concept substitute hardware and vote-manipulation devices.
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of India's EVMs is how simple they are. Simplicity is a virtue in security as in engineering generally, and researchers (including me) who have studied US voting machines have advocated simplifying their design. India's EVMs show that while simplicity is good, it's not enough. Unless there is some way to audit or verify the votes, even a simple system is subject to manipulation."

Update: Check out also ORG's briefing on why evoting systems are difficult to secure.

Irish High Court opens the way for European data retention challenge

Whilst I know many will be focussed on the UK general election results, I just wanted to draw your attention to an important piece of news on a decision by the Irish High Court enabling Digital Rights Ireland to challenge the whole notion of communications data retention in the European Court of Justice.  DRI have a terrific blog post on the decision which I hope they won't mind me quoting in full here:

"Great news today from the High Court where Mr. Justice McKechnie gave an extremely favourable decision on our constitutional challenge to data retention laws.
While the full judgment is 53 pages long, the gist is relatively simple.
Long story short: today’s decision has cleared the way for our challenge to proceed and to challenge the entire European legal basis for data retention.
(Following the wider European trend where Germany, Bulgaria and Romania have all found aspects of data retention to be unconstitutional.)
The longer version: Today’s decision dealt with three procedural issues which had to be cleared before we can argue the substance of the case: i.e. whether mass surveillance of this sort is compatible with constitutional guarantees of fundamental rights.
The first of these issues dealt with standing: could DRI (as a company, not a natural person) assert rights of privacy? And could it argue the rights of privacy of others? On this point the court held in our favour, accepting that DRI was a “sincere and serious litigant”, which raised these issues with bona fide interest and concern and ruling that it was appropriate for us to argue these points as this was a matter of “fundamental public importance”.
The second point dealt with an attempt by the State to stop the action in its tracks by seeking “security for costs” – i.e. requiring us to make a payment into court to cover the costs of the State should we lose the action. Because of the cost of High Court actions, requiring such a payment at the outset could effectively have prevented the case from being heard. Here the court rejected the State’s application, holding that:

the matters pleaded in this case do raise issues of significant public importance… Given the rapid advance of current technology it is of great importance to define the legitimate legal limits of modern surveillance techniques used by governments… without sufficient legal safeguards the potential for abuse and unwaranted invasion of privacy is obvious… That is not to say that this is the case here, but the potential is in my opinion so great that a greater scrutiny of the proposed legislation is certainly merited.”

Finally, the third point related to our application to refer this case to the European Court of Justice (“ECJ”). As data retention is now dealt with at a European level, it is important that we be able to challenge the European law in this area – something which can only be done before the ECJ in Luxembourg. Here the court again accepted our argument, holding that a reference to the ECJ was required and that it was appropriate that it be made at the current stage of the proceedings.
So what happens next? There will be some more legal argument next week about the precise questions which should be referred to the ECJ – after that, the case will be referred to the ECJ and will go into their system for a hearing in Luxembourg, which have implications for data retention across Europe."

A copy of the full judgment is below.
Data Retention Challenge: Judgment re Preliminary Reference, Standing, Security for Costs

European Copyright Code

Prof. Lionel Bently, Prof. Thomas Dreier, Prof. Reto Hilty, Prof. P. Bernt Hugenholtz, Prof. Antoon Quaedvlieg, Prof. Alain Strowel, Prof. Dirk Visser and other copyright scholars, working on the Wittem Project since 2002, have produced a European Copyright Code.

"The aim of the Wittem Project and this Code is to promote transparency and consistency in European copyright law. The members of the Wittem Group share a concern that the process of copyright law making at the European level lacks transparency and that the voice of academia all too often remains unheard. The Group believes that a European Copyright Code drafted by legal scholars might serve as a model or reference tool for future harmonization or unification of copyright at the European level. Nevertheless, the Group does not take a position on the desirability as such of introducing a unified European legal framework. The Code was drafted by a Drafting Committee composed of seven members. Each chapter of the Code was originally drafted by one or two members of the Drafting Committee, acting as rapporteurs. The rapporteurs for each chapter were: Prof. Quaedvlieg (Chapter 1: Works), Prof. Hugenholtz (Chapter 2: Authorship and ownership), Prof. Strowel (Chapter 3: Moral rights), Prof. Visser (Chapter 4: Economic rights) and Professors Dreier and Hilty (Chapter 5: Limitations).
Each draft Chapter, accompanied by an explanatory memorandum, was discussed in a plenary session with the members of the Wittem Advisory Board and other experts that were invited ad hoc. The proceedings of these plenary sessions were fed into the second versions of each chapter, and thereafter redacted and integrated into a final consolidated version by the Drafting Committee. Although discussions with the Advisory Board and experts have greatly influenced the final product, responsibility for the Code lies solely with the Drafting Committee.
While drafted in the form of a legislative instrument and thereby exceeding the level of detail normally associated with common principles of law, this Code is not comprehensive. It concentrates on the main elements of any codification of copyright: subject matter of copyright (Chapter 1), authorship and ownership (Chapter 2), moral rights (Chapter 3), economic rights (Chapter 4) and limitations (Chapter 5). The Code does not, for instance, treat such remuneration rights as public lending right and droit de suite, nor does it deal with the legal protection of technical measures. Also, the Code does not contain rules on copyright liability or enforcement, nor does it touch upon neighbouring (related) rights and database right.
This Code is not a recodification of EU copyright law tabula rasa. Since European copyright law must operate within the confines of the international commitments of the European Union and its Member States, the Code takes account of the substantive norms of the Berne Convention and the TRIPs Agreement. Also, the members of the Group have found it hard to ignore the aqcuis communautaire in the form of seven Directives that the European legislature has produced in this field since 1991. However, the Code does on occasion deviate from the acquis, and therefore cannot be considered a mere restatement or consolidation of the norms of the directives.
The members of the Wittem Group hope that this European Copyright Code will contribute to the establishment of a body of transparent and consistent copyright law that protects the moral and economic interests of creators, while serving the public interest by promoting the production and dissemination of works in the field of literature, art and science."

The code itself is available in html or pdf.

Cleanternet

Sharp satire on EU Commissioner for Home Affairs Cecilia Malmström's plans to introduce web filtering in Europe: