"A trial of a scanner that produces "naked" images of passengers has begun at Manchester Airport.
The authorities say it will speed up security checks by quickly revealing any concealed weapons or explosives.
But the full body scans will also show up breast enlargements, body piercings and a clear black-and-white outline of passengers' genitals.
The airport has stressed that the images are not pornographic and will be destroyed straight away.
Sarah Barrett, head of customer experience at the airport, said most passengers did not like the traditional "pat down" search...
Ms Barrett said: "This scanner completely takes away the hassle of needing to undress." "
The value-set of a management/administration, which is prepared to construct a justification for strip searching and believing somehow it is something else (because it is done with an expensive machine and the images are viewed remotely), is so far removed from the fundamental freedoms that the UK fought two world wars over, that you have to believe Churchill would be spinning in his grave. This one has to go into my book on The Insane Organisation.
"Swedish broadband provider ePhone is not obligated to hand over customer information to five book publishers, according to a decision by the Svea Court of Appeal which overturns a lower court ruling.
The case, which ePhone initially lost in June in Solna District Court, is significant because it is the first to go to trial since the passage of a law designed to crack down on internet piracy in Sweden.
ePhone argued that the five audio book publishers who filed the lawsuit had not been able to prove that anyone other than users from Sweden’s Anti-Piracy Bureau (Antipiratbyrån) had accessed a server containing sound files for 27 titles which the publishers claimed had been made available for downloading by the general public.
The appeals court agreed with ePhone, finding that the book publishers failed to show that there was probable cause to believe copyright infringement had occurred."
In 2001, in an amazing book, The Diversity of Life, Edward O. Wilson put forward a grand plan to protect the world's biodiversity the first stage of which involved doing a comprehensive survey of the world's flora and fauna. He accepted that this was a big but finite job and estimated it would take about 50,000 professional lifetimes over a period of 50 years. He didn't factor in the possibility of harnessing the networking power of the Web. Doug explains the discovery of the new moth:
Katie Robbins, a six-year-old living near Newbury, spotted an interesting moth on a windowsill. She and her Dad couldn’t identify what it was, so her Dad put a picture of it on iSpot, the nature identification website produced by the OU as part of the OPAL project, funded by the Big Lottery Fund. (I’m leading the development of the iSpot website.)
Martin Harvey, one of the resident nature experts on iSpot, saw it and thought it was an exciting rare find, and got the identification confirmed by the Natural History Museum.
It turns out that the moth was the Euonymus Leaf-notcher, Pryeria sinica, and it had never been seen before in Britain. It’s native to Asia, and has turned up in the last decade or so in North America as an invasive pest. Its larvae eat Euonymus shrubs (known variously as Spindle bushes, Spindles, and Burning bushes), which are widely planted in gardens. Martin Harvey’s blog post mentions that the Euonymus Leaf-notcher was observed in Spain last June, in the only other known siting in Europe (so far!).
Furry Moth (Pryeria sinica)
This is really exciting – according to press reports (I’ve not talked to her directly!) Katie and her family are “really excited”, and it’s a significant discovery.
You can see how the story unfolded on the ‘Furry Moth’ observation Katie’s Dad added to iSpot."
"The 2009 Nobel Prize in Economics was awarded today to Elinor Ostrom and Oliver Williamson for their research on economic governance. Ostrom’s award is particularly exciting, for it cites her study of the commons. Commons? That sounds familiar!
Ostrom’s pioneering work mostly concerns the governance of common-pool resources — resources that are rivalrous (i.e., scarce, can be used up, unlike digital goods) yet need to be or should be governed as a commons — classically, things like water systems and the atmosphere. This work is cited by many scholars of non-rivalrous commons (e.g., knowledge commons) as laying the groundwork for their field. For example, a few excerpts from James Boyle’s recent book, The Public Domain, first from the acknowledgements (page ix):
Historical work by Carla Hesse, Martha Woodmansee, and Mark Rose has been central to my analysis, which also could not have existed but for work on the governance of the commons by Elinor Ostrom, Charlotte Hess, and Carol Rose.
Notes, page 264:
In the twentieth century, the negative effects of open access or common ownership received an environmental gloss thanks to the work of Garrett Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Science 162 (1968): 1243–1248. However, work by scholars such as Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), and Carol Rose, “The Comedy of the Commons: Custom, Commerce, and Inherently Public Property,” University of Chicago Law Review 53 (1986): 711–781, have introduced considerable nuance to this idea. Some resources may be more efficiently used if they are held in common. In addition, nonlegal, customary, and norm-based forms of “regulation” often act to mitigate the theoretical dangers of overuse or under-investment.
Notes, page 266:
The possibility of producing “order without law” and thus sometimes governing the commons without tragedy has also fascinated scholars of contemporary land use. Robert C. Ellickson, Order without Law: How Neighbors Settle Disputes (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991); Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
In 2003 Ostrom herself co-authored with Charlotte Hess a paper contextualizing knowledge commons and the study of other commons: Ideas, Artifacts, and Facilities: Information as a Common-Pool Resource. It includes a citation of Creative Commons, which was just about to launch its licenses at the time the paper was written:
An example of an effective grassroots initiative is that taken by the Public Library of Science (”PLS”), a nonprofit organization of scientists dedicated to making the world’s scientific and medical literature freely accessible “for the benefit of scientific progress, education and the public good.”126 PLS has so far encouraged over 30,888 scientists from 182 countries to sign its open letter to publishers to make their publications freely available on the web site PubMed Central.127 By September 2002, there were over eighty full-text journals available at this site.128 Another new collective action initiative is the Creative Commons129 founded by Lawrence Lessig, James Boyle, and others to promote “the innovative reuse of all sorts of intellectual works.”130 Their first project is to “offer the public a set of copyright licenses free of charge.”131"
My son came home from school with a copy of the ContactPoint promotional leaflet yesterday. He had read the leaflet by the time he gave it to me today and explained that it's 'supposed' to make it quicker and more efficient to help children. I told him what a bad idea it was and why; and even at 11 years old he was flabbergasted that the govenrment seem to believe they can keep kids safe by putting all their personal details on a database to which a third to a half a million people have access to as a routine part of their job.
"They just can't be that stupid dad?!"
When I also explained that the details of the children of prominent politicians and celebrities would be kept off the database he was more than a little indignant.
"Well I suppose they have a point in one way, dad. Lots of people are interested in those people and their families but if it is not safe for them how can it be safe for the rest of us?!!!"
I couldn't have put it better myself. In fact I'd have been significantly less polite.
"A Japanese high court acquitted the developer of a free file-sharing program Thursday in a high-profile case over copyright law, a court official said.
The high court reversed a 2006 ruling by a lower court that imposed a fine of $17,000 on Isamu Kaneko, 39, said the court official, who declined to be named, citing department policy...
In the 2006 ruling, a judge said Winny assisted in the perpetration of crimes...
But Presiding Judge Masazo Ogura rejected the initial verdict, saying it "cannot be said that the defendant published the software to encourage copyright infringement," according to Kyodo News Agency"
"Eolas Technologies, a company that ground through a years-long patent infringement lawsuit against Microsoft, now has sued a large swath of corporate powers for infringement of that same patent and another related patent concerning interactive programs on Web sites.
The list of defendants includes many high-profile companies inside and outside the tech world: Adobe Systems, Amazon, Apple, Blockbuster, Citigroup, eBay, Frito-Lay, Go Daddy, Google, J.C. Penney, JPMorgan Chase, Office Depot, Perot Systems, Playboy Enterprises, Staples, Sun Microsystems, Texas Instruments, Yahoo, and YouTube.
Eolas' suit is not to be taken lightly. Although the earlier Microsoft case took many years to resolve, and Eolas by no means won a complete victory, the patent involved did overall withstand heavy legal challenges despite many on the Web rallying to Microsoft's aid. Microsoft and Eolas won't describe terms of their 2007 settlement of the patent case"
Update - apologies for losing the CNet link, hopefully now fixed.
Monica Horten reports that details of the UK government's proposed three strikes plans have been drafted by the music industry.
"Parking-fine style Internet suspension may be proposed by the British government, as a sanction for against peer-to-peer users who are alleged to have infringed copyright...
The new element is that the users will get a final warning, telling them that a "technical measure" will be applied. The warning notice will give them opportunity to appeal before the measure is applied. The appeal will be made to a panel of adjudicators. The panel will comprise legally-trained people, but it is not envisaged that they will be judges, and it is not even clear whether it will be a formal institution or a call centre.
The "parking fine" element is that users would receive a lesser technical measure if they do not appeal, or conversely, they would risk a more severe measure - possibly a longer period of being cut off the Internet - if they do appeal and lose...
It's understood that the new proposals were drawn up by the British music industry at the request of the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS). The request was apparently made because Amendment 138 in the EU Telecoms Package is a problem."
Update: Meanwhile the Council of Ministers in negotiation with representatives of the EU parliament has proposed an addendum to the original amendment 138 to the telecoms package.
"Proposition for Article 1.3.a of the Framework directive.
"Measures taken by Member States regarding end-users' access to or use of services and applications through electronic communication networks shall respect the fundamental rights and freedoms of natural persons, including in relation to privacy, freedom of expression and access to information and due process and the right to effective judicial protection in compliance with the general principles of Community law. Any such measures shall in particular respect the principle of a fair and impartial procedure, including the right to be heard.
This paragraph is without prejudice to the competence of a Member State to determine in line with its own constitutional order and with fundamental rights appropriate procedural safeguards assuring due process. This may include requirements of a judicial decision authorising the measures to be taken and may take account of the need to adopt urgent measures in order to assure national security, defence, public security, and the prevention, investigation, detection, and prosecution of criminal offences.""
It's the standard political move - declare the basic freedoms fundamental and provide a universal get out clause for governments which wish to ignore the requirements - and there's a fairly good chance the parliament reps will buy it. We'll just have to wait and see.
The pilot municipal elections done using evoting machines in Finland have recently been nullified by the country's Supreme Administrative Court. There's a nice Flash animation of how the machines work at the Finnish Ministry of Justice website. Ed Felten has a succinct report.
Ed Felten reports on the latest civic technology project at Princeton.
"Today we are rolling out FedThread, a new way of interacting with the Federal Register. It's the latest civic technology project from our team at Princeton's Center for Information Technology Policy.
The Federal Register is "[t]he official daily publication for rules, proposed rules, and notices of Federal agencies and organizations, as well as executive orders and other presidential documents." It's published by the U.S. government, five days a week. The Federal Register tells citizens what their government is doing, in a lot more detail than the news media do.
FedThread makes the Federal Register more open and accessible. FedThread gives users:
collaborative annotation: Users can attach a note to any paragraph of the Federal Register; a conversation thread hangs off of every paragraph.
advanced search: Users can search the Federal Register (going back to 2000) on full text, by date, agency, and other fields.
customized feeds: Any search can be turned into an RSS feed. The resulting feed will include any new items that match the search query. Feeds can be delivered by email as well.
I think FedThread is a nice tool, but what's most amazing to me is that the whole project took only ten days to create. Ten days ago we had no code, no HTML, no plan, not even a block diagram on a whiteboard. Today we launched a pretty good service."
He also explains that there were 3 primary reasons for them being able to produce such a service in such a short period of time. Firstly the government provided access to the data in an open standard format, xml, that was easy for the software to handle. Secondly there a great tech. tools available and thirdly they had a group of smart individuals. This is right in Tony Hirst writetoreply territory and the potential for these kinds of services built on open access to government data is huge. Congratulations to the Princeton team and hopefully FedThread will get widely used.
"Websites that help people find jobs or hospitals have been hit by legal action threatened by the Royal Mail.
The threat was issued against the company supplying them, and many other sites, with postcode data.
Royal Mail said the legal action was threatened to stop "unauthorised access" to the postcode data.
Ernestmarples.com, which supplied the address data, said it did not have the resources to fight a legal battle so has turned off its feed...
Commenting on its action the Royal Mail said: "We have not asked anyone to close down a website.
"We have simply asked a third party to stop allowing unauthorised access to Royal Mail data, in contravention of our intellectual property rights," it added in a statement."
According to La Quadrature du Net some representatives from the EU parliament are to get together with counterparts from the Council of Ministers to sort out their differences over a technical amendment to the EU telecoms package. Amendment 138 would effectively block the implementation of 3 strikes regimes without judicial oversight in member states.
"Concerning Amendment 138 the Commission accepted it in its amended proposal after the European Parliament's first reading but supported the European Parliament-Council compromise text afterwards as a balanced solution. The Commission could, therefore, accept the amendment, but will do its utmost to facilitate the emergence of a compromise between the co-legislators on this issue."
Prior to the issuing of that opinion there had been significant manoeuvrings behind the scenes. The amendment was variously dropped and re-worded and the parliament had voted overwhelmingly on two occasions to support it, for example. There remains considerable mutual animosity between those who support it and those against. So it will be interesting to see where these latest discussions lead, especially since the French have passed their latest attempt at 3 strikes legislation in mid September and the UK government have indicated a committment to doing likewise.
The amendment itself (now confusingly Amendment 46 (scroll down to page 41/93 in the amendments) reads
"Council common position – amending act Article 1 – point 8 – point fb (new)
(fb) in paragraph 4, point (fb) shall be added: “(fb) applying the principle that no restriction may be imposed on the fundamental rights and freedoms of endusers, without a prior ruling by the judicial authorities, notably in accordance with Article 11 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union on freedom of expression and information, save when public security is threatened in which case the ruling may be subsequent.”
Justification
This AM restores AM 138 adopted in first reading by Parliament on 24 September 2008, T6/0449/2008 (Rule 62(2)(a))."
The compromise position referred to the in Commission's official views, I believe facilitated the terminations of suspected copyright infringers' internet services but left open a possible right of appeal to an independent tribunal, not necessarily the courts, after the event. As to the notion of 3 strikes itself, it trips over so many legal, technical and economic hurdles it's difficult to know where to start but I can't beat Lilian Edwards condemnation of the idea at the Musicians Fans and Online Copyright event last year.
Update: The latest French 3 strikes law HADOPI 2 has apparently been referred to the Constitutional Council which declared its predecessor unsconstitutional.
"Digital literature, online scientific research and internet journalism that should have been saved in the nation's main libraries over the past five years may have been lost because ministers have failed to give them the legal power to copy and archive websites, the Guardian has learned.
Senior executives at the British Library and the National Library of Scotland (NLS) are dismayed that legislation giving them the right to collect online and digital material is still not in force, more than six years after it was passed by parliament.
The omission has meant the libraries – which are legally required to archive books, newspapers and journals – have failed to record online coverage of major events such as the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, the release of the Lockerbie bomber and the MPs' expenses scandal."
One of the best pieces of career advice I ever heard was to do something you're interested in. Comparative biomechanist Adam Summers discovered this by accident.
I also learn from the Enlightened Economist that I'm not the only one who has been arguing recently for a 'restoration of the wildlands' or space for the public domain to roam free or find safe harbours. Apparently Berkeley professor of economics, Suzanne Scotchmer, at the Global Economic Symposium, called "for international negotiation on what forms of knowledge should form a global public domain and be kept out of the international arms race towards ever-tougher (and probably ever-less enforcable) protection of IP via ludicrous patents and copyright terms."
I did a seminar for some respected colleagues at the OU yesterday on James Boyle's book, The Public Domain.
Boyle is an exceptional scholar, activist and storyteller. Needless to day I can't recommend the book highly enough.
In The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind, he eloquently and passionately argues that our culture, science and democracy depend on a delicate balance between ideas that are controlled by intellectual property and those that are freely available in the public domain. He tells a terrific series of engaging stories about, for example, why the building blocks of synthetic biology, business methods, pairs of musical notes are now owned, why blues, jazz or soul music would probably be illegal if it were invented today, why most of 20th century culture is legally unavailable to us, and why the World Wide Web would, most likely, have been killed at birth if lawyers, commerce and policymakers could have reacted quickly enough.
This all adds up to what Boyle calls a 'second enclosure movement' – except that on this occasion we’re not facing an enclosure of the grassy commons of olde Englande but rather an enclosure of the 'commons of the mind' and a serious erosion of the public domain, a state of affairs future generations will rightly condemn us for allowing to happen; at the very point that we have the technical and economic capacity to facilitate universal access to recorded human knowledge, a digital library of Alexandria.
The book, destined to become the standard text in the area, also serves as the Silent Spring of the information society – a clarion call to understand and protect the public domain through scholarship, communication, articulation and recognition of shared interests and values that allow that notion - the public domain - to come into public consciousness and a diverse ecology of activism to support all this. A kind of "environmentalism for information" and the public domain.
Sadly I can't put the slides on Slideshare since I included some audio and video sequences of the evolution of some songs James mentions in the book and a parody animated sequence of Disney characters explaining copyright, fair use and the public domain.
My thanks to John Naughton, who very kindly attended on his first day of long overdue study leave and recorded proceedings, despite having endulged my rants about IP for more years than he would care to remember. So John had already heard the stories and my views on them on mulitple occasions previously. Thanks also to Doug Clow who made a valiant attempt, live blogging, to make some sense of my incoherent ramblings during the afternoon.
In the final chapter of the book James makes a persuasive and heartfelt plea for a politics of the public domain. Although I'm pessimistic about his vision coming to pass I was just thinking in preparing for the seminar and following on from my presentation at the Gikii conference recently, wouldn't it be nice to have a visual representation of the erosion of the public domain equivalent to the kind of work James Balog does with the Extreme Ice Survey on glaciers.
Update: Just a PS for policymakers. When you do get round to reading The Public Domain and you should, pay particular attention to what Professor Boyle calls the "Jefferson warning" and its corrolary the "Sony axiom".
Update 2: Diane Coyle aka the enlightened economist posted a terrific review of the book at more or less the same time as I was discussing it yesterday.
Nearly 70 million persons in India have some form of disability (visual impairment being the most common) that prevents them from reading printed matter. The good part is that there are technologies available which can help persons with print impairment to read, if the material is converted into an alternate format such as large print, audio, Braille or any electronic format. Unfortunately the Indian law does not permit a person with print impairment to make an accessible copy of a book in order to be able to read it. What this means is that every time a print impaired person wishes to read a book he/she has to get permission from the copyright-holder – a completely unfeasible proposition.
The Solution
To solve this problem the law in question i.e. the Indian Copyright Act, 1957 should be amended to permit persons with print impairment to convert materials into accessible formats.
Campaign Objective
The Right to Read campaign seeks to accelerate change in copyright law, raise public awareness on the issue of access to reading for the print-impaired; and gather Indian support for the Treaty for the Blind proposed by the World Blind Union at the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO).
"Last week Sen. Richard Durbin introduced a bill (S. 1714) that would create a $15 million federal grant program for "open textbooks." The bill is a further example of continuing federal government interest in openness, transparency, and using information-sharing technologies to promote social aims.
Sen. Durbin is promoting his bill as a means to drive down the price of college textbooks, but I think it is going to have more far-reaching consequences than that. If it passes."
In a long running legal saga, the San Francisco Chronicle reports that:
"A Stanford professor who battled James Joyce's estate for the right to quote family documents in research on one of the author's most celebrated works will get $240,000 from the estate for her legal fees, the university said Monday.
Carol Shloss' settlement with Joyce's heirs ends a court case in which the estate, fiercely protective of its rights to his works, refused to let Shloss use excerpts from his papers or his daughter's medical records in her 2003 book, "Lucia Joyce: To Dance in the Wake""
