Back to the Future: sealed and delivered

I finally completed the book and delivered it to the publishers, Springer-Verlag London Ltd., yesterday. It was good to meet the folks I had been corresponding with via email. They seem very tuned in to issues of open access, visibility and the value of the long tail. I was also pleased to hear that they will be making one or two chapters of the book openly available online once it gets published.

Executive Editor, Beverley Ford and Sales Director, David Anderson even treated me to lunch, which was very decent. David suggested we change the title from 'Back to the Future: Digital Decision Making' to 'Digital Decision Making: Back to the Future', which I had no objections to, though I'd still be interested in the opinions of readers of this blog on the change.

Whilst I was being wined and dined, Jo Cooling and Helen Desmond were dissecting my printed manuscript and we had a meeting about it after lunch. They seemed genuinely enthusiastic about the final result and did a great job of making a new author feel he might have produced something worthwhile.

Beverley was interested in what my next book might be which I guess is a good sign and she asked me how I felt now the first one was completed. I told her I'd let her know today. I'm not sure it has even sunk in yet, though. Which reminds me - I have a leak in the kitchen that I've been promising to fix for the past ten days and I no longer have the excuse that I have a book to finish, so I'd better get on with it.

ID card mystery-benefits approach by Home Office

William Heath finds the latest assertion by the Home Office on ID cards "beyond parody." This week I'm finishing off a book, one of the main messages of which is that before you build a big complex information system, you need to know what it is for. The virtual reality world surrounding the government on this scheme goes way beyond anything that the most imaginative gaming programmer has ever produced.

IBM sue Amazon for patent infringement

Apparently IBM are suing Amazon for patent infringement.

Chefs want in on the IP protetectionist game

Ed Foster at the Infoworld gripeline has beenpondering a Recipe for Intellectual Property Madness. It seems that chefs now want a slice of the intellectual property protectionist cake.

Thanks to James Love for the link.

House of Lords ruling in Jameel defamation case

The House of Lords have issued a ruling in the Jameel v Wall Street Journal Net defamation case. I don't have the time to analyse it at the moment but it is being reported as a relaxation of the strict libel code in the UK.

Update: the decision is also available at BAILLI.

Copyright and the environment

Michael Geist has been musing on the parallels between copyright and environmental politics. He must have been reading James Boyle's work recently, particularly the wonderful Shamans, Software and Spleens.

A central theme of my book, Back to the Future: Digital Decision Making, which is due with the publishers at the end of this month, is the parallels between environmental decision making and decision making surrounding the creation, deployment and regulation of complex information systems. It's nearly done and I'm looking forward to handing it over but there is still a fair bit of formatting, indexing etc. still to do, so I'd better get back to it!

Book sales boost from Google book search

Reuters are reporting that book sales have received a boost from Google's book search project.

Google to Subpoena Yahoo, Microsoft on Book Scanning

From Bloomberg Google to Subpoena Yahoo, Microsoft on Book Scanning In its dispute with publishers Google is looking for information from Yahoo and Microsoft to help fight the case.

Chitty Chitty sue sue

Part of chapter 2 of my book covers some copyright disputes over children's literature and I often look out for any news of these kinds of cases. The latest in a long line of cases has just been heard in the US in a dispute over the rights to the Chitty Chitty Bang Bang film. The judge has said the issues are substantive and told the two sides to prepare for trial. It will be an interesting one to watch.

Incidentally if you do have children I highly recommend Ian Flemming's original book, which is significantly different to the film.

Update: By coincidence the trustees of the Great Ormond Street Hospital have just launched the official sequel to Peter Pan, Peter Pan in Scarlet by Geraldine McCaughrean. The Peter Pan copyright disputes, such as that surrounding Emily Somma's unauthorised sequel, After the Rain, have been amongst the most interesting.

Who wrote that song

Interesting essay by lawyer, Pete Gutmann, Who Really Wrote that Song? (A tale of copyrights and Wrongs) about the legal dispute between Chuck Berry and Johnnie Johnson.

Unlawful play

From the excellent folks at ARCH:

"Liberal England quotes Professor Armstrong on the need to get children more active, rather than restricting their food intake.

We're looking at police retention of children's DNA at the moment, and came across a story about 3 children arrested for criminal damage when they were trying to build a treehouse. In the summer, there was another one about children in trouble for making the pavement messy when they played hopscotch. We've mentioned the York 'Nipper' database before - amongst other things it collects details of children's 'inconsiderate' behaviour such as 'playing ball games in the street'. There's plenty more stories, but you get the picture.

Maybe it's not children's behaviour that needs to change."

House vote to expand electronic spying

Anne Broache at CNet reports that the House of Representatives have voted to expand electronic sureveillance without a warrant. President Bush will be pleased.

Text of the Law Profs' Letter v Torture Bill

Michael Froomkin has posted the text of an open letter against the impending Bush-McCain Torture Bill. Recommended reading, as is the Lord Chancellor's suggestions that the US and the UK may be diverging in their approach to torture and the war on terror. Lord Falcolner has launched a campaign to defend the Human Rights Act against critics.

PNR data, the EU, the US and the Beeb

I was surprised one evening last week when I saw the top story on the BBC Ten O'Clock news was the negotiations between the US and EU over the technical difficulties - the slight matter of the European Court of Justice declaring the activity illegal, following a challenge by the EU parliament - the EU now have with airlines handing over passenger details to the US security services.

They got all the details wrong, misunderstood what the whole thing was about and painted it as a 'complete breakdown' between the EU and the US. But that the Beeb's TV news had it billed as a top story, which is fairly unusual for one of such technical and legal complexity, was almost enough to forgive the errors. The Register has a short piece on the story today.

Tony Blair's barcode mustache

Guardian readers will have already seen it but the NO2ID folks have been having a go at Tony Blair again.

"Tony Blair is not Hitler. But he is building the tools of totalitarianism. The identity scheme he is pushing is more controlling than any Europe has seen before. He can give no guarantee how it may be used in his lifetime, let alone the lifetimes of our children.

Some practical freedoms - personal privacy, confidentiality, anonymity, going about our business without need for official permit - are so familiar to us that they are unnoticed, like breathing. This ID scheme will choke them. It seeks to replace the trust in our society with formal validation by officials.

Numbered, indexed and tagged, your identity subject to approval, the simplest things in life will no longer be under your control. Tony may have faith in the future, but who else will have that power? In 10 years? In 20? In what back room?"

Drug companies lobby ministers

The Guardian has a front page story today on pharmaceutical companies lobbying of ministers both to encourage fast track approval of their drugs through the National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE) assessment process and to complain that NICE were not very nice in turning down, for example, Pfizer's Alzheimer's drug on the grounds that it was no more effective than existing treatments and too expensive. The top executives have also been hinting that unless the UK steps in line they might take their business elsewhere.

This is absolutely standard practice for the big pharmacuetical sector, lest anyone be too shocked. If you are interested in the activities of pharmaceutical companies then I'd highly recommend Information Feudalism by Peter Drahos and The Truth About Drug Companies by Marcia Angell. In business the key perspective to understand is that concerned with maximising shareholder value. The means to that end, sadly, are somewhat incidental.

Summary judgement v Streamcast in Grokster

The US District Court for the Central District of California has just issued a summary judgement holding Streamcast liable for inducement of copyright infringement in the Grokster case. On page 30 of the judgement:

"Plaintiffs need not prove that Streamcast undertook specific actions, beyond product distribution, that caused specific acts of infringement. Instead Plaintiffs need only prove that Streamcast distributed the product with intent to encourage infringement."

Which is pretty much what the Supreme Court said in Grokster. The District Court go on to say Streamcast technology was "used overwhelmingly for infringement" and their

• targetting of Napster users
  
• technical assistance to users with copyright infringing content (like Seinfeld and the Matrix)
  
• active steps in developing the technology to enable infringing use (e.g. in beta testing the software they identified insignificant availabilty of infringing content as a problem)
• their business model relied on income from infringing use
• lack of effort to prevent infringing use
  

constituted clear evidence of intent to encourage infringement.

Game set and match to the entertainment industry, which following the Supreme Court's ruling in Grokster last year was pretty much inevitable.

Thanks to Mark Lemley on the Cyberprofs listserv for the copy of the judgement. It will no doubt be widely available on the Net soon, if it is not already there.

Update: The EFF have a link to the judgement

Italian wiretapping

The latest EDRI-gram recommends reading the British Academy's recent copyright report and has some more information on the Italian wiretapping scandal

"The chaotic way in which the public authorities have dealt with the situation is underlined in several articles that show the state institutions have reacted very late and only when their leaders' personal interests might have been at stake.

Andrea Monti from EDRI-member ALCEI has correctly underlined that the Italian Data Protection Commission, which should have controlled this market has only "succeeded" in sending a press release. He also points out that, contrary to the most spread common opinions that the "hackers", "pirates" and "direct marketing multinational companies" are those targeting our personal data, the authors of the biggest problems related to the misuse of information are actually insiders, not very technical, such as members of the Police and Information Services."

Makes you wonder about the parallels with the NSA domestic spying programme authorised by president Bush. The problem is not the huge majority of decent public servants working for these agencies but the few intent on corrupting or exploiting the system for their own nefarious ends. Ed Felten makes the same point in relation to Diebold's criticism of his paper pointing out a Diebold evoting machine is insecure. In addition Diebold have been complaining that it is unfair to claim their machines are insecure since they are never networked, yet the user manual for the machines tested by Felten and co. state that "Results [of elections] are transferred are [sic] by means of a TCP/IP network connection, either directly, by modem or ethernet." And as Felten points out anyway:

"Diebold’s insistence that the voting machines cannot be networked is especially odd given that the conclusions in our report don’t rely in any way on the use of networking — even if Diebold’s no-networking claim were true, it would be irrelevant."

Groklaw: the british library gets it on drm

Regular readers will remember Pamela Jones anger at the British Libary's adoption of restrictive policies and Microsoft drm in their deployment of information systems to handle electronic materials. She's now changed her mind about their perspective on drm because of their recently issued IP manifesto (pdf). The Library's press release gives a neat summary. Pamela Jones says:

"I wish to say thank you to the British Library for issuing this document.

The IP Manifesto's key recommendations include, quoting from the press release:
* Existing limitations and exceptions to copyright law should be extended to encompass unambiguously the digital environment;

* Licenses providing access to digital material should not undermine longstanding limitations and exceptions such as ‘fair dealing';

* The right to copy material for preservation purposes – a core duty of all national libraries – should be extended to all copyrightable works;

* The copyright term for sound recordings should not be extended without empirical evidence of the benefits and due consideration of the needs of society as a whole;

* The US model for dealing with ‘orphan works' should be considered for the UK;

* The length of copyright term for unpublished works should be brought into line with other terms (ie: life plus 70 years).

In other words, copyright law should not change in the digital environment, and if it doesn't change, then fair dealing and fair use are just as applicable there. Here's the press release. This sentence says it all: "Licenses providing access to digital material should not undermine longstanding limitations and exceptions such as ‘fair dealing.'" And here's another angle to the story.

I am so thrilled, I can't even express myself."

I said at the time of her original essay that she was probably being a little harsh on the good folks at the British Library, since their director, Clive Field, had already publicly expressed his concerns about drm potentially causing digital lockdown of libaries; and though this is an excellent initiative from them it won't make the issues surrounding the adoption of the Microsoft drm at the Library go away. The reality of the day to day deployment and managing of complex information systems tends to be far removed from well intended high level policies and it is important that things are right at the operational level as well as the policy level. The very nature of the institution, however, means that it is crammed full of dedicated people who will, hopefully, tip the balance in terms of killing off their operational drm strictures in the longer term.

Simulating terrorism

There's an interesting article in this month's Spectrum on using computer simulations to help model or predict terrorist behaviour.

"Different forms of the software are aimed at military officials, who are already using such programs to train officers and troops, and at intelligence analysts, who are finding that the shadowy, shifting organizations they must study are so complex and unstable that keeping track of all the variables without computer help is increasingly unrealistic. The hope is that one day an intelligence analyst sitting at a desk thousands of miles from Jakarta or Jalalabad will be able to make preternaturally good guesses about who is likely to commit violent acts, and to advise policy-makers on specific ways to prevent an attack...

Such work, concentrated in the United States and sustained by tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars in funding by various intelligence organizations, including the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency, points to a new era in training and intelligence analysis. The experts developing these systems are reticent about exactly how their programs are being used. But outside observers say it is a good bet that software designed to identify the critical people in a terrorist organization will be used—if it hasn’t been already—to draw up lists that prioritize which people should be killed or captured so as to do maximum damage to the organization.

That worries some experts, who caution that even when the models are fed by the best available intelligence, they should never be trusted to determine, by themselves, whether someone should live or die. “A simulation is by its nature speculative, and you don’t go out and kill people based on speculation,” says Steven Aftergood, director of the Project on Government Secrecy for the Federation of American Scientists, in Washington, D.C...

50 percent of U.S. analysts have less than five years’ experience, according to some estimates. And yet despite all the turnover, Johnston noted a lingering tendency among analysts to look for information to confirm the prevailing hypothesis in their groups or sections rather than challenge it and risk alienating colleagues and superiors. Indeed, it is considered taboo to change “the corporate product line”: if the president or his national security team receives an official opinion from an intelligence agency and that agency later radically revises it, trust, status, and ultimately funding are jeopardized."