Change To EU Enforcement Directive Could Criminalise Parallel Imports

From IPWatch: Change To EU Enforcement Directive Could Criminalise Parallel Imports

"The European Parliament has voted against criminalising parallel imports of goods in the proposed European Union directive on criminal measures aimed at ensuring the enforcement of intellectual property rights (IPRED2). Yet these re-imports of products marketed by rights holders in other countries may be criminalised if Parliament does not change a “cleaned-up” draft text of the directive that has quietly emerged, sources say."

I was grumbling recently about the EU situation in comparison to the Canadian Supreme court decision in the parallel chocolate imports case. IPWatch make the point much more pointedly in this piece. (Sadly the full article is only available to subscribers)

French police arrest teenager over Potter translation

In a reprise of similar stories related to earlier books in the series and ranging from Caracus to Berlin it appears that a French teenager has been translating the latest Harry Potter book and posting his efforts on the web before the official French translation of the book is released on 26 October. He's been arrested for his efforts. A little harsh don't you think?

The ghosts in the voting machines

Bill Thompson on evoting:

" When I started work as a professional programmer, writing in the C programming language, I sometimes wrote very bad code. It worked, but it wasn't what you'd call industrial strength, largely because it didn't do nearly enough checking.

As a result my programs would crash if you gave them unexpected input by typing a word into a field where a number was required, or because they failed to check whether a variable had been properly initialised before doing a calculation.

Fortunately I had talented and patient colleagues who showed me the difference between student programming and serious coding and understood that validating data, checking variables and handling all possible error conditions is not just a useful extra but at least as important as the part of the program that does the actual work.

The lesson has stayed with me, even though I now write little production code and only occasionally mess around with other people's programs.

Sadly, it seems that the developers behind three of the most widely-used electronic voting systems in current use in the United States have never grasped this important principle.

Following concerns about the accuracy of the electronic voting systems used in last year's the California state legislature commissioned computer science and cryptography experts at the University of California to review the main players and ensure that 'California voters are being asked to cast their ballots on machines that are secure, accurate, reliable, and accessible'.

Anyone looking for reassurance will have had their hopes dashed, as the recently published report into e-voting systems from Diebold, Hart InterCivic and Sequoia found massive security holes in the source code which, combined with poor physical security and badly-designed procedures, make it impossible to rely on them to record votes accurately...

Such problems are not confined to the United States, of course, though the campaign for more openness about the technology used in electronic voting seems to have made more progress there than elsewhere.

Here in the UK the Open Rights Group, resolute campaigners for civil liberties in the digital world, sent observers to several of the e-voting pilot projects in the May 2007 English and Scottish elections.

They had to fight through a bureaucracy which seemed to see openness as a dangerous aberration, where 'observers were frequently subject to seemingly arbitrary and changeable decisions via unclear lines of authority', but the final report makes chilling reading."

Security excuse bingo

Matt Blaze, not surprisingly has been following the California evoting review and has come up with a game called security excuse bingo to help read the press releases from the vendors affected.

"To help vendors focus on their obligations here, Jutta Degener and I present Security Problem Excuse Bingo. Usual bingo rules apply, with vendor press releases, news interviews, and legal notices used as source material. Cards can be generated and downloaded from www.crypto.com/bingo/pr

Because we follow all industry standard practices, you can rest assured that there are no bugs in this software. We take security very seriously."

Excellent.

JK Rowling loses court fight to ban publication of son's picture

JK Rowling has lost a court case which she pursued in an effort to ban the publication of a photograph of her and her son.

""I have considerable sympathy for the claimant's parents and anyone else who wishes to shield their children from intrusive media attention," Paten said.

But he said the law does not allow them to "carve out a press-free zone for their children concerning absolutely everything they choose to do."

The judge granted Rowling and Murray the right to appeal and continued a temporary ban on publication of the picture in the meantime."

And you thought ContactPoint was bad?

From ARCH and I hope they don't mind me quoting them in full:

"The government has delivered an astounding parting shot as it heads off for the long summer holidays. Hard on the heels of the ContactPoint database comes the announcement that eCAF will also be a national database.

If you don’t know what eCAF is, go and read all about it to understand just how serious this is.

It is despicable that the announcement was made in a written ministerial statement the day before recess. The plans were not mentioned in any of the debates on the regulations for ContactPoint last week.

Suddenly ContactPoint looks positively benign. Those 330,000 users will now have access to the full, in-depth assessments of up to 6 million children and their families, all held on an inevitably insecure national database. It simply beggars belief, and knocks on the head any faint hope that the Brown regime might offer relief from spin and deceit."

The Frodo Franchise

Henry Jenkins has done a fascinating interview (the first of three) with Dr. Kristin Thompson about her research for her new book, Frodo Franchise: The "Lord of the Rings" and Modern Hollywood. Dr Thompson, through a combination of scholarly reputation, good fortune and decent people involved in the production of the Lord of the Rings films seems to have got unprecedented access to the processes involved in the creation of a modern movie blockbuster.

"I started out not knowing any of the people involved directly or indirectly with the films. My assumption was that I would have to get in touch with one of the key people. There were only three of them who seemed powerful enough to make the decision to cooperate with my project: Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh, and Barrie Osborne.

In late 2002 I was still wondering if I could manage that. Fortunately I happened to be at a film conference in Adelaide, Australia, and met a film editor named Annabelle Sheehan. She was familiar with my work, and she said she could put me in touch with Barrie...

I won't go into the lengthy negotiation process that I went through with New Line, but it lasted from February to August, scotching my chances of being in Wellington during pickups. In late August I got the word that New Line was probably going to cooperate. That was enough for me to decide to go to New Zealand if possible, and witness some of the post-production, tour the facilities, interview people, whatever. I contacted Barrie about it, and he said I could come down. I booked my flights, bought a really good digital audio recorder, and by the end of September I was in Wellington.

Those two moments--Barrie's decisions to cooperate and to let me come down before the film was finished--were the crucial points, and I must give Barrie enormous credit for trusting and supporting me. I doubt that the book would exist if I hadn't had that support...

Barrie assigned me a point person, Melissa Booth, the main publicist at that time. She and I sat down on my first day, and she was terrific. She picked up right away on what I needed and made up a list of people and made the first appointments for me. After that I had the contact information and mainly made the appointments myself. Basically, once Barrie had made it known that I was doing the book, virtually everyone involved in the filmmaking whom I wanted to interview cooperated and indeed were very friendly and open about the whole thing.

I think it was really only after the first trip to New Zealand that I started trying to think of any comparable book that had appeared: a study of an entire film by a film historian, as opposed to a journalist. I couldn't think of any.

Now that the book is coming out, I can see why. I look back and think that getting the access I needed for my research was so close to impossible that I wonder if another such book can ever be written. The thing depended so much on some incredibly lucky coincidences, on dogged determination, on Kiwi friendliness and hospitality, and certainly on Barrie's support. That complex set of circumstances is so unlikely to come together again. I'm convinced that if I had tried to undertake a comparable project relating to one of the big franchises that are made in Hollywood or London, it wouldn't have gotten to square one.

On the other hand, if people in the industry read The Frodo Franchise, maybe some will recognize that it's really great publicity for them. I would like to think that it would inspire studio officials to give greater access to bona fide scholars. It would be somewhat like the studios' learning curve on how to deal with fans on the internet, I suppose."

Update: Other recetn Jenkins blog posts worth a read is 'Oh, Those Russians!': The (Not So) Mysterious Ways of Russian-language Harry Potter Fandom and 'Oh, Those Russians!': The (Not So) Mysterious Ways of Russian-language Harry Potter Fandom (Part One)

Evoting decertified in California

Well the Secretary of State for California, Debra Bowen, has, following the review of the state's evoting machines, decertified (or withdrawn approval and instigated re-approval conditioned on important changes, including full source code disclosure) the voting machines supplied by the four biggest evoting vendors in the US.

This is a pretty big deal for the evoting systems in the US and it will be really interesting to see how California copes with what comes next.

Update: The Washington Post has the story.

Digital content wants to be free...

Martin has been postulating:

"Through the various projects I've been involved in recently (openlearn, broadcast strategy review, Flosscom), I've come to the realisation that something very significant has happened to the nature of content. It can be summarised thus:

"Digital content wants to be free, and will seek the path to maximum access."

Let's call it the content law...

The content law may seem simple, but it has enormous implications. Let's try a thought experiment: imagine a matter transporter has been invented. The implications for transport industries, car manufacturers, holidays, property prices, retail etc would be enormous. The physical (including people) becomes digital content as it were, so there is no need to live near your place of work (or even to have a 'place of work').

The internet is a matter transporter for digital content. If you are working in any sector where the content can be digitised (broadcast, music, newspapers, movies, and er, education) then you should repeat the content law to yourself everyday, because it means you have to find alternative revenue streams for when your content achieves its nirvanic state of free and available to everyone. There may be some content which can survive this law, but you are probably going to do your organisation a bigger service if you assume the content law is true for you also and instead of trying to find ways to combat it, you seek ways to build new models around it."

This deserves a much more thoughtful response than I currently have the time to [virtually] pen because I think Martin is partly though not totally right. I say only partly right because digital content is never 'free as in free beer' and no less an authority than Larry Lessig has just completed a 10-year world lecture tour and a couple of books articulating the opposite point of view - that digital content is and will become the most controlled form of content ever. There will always be energy costs, technology/gadget/s costs and utility/connection costs and the trick for the commercial and public sectors, as Martin says, is to work out the business models to support the profit making ventures as well as the public goods infrastructure to sustain the production, hosting and universal access to the digital content. There is definitely an enrichment of the Gartner technology boom-bust-mainstream integration cycle



to be worked out here on the basis of Martin's proposed law but we shouldn't underestimate the potential of the existing money/political power brokers to distort the process. Then again maybe this should be the central theme of Martin's next book?

Quote of the day

"A President is impeachable if he attempts to subvert the Constitution." James Madison at the Constitutional Convention in 1787.

Thanks to Hipparchia for the link.

Assault on liberty

The Daily Telegraph's Philip Johnston won this year's Charles Douglas-Home Memorial Trust Award for an essay on Nu Labour's ten-year assault on civil liberites.


"IN his first statement to Parliament as Prime Minister, Gordon Brown said that “Britain is rightly proud to be the pioneer of the modern liberties of the individual.” Little noticed among the cascade of pronouncements about constitutional reform, was a promise to reconsider the ban on unlicensed political protest in the vicinity of the Palace of Westminster. Mr Brown implied that when it came to balancing the need for public order with the right to public dissent, this was a law too far.

A commitment to personal liberty is only to be expected from a British prime minister, and especially from a son of the manse brought up in Adam Smith’s home town. Yet Mr Brown sat in a Cabinet that did more than any other in recent years to alter the balance in the relationship between the State and the individual.

If Clement Attlee is remembered for post-war welfare provision and the NHS, Harold Wilson for Sixties optimism, Edward Heath for joining Europe, James Callaghan for the Winter of Discontent, Margaret Thatcher for reducing the size of government and John Major, however unfairly, for sleaze then we will look back on the past ten years as marking a serial assault by the State on the civil liberties of the citizen.

To be sure, the State always wants to limit the liberties of its people. But it is normally restrained by an executive that understands the limits of illiberalism or is contained by a parliament that considers itself to be a guardian of freedoms.

For a number of reasons, neither of these brakes was applied under Tony Blair’s premiership. The huge Commons majority he enjoyed, the craven pusillanimity of his party, the implosion of the Conservatives and the consequent absence of opposition, other than in the Lords ¬ and, to an extent, in the courts – conspired with a genuine, though irrational, fear of terrorism and rising street crime to let the State take greater control over the citizen than it has enjoyed in modern peacetime...

This assault on freedom has come from all directions. Surveillance of a sophistication never dreamt of in Orwell’s worst nightmares; the gradual dismantling of the judicial protections afforded to defendants in criminal cases, even to the point of questioning the presumption of innocence; the criminalisation of dozens of activities that would never previously have been considered immoral; the limits on freedom of speech; restrictions on movement and detention without trial or even charge; and the creation of databases containing information on us all and which will track the movements of our children and theirs from cradle to grave.

Taken singly, each one of these might be considered justifiable. For instance, the removal of the double jeopardy rule in trials, whereby a suspect found innocent cannot be tried again for the same offence, may seem sensible given the advances in DNA technology. But when this is combined with proposals to give police greater summary powers or attempts are made to limit, or even to dispense with, trial by jury then the sum of the parts appears far less benign...

are we a free country any longer? Were we ever? It is said, though less often now than it used to be, that the basis of English liberty is the rule of law, under which everything is allowed unless specifically prohibited. According to AV Dicey, the 19th-century constitutionalist, this was one of the features that distinguished England from its continental counterparts, where people were subject to the exercise of arbitrary power and actions that were not specifically authorised were proscribed...

The proliferation of state databases, again very much a recent occurrence, has also rendered the concept of the private individual a thing of the past, and from the earliest age. From next year, the children’s database will go online, containing confidential details on every child in the land, including a record of school achievements, police and social services records and home address. Each child will be assigned an identifying number so that the authorities can access his or her records. This database, known as the Integrated Children’s System, is being developed ostensibly to curb child abuse, but it goes much farther than the Child Protection Register, which holds information about children considered to be “at risk”. One reason all children are to be included is to avoid “stigmatisation”. Astonishingly, this plan has attracted little public hostility, though the Joint Parliamentary Select Committee on Human Rights pointed out: “The information which may be included on the database about a child goes beyond purely objective facts about a child, such as name, address and date of birth. It includes information, such as contact details of persons providing services including health services, which may reveal very sensitive information, such as the fact that a 17-year-old girl has been referred to family planning services.”

It also includes “the existence of any cause for concern” about a child, “an extremely subjective and open-ended phrase which is almost bound to include very sensitive information.” How long will this information remain on the database? Will it be erased when the children turn 18 or will some youthful, even childish, transgression return to haunt them in adulthood? We do not know...

But we have not yet got to the main event, the ultimate weapon of state control: the national identity system. This is something that the State qua State, as opposed to an individual minister or government, has long sought to introduce. When it comes to softening up the country for an ID card, the Home Office has been prepared to play a very long game. Officials have presented every home secretary for the past 50 years with a proposal for an ID scheme."

Highly recommended and thanks to the good folks at NO2ID for the pointer.

Out of the Theater, Into the Courtroom

From the Washington Post: A teenager is facing a year in jail and a $2500 fine for recording a 20 second clip of a film in a cinema, in order to get her brother hyped up to go and see it too. Some of the folk in the entertainment business certainly know how to overreact. Personally I can't see how it can be good business practice to terrorise a long term loyal customer who was interested in promoting your product.

Tech industry complain to FTC re content cos overreaching on copyright

Here's an interesting development:

"The Computer and Communications Industry Association, which includes Google, Microsoft, and other major tech companies, has filed a complaint in the U.S. with the Federal Trade Commission over the copyright notices used by sports leagues (the NFL and MLB are named), broadcasters, movie studios, and publishers. The gist of the complaint is that these industries use notices or warnings to misrepresent consumer rights with regard to copyright law as they often warn of significant liability for copying with no mention of fair use rights."

California evoting machine audit shows vunerabilities

Bruce Schneier and Ed Felten have been considering the University of California reports on the review of California's evoting machines.

Schneier:

"This was a serious review, with real security researchers getting access to the source code. The report was issued last week, and the researchers were able to compromise all three machines -- by Diebold Election Systems, Hart Intercivic, and Sequoia Voting Systems -- multiple ways. (They said they could probably find more ways, if they had more time.)...

This is no surprise, really. The notion that electronic voting machines were somehow more secure every other computer system ever built was ridiculous from the start. And the claims by machine manufacturers that releasing their source code would hurt the security of the machine was -- like all these sorts of claims -- really an attempt to prevent embarrassment to the company.

Not everyone gets this, unfortunately. And not everyone involved in voting:
Letting the hackers have the source codes, operating manuals and unlimited access to the voting machines "is like giving a burglar the keys to your house,'' said Steve Weir, clerk-recorder of Contra Costa County and head of the state Association of Clerks and Election Officials.

No. It's like giving burglars the schematics, installation manuals, and unlimited access to your front door lock. If your lock is good, it will survive the burglar having that information. If your lock isn't good, the burglar will get in."

Felten:

"So far only the red team (and accessibility) reports have been released, which makes one wonder what is in the remaining reports...

The bottom-line paragraph from the red team overview says this (section 6.4):

The red teams demonstrated that the security mechanisms provided for all systems analyzed were inadequate to ensure accuracy and integrity of the election results and of the systems that provide those results.

The red teams all reported having inadequate time to fully plumb the systems’ vulnerabilities (section 4.0):

The short time allocated to this study has several implications. The key one is that the results presented in this study should be seen as a “lower bound”; all team members felt that they lacked sufficient time to conduct a thorough examination, and consequently may have missed other serious vulnerabilities...

Despite the limited time, the teams found ways to breach the physical security of all three systems using only “ordinary objects” (presumably paper clips, coins, pencil erasers, and the like); they found ways to modify or overwrite the basic control software in all three voting machines; and they were able to penetrate the backend tabulator system and manipulate election records."

Update: I also should have said there was a parallel study going on in Florida. A study by Florida State University has reported that Florida's optical scan machines are still flawed despite efforts to fix them. Further information on the study available at http://www.sait.fsu.edu/news/2007-03-05-essr.shtml

Update 2: The evoting machine vendors have attacked the California study, saying all it proves is that all computer systems are vulnerable.

Candian Supreme Court and the chocolate case

The Canadian Supreme Court recently ruled in the Euro-Excellence v. Kraft Foods case that copyright cannot be used as a technical legal barrier to the parallel importing of chocolate. Michael Geist tells the story better than I can.

Of course in the EU, IP holders don't need to resort to such copyright trickery. The protectionism... er... complications of the free market...

Interestingly and rarely for a copyright case the question of economic interests was central to the key opinions penned by the majority justices. Justice Bastarache wrote:

"sometimes a substantial reproduction of a copyrighted work will not be an infringement, because copyright protection is limited to protection of legitimate economic interests which are the result of an exercise of skill and judgment, and that protection must not be extended beyond its proper limits. The CCH decision thus confirms that in order to protect the essential balance which lies at the heart of copyright law, care must be taken to ensure that copyright protection is not allowed to extend beyond the legitimate interests of a copyright holder... once copyright is granted in a given work, the protection that it provides must not be extended beyond its natural limits, and must take proper account of user rights such as the right to deal fairly with a copyrighted work."

Nurses have reseravations about NHS NPfIT

From William Heath's KableNet: Nurses have strong reservations about the benefits of electronic patient records, a survey for the Royal College of Nursing has found

Photoleap

Photleap seems like a good idea - apparently it "makes it easy to send photos and videos to your friends and family."

Given the limit on the size of files that can be attached to emails it's only a matter of time before they get bypassed by something more useful. I haven't looked at how Photoleap works - utility, privacy issues etc. - but it sounds promising.

Lucasfilm's Phantom Menace

Lessig in the Washington Post:

"In May, Lucasfilm announced plans to enable fans of the "Star Wars" series to "remix" "Star Wars" video clips with their own creative work...

A careful reading of Lucasfilm's terms of use show that in exchange for the right to remix Lucasfilm's creativity, the remixer has to give up all rights to what he produces. In particular, the remixer grants to Lucasfilm the "exclusive right" to the remix -- including any commercial rights -- for free. To any content the remixer uploads to the site, he grants to Lucasfilm a perpetual non-exclusive right, again including commercial rights and again for free.

Upload a remix and George Lucas, and only Lucas, is free to include it on his Web site or in his next movie, with no compensation to the creator. You are not even permitted to post it on YouTube. Upload a particularly good image as part of your remix, and Lucas is free to use it commercially with no compensation to the creator. The remixer is allowed to work, but the product of his work is not his. Put in terms appropriately (for Hollywood) over the top: The remixer becomes the sharecropper of the digital age."

Brown trying to look tough on terror

Gordon Brown is showing no signs of backing away from his predecessor's predisposition to do things that made look superficially tough on terror. He's pushing his demands to extend detention without charge period beyond the already very long 28 days and now he's keen to deploy a border force (originally a Conservative party plan) to look tough on immigration. They're all going to get uniforms you know.

In only November last year Immigration minister Liam Byrne was ridiculing the border force plan:

"The chaos of a damaging, distracting and disruptive reorganisation of three agencies on the front line into a single border force. That idea is outdated and is rooted in a concept of a frontier that is long past.

It is simplistic and dangerous in the disruption that it poses. The number of people who seek to come to this country might double in the next 10 to 15 years, and I simply cannot think of a worse use of time than to consume front-line staff in the process of reapplying for their own jobs in a reorganisation, the benefits of which we are already achieving by equipping different agencies with the powers to do each other's jobs"

I guess he didn't realise his soon to be leader liked the idea.

Senators to abandon '08 e-voting paper trail mandate

Anne Broache reports that

"Democratic senators on Wednesday made another push for banning electronic voting machines that lack paper trails, but they've backed away from doing so in time for next year's presidential election.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the chief sponsor of a contentious bill called the Ballot Integrity Act that proposes such changes, said she fears requiring all states to employ so-called voter-verified paper records in their systems, with some primaries only six months away, "could be an invitation to chaos." Earlier this year, she called for enacting such changes by 2008."

This 'it will cause chaos because we haven't got enough time before the next election' argument has been bandied about round the evoting debate for a long time now. The US are always going to be within two years of a major election. The evoting infratructure and the other structural problems with the US electoral system are going to take longer than two years to sort out. Yes it is a major systemic mess that will need major surgery but the ultimate conclusion of the 'it's going to cause chaos' argument is that 'we can't do anything about it so we shouldn't try'.