Mandelson on why UK is going for 3 strikes

Peter Mandelson has been explaining in this morning's Times why he is pushing the UK government towards a 3 strikes law.

"The Government decided to reopen the issue of suspending internet connections as a sanction of last resort against the most egregious offenders for two simple reasons. First, taking something for nothing, without permission, and with no compensation for the person who created and owns it, is wrong. Simple as that. I was shocked to hear that as much as half of all internet traffic in the UK is for the carriage of unlawful content...

Second, our creative businesses drive much of our economy... we should create a regulatory environment where they can operate without having to deal with illegal competition.

Crucially, if these changes can give the creative businesses and their partners the space to develop new business models that support more new artists, acts and films, then surely we are duty bound to consider them. "

You have to hand it to the entertainment industry lobbyists - they're good at getting influencial politicians fighting their cause. Ruled out by the European Parliament, mulitple jurisdictions all over the world, the Council of Europe, dicta in the the European Court of Justice Promisicae case, and even declared unconstitutional by the highest court in France, 3 strikes gets a new lease of life in the UK, where it had been ruled out by the prime minister, all because music industry executives manage to organise a friendly chat with Peter Mandelson. I do agree with him on one point though and have been saying it for several years:

"Provide customers with a good quality, cheap, safe and efficient experience, and they will ditch illegal downloading."

Convenience beats free every time.

Twitter's bid to trademark 'tweet' fails

Also from last Friday's Guardian: Twitter's bid to trademark 'tweet' fails

"The word "tweet" may have entered the international lexicon thanks to an explosion in 140-character microblogging messages, but an attempt by Twitter's founders to trademark it has been rejected.

Twitter applied to the US patent and trademark office last month for ownership of the word but the request was provisionally denied on the grounds that other companies had filed for trademarks of very similar words."

Teen jailed over Facebook death threats

An 18 year old in the UK has been jailed for making death threats on Facebook according to the Guardian.

"A teenager who posted death threats on Facebook has become the first person in Britain to be jailed for bullying on a social networking site.

Keeley Houghton, 18, of Malvern, Worcestershire, has been sentenced to three months in a young offenders' institution after she posted a message saying that she would kill Emily Moore. She pleaded guilty to harassment.

On 12 July, Houghton updated her status on Facebook to read: "Keeley is going to murder the bitch. She is an actress. What a fucking liberty. Emily Fuckhead Moore.""

Another example of not just the nastiness but also the stupidity of online bullying - they don't seem to realise that they are leaving clear hard evidence of their odious behaviour.

3 strikes for the UK?

The Guardian is reporting that the UK government are planning to introduce a three strikes law for suspected internet copyright infringers.

"People who persist in swapping copyrighted films and music will have their internet

connections cut off under tough new laws to be proposed by the government today.

The measures also include taking the power to target illegal downloaders away from regulator Ofcom and giving it to ministers to speed up the process.

The decision to cut off peer-to-peer filesharers is unexpected since it was ruled out by the government's own Digital Britain report in June as going too far."

Google must reveal blogger's ID in defamation case

From the Findlaw tort blog:

"Model Liskula Cohen was victorious this week in her efforts to get Google to turn over the IP address and email address of an anonymous blogger who allegedly defamed her. She celebrated, according to the New York Post, by forgiving her attacker (one Rosemary Port, who was apparently retaliating against Cohen for some nasty things Cohen allegedly told Port's boyfriend), and dropping a $3 million lawsuit against her.

Perhaps Liskula Cohen was feeling generous, but do the rest of us have to worry about the "anonymous" things we post on the internet? Are you on the verge of being outed, and sued, by the next person who doesn't like what you have to say?"

Remember the post is referring to US not UK defamation law.

Eircom to block internet access to Pirate Bay as other firms refuse

The Irish Times reported last week that Eircom is blocking access to Pirate Bay.

"EIRCOM WILL block its internet customers accessing the Pirate Bay website from September 1st, but other internet service providers (ISPs) have refused a similar request from Irish record labels.

Pirate Bay (piratebay.org) is a notorious Swedish website which provides links to places where copyrighted material such as movies and music can be downloaded for free.

Under an out-of-court agreement with EMI Records, Sony Music, Universal Music and Warners in January, Eircom agreed to cut off customers found to be repeatedly downloading music illegally. The deal also required Eircom to cut off access to Pirate Bay if requested."

Amazon, Yahoo, Microsoft oppose Google book settlement

From the NYT:

"Amazon, Microsoft and Yahoo are planning to join a coalition of nonprofit groups, individuals and library associations to oppose a proposed class-action settlement giving Google the rights to commercialize digital copies of millions of books."

Biometrics and the NIS

David Moss over at the Register has been exploring some of the figures on the reliability of the fingerprint, facial recognition and iris biometric technologies that will underpin the UK's national ID card system.

"Until the 16th century, educated opinion, as codified by Ptolemy, held that the Earth is at the centre of the universe. Then along came Copernicus.

On 29 June 2009, the Identity & Passport Service (IPS) published their latest paper on the National Identity Service (NIS). According to Safeguarding Identity (http://dematerialisedid.com/PDFs/13439_Safeguarding_Identity_w_opt.pdf) (pdf), "the vision for the NIS is that it will become an essential part of everyday life, underpinning interactions and transactions between individuals, public services and businesses and supporting people to protect their identity" (para.3.32).

Early adopter

Placing the NIS at the centre of social interaction like this makes IPS about 92 million miles wide of the mark."

It's a nice summary of the numbers.

Government should focus on opening up data rather than building websites

Here's a really interesting paper from Ed Felten and his colleagues at Princeton University Center for Information Technology Policy, Government Data and the Invisible Hand (Yale Journal of Law & Technology, Vol. 11, p. 160, 2009 ).

" Abstract:
If the next Presidential administration really wants to embrace the potential of Internet-enabled government transparency, it should follow a counter-intuitive but ultimately compelling strategy: reduce the federal role in presenting important government information to citizens. Today, government bodies consider their own websites to be a higher priority than technical infrastructures that open up their data for others to use. We argue that this understanding is a mistake. It would be preferable for government to understand providing reusable data, rather than providing websites, as the core of its online publishing responsibility.

Rather than struggling, as it currently does, to design sites that meet each end-user need, we argue that the executive branch should focus on creating a simple, reliable and publicly accessible infrastructure that exposes the underlying data. Private actors, either nonprofit or commercial, are better suited to deliver government information to citizens and can constantly create and reshape the tools individuals use to find and leverage public data. The best way to ensure that the government allows private parties to compete on equal terms in the provision of government data is to require that federal websites themselves use the same open systems for accessing the underlying data as they make available to the public at large."

Obama's US Graduation Initiative

President Obama has announced that the US will be spending an extra $12 billion on education initiatives in community colleges in the next ten years in an effort to make higher level qualifications accessible to an extra 5 million US citizens.

Part of the plan is to create entirely open online courses that anyone can take.

"Create a New Online Skills Laboratory: Online educational software has the potential to help students learn more in less time than they would with traditional classroom instruction alone. Interactive software can tailor instruction to individual students like human tutors do, while simulations and multimedia software offer experiential learning. Online instruction can also be a powerful tool for extending learning opportunities to rural areas or working adults who need to fit their coursework around families and jobs. New open online courses will create new routes for students to gain knowledge, skills and credentials. They will be developed by teams of experts in content knowledge, pedagogy, and technology and made available for modification, adaptation and sharing. The Departments of Defense, Education, and Labor will work together to make the courses freely available through one or more community colleges and the Defense Department’s distributed learning network, explore ways to award academic credit based upon achievement rather than class hours, and rigorously evaluate the results."

It's a nice idea but that single (if lengthy) paragraph worryingly conflates a lot of complex ideas - access to knowledge, access to formal education, credit for skills and experience already acquired, supported open learning at a distance, exploitation of technologies to facilitate education and learning, open content, sustainable open content business models, personal social and economic capacity to engage in formal education - and hints at that old chesnut of an underlying assumption that 'the computer automatically does education better faster and cheaper'. They need to disentangle and run with all of those things, play with the technologies and most importantly use those technologies for what they are good at rather than trying to shoehorn them into doing things they are not good at better faster and cheaper.

William Patry's new blog

William Patry has a new blog, Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars. Hurray!

The audacity of Google book settlement

Pamela Samuelson has been pointing out again the audacity of the Google book search settlement.

"Exploiting an opportunity made possible by lawsuits brought by a small number of plaintiffs on one narrow issue, Google has negotiated a settlement agreement designed to give it a compulsory license to all books in copyright throughout the world forever. This settlement will transform the future of the book industry and of public access to the cultural heritage of mankind embodied in books. How audacious is that?"

Highly recommended.

Google government and the Tories

When David Cameron spoke last month about "a new era of Google government" in an effort to sell his modern high tech trendy image of the future I didn't pay a whole lot of attention to it. It was just another soundbite but given his plans to cure the current government's national programme for IT in the NHS by scrapping it and handing our medical data to Google and Microsoft instead I probably should have taken notice. The British Medical Association are sufficiently concerned at the idea that they've issued a press statement expressing their worries about the security of web based database systems and warning of the need for very strong safeguards and the "highest possible standards for privacy, accuracy, security, and useability."

The Independent has picked up the story too, keen to emphasise the fact that David Cameron's "chief strategist, Steve Hilton, is married to Rachel Whetstone, Google's vice president of public policy and commumications."

A Song's Tale: Mashups, Borrowing, and the Law

James Boyle on a song's tale. Educational and entertaining as ever.

ACPO advise police to ignore S & Marper ruling

The Guardian has reportedly seen a letter, from the Association of Chief Police Officers, telling chief constables to ignore the ruling in the European Court of Human Rights in the S. and Marper v UK case last December.

"Chief constables across England and Wales have been told to ignore a landmark ruling by the European court of human rights and carry on adding the DNA profiles of tens of thousands of innocent people to a national DNA database.

Senior police officers have also been "strongly advised" that it is "vitally important" that they resist individual requests based on the Strasbourg ruling to remove DNA profiles from the national database in cases such as wrongful arrest, mistaken identity, or where no crime has been committed.

European human rights judges ruled last December in the S and Marper case that the blanket and indiscriminate retention of the DNA profiles and fingerprints of 850,000 people arrested but never convicted of any offence amounts to an unlawful breach of their rights."

The letter alledgedly goes on to strongly advise that any individual requests to have their details removed from the databases should be resisted until the government can get round to legislating on the matter.

I'm not sure this letter actually says anything other than 'follow current procedures until we have new ones'. It is more an indicator of the emergent insanity of large bureuacracies than the machiavellian machinations of a government attempting to circumvent the European Court decision. That's not to say active attempts to get round the decision are not ongoing. I'm just not convinced this ACPO letter is anything other than bureaucracy behaving like... well... bureaucracy.

The bigger question, possibly, is how we can avoid a likely incoming Conservative government next year from being infected with the current government's 'cure it with a database' affliction. Where is the Jefferson's moose that will actually show policymakers the complete and utter wrongheadedness of the database state mentality?


Europeans, in Thomas Jefferson's time, considered the US to be vastly inferior in every way to Europe. The then famous French ecologist Compte de Buffon even widely proclaimed that all plant and animal life (including native Americans) in the US was inferior to European equivalents. In a effort to show de Buffon and other Europeans how wrong they were, when he was minister to France, Jefferson had a dead giant American moose transported across the Atlantic, stuffed and placed in the hall of his ministerial residence in Paris. He believed that anyone who saw this impressive moose - an animal so enormous that a European deer could walk under it - could not fail to be disabused of their ideas of the inferiority of U.S. natural history.

David Post has put this far more articulately than I am capable of doing but where is the Jefferson's moose for the database state, when even direct demonstrations of the insecurity of the systems that are being constructed result in a complete denial of the existence of a problem?

Mickey Mouse copyright term

James Boyle has some interesting comments on Tom Bell's Copyright Duration and the Mickey Mouse Curve:

"What Tom knows, but the casual viewer may not, is that while this graph is quite correct it actually dramatically understates the extent to which the effective length

of copyright has been extended and does so in two distinct ways.

1.) For most of American history, copyright has been given in renewable increments... if we asked, “what was the median length of actual copyright during that period?” we would have a very different graph...85% of copyright holders were not bothering to renew their works for the second term. Thus, the effective length of copyright for the majority of copyrighted culture was actually half what Tom shows. 14 years in 1790 and so on.

2.) The proportion of culture covered by Tom’s graph changes by several orders of magnitude."

James goes on to note that:

"a.) for most of American history the vast majority of most potentially copyrightable works weren’t under copyright at all and b.) that, of the tiny, tiny percentage that were, the vast majority went into the public domain at the expiration of their first term. "

So (also via Twitter):

"1.) We are the first generation to deny our own culture to ourselves.

2.) No work created during your lifetime will, without conscious action by its creator, become available for you to build upon."

Plain, simple and profound.

University education can't be mechanistic

In a letter to the Times Peter Foster from Sheffield questions the mechanistic view of education promoted by the Dearing Report.

"Bureaucracy in its purest, rule-based, form relies on prediction and rigid planning. It is blind to the unfolding of knowledge, to the personal nature of education, and what motivates students. A uniformity of standards between universities is unattainable because they have different contexts and histories, and push the boundaries of knowledge in different ways. Although open to scrutiny, audit and criticism, they must have control of their intellectual life, which includes curriculum, teaching and examining.

It is this that makes them universities. Their courses are constrained into domains of coherence by the aims of the university and faculty; the structures in professional accreditation; the influence of external examiners; the academic and professional milieu of the staff, and, of course, the perceptions and ambitions of politicians.

This constitutes a necessary dynamic tension which, in the name of a false concept of accountability, is already made brittle."

Very well said.

No progress on patents for over 100 years?

I finally got around to subscribing to Greg Aharonian's widely admired Internet Patent News Service today after meaning to do so for many years. Interestingly enough in today's newsletter Greg is lamenting the total lack of progress on the question of obviousness in patent assessment in the US for over 100 years.

Regular readers will know I've wondered for some time about the Groundhog Day like surreality surrounding IP, where the same story and the same arguments seem to be repeated time after time after time. I even devoted the opening story in my book to a 6th century book-copying case in Ireland, where the closing arguments were essentially repeated before the US Supreme Court in the Eldred case more tham fourteen hundred years later. (Incidentally if you follow the search inside links for the book at Amazon you can read the whole story of 'Colmcille and the battle of the book' there).

Is there something about intellectual property in particular or just human nature that means we're doomed to repeat the same mistakes over and over again?

Update: I should have said that Greg came to his conclusions having been reading a copy of the 1894 volume of the Transactions of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers, where engineers had been articulating the same problems with the US patent system as are apparent today.

Aussie ISP looks to Ombudsman in copyright case

Australian ISP iiNet, which is being sued by the Australian Against Copyright Theft (AFACT) for copyright infringement (the suit is being pursued on behalf of the big movie companies), is reportedly going to ask the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman (TIO) for support.

"AUSTRALIA'S third-largest ISP may recruit the telecommunications industry's peak regulators in its bid to beat a copyright lawsuit brought against it by a group of entertainment giants.

The Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman (TIO) said it was yet to formally discuss the case with the ISP but iiNet’s regulatory chief Steve Dalby said he had held informal discussions with the group about issues relevant to the case. "

12 minutes to forge UK ID card

The Daily Mail has paid Adam Laurie to test the most secure ID card in the world, launched by the UK Home Secretary recently.

He cracked it and produced a perfect forgery in just 12 minutes.

The Home Office reaction?

"We are satisfied the personal data on the chip cannot be changed or modified and there is no evidence this has happened.

The identity card includes a number of design and security features that are extremely difficult to replicate.

'We remain confident that the identity card is one of the most secure of its kind, fully meeting rigorous international standards."

Fingers jammed in ears, eyes tightly shut, not listening not listening not listening...