The State of Play Academy begins today, and will offer classes until June 2007. SOPA will be teaching law and technology classes from an impressive array of experts on a wide range of topics. SOPA is taught through www.there.com. Unfortunately for those of us on this side of the Atlantic, the classes are held in Pacific Time, which means that to attend I will have to stay up late. I may do it tonight, where David Post will talk about the Viacom-YouTube case.
You may have read about the CC Canadian enforcement case reported earlier. David Wise, the photographer involved, has left a comment stating that he may actually go to court over this.
If you know of a pro-bono Canadian lawyer, please email David.
(via Trey Roberts) Reuters and the BBC are reporting on two arrests made in Worcestershire for wi-fi piggybacking, but where released under caution.
Wi-fi leechers are a growing phenomenon, as more and more houses have wireless devices and routers, the number of unprotected networks also increases. A leecher will conduct wardriving to find unprotected hotspots, and then connect to the unsecured network. The intentions of the piggybacker may be honest, the person may just want to get a free wireless connection to check his/her email. But there is a more sinister side to wardriving. For example, it has been reported that some people are using piggybacking in order to engage in illegal activities, such as infringing file-sharing, or child pornography. One can see this as an attractive proposition for criminals, as it would lay the burden of proof entirely on the person with an open access point.
The solution to the problem is to make wardriving and piggybacking illegal. In the UK there is enough legislation to prevent piggybacking and to allow the police to intervene. Firstly, the Computer Misuse Act 1990 could be applied, as section 1 reads:
"1.—(1) A person is guilty of an offence if—However, this would be subject to interpretation, as a wardriver may not fulfil the type. The Communications Act 2003 is clear with regards to the prohibition, as it establishes an offence of up to five years for dishonestly obtaining electronic communications services. Section 125 reads:
(a) he causes a computer to perform any function with intent to secure access to any program or data held in any computer;
(b) the access he intends to secure is unauthorised; and
(c) he knows at the time when he causes the computer to perform the function that that is the case."
"(1) A person who-Other legislation that could apply is the Regulation of Investigatory Powers, as it establishes an offence for intercepting communications.
(a) dishonestly obtains an electronic communications service, and
(b) does so with intent to avoid payment of a charge applicable to the provision of that service,
is guilty of an offence."
The blog has now reached forty thousand hits since I started counting, and most days we get more than one hundred individual visitors (not counting those reading through RSS).
Thanks to all regular and non-regular readers for making the early mornings worthwhile.
This seems to be an urban legend or prank, but I found some of the potential legal implications quite interesting. Supposedly, a female gamer from New York placed an advert on Craigslist stating that she would have sex in exchange for 5000 gold in Wolrd of Warcraft so that she could buy an Epic Flying Mount in game. The listing was allegedly removed from Craigslist, but someone managed to make a screen-shot.
As you can imagine, the item generated considerable amounts of discussion in its own thread in the WOW forums. The story culminated, according to WOW Insiders, with the player posting again on Craigslist to advertise the fulfilment of the transaction, and share an image of the epic mount (the beastie, not the act).
Besides the very strong possibility that this is some kind of prank, and leaving aside some of the unsavoury and misogynistic comments in some of the forums, I've wondered about the potential legal issues here. Firstly, there is the self-regulatory element of Craigslist removing posts that advertise or make offers of selling sex. Would this act be considered prostitution? Does it make a difference that the payment is in a currency that can only be accessed in-game, to make virtual purchases? Does it matter that the exchange is in virtual goods?
Similarly, I have been wondering at the amount of social regulation taking place here. Most of the forum participants have expressed their disapproval or disgust as this type of practice. Why is this? Is it just that it seems a little sad? Isn't this just another commercial transaction involving virtual goods? Should we care what two consenting adults get to in their own time?
I will leave the most lurid details out of the discussion, but perhaps we will have to start thinking of virtual pimping, virtual brothels and such soon. Reading Wired's Sex Drive column is always quite an education on what some people do with their online existence.
I guess I'm just too boring, all I do with my online time is blog.
(via Erick Iriarte) The Chilean NGO Derechos Digitales has successfully issued its first cease and desist letter to enforce a work released under a Chilean Creative Commons licence (read the original story in Spanish here). The image (pictured on the right) is the work of young designer Armando Torrealba, and it was part of a promotional campaign of Chilean rock group Marlou. Torrealba wanted to distribute the image in a way that would allow fans to remix it and reuse it, so he released it under the Chilean CC.
However, the picture was picked up by department store Falabella and used in their own Internet advertising campaign. Torrealba contacted Derechos Digitales, who decided to help the designer enforce his work against the commercial use by drafting and sending a cease and desist letter. The missive was successful and Falabella has taken down the picture.
Congratulations to Claudio Ruiz and his team in CC-Chile for their work, which demonstrates that Creative Commons licences can be enforced in Civil Law systems. This also shows that a support system is required in order to properly enforce open licences, as evidenced by the power wielded by organisations such as GPL-violations.org. Chile is lucky to have an excellent team behind the licences, and similar support can be found throughout many jurisdictions.
Legal issues aside, am I the only person who thinks that the panda is particularly cool-looking? The Sex Pistols meets WWE meets Andy Warhol. Nice.
The winners of the ORG Raffle have been announced in the ORG blog. They are:
Recently, Microsoft lost a case filed by Alcatel-Lucent with regards to patent infringement of MP3 technologies owned by the later. In Lucent Techs. Inc. v. Gateway, a jury awarded 1.5 billion in damages to the plaintiff and against Gateway, Dell, Microsoft and other defendants for using patented technology without a licence. Alcatel-Lucent owns two patents, US 5,627,938 and a reissue of the same. Alcatel's claim is for "Rate loop processor for perceptual encoder/decoder". The abstract for the patent reads:
"A method and apparatus for quantizing audio signals is disclosed which advantageously produces a quantized audio signal which can be encoded within an acceptable range. Advantageously, the quantizer uses a scale factor which is interpolated between a threshold based on the calculated threshold of hearing at a given frequency and the absolute threshold of hearing at the same frequency."Defendants claimed that they had already licensed technology from the Fraunhofer Institute, which was perceived to own the patent. However, this ruling seems to establish that all MP3 licensing should go to Lucent, and therefore many companies may be getting nervous, as they could be sued next.
(via Wiebke Abel and other sources) The blogosphere has exploded once more in collective cries for or against a proposed code of conduct for bloggers. Tim O'Reilly has made a call for the imposition of a self-regulatory set of rules that bloggers will post under. The proposed code is:
The New York Times comments on a report by vidmeter.com about the popularity of user-generated content prevalent on YouTube as opposed to content owned by the creative industries. The report concludes that of the most popular videos, only 9% had been removed due to DMCA take-down requests, while those potentially infringing videos had generated less than 6% of all views.
This is quite a remarkable study, but it confirms my own experience with the site. I never visit YouTube to watch potentially infringing content, I visit to watch some amazing user generated content, such as this brilliant explanation on the genetic evidence for evolution.
The implications of the study are clear for Viacom v Google, as it seems to remove potential inducement arguments made by copyright owners.
I never thought I would say this, but I've actually read something written by Andrew Orlowski which has not prompted me to throw things at my computer screen in anger. In an article on Net Neutrality, he has actually uncovered something that has been worrying me since I first heard about the debate. The big problem is, how do you define the term? You can get five different definitions from Wikipedia alone.
But this is not a post about net neutrality, I don't know enough about the subject to comment intelligently on it. However, this is a Monday morning rant against easy sound bites and complacent application of terms just because they sound good. Web 2.0 is one of those terms, similar to social networking and other neologisms prevalent in technology writing.
(via Jordan Hatcher) Ben Muse recently linked to an International Chamber of Commerce report on high-seas piracy. Apparently, sea piracy is on the decrease as pirates find it more difficult to collect plunder from their victims. There were 239 piracy attacks during 2006, while 2005 saw 445 attacks in total. That is an astounding drop in all things that go "Argh", but what does it all mean?
As a devout Pastafarian, this only serves as further proof that we have been touched by His Noodly Appendage. After all, one of the main tenets of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster is that global warming is caused by the decrease in pirates. It's all proven by this useful chart:
This however, spells doom to all of us. If piracy rates continue to decrease, we're all going to fry. I've often wondered if online piracy rates can help to alleviated global temperatures, but alas, the Gospel of the FSM does not make any mention of that. I'm firing up BitTorrent just in case.
Becky Hogge from the always excellent Open Rights Group has reminded me that their support ORG party will take place next Wednesday 11 April. Details about the venue, how to get there, times and other questions can be found here.
Becky also has reminded me of the most excellent raffle they're running. What's in display is an astounding range of geeky goodies, including the chance to be written into Cory Doctorow's next novel, a keyboard signed by the one and only geek god Neil Gaiman, a signed-copy of the Gowers Review for the law geeks, signed copies of Lawrence Lessig’s Code v2 and Bruce Schneier’s Beyond Fear, and other nice goodies.
I've bought four raffle tickets already because all prizes are tremendously appealing to me, but I'm particularly hoping to win the signed copy of the Gowers Review. Yes, I'm THAT sad...
(via Michael Geist). A Canadian photographer posted some pictures in Flickr and licensed them under a Creative Commons ShareAlike licence. According to one Mr Spatial Mongrel from Kamloops BC (no real name is given, but you have to love the nick), one of his pictures was used for political propaganda by Betty Hinton MP, who has been the subject of previous IP-related incidents as I recall.
I have written an analysis of the case, but I am now aware that this is rather moot as I'm not sure what was this picture licensed under, as it now shows as "All Rights Reserved" in Flickr. I will base the analysis under the assumption that it was licensed under a CC-BY-SA Canadian licence and not under the old generic one.
The first element of analysis is one of mere breach of the terms of the licence. As the original picture was licensed using a CC Attribution Share Alike 2.5 licence, then the derivative is in breach because it did not attribute and it did not share the derivative under a similar CC licence. To me this would be enough to warrant a suit if the author feels slighted.
However, the author claims that the use of the licence is done by someone with whom they don't share political views. This is irrelevant to the existing licence for several reasons. Firstly, the Canadian CC licence is the only one that waives the moral right of integrity. The current language reads in section 3:
"Except as otherwise agreed by the Original Author, if You Use a Work or any Derivative Works or Collective Works in any material form, You must not do anything that would offend the Moral Rights of the OriginalThis clause made the Canadian licence incompatible with other jurisdictions where moral rights could not be waived (Continental Europe, Latin America, etc.). This prompted changes and version 3.0 will be ported to remove this clause and to leave integrity rights intact. This is the solution we use in Scotland at the moment, where our licence asserts the moral right of paternity, but does not waive the integrity right. The new Generic CC Licence 3.0 contains this in section 4.d:
Author, including but not limited to:
1. You must not falsely attribute the Work to someone other than the Original Author; and
2. If applicable, You must respect the Original Author's wish to remain anonymous or pseudonymous.
All other moral rights are waived. This means the Original Author is not reserving the ability to prevent downstream creators from engaging in material distortion or modification of the work, including, but limited to, associating the Work with a particular product, service, cause or institution."
"You must not distort, mutilate, modify or take other derogatory action in relation to the Work which would be prejudicial to the Original Author's honor or reputation."Similarly, s 4.c now has specific no-endorsement language:
"You may not implicitly or explicitly assert or imply any connection with, sponsorship or endorsement by the Original Author, Licensor and/or Attribution Parties, as appropriate, of You or Your use of the Work, without the separate, express prior written permission of the Original Author, Licensor and/or Attribution Parties."Even if the author was using this licence instead of the Canadian one, I would still be sceptical of making an integrity claim. This is because you'll notice that the language is quite strong. The derivative must "distort, mutilate, modify or take other derogatory action", and this must be prejudicial to the author's honour and reputation. In my opinion, the mere use of the picture in political advertisement does not fulfil the language. In the UK, I believe that the right of integrity has not produced a lot of case law because the bar is set too high.
The March 2007 issue of SCRIPT-ed is now live. In this issue:
Editorial:
The internet and security: do we need a man with a red flag walking in front of every computer? Lilian Edwards.
Peer-reviewed Special Issue - Creating Commons:
As I mentioned yesterday, the EMI and iTunes DRM deal did happen, and it was not a joke. I have nothing else to add, as it seems like everyone and their mothers have been talking about it. The demise of DRM? The beginning of the end? The rise of iTunes? I have no idea, but this feels like one of those "turning of the tide" moments. The entire geeky blogosphere is shouting "We were right, and they know it!".
Just check Techmeme's coverage of the subject, their algorithms must be going crazy.
Another good April 1st has gone by, with some beautiful stories. Google sits on top of the April's Fool list, as usual. This year everybody's talking about Google's TiSP, a convenient ISP that comes through your toilet, and whose tag is "Want WiFi around? Just Flush it down!" The service works like this:
Finally! They've found uses for their many PhD students!
But my favourite this year is Google's explanation of their ranking system. Did you think that Google's ranking had anything to do with the popularity of links? No! It's all done through millions of pigeons tapping away on computers (as pictured above). Google's patented PigeonRank™ is so succesful because it "relies primarily on the superior trainability of the domestic pigeon (Columba livia) and its unique capacity to recognize objects regardless of spatial orientation. The common gray pigeon can easily distinguish among items displaying only the minutest differences, an ability that enables it to select relevant web sites from among thousands of similar pages."
In other sites, NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day shows the first space quidditch match. In other items, Microsoft's Open Source Software Lab has announced a penguin adoption programme (just in case of doubt, there is such a thing as Microsoft's Open Source Software Lab, it's not part of the joke).
Interestingly, at first I thought that this story about EMI dropping DRMs was also a joke, until I saw it replicated everywhere. This goes to show that truth is indeed stranger than fiction.
(via Burkhard Schäfer) Students in Arizona have sued Turnitin, the makers of plagiarism-detection software. They claim that the company violates their copyright because the papers are kept in a database. Students could get $600,000 USD from the suit if they are successful.
I'm having real problem seeing how a student could claim that their work is being infringed in any way by being hosted in a database to which there is no access. It's not like the essays involved, "Ancient Greek Contributions," "What Lies Beyond the Horizon," "Under a Pear Tree," and "Day is Weary" will ever see the light of day in any commercial way.
I'm also surprised that the students are not made to sign a licence when they submit their papers.
(via House of Commons and Groklaw) The third draft of the GPL version 3 is now available for comment. I haven't had much time to go through it in detail, so I will be making comments later, mostly building on previous praises and criticisms here, here and here.
However, one thing I noticed straight away is that there has been one significant change to the anti TPM clause. Version 2 of the draft used to read:
"No covered work constitutes part of an effective technological “protection” measure under section 1201 of Title 17 of the United States Code."The new draft reads:
"No covered work shall be deemed part of an effective technological measure under any applicable law fulfilling obligations under article 11 of the WIPO copyright treaty adopted on 20 December 1996, or similar laws prohibiting or restricting circumvention of such measures."I'm very happy about this change because I commented on previous drafts that:
"This makes it evident that what the paragraph is covering is the legal definition of "technical protection measure" found in international treaties and national legislation. Specifically, section 1201 of the U.S. Code is the DMCA anti-circumvention measures provision. This is useful, but if the licence wants to be really international, why not mention the WIPO Copyright Treaty instead?"Is somebody actually reading my blog?
Everyone is talking about Kathy Sierra's blog death threats. I don't feel like I can comment a lot as I have never before read her blog or heard about her before I read the news coverage, but this seems to have an interesting cyberlaw angle. If Kathy Sierra has been the subject of death threats, should this be treated in any way different to other types of death threats?
To answer my own question, I don't think that there's anything in principle that would compel us to view online threats differently to other types of threats. However, it may be important to consider that anonymity and distance may actually play a big role in the preponderance of abusive behaviour in cyberspace. There's the famous equation that anonymity may breed trollish behaviour online, and that normal people will become monsters when writing behind a keyboard. The perception of anonymity may prompt some people to do something stupid, like sending death threats. There is also a disconnection with the subject. People may not be real people, they are names, avatars, bits of information in the ether.
However, should this be excuse enough to treat online threats differently? Discuss.
I'm in Brussels for a workshop of a European project on creating an E-Infrastructure for E-Science Digital Repositories. We are discussing legal and economic aspects of digital repositories.
Copyfight has a good post about the OKGo phenomenon. OKGo, for those who don't know, is a band from Chicago that could be largely classed as alternative, but it may well be part of the new geek rock. What makes OKGo unique is that they're a Web 2.0 band, having embraced YouTube and the YouTube generation. This geek-savy has catapulted the band to geek fame and they're officially an online phenomenon, perhaps achieving similar iconic status as the I Love You guy, All Your Base Are Belong To Us, and the Numa Numa dance. OKGo's brilliant videos are a definition of the Web 2.0 do-it-yourself ethos. The videos are freely available online in YouTube, such as the wonderful Here it Goes Again, and my favourite, Million Ways.
The videos have spawned hundreds of fan interpretations of their favourite band. After all, nothing much is needed to replicate this, only four people with lack of self-consciousness and a video-recording device. Upload it to YouTube and you have a bona-fide Internet phenomenon. Look at the first version and the second of the fans interpreting the Million Ways choreography.
Perhaps I'm dazzled by the hype, but to me there is something deep happening here that goes beyond geeky teenagers embracing a fad. While this may have many interesting implications to media, new media, free culture and how we view our content, phenomena like the OKGo videos exemplify why I believe strongly that Viacom has made a mistake by suing YouTube and Google. Viacom made handsome profits from two shows that are a success because of YouTube: The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. There is considerable danger for Viacom that these two products will become tainted by the suit, and loose their edge and "coolness" factor. Viacom are like Metallica during the Napster trial. Metallica may have been right in legal terms, but they became associated with the establishment, lost their edge, and have not recovered since.
Whatever one may think about the legal arguments in Viacom v Google, there is the true danger that a Web 2.0 revolution against the media conglomerate could spell disaster for them. I smell a settlement somewhere.
This is an excellent read from TorrentFreak. They interview a real pirate, one of those people who makes physical copies of copyright content and sells it in marketplaces, car-boots or pubs. Tony, a physical pirate, complains that P2P has stolen their sales, and they have had to close down some of their factories because people will get their bootlegs online.
We need more headlines like "P2P fights piracy!" or the such.
This is yet another well-informed technology article from The Guardian on P2P, IP and downloads. I often complain about journalistic inaccuracies, but praise where it's due, sometimes they get it right.
The Beeb runs a story on a new report by research consultants Screen Digest on the Massively Multiplayer Online Gaming (MMOG) market. The big headline in the report is that the MMOG market has now passed the $1 billion USD revenue mark from subscriptions worldwide. While big revenue is to be expected from the North American and Asian markets, I was surprised to learn that the European subscription revenue goes up to $299 million USD (€224 million EUR, or $309 million Panamanian Balboas).
I was also surprised by the top five earners list. While World of Warcraft still sits at the top ($471 million USD), its next competitor was a little Java-based game called Runescape. The top five list is:
Security firm Symantec has released it's 11th Internet Security Threat Report, and if accurate (no reason to doubt that it is), it makes for some very grim reading indeed. I have taken some key findings from the summary which warrant highlighting:
There have been plenty of reports and commentary on Viacom v YouTube and Google, the mother of all copyright infringement suits at a whooping $1 billion USD. I didn't want to comment on it until I got the chance to read the complaint. Google is being sued for pretty much the full monty. We have direct infringement of the exclusive rights to public performance, public display and reproduction of owned content. We have inducement (in accordance to MGM v Grokster), and if that was not enough, we also have contributory and vicarious infringement. In paragraph 30, the plaintiffs state:
"Defendants encourage individuals to upload videos to the YouTube site, where YouTube makes them available for immediate viewing by members of the public free of charge. Although YouTube touts itself as a service for sharing home videos, the well-known reality of YouTube’s business is far different. YouTube has filled its library with entire episodes and movies and significant segments of popular copyrighted programming from Plaintiffs and other copyright owners, that neither YouTube nor the users who submit the works are licensed to use in this manner. Because YouTube users contribute pirated copyrighted works to YouTube by the thousands, including those owned by Plaintiffs, the videos “deliver[ed]” by YouTube include a vast unauthorized collection of Plaintiffs’ copyrighted audiovisual works."What every pundit in the mainstream media and the blogosphere has been talking about is, just how good is Viacom's case? At first glance, the case seems pretty strong. After all, everybody knows that YouTube offers infringing materials. However, when one looks further, the case begins to evaporate. I had written already about this topic when YouTube got sued before by a content owner in that occasion I was not convinced of the strength of the case, and I am not convinced now. The problem for content owners is that the Grokster inducement test would not apply to YOuTube as it does not advertise or promote infringement in any way. When users sign-up for a YouTube account, they agree on click-wrap terms of use that clearly leave all responsibility of ownership with the person submitting the video. The relevant clause reads:
"In connection with User Submissions, you further agree that you will not: (i) submit material that is copyrighted, protected by trade secret or otherwise subject to third party proprietary rights, including privacy and publicity rights, unless you are the owner of such rights or have permission from their rightful owner to post the material and to grant YouTube all of the license rights granted herein; (ii) publish falsehoods or misrepresentations that could damage YouTube or any third party; (iii) submit material that is unlawful, obscene, defamatory, libelous, threatening, pornographic, harassing, hateful, racially or ethnically offensive, or encourages conduct that would be considered a criminal offense, give rise to civil liability, violate any law, or is otherwise inappropriate; (iv) post advertisements or solicitations of business: (v) impersonate another person. YouTube does not endorse any User Submission or any opinion, recommendation, or advice expressed therein, and YouTube expressly disclaims any and all liability in connection with User Submissions. YouTube does not permit copyright infringing activities and infringement of intellectual property rights on its Website, and YouTube will remove all Content and User Submissions if properly notified that such Content or User Submission infringes on another's intellectual property rights. YouTube reserves the right to remove Content and User Submissions without prior notice. YouTube will also terminate a User's access to its Website, if they are determined to be a repeat infringer. "This would seem to be enough to protect YouTube and Google from intermediary liability. After all, the DMCA provides Safe Harbor exceptions for intermediary services that allows clear copyright policies and inform content providers of clear take-down procedures. Looking at the Safe Harbor requirements, it seems clear that YouTube is protected by such. This opinion seems to be shared by others.
The following books are available for review for SCRIPT-ed. As usual, they're allocated on a first-come, first-served basis:
(via Ashley Theunissen) Are you bored of that annoying anti-piracy ad at the start of your DVD? You know, the one you cannot fast-forward?
Check out this alternative editing.
One of the problems of moving house is getting new providers for all kinds of services. Choosing a new broadband provider is a worry, particularly if you were happy with your old ISP. Telewest (now Virgin Media) were pretty good in general, even despite the fact that they were too quick to disconnect my web space and to get rid of all my files the very second after mys subscription ran out. Now I am with BT, and while I have been quite happy with some features of their service (free wireless roaming hours, yay!), I have found to my surprise that they seem to cap BitTorrent transfers. I found to my dismay that I could not get a BitTorrent load exceeding 30 kbps.
How could BT do this? And why? Welcome to the weird and wonderful world of traffic shaping. Even the most conservative estimates tell us that BitTorrent traffic makes up for 30% of all bandwidth used in the world at any given time. At peak hours, some have estimated the figure to go as high as 55%. This is a large chunk of very expensive bandwidth. Some ISPs have decided to regulate this by applying traffic shaping rules that will provide caps on the bandwidth allocated to P2P traffic, particularly BitTorrent. One Quality of Service (QoS, talk about euphemisms!) software provider describes the traffic shaping done by their software like this:
| QoS Class | Protocols | Priority | Guaranteed | Maximum |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| VOIP | SIP, H323, Skype, MSN Messenger | High | 1Mbit/s | |
| P2P | eMule, EDonkey, KaZaA, Gnutella, BitTorrent, Direct Connect | Low | 256Kbit/s | |
| SHELL | ssh, telnet | High | ||
| BULK | ftp, smtp | Low | ||
| DEFAULT | Unclassified | Medium |
(Via David Berry) The Conservative Party has turned open source, according to their website:
"Shadow Chancellor George Osborne has promised that an incoming Conservative government would create a level playing field for open source software in the UK, in a move which could save taxpayers more than £600 million a year.While my initial thought was to type ZOMG!1, many people in the CC-Community list have pointed out that a lot of open source ideals and philosophies come from the right. Eric Raymond is a vocal libertarian, check out his page on firearms.
In a speech at the Royal Society of Arts, he also announced the appointment of Mark Thompson, of the Judge Business School at Cambridge University, to advise the Party on how to make Britain the open source leader in Europe.
Mr Osborne reckoned that opening up the market in software would enable the Government to slash 5 per cent off Whitehall's annual IT bill, because open software allows users to read, change and improve its code, in contrast to proprietary software where a company controls the source code."
One of the most traumatic events for the fledgling field of IT Law was the bursting of the dot-com bubble in 2001, when the artificially inflated electronic commerce market suffered a re-adjustment and a crash to weed out all of the pretenders and irrelevant market dwellers, producing some of the landscape that we see today.
The BBC reports on the potential for another bubble forming in the MMORPG market, with large media corporations moving in to copy the success of World of Warcraft, and other similar games (City of Heroes pictured). According to the report, several games are offering their own brand of MMORPG without really understanding the marketplace. According to one of those interviewed, there's a lot of silly money sloshing around in the online games environment.
I see this as a potentially similar event to the dot-com bubble. I believe that the amount of press awarded to WoW and Second Life is disproportionate to their real importance. Yes, many people are playing, and many people have signed up to Second Life. But let's be honest, SL is a glorified chat room, and its economic importance has been inflated. Similarly, the MMORPG market is limited, as it is geared towards the serious gamer for its long-term survival, and the supply of geeks is limited.
Now, where did I put my City of Heroes activation code?
While listening to the excellent podcast Digital Planet from the BBC, I heard a horror story about the problems of regulating cyberspace. While just a couple of days ago I sounded rather optimistic about the prospects of regulating online environments, this story lays bare some of the real problems of enforcing some specific practices conducted online.
The story commented on the case of an anonymous worker from a company that is peripherally related to animal testing. His personal details were posted in an American activist website, and since then he has been the subject of constant harassment, abuse, vandalism and death threats. With the UK government's clamp-down on animal protesters in full force, many illegal activities have moved abroad, particularly online activism. Sites like Bite Back, based in the USA, provide propaganda for the activities of the Animal Liberation Front and other organisations. Some of those sites have been posting the personal address and personal details of all sorts of people. The problem for the targets is the lack of regulation with regards to personal privacy in the United States.
Imagine you were the target of such an attack. What would you do? The answer is: not much. While posting personal details on a website would definitely contravene Data Protection in the UK (and Europe in general), this is not the case in the U.S., where most of these sites are protected by the First Amendment. If there is a criminal offence being committed in the UK, then the Crown Prosecution Service could seek extradition, but I wonder if the American judiciary would be willing to enforce such a request as the opposing values are privacy vs freedom of speech.
Funnily enough (in a perverse way), if we were talking about copyright infringement, the site would remain open only as long as you can say DMCA.
The peer-to-patent project is almost ready to go live, reports the Washington Post. For those unfamiliar with this initiative, the peer-to-patent system was proposed by New York Law School Professor Beth Simone Noveck in this paper. If we agree that the American patent system is broken, and reading some of the literature out there it is hard to argue that it is not, then one has to find solutions for viable reform. Noveck's suggestion places the emphasis on the examination part of things, and not so much on substantial reforms to existing legislation, which makes it an attractive solution because it's cheap and easy to implement. Noveck suggests to use a model of peer-review of patent applications by making them available online and open for comment. Following open source and wiki principles, experts will analyse and comment on patent applications to uncover prior-art and to comment on the innovative value of an application. Paraphrasing Linus Law, with more eyeballs, superfluous claims are shallow.
Surprisingly, the idea has caught on, perhaps because it has found the favour of almost all parties involved in the American patent debate. The project has found favour with the big technology companies like IBM and Microsoft, and also with open source developers such as Red Hat. Now the Peer-to-Patent site is open, and the pilot is set to start soon (with an announcement to be made March 12).
If anything, this proves that somebody listens to legal academics from time to time.
I mentioned some time ago that my blog was being copied and used in a splog. As the content was used to farm Google Adwords, I felt that this was done in breach of the terms of the Creative Commons licence I use. I started the process of sending a DMCA notice of take down, but I never got around to it, it always felt wrong (or even hypocritical) for me to use something which I otherwise despise.
Fortunately, the sploggers involved have been probably getting in trouble with their host, and so they have started offering a link to take-down content. While I was suspicious about it, I decided to send a request. What do you know? All of the content has been removed!
Anyway, this has got me thinking about the regulation of online content, and I feel that this is further proof for the growth of alternative online regulation, the growth in a bottom-up approach to regulating content that bypasses legislation and the courts, and has put in place a very effective norm-setting system, enforced by the users. Granted, this system does not work against things like spam, but I believe that most practices have some form of regulation in the shape of community enforcement of some sort (not vigilantism, mind).
So, we now have ethical sploggers. What's next? Cuddly porn lords?
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So, you are a member of the religious right in the United States. You go online to find information to defeat those heathen atheists and their plot to subvert the youth by teaching the evils of Evolutionary theory. But what do you find? Wikipedia is biased against Creationism and the right!
What do you do? You found Conservapedia, a place where home-schoolers can get their biblical facts straight without Euro-pinko-lefty-contamination. Conservapedia, where the entry on dinosaurs reads:
"Because the term only came into use in the 19th century, the Bible obviously does not use the word "dinosaur." However, they are alleged to be mentioned in numerous places throughout the biblical account. For example, the behemoth in Job and the leviathan in Isaiah are sometimes said to be references to dinosaurs."The entire entry on France reads: "A country in Europe. Thrived during the middle ages. The capitol is Paris, France, which was founded in the Middle Ages."
The world of classical music has been shaken by the Joyce Hatto scandal. For those unaware of the affair, Joyce Hatto was a pianist whose career was cut short in the 1970's due to cancer. However, in 1989 she started recording again and producing CDs with her husband's independent record label. When she died in 2006, The Guardian pronounced her "one of the greatest pianists Britain has ever produced".
Unfortunately, she was not the great one, her husband's recording capabilities were. It seems like all her output since 1989 had been copied from other artists. How was the trick discovered? Through iTunes of course! Tipped by readers, music magazine Gramophone tested several of Hatto's CDs on the database, only to discover that iTunes recognised them as being recorded from other artists. iTunes believed that the first CD was from Laszlo Simon, while the second had been the work of Yefim Bronfman. After the deception had been uncovered, William Barrington-Coupe, the guilty widower, admitted to it.
How did iTunes recognise the original? iTunes uses Gracenote's CDDB, a database which enables third party applications to identify individual CDs so that it can automatically discover cover art, artist, title and label. CDDB is powerful enough that it will identify songs without metadata if they are in the same correct order and have the same length as the original. This is because CDDB creates a unique fingerprint of each CD on the database called a 'discid'. This contains information about the CD's song order, length and other data. It seems like Mr Barrington-Coupe's error was to copy the CDs as they were instead of mixing them a bit.
As any amateur CD-ripper knows, CDDB will not identify your own compilations.
(via Laurence Diver and other sources) The Prime Minister's office has been accepting online petitions, which has prompted all sorts of people making specialist requests. One such petition has been posted against software patents, which reads "We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to make software patents clearly unenforcible". The petition gathered 2,215 signatures.
Perhaps more astounding than the actual petition was the very informed reply. The response reads:
"The Government remains committed to its policy that no patents should exist for inventions which make advances lying solely in the field of software. Although certain jurisdictions, such as the US, allow more liberal patenting of software-based inventions, these patents cannot be enforced in the UK.However, notice that the language is still against "pure software", or "software as such". As I have commented often, some software patents will still get through, but this is an encouraging sign.
The test used to discern between patentable and non-patentable subject matter in the UK has recently been clarified by the courts, and is applied rigorously by the Patent Office. Under this test, the true nature of the advance being claimed in a patent application must be determined, and if this advance lies solely in the field of software, or another non-technical field such as methods of doing business, the patent will not be granted. If the advance being made by an invention does lie in a technical field, it must also be non-obvious and sufficiently clearly described for the invention to be reproduced before a patent will be granted by the Patent Office.
The recently published Gowers Review of Intellectual Property, an independent review commissioned by the Government, recommended that patent rights should not be extended to cover pure software, business methods and genes. The Government will implement those recommendations for which it is responsible, and will therefore continue to exclude patents from areas where they may hinder innovation: including patents which are too broad, speculative, or obvious, or where the advance they make lies in an excluded area such as software."
Those few regular readers who care about these sort of things may have noticed that I have not been posting that often in the last few days. I have been moving flats, which has of course affected my online connection as well. I have finally moved everything and I'm now online. Expect posting to become regular again.
How did we ever manage without broadband?
(Valuable item from Ultima Online)
The version 3.0 f the generic (or unported) Creative Commons licences have now been released. There are many important improvements in the new licences. The biggest change has been to distinguish between the generic licence and the American one. The generic is now drafted with neutral international language in accordance to the Berne Convention, so finally we are rid of the confusing terms like "derivative" (although the licence is still called No derivs), but the language now refers to adaptations.
Other changes are the consistent changes to moral rights treatments, and specific language to make it easier for music groups to collect royalties from collecting societies. Here is a list of changes according to the original post from Mia Garlick:
This is a huge step for CC licensing. Expect the version 3.0 of the Scottish licences shortly."Separating the “generic” from the US license
As part of Version 3.0, we have spun off the “generic” license to be the CC US license and created a new generic license, now known as the “unported” license. For more information about this change, see this more detailed explanation.
Harmonizing the treatment of moral rights & collecting society royalties
In Version 3.0, we are ensuring that all CC jurisdiction licenses and the CC unported license have consistent, express treatment of the issues of moral rights and collecting society royalties (subject to national differences). For more information about these changes, see this explanation of the moral rights harmonization and this explanation of the collecting society harmonization.
No Endorsement Language
That a person may not misuse the attribution requirement of a CC license to improperly assert or imply an association or relationship with the licensor or author, has been implicit in our licenses from the start. We have now decided to make this explicit in both the Legal Code and the Commons Deed to ensure that — as our licenses continue to grow and attract a large number of more prominent artists and companies — there will be no confusion for either the licensor or licensee about this issue. For a more detailed explanation, see here.
BY-SA — Compatibility Structure Now Included
The CC BY-SA 3.0 licenses will now include the ability for derivatives to be relicensed under a “Creative Commons Compatible License,” which will be listed here. This structure realizes CC’s long-held objective of ensuring that there are no legal barriers to people being able to remix creativity in the way that flexible licenses are intended to enable. More information about this is provided here.
Clarifications Negotiated With Debian & MIT
Finally, Version 3.0 of the licenses include minor clarifications to the language of the licenses to take account of the concerns of Debian (more details here) and MIT (more details here).
As part of discussions with Debian, it was proposed to allow the release of CC-licensed works under DRM by licensees on certain conditions — what was known as the “parallel distribution language” but this has not been included as part of Version 3.0 of the CC licenses."
You could not make up stories like these even if you tried. James Pacenza used to work for IBM until he got fired for participating in adult chat rooms. He now has sued IBM because he claims to be a sex addict and an Internet addict, and that under his condition he's entitled to protection under the American with Disabilities Act.
While this has some comedic value, the case could be the first test of Internet addiction. As early as 1998, clinical psychologists have been claiming that the Internet can be addictive. A PubMed search on "internet addiction" retrieves 156 results. Could this person have a case if there is such a thing as Internet addiction?
Having played MMORPGs from time to time, I can empathise with the addictive claim.
(Via Howard Knopf) Those involved in the P2P debate might remember the 2004 Oberholzer-Gee and Strumpf paper on the effect of music downloads on sales. The paper has now been published in the Journal of Political Economy with updates. The abstract reads:
"For industries ranging from software to pharmaceuticals and entertainment, there is an intense debate about the appropriate level of protection for intellectual property. The Internet provides a natural crucible to assess the implications of reduced protection because it drastically lowers the cost of copying information. In this paper, we analyze whether file sharing has reduced the legal sales of music. While this question is receiving considerable attention in academia, industry, and Congress, we are the first to study the phenomenon employing data on actual downloads of music files. We match an extensive sample of downloads to U.S. sales data for a large number of albums. To establish causality, we instrument for downloads using data on international school holidays. Downloads have an effect on sales that is statistically indistinguishable from zero. Our estimates are inconsistent with claims that file sharing is the primary reason for the decline in music sales during our study period."I have not yet read the published version, so I do not know if there are any changes to the unpublished one. The original prompted some angry replies, and even some reasoned rebuttals.
Finally! Looking for UK legislation? The Department of Constitutional Affairs has released its Statute Law Database. No longer will you have to guess the legislation's name to find it in Google, everything is now available in one place.
I've been browsing it (as you do), and I think that it looks very comprehensive, particularly the regional support. The database includes Scottish Parliament acts and Scottish statutory instruments, so I'm glad to see that Scotland is given its proper place.
The database still has some holes: the Consumer Credit Act 1974 is still not online.
Creative Commons blog and even Eben Moglen are all talking about this video explaining Web 2.0, the hyper-web, or however you want to call it. It was quite an amazing display, really well done. Web 2.0 is one of those terms that I see defined in different ways. Originally, it was meant a description of web-based or browser-based applications, such as gMail, Google Desktop, gadgets, Windows Live, etc. Now it is used to describe user-generated content, social networking and the wiki web.
I still felt that the point was over-stated. Do we really need to re-think everything?
So, as part of my research into software and operating systems, I purchased a cheap OEM version of Vista and installed it on my new and shiny Core 2 Duo system. I also installed OpenSUSE 10.2 as a dual boot to test comparative installation times and ease of use.
Vista looks good, Microsoft has really done a sterling job with Aero and the look-and-feel of the operating system. The menus are approachable and easy to use, and the desktop is definitely one of the nicest out there, with the exception of Mac's stylish workspace. However, I became easily exasperated by Vista's new security features, particularly the User Account Control (UAC). As a power user, I like to be in control of my operating system, something that is very difficult to exercise in Vista. While I know that this will make the new OS tremendously secure, I found the constant prompts when I wanted to do something a serious nag factor. Worse, I could not even delete files! Sure, I do not want a virus, spyware or zombie master taking over my system, but I would like from time to time to delete a file or two if I feel like it.
A more serious problem that I've encountered is that my favourite software does not work in Vista. An operating system is only as strong as the applications you can run. My anti-virus did not work (BitDefender), neither did iTunes, Winamp and my motherboard's tuning software. Firefox encountered serious problems when I tried to install plugins, and whenever I tried to install anything, chances were that the features were not compatible with the operating system. I know that this is a problem that is shared by other 64 bit architectures, but I felt that the application support is woeful.
To round things nicely, nothing works in OpenSUSE. It seems like the Linux driver support for my chipset is not there, so I did not have Internet access right away. Seems like I'm stuck with XP for a while.
Update: This is my first post from Vista though.
Apple boss Steve Jobs has surprised pretty much everyone by making a statement about technological protection measures in the music industry, in a move reminiscent of Bill Gates' comment about how DRM had become too complex for consumers. In an open letter to the public, Jobs has stated that:
"Why would the big four music companies agree to let Apple and others distribute their music without using DRM systems to protect it? The simplest answer is because DRMs haven’t worked, and may never work, to halt music piracy. Though the big four music companies require that all their music sold online be protected with DRMs, these same music companies continue to sell billions of CDs a year which contain completely unprotected music. That’s right! No DRM system was ever developed for the CD, so all the music distributed on CDs can be easily uploaded to the Internet, then (illegally) downloaded and played on any computer or player.This is remarkably sensible, and at least it has opened the debate against DRMs. It is heartening that such a powerful voice as Jobs has seen the light. To be fair, he is probably just worried about slumping sales in iTunes, and he wants to make sure that Apple will end-up with the largest piece of the digital downloads cake. With so many companies placing themselves as competitors, and with Microsoft Vista and Zune placing themselves as a viable competitor, Jobs and Apple want a cut of the sales. iTunes has brand recognition, and if their music can play anywhere, then they would probably see their sales increase.
In 2006, under 2 billion DRM-protected songs were sold worldwide by online stores, while over 20 billion songs were sold completely DRM-free and unprotected on CDs by the music companies themselves. The music companies sell the vast majority of their music DRM-free, and show no signs of changing this behavior, since the overwhelming majority of their revenues depend on selling CDs which must play in CD players that support no DRM system.
So if the music companies are selling over 90 percent of their music DRM-free, what benefits do they get from selling the remaining small percentage of their music encumbered with a DRM system? There appear to be none. If anything, the technical expertise and overhead required to create, operate and update a DRM system has limited the number of participants selling DRM protected music. If such requirements were removed, the music industry might experience an influx of new companies willing to invest in innovative new stores and players. This can only be seen as a positive by the music companies."
And the 2007 prize for the most useless piece of online regulation goes to....
The Beeb reports on the latest proposal from Home Secretary John Reid to force paedophiles and other sex offenders to register their electronic mail details, as well as chat-room login names and other virtual identifiers in order to avoid Internet grooming. The Internet is after all full of nasty people.
And this will work how? Sure, sex offenders will register their details, and open a new Hotmail account the same minute they register the old one. And of course, nobody can register a new user name in a forum. That one has never been tried before either.
At least John Reid did not say that we must regulate the Internets...
The AHRC Research Centre for Studies in Intellectual Property and Technology Law has now released a personality rights wiki, where you can browse the latest cases on personality rights from all over the world. Do you know a case that is not listed? Write a stub for it, a note, or just drop a quick link.
A follow up on the Blackboard patent story. Blackboard has seen the writing on the wall and has issued an enforcement promise for open source software projects. According to the terms of this pledge, Blackboard will not enforce U.S. Patent 6,988,138 against software released with an open source licence. According to the press release:
"[...] the Pledge commits Blackboard not to assert U.S. Patent No. 6,988,138 and many other pending patent applications against the development, use or distribution of open source software or home-grown course management systems anywhere in the world, to the extent that such systems are not bundled with proprietary software."Too little too late? I'm not sure about the enforceability of unilateral promises in the United States, but I hope that this pledge is valid.
Luke Razzell has forwarded this invitation to an event in London for publicity purposes.
Identity Society is delighted to announce an Open Space event (aka "unconference") on February 19th in the revolving restaurant space on the 34th floor of the BT tower in central London. The tower's curious history as an Official Secret is detailed here. Our panoramic views (one shown below) will surely inspire us to think big about our objectives. Identity Society is still just a twinkle in our eye—this event is an amazing opportunity for you to contribute to its meme pool at inception.I cannot attend, but it seems like an excellent event.
But what is the Identity Society actually about?Our integrated experience of our own and others' identity helps us make sense of our life: each person's unique, individual experience is threaded though their interactions with friends, family, businesses, government, doctors, the legal system and information of all kinds. At the same time, as individuals, we are very skilled at selectively disclosing and concealing aspects of our identity according to context and need.
So, given our consumate individual skills with identity, why is our society so often so poor at mediating the flow of identity information for helpful outcomes? Why can't we make key medical information readily available to doctors in an emergency without compromising our privacy at other times? Or enjoy a personalised shopping experience that is joined up across retailers? Or have our government vouch for our identity without allowing them to track our every action? What is the psychological impact of revealing or concealing our identity in various situations? And at root, what does identity mean anyhow?
These are just a few of the questions that Identity Society might address. But the Open Space event is an opportunity for us to work out what the best questions really are, and to begin to devise an effective strategy to answer them. Some of the best and the brightest in the UK and US identity scene are already signed up to attend—we hope to see you there too!
Click here to register!
Excellent news coming from the Software Patent Law Center (SFLC). The USPTO has granted ex parte re-examination of US Patent 6,988,138, which protects "Internet-based education support system and methods". As previously reported, this patent led to its owners, e-learning software firm Blackboard, to sue Desire2Learn, which also manufactures educational software.
The SPLC initiated the re-examination procedure on behalf of several open source software projects. According to their press release:
"A re-examination of this type usually takes one or two years to complete. Roughly 70% of re-examinations are successful in having a patent narrowed or completely revoked."It will take some time to learn the outcome, but at least it has been challenged. Well done!
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