Lack of updates. Yes, hmmmm... This is due to many different things. There is Easter, and then there is the fact that the World Model United Nations is in town, and then I am doing some research into MMORPGs.
If anybody plays City of Heroes, keep an eye out for Technollama!
Yahoo is now offering a search engine that looks for content bearing Creative Commons licences. This is a great source of reuseable content, and it is nice to see search engines embracing Creative Commons ideals, although it must be said that this may just be part of Yahoo's fight against Google. This developmentg takes place at the same time as the split between Creative Commons UK into CC-England and Wales and CC-Scotland is now official. The project will be officially launched next weekend when Lessig visits Edinburgh.
Cork City can now boast the largest WiFi in Europe. The city centre will be coverd by a large wifi mesh network that will pbe offered through credit card payments. This is an interesting development which [rpves that the future is wireless.
Am I moving to Cork? NAH!
This is a Beeb article that explains Podcasting. I don't follow any podcast shows myself, but it seems to be growing in popularity. Missing from the aticle is the issue of copyright and podcasting. So far, the movement has been untroubled by copyright concerns, many of the shows are not using , but there are music as well, and the concerns are there. The logical solution for podcasters is not to use music, or if they do, to use audio released with Creative Commons, such as the famous Wired CD.
The person responsible for the leaking of the first Dr. Who episodes has been exterminated, I mean, has been fired. It is thought that the source of the leak was a peson who worked for a DVD transfer company.
BTW, the first episode of the new Doctor Who will be broadcast this Saturday. Life is good.
The blogosphere has been buzzing with the news that Agence France Press has sued Google for copyright infringement. This is because Google News displays results from different news sources, including pictures, links and headlines. Now Google has decided to remove AFP's content from their site as a direct response to the suit.
I must confess that I still have not made up my mind about this case, but I feel that Google News may be infringing the news sources. I must say that I assumed Google was paying the news service providers. Could AFP be fishing for licensing fees?
I really wish that I could go to New York to this event. This is a workshop by artist Nicolas Collins, who is publishing a book called, oddly, Hardware Hacking. The description of the process sounds really good:
Basic soldering skills will be learned through building contact microphones and coils to sniff electromagnetic fields. The students will open up a range of battery-powered "consumer" technology (radios, electronic toys), observe the effect of direct hand contact on the circuit boards, experiment with the substitution of components, and listen to unheard signals running through the circuit. Knowledge acquired through this process will be applied to building circuits from scratch...Sounds like fun. As I will be building my new computer this Easter weekend, I could use some of this knowledge.
Finally! Google Print is now starting to produce results for works in the public domain (but it appears to be working only through Google.com and not co.uk). I googled Oliver Twist and got the entire book in the results (TIP: It is the icon with the books beside the link). I also was able to find The Count of Monte Cristo and Dracula.
But beware, the service is still in BETA, so most of the books are available as placeholder and provide a few pages and the table of contents. Still, this is a very exciting development, and it could prove to be a very good marketing tool for your writers, as you are allowed to advertise your own book with Google Print.
Robert Terry, the Senior Policy Adviser of the Wellcome Trust, has written a paper in PLoS stating that the Trust will require the publication of all work that is funded by them through open access journals. This is a great boost for the open access movement, because it means that funding bodies are starting to require open access publishing as a prerequisite for researchers obtaining funding in the first place. The Wellcome Trust funds a considerable amount of research every year, which should mean that a sizeable chunk of high-quality research will go to open source journals. (thanks to Andy and Lilian for the link).
This is a new game by Yahoo that allows you to measure the buzz level of a technology through share investment by players. You can play in diverse markets, such as which is the best Linux ditribution (Fedora seems to be at the forefront), the best MMORPG (World of Warcraft), Annoyances (Spyware), P2P (surprisingly, GNUtella over Bittorrent), and portable players (iPOD, duh).
The Washington Post has an article about Creative Commons, featuring interviews with Lessig and Cory Doctorow. This seems to be the watershed that demonstrates that the movement has become mainstream. The article emphasises the many commercial uses of the movement.
Does this mean that Creative Commons is not cool any more?
Lessig has claimed that he will never again publish in a journal that is not published through some sort of open access licence, preferably a CC BY-NC licence (Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial.
This raises an interesting point. Why should we academics give away our copyright when publishing in "traditional" paper journals? We are not getting any money. The publishers prey on the desperate academic who needs to publish or perish. Academics should stand up for their rights and end this despotic state of affairs, publish in open access journals.
Viva La Revolución!
Search engine optimisation is an art, and people get paid a lot of money to do it. There are now some firms that offer all sorts of services to make sure that your website can be found near the top in Google and other search engines. Why is it so important to get to the top? Because one study "concluded that sites that appear on the first page of results attract six times the traffic they did before landing there and earn double the sales." Being in the first Google page means big money, which creates an incentive to be there at whatever cost. This situation has created an economy of links, where getting links to your site enhances your Google rating.
An article in today's Guardian warns about the growing dangers of cybercrime. From phishing to eBay fraud, organised crime is increasingly using the internet to promote some criminal activities. Although this is a growing development, there seems to be a certain luddite stream running through these articles. It is almost as if the authors are telling us that these things are new because of the internet.
Nevertheless, these fears may be warranted to some extent. The online world brings a new scale to this issue, as criminals can have better chance of reaching more and more people, but it also allows access to otherwise inaccessible targets. Today's FT relates a case of cybercrime: hackers in Israel targeted a Japanese bank through their UK servers. Die Hard with computers. And no Bruce Willis. And no Alan Rickman.
Here is the list of contents:
Editorial:
- Laureation for Honorary Degree of LL.D: Professor W R Cornish, Professor Hector MacQueen, p.1.
Special feature:
- Identifying Risks: National Identity Cards, Wendy M. Grossman, pp.2-17.
Peer-reviewed articles:
- The Significance of UNESCO’s Universal Declaration on the Human Genome & Human Rights, Shawn H.E. Harmon, pp.18-47.
- Evolution of Industry Knowledge in the Public Domain: Prior Art Searching for Software Patents, Jinseok Park, pp.48-82.
- Public Domain; Public Interest; Public Funding: Focussing on the ‘three Ps’ in Scientific Research, Dr. Charlotte Waelde and Mags McGinley, pp.83-106.
- The Shape of Things to Come: Swedish Developments on the Protection of Privacy, Rebecca Wong, pp.107-124.
Analysis:
- Regulación Para Mundos Digitales: El Mundo Comunitario, (Regulation of Online Worlds: The Community World), Erick Iriarte Ahon, pp.125-134.
Book Reviews:
- The International Political Economy of Intellectual Property Rights, Meir Perez Pugatch. Reviewed by Geoff Gregson, p.135
- Intellectual Property Law in Practice, Thomas E. Hays and Claire C. Milne. Reviewed by Christine Riefa, p.136.
Phishing, you ask? Phishing is soo 2004. Pharming is the latest craze amongst the trendy cybercriminals. Pharming is an attack that resembles a virus, it changes the host files in a computer - files that interpret the URL that you input in the browser. The site then takes you to a pharming site where you give your password and details, never even knowing that you were not in the actual site that you wanted to visit. An expert describes pharming as :
"Phishing is to pharming what a guy with a rod and a reel is to a Russian trawler. Phishers have to approach their targets one by one. Pharmers can scoop up many victims in a single pass,"I'm phed up of those phlipping phools and their phorbidden pharming. Phie on you!
The main Scottish universities have signed the Scottish Declaration on Open Access, organised by OATS (Open Access Team for Scotland; what a great acronym). Timothy O'Shea, the Principal at the University of Edinburgh, said that "The University of Edinburgh wants to ensure that its research is as visible as possible within Scotland, the UK and the world. This open access initiative provides an important route to deliver this."
So, we have joined the 21st century. It will be interesting to see if there is any money involved in promoting successful open access initiatives. *COUGH*give-us-money*COUGH*
It seems like the story about virtual sweatshops is true after all. Romanian workers play computer games for 10 hours a day to produce virtual goods in MMORPGs which are later sold through eBay or through other websites such as Gamersloot. In those places you can buy powerful accounts, virtual estate or other goodies to satisfy your gaming needs.
What are people buying and selling? Well, on eBay you can buy an ethereal llama. I am jealous, I am just techno, I'm not even ethereal!
(Warning: the article is entitled "Patently absurd", I had never seen that title before!) This is an article by John Naughton about software patents (yes, I know I promised that I would not write about software patents again, but I can't stop myself). Although the article is an adequate introduction to what took place, the item is much more complex than described, but the depiction is good enough to introduce the unwashed to the mysteries of the patent world.
However, what I really liked about the article is that it mentions US Patent 5,443,036. This patent claims to protect:
A method for inducing cats to exercise consists of directing a beam of invisible light produced by a hand-held laser apparatus onto the floor or wall or other opaque surface in the vicinity of the cat, then moving the laser so as to cause the bright pattern of light to move in an irregular way fascinating to cats, and to any other animal with a chase instinct.The mind boggles.
Swedish police have raided servers belonging to the ISP Bahnhof Internet. They discovered 23 Terabytes of infringing content. Apparently, one of the servers in the ISP was the largest file serving machine in Europe!
This case highlights an interesting question about ISP liability. Apparently, two employees are now suspected of being responsible. Assuming that the company didn't know about the misuse of the servers and the employees are found responsible, would this be enough to limit their liability? In most legal systems, employers have certain responsibility for the actions of their employees (responsibility in eligendo). The thing is, how can a company keep track of what the system administrators are doing? Who keeps the keepers?
In the last episode, our hero NCSoft, defender of City of Heroes, had been caught by the evil ploy of Marvel Comics Lawyer-Man. The evil Lawyer-Man caught NCSoft in the cave of The Judge, where he alleged that our hero was guilty of willful secondary infringement. Lawyer-Man has all the powers of the Doomsday Machine Copyright Armament (DMCA). How can NCSoft escape?
But do not despair! The Judge has heard the pleas of NCSoft, and has declared that City of Heroes has considerable non-infringing uses. The Judge has also kindly destroyed several of Lawyer-Man's weapons. NCSoft has not escaped yet, but it seems like our hero might just pull through.
KAPOW! ZAP! ZOINK! Holy lawsuits, Batman!
The wireless roadshow is a project that creates very cheap wireless solutions that use cans and cheap circuits, and takes it to developing countries, where they can be used to connect to remote communities to the internet at very little cost.
This I believe is the way of the future, developing countries will leapfrog copper wires and jump into the wireless domain right away.
I promise that this is the last software patent article for a while. The Guardian has a pretty decent article describing the state of affairs with the approval of the directive-that-shall-not-be-named. It is quite interesting to see that there is something happening that produces enough interest to allow this issue to be reported by the mainstream media. Who said that patent law was boring?
This is an exercise to test the patent described in the previous article (and infringe a silly American patent in the process). This is the full list of my purchases for the last two months with eBay and Amazon:
Take a look at Amazon's US patent 6865546. This is a patent for a system that determines a buyer's age according to previous buying records. The patent states that:
One embodiment of the present invention is a system and method of determining the age of an item recipient, such as a gift recipient. The age range for the gift recipient is estimated based at least in part on a customer order history of gifts purchased by the customer for the gift recipient. At a first date, a customer order for a first gift for the recipient is received, where the first gift is associated with a first age appropriateness designation. At a second date, a customer order for a second gift for the recipient is received, where the second gift is associated with a second age appropriateness designation. An age range associated with the recipient is then estimated based upon at least the first age appropriateness designation and the second age appropriateness designation.I would like to know the "age appropriateness designation" for my recent purchases. Let's see, I have purchased Cowboy Bebop, Hack//Sign, Neon Genesis Evangelion and Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic II. I bet the system would say that I am a 16 year old geek.
So, what now? If there are any patent lawyers celebrating, they should not open the bottles yet. It is my understanding that this agreement still has to go back to the Parliament, where the shenanigans from the Council are likely to produce a serious backlash. Then there is going to be a long string of articles that attempt to tell people about what is really happening. This article for example actually does a good job of explaining why the directive may be bad for SMEs.
My take? There is no telling what will happen, but the dubious procedure will make this directive a prime target for some sort of review. I don't know enough of European Law procedures, but I would guess that this is something that could be reviewed by the European Court of Justice. Any good European appeal lawyers out there?
This is an old article, but I have just read it and found it quite thought-provoking. The article first discusses the economics of mainstream entertainment, which offers us low-quality works from the because of their proven economic return. Those with different tastes must look further and deeper to satisfy their taste. Enter the internet, and everything is turned upside down. The net gives us the chance to buy items that are not the average mass market stuff, which opens profit opportunities for a larger number of creators than the average market.
The way in which this is done is by exploding the Pareto Principle (which roughly states that only 20% entertainment works will be profitable and will fund the 80% that are not). The net has created a space where even the non-hits are profit-making, because there are many more buyers. The article explains that this is now being proven by legal download sites.
What is then the long tail? The fact that creative works may make income from little things accumulating through the mix culture. My hope is that Technollama will someday become a household brand and I will make tons of money from tie-ins and merchandising.
Yahoo is celebrating its 10th birthday by launching an excellent little flash applet that celebrates the 100 most important net moments of the last decade. Yes, the visual net is now 10 years old, so we have a lot to reminisce about. There is Napster, ICANN, Jerry Garcia, Howard Dean's scream, The "I kiss you" guy, Peter Pan Guy, Blair Witch Project, Wikipedia, open source, NakedNews, Heaven's Gate, Hot or Not, and even flashmobs!
Ah, the memories.
There is an interesting argument between the BBC's Bill Thompson and Lessig. Thompson recently wrote a thoughtful paper about the great copyright debate, which amongst other things, criticised the lack of thought that Creative Commons has had regarding moral rights. Lessig has replied that moral rights are really important, but that CC licences do not deal with them and leave each jurisdiction to handle them as they may. Lessig says:
So yes, Creative Commons will not, at least in some jurisdictions, deal with moral rights. Nor will it cure cancer or end poverty. But if it is unclear to anyone, let's be clear about it: We don't therefore not "care" about cancer or poverty. We don't therefore "dismiss" those problems. We just understand -- as everyone should -- that the tools we're spreading can only do so much.This is a false analogy, as cancer and poverty have nothing to do with copyright, but moral rights are an integral part of copyright in many jurisdictions. Therefore, dealing with moral rights is going to be integral to any adequate copyright-related licence. I can see why CC licences prefer not to deal with moral rights, as they are often seen to be directly in clash with many of the adaptation and derivative rights awarded in such documents. Bill Thompson argues that he may want to object Nazi groups from using his work, and this is where moral rights would be useful. I tend to agree with him, but I have also expressed elsewhere that the philosophy behind open source, free software and CC licences is to allow modifications of the work, and moral rights may be against those stated goals.
Lawrence Rosen cannot be accused of being an outspoken attacker of open source. He is one of the main advisors for the OSI, and has written a very good book on open source licences. However, he has recently expressed some lingering concerns about this licensing scheme. He describes some problems with the multiplication of open source licences, which poses a problem to developers as they will have to look at different documents to choose one that fits. This is the thorny problem of standardisation versus customisation of licences. Should OSS developers choose one of the existing OSI certified licences, or they should just draft one that fits their needs? This is an increasing problem because there is growing concern about the international validity of some OSS licences, particularly because most of them are American-centric licences. Rosen says that "It's a legitimate reason for submitting a new license if there is an aspect of your license that doesn't satisfy the law of your country". There is already a French GPL, but moves towards creating new licences may be stopped by the German case declaring the GPL valid.
This could be a good time to be smug and say "I told you so". I believe that there is nothing wrong with customisation because not all of us should be forced to consume American licences. Are we in danger of creating a McOSS culture?
The papers from the ground-breaking conference State of Play are now online. This conference explores the interaction between the law and computer games. Readers may be tempted to think that this is just another excuse from academics to go to a city, have a conference and ingest large quantities of cheap crust-less sandwiches. Nevertheless, there are some good articles in there. Michael Froomkin, one of the best theorists of cyberspace regulation, writes a great article about the use of online games to test and experiment real rules.
Read them, if you can get away from your PS2.
As part of an agreement with the good people at IPKat, we are going to include some pictures of llamas. I hope to make this llama famous, it was a particularly photogenic one:
I am not sure if I should feel ashamed of this piece of news. ICE, the Costa Rican telecommunications monopoly has done some good things ensuring that large sectors of the country are connected online, but now they are hoping to ban Voice over IP (VoIP). According to them, 1 out of every 5 calls to the United States are done through VoIP services. ICE has presented a bill to the Costa Rican legislature that will declare all unlicensed use of telecommunications networks a type of fraud, and those found guilty of providing the service could go to jail. Some critics have stated that this could include all sorts of chat services that use multimedia.
Could Xbox Live be banned in Costa Rica? I'd better stay here in Edinburgh.
Have you seen the Numa Numa Dance? It is strangely compelling, isn't it? But what of the guy in the video? According to this article, he is now in hiding and suffering from depression. It raises some questions about cyber-privacy, but it may have other implications. I wonder if the Romanian group has found some considerable financial advantages from their song being downloaded so much, and how one could go ahead and measure it.
One could easily comment that Creative Commons licences are becoming very popular on the internet as they are being linked often. It is now very common to find websites that link to a Creative Commons content licence, but just how popular is this model really? The CC blog has some raw data from Yahoo about how many people are linking to various CC licences, and the data is really interesting. Apparently, there are ten million links to the various CC licences, which are distributed like this:
This is actually a very intelligent and coherent analysis of the problem of software patents and software copyright, but it fails in many levels. I know that the author does not claim to make an European software analysis, but why criticise the problem of European software patents with an American copyright analysis? The problem with this is that the argument may be true in the United States, but software copyright is a much less complicated issue in Europe, where the ridiculous filtration and abstraction test has been rubbished by English judges, while Continental copyright law is perfectly applied to software all the time. Few can doubt that there is a problem with American copyright law and software, but this is not the case in Europe. Without this argument, the pro-patent lobby has almost nothing else left to offer, and explains why the directive has been so unpopular in Europe.
Another problem with the pro-patent argument is that its proponents want to have double protection for software, as it is quite clear that they still want copyright protection to be able to prevent piracy. Their argument is to continue with copyright protection where it serves them, but also to add patent protection so that they can prevent others from misappropriating their ideas. The problem with this is that these ideas tend to be extremely broad, and are often the result of already existing ones. The history of software development is nothing but a long history of people adapting one idea and using it in their own program. But the protection of software ideas has another problem, and it is that in software there are usually not many different non-obvious ways of performing an action and producing an effect. Text editors must all look and operate like they do because there are not many other ways of doing it. If you were able to obtain a patent on text editors, then you could have an exceptionally forceful advantage over every other potential text editor maker.
The article also wants to make a case about patent quality, but it fails to stress just how important this is. If patents are being issued for obvious software inventions, then the entire application of the system should be looked at, as there is clear danger for the future of the entire field.
Ms Meeker also neglects to explain one very important point. Why are software patents needed in Europe? True, the EPO has issued some, but they have not been subject to the same level of enforcement than in the United States. I believe that this is because owners may fear that courts could easily strike them down, as it is obvious that they are strictly in contravention of the written word of the European Patent Convention. The low level of enforcement has made European software patents very weak indeed, and is the main reason why you have had the push by some sectors of the industry to obtain a directive. It is also clear that the European software industry is not suffering from the problems with software patents. On the contrary! Europe has a lot to win from curbing software patents. Software development in the United States has become such a toxic environment that Europe could become a beacon of new software innovation.
eBay is thinking about opening its source code under some sort of open licence to allow faster development. eBay currently has a proprietary/closed code software developer's kit(SDK) that they provide to programmers that want to create applications that interact with eBay's interface and enhances its current use. Currently, 42% of eBay's website has been produced by external developers, but this is done at a slower pace, and they cannot produce SDKs for different languages, or make them available to all would-be programmers.
This opening of source code also would make it easier for eBay to change their interface entirely, as it would allow developers to adapt their applications at a faster rate. If eBay goes open source, this will mean that most of the most innovative companies on the internet will be using this model (Amazon, Google and eBay). It seems like the success of open source as a viable business model is unstoppable.
John Swainson, the CEO for anti-virus and security products producer Computer Associates will announce a donation of some of its software patents to open source software developers. It will be good to see the shape that this offer takes. IBM's offer took the shape of a legally binding non-assertion promise of 500 of its software patents. Hopefully, CA's promise will unlocked more patents, which should go a long way towards creating an open source free environment.
This is another variant of the Nigerian scam phishing letter that has arrived to my Inbox. It is more sophisticated than your average scam letter, and they have fixed some problems that it had earlier.
Bullseye Consultants:Private Investigators and Security Consultants isBullseye Consultants? Change "eye" for a word synonymous with post-digestive refuse, and you may be closer to the truth.
conducting a standard process investigation on behalf of Halifax Bank of
Scotland,the international Banking conglomerate, and we will like you to assist with this Independent Enquiry.
My name is Pauline Coker. I am a senior partner in the firm. This investigation involves a client who shares the same surname with you and also the circumstances surrounding investments made by this client at HBS Republic, the Private Banking arm of Halifax Bank of Scotland.
The Halifax Bank of Scotland Private Banking client died intestate and nominated no successor in title over the investments made with the Bank. The essence of this communication with you is to request you provide us information/comments on any or all of the four issues:
1-Are you aware of any relative/relation who shares your same surname whose
last known contact address was Brussels Belgium?
2-Are you aware of any investment of considerable value made by such a person
at the Private Banking Division of Halifax Bank of Scotland PLC?
3-Born on the 1st of June 1927
4-Can you establish beyond reasonable doubt your eligibility to assume status
of successor in title to the deceased?
It is pertinent that you inform us ASAP whether or not you are familiar
with this personality that we may put an end to this communication with
you and our inquiries surrounding this personality. You must appreciate
that we are constrained from providing you with more detailed information
at this point.
Please respond to this mail as soon as possible to afford us the opportunity
to close this investigation. Thank you for accommodating our enquiry.
Pauline Coker
For:Bullseye Consultants.
(Warning: The link takes you to an article that uses the title "Bridging the digital divide"; how original!) How do you make sure that people in developing countries have access to information technology? By making it cheap. Very cheap. Famous technologist from MIT Media Lab Nicholas Negroponte and other associates are planning to produce a $100 USD laptop to give to children in developing countries. This is a very good development, hopefully the computers will be good and not only cheap. The laptops will be cheap because they will be a mesh network. The specs are quite impressive as well:
It will have a 12in colour screen and run Linux and other open source software. It will be Wi-Fi and 3G-enabled, with many USB ports. The laptops will not have lots of storage space, and will not be hooked up via a conventional local area networks, but will rely on mesh networks, where one child's laptop will act as the print server, one the DVD player, and another the mass storage device.
Can I get one? I am from a developing country.
Do office affairs matter? According to this article, they are on the increase, and may be posing some questions about office surveillance. Your systems administrator has the power to do check all of your email, and there are many other ways of surveillance. There are a growing number of complaints from employees, mostly women, about workplace abuse. I think that there are two ways to deal with the problem. First, workplace surveillance itself is a growing concern, but most of the times it is done within the law. The other problem is the actual abuse that ranges on cyberstalking. One could argue that people should attempt to keep their personal lives separate from their private ones, but this is increasingly difficult.
There is growing interest about the legal implications of MMORPGs. Terra Nova has a good post about the growing trend to emphasize the technology and ascertain the inherent difference of virtual worlds when compared to real life. The questions are generally centred around American freedom of speech arguments (as most American discussions about new technology tend to do), but they can be boiled to this: some people want claim ownership over what they produce in increasingly rich worlds because these works have value, be it commercial or sentimental. Some MMORPG user agreements have clauses where users transfer all assignable IP to the company.
I tend to agree with the idea that these worlds are no different than any other worlds, and that therefore the legal questions should not differ to what we already have. However, I also think that there may be some new questions lurking in here, questions that have been missed by the freedom of speech arguments. If people spend hours and hours putting together a character and creating a viable online world, shouldn't that be recognised in some way? Could we argue that agreements that force users to give away their IP when they sign up to the game would be abusive?
Mark Jen used to have a small technical-oriented blog read by a few people (much like your humble Technollama). Then he started working for Google and everything changed. He started using his blog ninetyninezeros to descibe conditions at Google. He wrote some candid posts about his short life with the company, something that did not sit well with the powers that be. Only eleven days after starting, he was fired.
When did Google join the Dark Side?
Seems like the European Palrliament has done the right thing and finally driven the stake through the heart of the malinformed software patent directive. The Commision may try something, but it seems that under the present political climate they will not try something for a while. I can hear thousands of European patent lawyers crying lost profits.
Is this the end of software patents in Europe? I don't think so, there is a lot of money involved, and a big political push from the giants in the software industry. India is suffering from similar underhand tactics to get software patents accepted. Let's just hope that they will be able to come through.
This one practically writes itself. The Register reports that a man in the United States is suing the makers of a herbal penis enlargement pill for misleading advertisement. He says that the ads claimed that he would gain three inches, but that nothing happened. I wonder how they are going to collect evidence for this one. Is there going to be a discovery meeting amongst the parts?
So many jokes, so little time.
As the fight against European software patents heats up, we can find a lot of opinions about the subject. We have irony-filled pieces, like the one where Richard Stallman calls Bill Gates a communist. Then witness this debate between Karl Lenz and Alex Horns. The arguments are not about the law, which is clearly not in favour of software patents, but about protectionism and economics and the "declining European industry".
Funny that. Europe's manufacturing is in decline, mostly fuelled by the low dollar and some restrictive labour regulation, not because of the European patent system, which is one of the most sensible around. The knowledge economy in Europe is not declining, it is vibrant and full of innovation. This is why the supporters of software patents have to offer preposterous arguments claiming that the system is not working when it clearly is. So what if the American patent system has gone absolutely crazy? We should not follow them and copy their bloated and failing patent system. The only people set to win from software patents are patent lawyers.
Loki Torrent was one of the most popular bittorrent sites on the net. It had decided to fight and they were raising money from users to pay for their legal defense; apparently they had made about $40,000 US dollars from this, and leaves one to wonder how is it that people who will not pay for a CD will pay for legal fees of a P2P site. Anyway, it was quite evident that services like Loki would disappear eventually based on the fact that they were central services where links to the infringing material were kept, even if the infringing material was distributed in computers all around the world.
What is novel about this case is that Loki decided not to fight, gave up and allowed the MPAA access to their user logs and files, which means that the MPAA is threatening to sue the users by applying well-used RIAA tactics. Moral of the story? Don't use central services, use P2P services like eXeem that have built-in torrent capabilities. Others that do that are Morpheus and eDonkey.
Paraphrasing my colleague Lilian Edwards, where on Earth do things happen in cyberpsace? Techdirt has a small report about the latest case to muddle the question of cyberspace jursidiction. This case is Dow Jones & Co Inc v Jameel [2005] EWCA Civ 74 (note that link is only for the report of the injunction), and it involves the case of a Saudi Arabian national who sued WSJ for libel after they published a report that linked the claimant to terrorist funding. WSJ is published in New Jersey, but Mr Jameel sued in London because it has the strictest libel law (this is often called forum shopping). The court threw out the case (thankfully), but on the basis that not enough people had read the article in the UK, so it could not be assumed that it had been published here.
This opens an interesting new question about possible future cases. What constitutes publication on the "web"? Is the fact that somebody has made something available online enough to constitute publication everywhere? If so, can I be sued anywhere that has an internet connection?
Next week should give us a better idea of what is going to happen with software patents. Earlier in the week, there were some reports that it was possible that software patents were going to be adopted next week. Since then, the Dutch Paliament has adopted a motion to block this in the European Council, and the Danes are also having second thoughts about the whole thing.
The problem with software patents is that they are not needed in Europe. The European software industry is doing really well without them (or with a very limited version of them), with a vibrant economy dependent on small and medium developers, who would be the worse affected by what is happening in the United States over patents.
Technollama has spent some time in London at the Queen Mary Intellectual Property Research Institute for the launch of the Patenting Lives project. This is pretty good project, we will keep an eye on it (and link to it often).
This is a column about the growing amount of litigation found in the United States related to computer games. We all know about the preposterous case brought by Marvel Comics against City of Heroes for allowing its players to dress up as *GASP* superheroes. Then there is the story of Blacksnow Interactive, which apparently sells virtual goods in the real world. How does that work?Blacksnow are supposed to have some virtual sweatshops in Tijuana, where poor Mexicans play MMORPGs every day to produce goods that can then be sold on eBay (although Terra Nova claims that the story's truth is doubtful). The column then asks whether we should regulate "virtual worlds". I feel déja vu, again. We've been here before. Take these words:
"We now have this technology that allows people to create their own place, their own rules," said Noveck. "We need to preserve it."This sounds familiar, a lot like the much maligned Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace. The problem is that it assumes that the space is something new created by its users. This is not true, the spaces are owned and maintained by the companies. True, it is possible to establish player-run servers, but these are the minority and most people prefer to play the proprietary environments.
There has been some talk recently about the possible death of P2P, particularly in the popular media. The argument is that P2P networks have seen a sharp decrease from the actions of the music industry and their lawsuits against users. A new study called "Is P2P dying or just hiding?" claims that P2P traffic is at its highest, if you know where to look. Another study from the OECD should give people more raw data about the actual figures involved.
Yahoo is suing small company Xfire for alleged patent infringement. Xfire provides a chat application that allows online gamers to chat with each other. However, Yahoo claims that it owns a software patent that protects precisely that, U.S. patent 6,699,125. This patent, applied for in 2001, claims to protect a novel system of having a games servers with games clients that will connect to a chat server and chat clients allowing intercomunication within the servers and the clients. Here is what the patent says:
A game and messenger client-server system is provided including a plurality of game clients, a game server, a plurality of messenger clients, and a messenger server. The game server includes logic to operate a multiplayer game using inputs from and outputs to an active game set of game clients, wherein game clients other than those in the active game set can join an active game by supplying the game server with a reference to the active game.Wait a second, this sounds familiar! Microsoft's Gaming Zone predates 2001, and I am sure that I chatted with people there while playing Checkers or Chess. What about the many other game client sites? GameSpy Arcade anyone? I remember playing in the World Opponent Network back in 1999. I also played in KaliNet, which had chat capabilities, and I know that I am forgetting a lot more. By 2001, almost all game developers had their own online gaming server with chat capabilities. How can Yahoo claim that there was no relevant non-patent prior art?
The RIAA has reached a new low in their tactics of suing P2P users. According to The Register, they have sued a dead woman. I love this line:
"An RIAA spokesperson said that it would try and dismiss the case."Yep, nobody is safe from the RIAA.
This is a Distance Learning LL.M. we are going to start in Edinburgh. If you fancy spending a year (or two) studying Technology Law but can't be bothered to travel abroad, then we will happily make you feel welcome with the distance LL.M.
You want to get more money for your industry (which is already a very profitable one). What do you do? You ask people to turn in their bosses for software piracy after you leave the company. I was reading The Onion when I came across this ad:
(Registration required, remember to use Bugmenot). So, BitTorrent is making TV execs uneasy in the United States. It was meant to happen, as torrent technology is quite fast, but not as fast as the article would make us believe. I still cringe at the use of the word "stealing", the fact that I have downloaded the 5 episodes of Macross Zero does not mean that I will not buy the DVD as soon as it comes out. I am really bothered about the unimaginative copyright industry suits and their exaggerated claims, where any download is immediately translated as a lost sale, when the reality is much more complex.
Q: Is the publishing of a photo of the Eiffel Tower permitted?
A: There are no restrictions on publishing a picture of the Tower by day. Photos taken at night when the lights are aglow are subjected to copyright laws, and fees for the right to publish must be paid to the SNTE.
My guess is that they are really interested in the post card market, and it is just another way of squeezing money out of the tourists. I will infringe with the image to the left and see what happens.
MP3.com was one of the early pioneers of online music sharing. It started offering direct links to MP3s, which was shut down easily by the music industry. Afterwards, MP3.com has been offering music from emerging groups that want to offer their music online. Now MP3.com will open a novel music store, it will offer DRM free downloads.
I think that they are on to something. The only reason why I have not started using "legal" downloads is that the established players and sites use DRMs. If there is a DRM-free option, then count me in.
Software patents are a serious problem for open source developers according to Linus Torvalds and other open source superstars, despite IBM's legally binding pledge not to enforce 500 software patents against OSS companies. This should not surprise anybody. With almost every single obvious element of software already patented in the United States, the only thing stopping a large-scale patent war is the fact that Novell and IBM own a good number of patents, and there may be fear that any action against open source would induce Big Blue's rage.
Teoma is a new search engine that follows a similar idea to that of Google Scholar, it tries to filter searches to give sources that have certain authority. It does this by producing searches that are linked to by pages with the similar topic. I have tried it with some vanity searching, and I must say that I was quite impressed. It allows you to search for some specific topics. When I searched my name it brought up the topics "data protection", "intellectual property" and "creative commons". Very impressive!
This is an excellent rant from Ed Felten's blog Freedom to Tinker, where he asks something that has been on my mind recently. Why is Hollywood complaining about the evils of movie downloading, when profits are at its highest levels ever. Why are we told that there is a problem when the money is coming in? People are still buying DVDs and going to the movies, I haven't met anybody who says "I think that I will download this movie and watch it in a crappy little screen instead of going to the movies". Let's face it, those who do that will almost certainly not go out anyway.
A Norwegian student has been found guilty of copyright infringement and has been told that he has to pay the music industry the equivalent of £8,000 for hosting a site called napster.no. As its counterpart in the United States, the problem is that this site had links to actual infringing material, other users could give links to its music, and they could download it.
The RIAA continues its strategy of suing P2P users by initiating lawsuits against 717 users of the Kazaa, eDonkey and Limeware P2P networks. Will this strategy work? I will conduct a survey of users tonight and get back to you tomorrow with a report of numbers of people sharing.
eXeem is a new P2P application that was created in the wake of the shutting down of the SuprNova bitorrent website. This new technology marries the speed and capabilities of Bitorrent with the relative anonymity and decentralization of P2P.
However, eXeem is said to come with spyware, so a new and lite version of the software has been created, eXeem Lite. Could this be the perfect downloading application at last? Technollama will download and install it, all in the name of accurate reporting and for strict educational purposes.
Yesterday we brought you news about the devilish new McAfee patent. PantentNews has pointed out that the patent also claims to trace IP and then "displaying a world map with an illustration of the trace thereon utilizing the firewall."
Wait a second, that is just a graphical traceroute, is it not? Well, yes it is! And guess what? It predates 2002 as well. I even have a Linux application that does the same thing!
Slashdot reports that anti-virus developer Mcafee has been granted U.S. Patent 6,839,852 for monitoring network traffic with a firewall. The patent is for:
A system, method and computer program product are provided for tracing a traffic event utilizing a firewall. Initially, a firewall is executed on a local computer. Next, traffic events between the local computer and a remote computer over a network are monitored utilizing the firewall. Further, the traffic events are displayed utilizing the firewall. In use, at least one of the traffic events is traced utilizing the firewall. Moreover, a map of the trace is displayed for effectively conveying information about the traffic event.The patent was filed on February 8, 2002. 2002?! How can McAfee claim no prior art exists when there is a very concise FAQ on firewalls written in 2001?
In a similar move to IBM's much talked about patent handout for OSS developers, Sun Systems are offering more than 1,600 patents that they own for open source developers in Solaris projects. Although many will complain that this is another PR exercise, it must be said that there seems to be a growing understanding from OSS friendly enterprises that the open source model needs some software patents to support the model if the patent wars break out.
Poland has saved Europe once more from the proposed software patent directive. The item was to be viewed as an A-item in the Agriculture and Fisheries agenda, but Poland has once more opposed its inclusion there. The official Polish statement reads:
"In regard to the news about the possible inclusion of the item concerning the Directive on the Patentability Computer-Implemented Inventions in the agenda of the meeting of the Council of Agriculture and Fisheries on the 24th of January, 2005, the European Committee of the Council of Ministers noted on the meeting on the 21st of January that the work on the final position of Poland on the issue has not yet been completed. On account of that, the European Committee has decided that the Permanent Representation of the Republic of Poland to the European Union will make a request to the Presidency not to include that item in the Agenda of the EU Council Meeting. If the Luxembourg Presidency includes the draft of the aforementioned directive in the agenda, Poland will request its withdrawal and postponement until the end of the necessary analyses being conducted by Poland."What new devilry will the guys at the Commission device next? I would venture that a Balrog may be brought next to push the proposal forward.
Firefox is increasing its market share in detriment of Internet Explorer, an increase that has been fueled by security fears in Microsoft products. Firefox is said to have taken 5% of the market, as opposed to a 1% during Mozilla times. I can say that I have noticed that Firefox share in sites that I administer is up to 15-20%, but that may have to do with the readership.
I watched I, Robot last night. While the movie wasn't all that bad, there were certain IP practices in the rental that annoyed me considerably. The first was an annoying commercial right at the start of the DVD (which can't be forwarded) from FACT (Federation Against Copyright Theft). This piece of propaganda asks viewers that they would not steal a car, but that downloading a movie is stealing. The problem is that it is not, it is infringement, which is different. The use of charged words is designed to equate the stealing of goods with the infringement of rights, which is not the same thing. Stealing a pie means that nobody else can use the pie. Downloading a song or a movie does not stop anybody else from watching or buying the movie. I also was annoyed by the sheer stupidity of placing this to rental copies. I am renting the DVD, so I am not likely to download the movie, am I?
The other annoying factor was the inclusion of endless commercials and previews. Wait a second, I just paid £3,50 to rent that DVD, why am I being subjected to viewing commercials and previews?
Then the movie starts, and it is filled with product placement, some of it is the most cringe-inducing placement that I have seen since Wayne's World did such as good job of satirizing it. The worst offender is the use of a pair of sneakers (Black Converse All Stars) that are reffered to more than some plot elements. They are "Vintage 2004", which makes this a blatant commercial, and then are talked about by at least three other characters. It is the most disgusting use of product placement that I have ever seen, and it makes other blatant product placement less noticeable, such as the disgusting Fed Ex robot and the lovely Audi car.
What I am getting at is that I felt that I had been subjected to so much advertising during this rental that I should have gotten it for free. As somebody else said, the movie should be renamed and called I, Converse.
This is a great project from the Washington and Lee Law School Library, which is collecting a list of legal journal RSS feeds. The list includes 137 legal journals at the moment, ranging from philosophy of the law to Gaming Law (yes, there is a Gaming Law journal!). SCRIPT-ed has now joined the 21st Century and is also offering a feed informing subscribers of the lates issue.
If you believe all sort of technology horror stories, you would think that Wi-Fi is the source of all evil on the web. Check this story for example, or this one. The common denominator is that the risks of having a Wi-Fi network in your house are completely blown out of proportion. Cities are not being taken over by hackers intent on warchalking and taking over your personal network. This article is more measured, and gives some good advice. Do not give into fear, go wireless.
The good folks at FFII are announcing that the software patent directive will once more be presented as an A-Item in the Agriculture and Fisheries meeting next Monday. Yes, you heard right, Europe's agriculture ministers will decide whether we are stuck with software patents. I apologise in advice for the bad pun, but there is something fishy going on. Something stinks in Brussels.
A report by the BBC says that legal music downloads are up almost tenfold during 2004 . In other news, snow is cold, rain is wet, and young people have no taste in music.
A new bill in California is asking for jail time for P2P developers. That's right, if you produce some software that can be used to exchange files through a network, then you can be thrown to jail. The stupidity of this bill is monumental for so many reasons, and works on so many levels. For example, they define P2P as:
"'peer-to-peer file sharing software' means software that once installed and launched, enables the user to connect his or her computer to a network of other computers on which the users of these computers have made available recording or audiovisual works for electronic dissemination to other users who are connected to the network."
So, this would make internet developers into offenders. FTP developing should also be covered by this. Not only that, Windows XP has some built-in technology that allows sharing files through a network, doesn't that mean that good ol' Bill should spend some time in the slammer?
Some people fear that the net may be suffering from a balkanization of the internet, with a broken up network consisting of people who inhabit a space that only accepts trusted users, coming from trusted domains. This is made evident by some ISPs blocking email from Europe, and also about a decision by Google to allow a new hyperlink tag attribute that doesn't weigh the link in the search engine. I think that this is an exaggeration, but I am very worried by Verizn blocking european email. This assumes that the web is American.
This is a very good article in The Economist talking about the problems with the American patent system and IBM's 500 patent handover. They state that studies claim that 30% of all patents awarded in the United States are duplicate claims.
30%? I am surprised, I thought that the figure was much higher!
Open biotechnology continues to gather momentum in the press. This is a new article in Wired, very similar to many other articles that have been showing up since The Economist produced an article where the phenomenon was explained. The article doesn't really say anything new, but it is nice to see that the issue is perceived to have journalistic relevance. This really makes a change for one of my main research interests.
This sounds like a badly written zombie movie. A man in Scotland is being held under suspicion of keeping a zombie network. A zombie is netspeak for a computer that has been hijacked to produce a certain effect, such as serving spam, serving viruses or sending DoS attacks (denial of service).
This is the first UK case of a man being fired because of something that he wrote on a blog. Joe Gordon, was a senior bookseller at Waterstone's store in Edinburgh, and had been with the company for 11 years. He has a blog called the Woolamaloo Gazette, in which he referred to his employer as Bastardstone's, called his line manager Evil Boss, and complained about his working hours and that the working conditions were slavery. He was fired for bringing the company into disrepute.
Don't you love the irony? This has gotten so much press that them firing him has really brought the company some bad PR. I think that they should take him and fire the guy that fired him. Poetic justice I would call it.
Jailed for a song is a new campaign in the U.S. that is trying to get sensible IP legislation passed through the American Congress. The idea is to turn the tide of IP protection to regain liberties and freedoms enjoyed by the public, and to attack preposterous legislative proposals that attempt to further criminalise infringement.
Those singing the demise of the Bittorrent network should not get ahead of themselves. The existing technology can still be used for countless purposes where the sharing of large files is needed. There is also a lot that can be done with a system that marries torrent technology with the distribution of seeds that can be found in other P2P networks. Developers are looking to create a new network that marries both ideas, called Exeem.
Don't owners know that they cannot kill file sharing? We will keep you posted about Exeem and any other file sharing technology.
There have been several interesting moves about software patents in Europe. The proposal was introduced sneakily by members of the Commission to an Agriculture meeting dealing with fishing, which was struck down by Poland (thank you Poland, again!). Now, 61 MEPs have pleaded for the directive process to be restarted.
(Registration required) IBM continues to champion the open source movement by allowing access to 500 software patents that it holds to open source developments. However, IBM is only allowing access to a minimal amount of its patents, as it was awarded more than 3,000 patents in 2004.
One of the most important things to happen in recent days is that several torrent rtepositories have been shut down. This is an excellent post in the blog Cyber Divide about the implications of the technology.
IP consultant and patent advocate extraordinaire Greg Aharonian has presented a lawsuit to attempt to get a court to determine that copyright doesn't protect software adequately and that patents are sufficient protection. Aharonian edits the popular and interesting site Patenting Art, and publishes an email newsletter. It is difficult to tell if this is just a ploy or if he is serious, but Technollama promises to find out. It seems evident that he is making his claim based solely in the American developments for software patents, while many other countries are happy with copyright protection.
The new issue of SCRIPT-ed is now online. This issue covers a good range of issues, including an analysis of the German case that has declared the validity of the GPL.
This is where the great battle of our time will be fought. The P2P debate in the US Supreme Court is upon us, a case that will probably shape the near future of the legal validity of sharing networks.
But one must say that sharing will go on regardless of the ruling, BitTorrent is not under scrutiny here.
Some local news from Costa Rica. The weirdest patent claim has made some of the news over here, after a Canadian patented and claimed the ownership of the "canopy tours", a great way to travel on the top of the rainforest to see the wildlife from close range. The problem is that we Costa Ricans have been using similar technologies for more than a century, which sort of invalidates any novelty claims. Besides, there is a dubious claim of patentability of business methods in Costa Rica. Now, the SALA IV (the Costa Rican constitutional court) has ruled that the patent was invalid.
Great news for canopy tour lovers.
Sunny Costa Rica is great this time of year, so I will be heading down there for my holidays tomorrow. Updates will be few and far between.
This is a great article by Fred von Lohmann about the surreal case of Marvel suing the makers of the popular "City of Heroes" MMORPG game. Marvel complains that City of Heroes is guilty of contributory infringement of copyright and trademark because some players in their site are creating characters that resemble Marvel heroes, such as Wolverine™, Hulk™ and Spider-man™. The argument is so ridiculous that it should not require any analysis. What is the damage to the brands if there are some gamers who also like Marvel comic characters and want to generate an avatar that resembles their hero? This is one of those cases in which abuse of IP serves only to provide bad PR for the company involved.
Marvel should not mess with comic-book geeks.
This is an excellent article by Regina Lynn about the dangers of Google and leaving a digital trail. We are increasingly leaving a digital footprint that tells people about our interests, opinions and tastes. People can Google and find some amazing details about who you really are. It makes one think what the world thinks of us, and everybody has googled themselves at one time or another.
Reuters reports that Microsoft is targetting its cheap (sorry, "low cost") version of Windows XP to Asian markets. The stated purpose of this is to try to make Windows more appealing in emerging markets. The real reasons are: to hook home users into Windows, to try to stop the rampant piracy in Asia, and to try to redress the rise of Linux in that part of the world.
I pity the poor people who get this. If Windows XP is buggy (SP2 Anyone?), what will a cheap version look like?
Technollama is coming to you today from the Playfair Library, where we are attending the very interesting conference named "Towards Utopia or Irreconcilable Tensions: the interface between intellectual property, competition and human rights". More reports later, but I am hoping to load the powerpoints from some of the talks later on.
This is an interesting article in the excellent WorldChanging blog. The article looks at the possibility of using open source models in drugs and biotechnology. Although the article cites many of the possible uses for the technology, it fails to mention that the reason why this is still in "planning stages", or "gathering interest" and not in the licence drafting stage is that it is extremely difficult to translate the open source model into biotechnology.
2004 has been the year of the blog. The BBC reports that the word "blog" has now been included in the Merriam-Webster dictionary. The definition reads: "BLOG noun [short for Weblog] (1999) : a Web site that contains an online personal journal with reflections, comments, and often hyperlinks provided by the writer."
Contrast that with Wikipedia's entry. I think that this is similar to the difference between the Encyclopedia Galactica and the Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy on the subject of Pan-Galactic Gargle Blasters.
This is a rather good report in The Register that talks about the digital divide in the United States, where internet access is still the realm of the high-income white guy. The idea of the cosmopolitan world wide web is still a fantasy, as the average netizen tends to be American white guys.
del.icio.us
