DVD formats: Blue-Ray vs HD-DVD

There is a new format war brewing in consumer electronics that reminds people of the VHS vs Betamax battle. This brings two competing incompatible DVD formats against one another - Sony's Blu-Ray vs Toshiba's HD DVD. You may wonder why do we need a new DVD format. After all, DVD has just recently taken off, and we are just starting to fill our collections. One of the problems with the current DVD format is that its copyright protection is extremely vulnerable, and the industry wants much better built-in DRM. The other problem with current formats is storage space. It is also appealing for the industry to get us to buy new players that support one of the formats.

Technically speaking, Blu-Ray seems to be much better than HD DVD where it counts: storage and DRM. Blu-Ray supports 50 GB storage in one single disc, while the highest test in the lab has produced storage capacities of up to 100 GB. HD DVD only has capacity for 30 GB, with the highest test at 45 GB. Sony has also claimed that it has much better copyright protection because it allows for dynamic encryption. This means that if the encryption protecting the disc is cracked (as it happened with normal DVDs), then the entire system would not be compromised, as new encryption algorithms could be uploaded to the disc and the players.

The format battle is set to reach us soon. Sony is putting all of its considerable weight behind Blu-Ray, particularly by the fact that it will include it in the Playstation 3. HD DVD has received the support of Microsoft and Intel, which would seem to make it the favourite.

Will history repeat itself? Sony lost the video recorder war, while many people claimed that Beta was much better. Will they also lose the DVD war?

WIPO Webcasting treaty

This is another amazing comment by James Boyle in FT regarding the WIPO Treaty on the Protection of Broadcasting Organisations, also known as the Webcasting Treaty. Boyle's point is undeniably strong as usual. Why does the broadcast industry need a new right? Why is there need for further protection of a multi-million industry that is under no threat?

But what is the treaty? The broadcast right provides an extra layer of copyright protection by giving broadcast organisations a series of exclusive rights found under copyright (communication to the public, fixation, making available to the public, reproduction and distribution of the broadcast). This would generally seem fair enough, if an organisation broadcasts a drama, it will have several rights over their work. This would stop the fixation of shows in digital format and their online distribution through BitTorrent or other P2P services. The problem with the right is that it has the potential of extending copyright once more, as a work that is broadcast just before it is to enter the public domain could earn a new lease of life (50 years according to the treaty). This is unacceptable, and as Boyle points out, countries that do not have a broadcast right have not suffered from it.

IP can make you famous

(via Steve Hedley's news list). An interest in software patents and IP can make you famous. Florian Muller is the founder of Nosoftwarepatents.com, who successfully lobbied against the Software Patent Directive. Muller has been nominated in this year's Europeans of the Year awards in the "Campaigner of the year" category alongside Bono and Sir Bob Geldof. Michel Rocard, the raporteur in the European Parliament that spearheaded the campaign within the legislative body is nominated for MEP of the year for "turning the software patent directive into a fascinating debate about the future of technological innovation".

Next thing we know, famous cyberlaw professors will be portrayed on hit TV shows.

Oracle software patent: The little man falls!

The UK Patent Office has ruled on the patentability of application number GB 2385686 filed by software giant Oracle. This patent application is for a system that translates a language like SGML into markup language like HTML. The application was denied by the examiner, who had doubts about whether the invention was novel and involved an inventive step. This is of course accurate because there have been programs that do this for ages. The applicants did claim that theirs was better, but should patents be awarded for any program that does something slightly better than previous ones?

Nevertheless, the important part of the case was that the examiner did not believe that the application met the patentability requirements set out in the law and in recent cases. Particularly, the recent case of CFPH Application was particularly enlightening in attempting to set out a test for patentability of software in the UK. One of the hidden gems of the ruling is the "little man test". This test states that the software will be patentable if it fulfills all other patent requirements, but also if it can be performed by a little man inside the computer. As useful as this test is, it is not without faults, particularly in this case. As the Comptroller stated:

Not only is there no artifact or industrial process being controlled, but the application makes it clear that the purpose of the invention is to convert a document from one format to another in a few minutes without requiring manual input from a user, where previously it would have taken days— with or without the assistance of a computer.

Well said. The patent application was struck down, but I'm afraid that we may see this one come back in court. Will the little man get his day in court?

Online game plague tops BBC News

Some days ago the Terra Nova blog reported on the curious case of a plague that is killing thousands of players in the popular MMORPG World of Warcraft. Apparently, players that killed a new super-boss enemy were infected with a strange disease that started killing characters in the near vicinity. The reports are not clear on the details, but it seems like the goal of the disease was to affect only those who killed this boss. Ingenious players found a way to unleash it on near-by cities, so the plague spread, killing thousands of characters.

What is interesting is that there is no clue as to whether this was a planned event within the game, or if it was actually a random disease that exploited a bug in the system and allowed for the first documented online plague. It is also interesting that the story has been picked up by the BBC Technology news, which gives some clues as to the popularity of MMORPGs.

Bio-terrorism online?

Welcome to our new students!

A new year has started and a new batch of students is arriving to Edinburgh. If you are one of our new students interested in this blog business, welcome!

To entice participation, I have drafted a list of online resources that may be useful:

Writing

• How to write a student paper

General resources

• Databases (Lexis Academic Quickfind has both UK and American resources. Professional only has UK resources).
  

Scholarly Search

• Google Scholar
• Teoma
• Resource Discovery Network
  

Papers online

• SSRN
• DOAJ
• Online Journals
  

Bibliographic styles and help

• OSCOLA
• ELR
• SCRIPT-ed
• Cornell citation resources
• Cite-u-like
• Bibliography software resources
  

RSS, blogs and feeds

• RSS?
• RSS Readers
• Blawgs
• UK Blawgs
• My Blog
• RSS Feeds

Google Print sued

The Google Print Project has been digitizing books found in several libraries, and already some examples of the work can be found when you search in Google. You can also search Google Print and find words within their archive.

Some people believe that Google Print would fall under the fair use doctrine in the United States. I still think that this is a great idea, but it seemed to me that this was clear infringement, particularly because we don't have fair use. Nevertheless, the project was paused last month for fear of copyright infringement suits. Now three authors have sued Google with the assistance of the Author's Guild (the complaint can be found here). I have just browsed the complaint, but it looks serious. There is no doubt that Google has made digital copies of the works without the author's permission and that they are reproducing parts of those works online.

I wonder if Google will fight this. I believe that Google would benefit from a jury trial, as there is still considerable good will towards the company, despite grumbling nooises from many internet activists and fears that Google is going Microsoft on us. This is a case to watch.

The political economy of reading

(Received via the CC-UK list from Rufus Pollock). This is the text of the John Coffin Memorial Lecture in the History of the Book, given by William St Clair at the School of Advanced Study University of London. The lecture deals with property, copyright and the state of literature (and publishing) in the 18th and 19th century.

Girls are evil

Not at all related to work. I received this and I liked its elegance:

Finally, mathematical proof!

KAPOW! Revenge of 'City of Heroes'

There is a new ruling in the impressive saga of NCSoft (City of Heroes fame) v Marvel (of Spider-man fame).

For those unfamiliar with the case, Marvel Comics sued NCSoft, the makers of the popular City of Heroes MMORPG game because the game character-design engine allows users to create their own versions of existing copyright (and trade marked) heroes such as Wolverine, Hulk and Spider-man. I have played the game and I must admit that I have seen some large-looking green giants with purple pants called "Hu1k", or imaginatively, "Big Angry Man". The claim by Marvel is that these acts of infringement by players is the responsibility of the game makers.

Needless to say, the case has angered many fans. Does Marvel really mean that people cannot dress in super-hero costumes any more? No, Marvel's argument is that they don't care about Halloween costumes; but if a company has had a great idea for a game that sure beats the games licensed by Marvel, then they will find a way to sue that company.

Anyway, Marvel created characters in city of heroes that resembled their own characters, and then sued City of Heroes using the characters that they had created as evidence. Now the game seems to be up and NCSoft are alleging that these practices have led to loss of goodwill and cancelled accounts. It is now up to Marvel to prove that this is wrong.

Off to dust my old Batman costume.

New issue of SCRIPT-ed now online

The September 2005 issue of SCRIPT-ed is now online. The contents of this issue are:

• [Editorial] Patenting Lives; by Johanna Gibson.
• Los contratos por adhesión en plataformas electrónicas: una mirada al caso chileno (Adhesion Electronic Contracts: A Look at the Chilean Case); by Iñigo de la Maza Gazmuri.
• ‘Show me the money!’ An insight into the Copyright Licensing Agency (CLA) and its interaction with Higher Education Institutions; by Dinusha Mendis.
• About Leechers, Seeds and Swarming – The copyright implications of BitTorrent; by Bob Rietjens.
• Bloomsday: Copyright Estates and Cultural Festivals; by Mathew Rimmer.
• ‘.XXX’ Sponsored Top-Level Domain - Is it a solution to curb child abuse due to Internet Pornography?; by Indranath Gupta.
• Patents on Compatibility Standards and Open Source – Do Patent Law Exceptions and Royalty-Free Requirements Make Sense?; by Mikko Välimäki and Ville Oksanen.
  
• [Review] Lawyers and Vampires –Cultural Histories of Legal Professions, W. Lesley Pue and David Sugarman (eds). Reviewed by John Blackie.
• [Review] Genetics and DNA Technology: Legal Aspects, Wilson Wall. Reviewed by Michael Bromby.
• [Review] International Investment Agreements: Key Issues (Volume I), UNCTAD. Reviewed by Joseph Savirimuthu.

Enjoy!

Servers down?

It is interesting how you come to rely on the internet. The entire web at the university of Edinburgh seems to be down since yesterday. I haven't had access to my email since yesterday, and I feel isolated from the world.

Besides, today is the first day of the semester.

[UPDATE] Servers are back up.

Keyboards: The new security threat

A new security threat has been uncovered. The keys on a keyboard can be digitally recorded and used to determine what's been written. Researchers at the University of California at Berkeley (where else?) have been using a computer program that can pick up more than 90 percent of key sounds and reproduce the text that has been written.

Expect new soundless and keyless keyboards to be released soon.

Could cyber-trespass kill the net?

This is an interesting article in Wired from Jennifer Granick. The author claims that the growing number of cases that require users of other computers for permission before using it to access the internet may stifle innovation. The article starts with some amazing examples of websites coming together to help victims of Hurricane Katrina to find friends and family. But then the article makes a turn and warns that new cases against cyber-trespass threaten such examples. I must say that I did not follow the reasoning jump there.

Granick is correct in the assessment of the growing number of cases against cyber-trespass, used to regulate anything from unauthorised access to wireless networks to spam. Pamela Samuelson has a short article (registration required) with some of the cases. Dan Burk has another good article about this subject. Nevertheless, I think that some of the wider implications of the cases are being exaggerated, and thankfully, these cases may not have equivalent this side of the Atlantic, according to Professor Steve Hedley's paper "Do we need a tort of cybertrespass?", which I heard last week at the SLS conference.

This is an intriguing subject that requires more study.

Mobile payment system fails

This happened a while ago, but I just noticed (it has been a bit of a hectic summer). The mobile payment system SimPay was supposed to become the main manner to pay for stuff with your mobile phone. The idea was for a micropayment system that you could use to buy movie tickets, music downloads and the such. The system may have been doomed by the fact that many mobile companies already offer complicated payment schemes, it all goes to your bill at the end of the month.

GMail trade mark dispute

GMail is Google's email application, right? Wrong! The name had been first used by Independent International Investment Research, a British firm that had a trade mark for Gmail. Google and IIIR have been negotiating but the UK company is sticking to its guns, they probably realise that they are sitting on a gold mine. They are even threatening to sue Google.

There ain't such thing as a free lunch

Yahoo has had to provide access to Chinese authorities to the details of an email account of a journalist accused of being a dissident. The journalist was then convicted and sent to jail for 10 years. The Chinese government exercises heavy control over the internet, with filters that block some domains from the entire Chinese mainland. Blogspot is not available in China.

This is a disturbing story, but it demonstrates the vulnerability of users online. We are all using all sort of free services, chances are you have one account with either G-Mail, Hotmail or Yahoo. Millions use Flickr and Blogspot. Companies are gathering a significant amount of information about us. Most of the times all that will happen is that you will be the subject of some direct marketing, but what exactly will happen when there is something really important at stake? The company will give your information as fast as possible, you are not a paying customer after all. There's nothing wrong with that, businesses have to diminish their liabilities.

Those concerned about the vast amount of information out there may have a point.

Porn is sinful, virus says

A new and bizarre computer virus (a Trojan actually) called Yusufali-A is attacking Windows machines everywhere. The virus will scan the title of the active window and look for the following words:

sex
teen
xx
Phallus
jegger
Priapus
Phallic
Penis
Exhibitionism

If it finds any, then it will display the message displayed above stating how Allah knows what you are doing. The message stays on the screen, but the user will be given an option to "Exit", when they try that, another box is displayed that screams "Oh! No I'm in the Cage". Hell perhaps? As if Windows hell was not enough. Anyway, the screen will remain and the keyboard is locked until the user logs out.

Quite an interesting use of viruses to preach and warn about the dangers of porn, but I am a bit puzzled by the choice of words. When did "teen" become a dirty word? I would also like to know what "jegger" means, but I'm afraid to ask.

SLS

I'm attending the SLS Conference today and tomorrow.

Grokster and KaZaa don't matter

To emphasise the point that the Grokster and KaZaa decisions are irrelevant to file sharing, the latest statistics demonstrate that August has had the largest number of online sharing in history. Internet statistic company BigChampagne has calculated that there were 9.6 million file sharers at any given time.

KaZaa's market share has dropped to only 9%, while eDonkey is the clear winner at the moment with 50% of the market. This could be caused by the fact that eDonkey is faster than other networks because it is using Bittorrent.

KaZaa loses case

Unsurprisingly, Sharman Networks has lost their case in Australia. The Australian Federal Court has finally ruled in the case Universal Music Australia v Sharman License Holdings [2005] FCA 1242. The Court has ruled that Sharman Networks "authorised" copyright infringement. From what I understood from the ruling, "authorising" is the equivalent of the UK's "providing means for making infringing copies" (s 24(2) CDPA), and it is the equivalent of secondary infringement in American law.

The music industry did not get all they asked for, but they got enough. Sharman networks will be liable for the infringement and has had an injunction to stop the infringement. They will also have to include copyright filters in their software. To me, this may very well spell the end of KaZaa, but it will all depend on the amount of the liability.

The thing is that this will not affect P2P networks whatsoever. KaZaa could disappear tomorrow and people will still be using the software, because the network exists independent of Sharman. There are old clients out there, and the software will operate the same without those, but then there are loads of KaZaa clones (such as KaZaa Lite) that also connect to FastTrack, their P2P protocol. And even if FastTrack was to disappear (unlikely), there are many other surviving protocols out there, such as Gnutella, eDonkey 2000, LUSerNet and Kademila protocols.

MusicWorks 2005 Creative Commons debate

Last Friday I took part in a very interesting debate about Creative Commons at the MusicWorks 2005 Convention in The Lighthouse in Glasgow. The panel was moderated by Professor Simon Frith from the University of Stirling, and was attended by David Ferguson from the British Academy of Songwriters and Composers, Florian Koempel from British Music Rights, Jonathan Mitchell Q.C. from Creative Commons Scotland, Ashlyn Eaton from Fading Ways Music UK, and yours truly.

I thought that this was probably going to be a rather hostile crowd because the Convention was advertised as an industry event, but I was surprised that in the end it was not as well attended as I thought, and those present seemed to be less hostile than expected.

The event started with a foreword from Professor Frith, and then I presented a small introduction to Creative Commons. Not much to say about my participation other than the fact that I just gave my "CC for Dummies" presentation. My main point was that Creative Commons is a recognition that the internet has made it possible for everyone to become publishers, and that copyright is now something that happens to all of us, and not just to a few.

The next speaker was Florian Koempel from BMR. Florian did not criticise CC completely, but he said that he was concerned by some legal problems. The first one was that the licences are not "transparent" enough, and that they are not clear enough in the rights involved. He also complained that it was difficult to find the actual legal code on the licence, and that it took him two hours to find it. I was baffled by this, did he miss the clearly marked "Legal Code" link at the bottom of the Commons Deed? Most of his concerns were not warranted, such as the common FUD used against open source and free software licences that "they have not been tested in court". As far as I know, neither has Microsoft's EULA, but I don't see anyone complaining. The most valid point that was made was the potential problem with moral rights in civil law jurisdictions. This, in my view, was the only valid point in his presentation, but he did not really elaborate about it because he ran out of time.

Then followed David Ferguson. We knew that he was going to attack CC fiercely, he has been doing just that for a while, and his rhetoric has been vitriolic and over the top in the past. His presentation was indeed vitriolic, but I was more concerned by the fact that it was purposefully and completely designed to misrepresent Creative Commons in every way possible. The opening tirade was the same spiel about how "You and the band will never earn one penny in publishing royalties from your creation". This is not only untrue, it is mostly the fault of collecting societies, which have not considered CC in their models. Over and over we got the same attack, stating that using a CC licence is the same as "giving away your rights", equivalent to giving away your copyright. The presentation then took a turn into the surreal. Very cunningly, Ferguson started characterising Creative Commons as a personal attack against those who earn their living from copyright, a deliberate attack from academics and "amateurs". There was also a sublte equating of CC and piracy, of CC and file sharing, of CC and the copyfight. The implication was that this is an anarchic movement that wants to take away your right to make a profit, and that it must be opposed. Most interestingly still, David Ferguson used the event to launch his new sharing licence for musicians and composers from his organisation, drafted by a law firm in London. I have tried to find a link to this new licence somewhere in their site, but I have not found it, I will appreciate it if anybody has a link to it.

Then followed Ashlyn Eaton from Fading Ways. Ashlyn was precisely the type of person that can prove the likes of David Ferguson wrong, as Fading Ways is doing well as a CC label. Yet Ferguson and others kept insisting that you cannot make money from CC. Sigh! Nevertheless, there was a warning that CC still has some problems for musicians, particularly some problems with collecting societies.

The final speaker was Jonathan Mitchell. It was great that he was given the last spot, as he descended upon David Ferguson and Florian Koempel and tore them into little pieces. First by pointing out that it was bad form from Koempel to only read the Generic licence and not even care about the two British licences, to his sloppiness in not researching enough about how to find the licence. Then he attacked the many different inaccuracies from David Ferguson with applomb and by providing examples from his legal practice. I just sat there and grinned.

Some of the speakers had taken too much time (Ferguson and Koempel particularly), so the actual discussion was very short. We heard from a representative from collecting societies repeating the "giving away your rights" rubbish, and we had a couple of sympathetic questions.

What still bothers me about the debate is something that I have now witnessed in many discussions about copyright. Industry representatives are always keen on making two points. Firstly, there is the argument that the public domain is not free. They argue that the public domain takes money to be maintained. The fact that this is not always true, and that where it is true the maintenance is done with public money seems to elude them. Secondly, there is the strange argument that industry people always present themselves as "making their living from copyright", and that there is very clearly an "us and them" mentality. We are the true keepers of copyright, they tell us. We are the ones making a living, so you just shut up. David Ferguson made this argument several times. We are academics, and amateurs, they are professionals. The problem with this vision is that it is not only false, it is demonstrably false. Copyright does not exist solely as an economic right, it is awarded regardless of quality and/or commercial worth. This immediately destroys the argument that somehow only those who make money from their works should have a say on copyright. In the digital age, we are all creators, we are all publishers, copyright is no longer something that happens to other people. Whether they like it or not, my works have as much copyright as Mr. Ferguson's compositions.

Besides, what's wrong with being an hobbyist? An academic? Mr. Ferguson may have heard of some hobbyists. JRR Tolkien, JK Rowling, Albert Einstein. Hobbyists and academics, I'd rather be in their company.

Update on "Stealing booty"

I was not able to attend the "Stealing Booty" event I advertsied last Friday, but some other copyfighters (am I a copyfighter now?) were able to attend and have given some very good reports. The first one comes from former student Jordan Hatcher, who wrote a very good article here.

The other report comes from music enthusiast Paul Harkins. Paul comments that:

"The lawyer on the panel talked about the protecting the value of IP and the representatives from PACT and the UK Film Council outlined the mechanics of the film industry and how those involved in making film lose income from counterfeit copies. They stressed that small producers are the ones who will suffer but an audience member made a good point that producers in Europe should be more concerned about the current stranglehold over distribution than piracy.

The most entertaining interventions were made by Nick Love, the director of The Business and The Football Factory. The latter was one of the most pirated films in the UK but took £1 million at the box office and sold 500,000 DVDs so his attitude to piracy was laissez faire to say the least. One of his mates who had seen a pirated copy had complained that it was too long to which he replied: 'that's because I've still got 3 months to edit it!'"

Thanks to Paul and Jordan for their emails.

The Commonistas Strike Back

Seems like Andrew Orloski of The Register is at it again. I don't know if he has a personal problem with Creative Commons, but he seems to be on a crusade against CC. This time he is reproducing some letters and continuing his comments against the global licensing movement. We see a repeat of many of the arguments posed before, and some new ones. The first thing that we get is a selection of letters in favour of Mr. Orlowski's views. Hardly surprising, but then he starts his article by stating that:

"The use of an irrevocable Commons license, which effectively ends any hope of the artist being compensated by the creative industries, doesn't seem fair or sensible for most readers."

We keep hearing this, but I see no evidence of such an assumption. The first thing to point out is that this assumes that most people create with profit in mind. This is of course, a ridiculous assumption, as the internet proves without a shadow of doubt. People will create for all sorts of reasons, including profit, but to assume that the licences are not sensible or fair because there may be no hope of future profit misses the entire point. It is also not true that the licences do not offer any hope of profit to artists. There is a growing number of successful examples of people who manage to profit even while using Creative Commons, such as the good people at Fading Ways.

In general, the entire article rests on that faulty assumption. Orloski repeats the mantra that people cannot profit from Creative Commons, with no hope of any evidence to support that assumption. The fact that the licences are irrevocable is not relevant whatsoever. If you release a work with a CC licence, the irrevocable nature only means that those who have acquired rights will retain those rights in the future. You can still change your mind and stop releasing the work with a CC licence if you want, and even remove the work from the internet altogether. You can also negotiate rights in the future for commercial uses (if you are using a non-commercial licence).

Mr. Orloski should do his research in the future. It is painfully obvious that, despite protestations to the contrary, he still doesn't get CC.

Pirates of the Multiplex

(The article may require registration). Once again we are being warned that movies are in danger of becoming a thing of the past by internet pirates and DVD-copying rings. This is another article that warns that movies will become impossible because of pirates. I have many problems with the underlying assumptions here. The first one is that we have yet one more article that conflates DVD-burning and bootleg-selling to P2P and internet downloads. Then the movie industry claims that they have lost $3 billion USD in sales due to piracy. How do they calculate that? They keep assuming that a download or a person who buys a dodgy DVD would have purchased their product anyway, which is not proven.

We then get another serving of the horror stories of movies downloads. We are told once again how Star Wars Episode III was downloaded before it made it to the cinemas, but there is no mention that the movie earned $834 million USD worldwide in ticket sales. Then we are told that 100 thousand people downloaded "War of the Worlds" online ($570 million USD worldwide gross).

Then we are treated to a bizarre description of cammer rings, where people actually go to the movie and film it, then offer it online. The FBI is after them. Perhaps I am a bit naive about this stuff, but I really cannot see that a person will not go to a movie and will prefer to spend hours downloading a lesser quality picture. Have these people considered that people are still going to the movies, and downloading the work so that they can view it again before the DVD comes out?

Then we get to the real meat of the article, the bootlegs. I am amazed by the fact that the phasing between both activities is made almost without a glitch. They are both parts of the same coin. The fact that people in Peru cannot buy full-priced DVDs is not really mentioned.

Network Law: citations

I keep thinking that there may be a new subset of IT Law called Network Law, interested with the formation, regulation, and study of networks. An article in The Economist is making the usual rounds through the blogosphere describing an interesting paper by Seth Chandler of the University of Houston, where he maps the network of U.S. Supreme Court decisions and discovers that there is a scale-free topology at work. Apparently, some older cases about Federal Jurisdiction are the hubs on the network.

This is yet another interesting use of the mathematics of networks. I am sure that in the near future there will be many other applications for such studies in the law.

Silly Saturday post

So, the Llama song was a hit, so I will continue with the silly Saturday tradition. Here are the Ninja Kittens from RatherGood.com, the best site on the net. As contagious as the Ninjas are, my favourites are still the Angry Kittens, with the Viking Kittens following in a close second (there's something about a kitten wearing an axe and a viking helmet that always makes me smile).

P2P suits, chilling effects, and a last stand

So, the MPAA is filing 286 more "John Doe" suits against internet users from logs obtained from old bittorrent sites LokiTorrent and SuprNova. I am sure that those who paid money to LokiTorrent to mount a legal defence will be feeling a bit silly by now, and proves that those logs were indeed important, as we predicted back in February.

This could lend credit to those who claim that the effects of Grokster are starting to be felt. According to an article in The Guardian, the chilling effect of the Grokster ruling on technology may hinder the development of new digital advances. The argument presented is that venture capitalists are abandoning file sharing technologies and investing in safer ones. This may be an accurate picture of what is happening, but I think that it is too early to tell because a lot of the most innovative P2P technology has been developed by hobbyists (Napster and bittorrent for example).

On the other hand, there are some more positive shifts in the copyfight (positive for us, the pinko-leftie commies that is). First, there is the amazing report that a new UK ISP will allow its users to share files from the Sony BMG catalogue. And then there is the very interesting case of a New York mother that has decided to take on the industry and fight a suit by the RIAA. It will be interesting if the RIAA will fight this, it could turn out to be a disastrous PR exercise, but many of us fear that this has gone beyond PR. They are suing dead people anyway.

Piracy: Stealing Booty

This is an event at this year's Edinburgh Film Festival. From the event's advertising blurb:

"Why should you care about film and video piracy if you can get a DVD cheaper than the retail price? Film piracy is theft. Black market DVDs are not just terrible quality but deprive the filmmakers of millions in income each year. And unauthorised downloading and file sharing of films is illegal. Last year the Federation Against Copyright Theft (FACT) confiscated almost 3 million pirate DVDs. Why should you care? Come and talk with the industry experts about film piracy can and see a popular feature film which looks so much better on the big screen than on any pirate DVD or download!"

I have some comments about the many mistakes and faulty assumptions in this paragraph, but I really don't like swearing in public.

Kill me if you can

This is the name of an amazing documentary shown last night on Channel 4. I could try to describe the circumstances that gave rise to the documentary, but The Guardian does a better job than I could, but I will try a very rough description.

Mark, a 16-year-old boy from Manchester logs into a chat room and meets a girl, he falls in love with her although they have never met, then the girl is kidnapped by a self-described gay stalker, then this stalker rapes and kills her, while posting his exploits on the chat room. Mark then meets a 44-year-old female ("but still very sexy") spy who is grooming him for the secret service, who asks him to play bodyguard to a 14-year-old boy named John, but who has the keys to a fortune located in the bottom of the Atlantic. He is then asked to kill John. Mark meets John and stabs him, but John survives. The problem is that Mark was being manipulated by John, who wanted to be killed and had been impersonating all of the characters in the play. In total, the police found that he had 193 personalities in the chat room.

Many interesting implications here. My main concern at the moment is that this is going to provide some fuel to those who believe that the internet is a sinister and evil place, filled with stalkers and paedophiles. Could this result in yet another failed attempt to regulate the internet?

Some other socio-legal issues are involved here. There is the anonymity element of the internet, which may prompt some people to behave in ways in which they would not behave in real life. There is also the fact that the internet is stressed always as a cause of crimes like this one. What took place in my opinion is that a disturbed teenager -with a deat wish met an extremely gullible kid. Gullible people populate the internet, but isn't it the same of real life? Online fraudsters and Nigerian letters are often online versions of real life scams. What the internet does is give people the power to hide their personality (sometimes), impersonate others and be able to entice victims through a wider net.

Linux® trade mark

Last week, Slashdot reported on a number of Australian companies that have received letters about their use of the trade mark "Linux". Linux is actually a trade mark owned by Linus Torvalds himself, and it has been sub-licensed to Oregon non-profit corporation named Linux Mark Institute. This post prompted one of the most acrimonious flame wars that I have read in Slashdot (perhaps with the exception of Trek v. Star Wars flame wars). The general feeling that I got from many people was that there was a feeling of betrayal. As one poster wrote: "Isn't this the kind of thing Free Software was supposed to be against? Anyone can distribute their own flavor of Linux and call it Linux without being threatened by lawsuits over trademarks?"

Pam Jones from Groklaw has replied many of the concerns with a measured post explaining the reasons why, and coming mostly in favour of the Linux trade mark. While I know nothing about trade mark law, I tend to agree that this is a step that should be taken at some point. Linus Torvalds should start defending his mark if he wants to keep some people from abusing it. At the moment, nothing stops Linux opponents from using the name Linux.

However, I can see this becoming yet another wedge between open source and free software.

By the way, it must be noted that Linus does not own the trade mark for Tux, the friendly Linux penguin pictured above.

More silliness

The llama song has proven so popular that I have to add another silly Sunday post.

Remember, You can do anything at Zombo.com.

WIKIPEDIA NEEDS YOU!

Wikipedia is holding a donation rally asking for user support. As far as internet causes go, it doesn't get any bigger than this. Your donation can save a wiki article from ending up at the bottom of Google's cache, so please give generously.

Machinima: Is it legal?

So, Machinima has finally made it to the mainstream in a great article by games blogger chick Aleks Krotoski. Machinima, in case you are too bored to click on the Wikipedia article, is a new type of creative expression that uses 3D games engines to tell a story, produce a music video, or just have a little fun.

One of the best examples of Machinima is Red vs. Blue, which uses the Halo engine to generate an excellent serial. See for example their Public Service Announcement to tell us how real life is different to internet life. Other examples of Machinima can be found in, you guessed it, Machinima.com. My favourite is still this music video based on City of Heroes.

The growing popularity of the movement poses interesting legal questions. For example, does the use of a computer game engine to produce a new work give any rights to the makers of the engine? This would seem unlikely, it would be like Polaroid owning the copyright over pictures taken with their cameras. Yet, it is increasingly common to see online games providers claiming that they own copyright over content uploaded to the game, and often claim ownership of everything created within the game.

The question will have to be if these agreements are valid, and if they apply to Machinima. I personally don't think so.

We love to wiki

Wikipedia is fast becoming one of those great internet ideas, something that helps to define the web, just as Google, Amazon and eBay have done in the past. But I think that Wikipedia is much more than a mere site, it is the living example that open source works. When somebody posts something in Wikipedia, it is open to the world to debate and argue about. True, it still has a lot of inaccurate information, but if you find some inaccuracies, then you should just change them!

Anyway, I have become hooked to collaborating to Wikipedia. For example, I was browsing for some information, and I found out that gender-baiting was not defined. This is a term that I like, so I decided to create an entry for gender-bait. This taught me a lot about the editing process in Wikipedia. I wrote a brief definition, and then noticed that the term had been provisionally deleted by another member on the basis that it was a neologism. Apparently, besides the mere mortals like myself who decide to collaborate, there is a class of super users looking over new entries. The decision was overruled by another super user, but there was a request to expand the article, which I did.

This is a form of anarchic organisation, something that I am reading about in Siva Vaidyanathan's excellent book The Anarchist in the Library.

54 million Creative Commons pages

(Warning: this is unofficial data, please take it with a pinch of salt). Some few days ago the Creative Commons blog reported that there were 53 million pages linking to Creative Commons licences. It seems only yesterday that we were amazed by the fact that there were 16 million pages. I have checked the unofficial figures and there are now 54 million link-backs to Creative Commons!

What can account for such a meteoric rise? I think that blogs and sites like Flikr are largely responsible for a large number of links, but it would be difficult to know for sure without raw data about domains. Still, the data is a good indication of the mainstream online acceptance of CC as a viable movement.

Some other interesting figures. Most links are for the "Generic" licences, although the jurisdiction specific are rapidly gaining ground. Unsurprisingly, the most popular jurisdiction licence are the non-English ones: Spain, Germany, France and Italy, although the England and Wales licence has now surpassed the 80 thousand licences. It also seems like most people prefer the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike licences, with 35%. Here is a graph describing the licence breakdown:

Music CD burning is the real threat

One of my favourite phrases in English is "the more things change, the more they stay the same". When I was growing up, I used to get a lot of my music from tapes recorded from friends (and even from the radio). I didn't have money to buy records, and every purchase was treasured.

It seems like the availability of CD burning equipment has made this the choice for people exchanging music. Instead of going online, people have gone back to exchanging CDs.

What I found interesting in the report is that it claims that CD burning is affecting CD music sales, as the figures for this media are down 7% from last year. But at the same time, it is claimed that overall sales are up because of "legal" music sales. Wouldn't it be accurate to say that the largest threat to CD music sales are legal music downloads? Does the fact that a new media is more popular be met with such negativity from the industry? Perhaps the RIAA will tell us that this year tape and vinyl sales are down. Duh!

Anyway, it is almost certain that these figures will spell more DRM included in music. I still have a policy that I will not buy a DRM-protected album.

Microsoft v iPod? Not really

I have been reading many different reports over the weekend regarding a supposed patent dispute between Microsoft and Apple over the iPod. The more I read about it, the more confused I become, because this seems like one of those stories invented by bored journalists with nothing else to do during the silly season. It seems like it all began with a story in AppleInsider about a failed patent application by Apple, where the application failed because of another conflicting application by inventor John C. Platt from Microsoft.

This seemed straightforward enough, no conflict here, right? Not according to El Reg's Andrew Orlowski (infamous for his FUD articles). Orlowski wrote an article on Wednesday stating that there is a patent "tussle" between Microsoft and Apple over a software patent. Being The Register, it immediately got picked up by the blogosphere, and the story spread like fleas in a camel market.

The problem is that the story has been replicated without noticing that there is no such "tussle". Apple has had a broad software patent rejected because there is another broad software patent on its way, while there are at least 50 similar software patents protecting media players and playlists (see for example, U.S. patent 6,868,440). To me the worst thing is that the story then gets picked up by "journalists" in mainstream websites and news sources. ZDNet for example goes as far as stating that:

"While Microsoft has struggled to challenge the iPod in the market, the software giant's lawyers have managed to slow Apple's attempt to patent its digital music technology."

What? Where did they get that? Take regurgitated information from an originally badly researched article by somebody who doesn't know what they're talking about, and produce a conspiracy theory about evil Microsoft lawyers attempting to take our iPods away. Take other ill-researched articles, and you have an internet outrage. Thankfully, there are still some good journalists out there. Forbes has an article stating that this is all a big fabricated controversy, but it may just be that they are parroting the words from Microsoft's IP division about how great their patent is.

The fact is that this is all a great fabrication. Apple and Microsoft already cross-license their patents, and it doesn't matter who gets it first in the grand scheme of things. What's two more software patents in the market? What I find interesting is how bad information replicates online with such speed. Mainstream news sources are reproducing hogwash all the time, copying sources and paragraphs without displaying a scintilla of research. These people are the professionals, they get paid for doing this.

Is it any surprise that more and more people are getting their news from blogs?

Patent Commons project announced

An interesting piece of news via Axel Horn's blog. Open Source Development Labs (OSDL) is starting a patent project for Open Source. It will house a database containing information about patents and patent pledges for the benefit of the OSS community. According to the release from OSDL, the project will contain the following:

• A library and database that aggregates patent pledges made by companies. The library will also aggregate other legal solutions, such as indemnification programs offered by vendors of open source software.
• A collection of software patent licenses and software patents (issued and pending) held for the benefit of the open source community.

This will be a useful resource for OSS developers, particularly considering that software patents are going nowhere.

And now for something silly...

Thanks to Burkard for the link. It's strangely contagious.

New DVD DRM revealed

DRM protection in DVDs is laughable at most. That is the reason why there is new protection being planned. Blu-Ray is just one of the competing DRM standards being discussed for DVDs. The protection will have three steps, content protection so that users cannot use the DVD in certain ways; counterfeit protection; and protection against player hacks. This is interesting because current DVD players are remarkably easy to hack, particularly with region protection.

My concern with this is mostly about region protection I will have to be convinced of buying a DVD that contains such protection.

The Box Office is dead

(Via Copyfight). If asked about the main source of profits for the movie industry, you would probably assume that ticket sales are near the top, otherwise, why is there so much emphasis on ticket sale figures for the latest blockbuster? And why do we have to put up with the idiotic copyright warnings before watching a movie?

It seems like ticket sales are indeed at the bottom of the profit earners at $7.4 billion USD ticket sales worldwide. The top earner for movie studios is video market. In 2004, sales for video (includes DVDs) were $20.9 billion USD worldwide. But these figures are just for sales, so the actual profits are $13.95 billion USD for video.

The best profits come from TV licensing, because these are profits only, and the studios incur in no expenses. This produces $17.7 billion USD of profit.

This seems to tell us better why the movie studios are so worried about P2P. Ticket sales are not worries, but if people start downloading movies from the internet instead of watching them in Sky Movies, then the profits will decrease. IP is the big profit maker.

Spyware and identity theft

Spyware is back in the news with some chilling warnings regarding a vicious keylogger spyware application called CoolWebSearch. This program used to be mostly an annoyance, it is a browser hijacker, which installs dozens of bookmarks to porn sites, changes the home page and continually changes it back, which can slow the computer considerably.

The problem is that an anti-spyware firm has discovered that recent variants of CoolWebSearch are actually logging keys and sending them to servers operated by an ID theft ring. The information includes bank details, personal emails, eBay and PayPal accounts, and pretty much anything that you do in your computer. There is a claim that there are millions of machines infected with this.

You can get a free detection and removal tool here.

Snaparazzis and copyright

(Picture from Flickr)

After the London bombings we are all becoming familiar with seeing snaps from passers-by using their increasingly sophisticated mobile phone cameras to take stills or even video of newsworthy events. With so many images out there - many of them with considerable commercial value - the question of who is handling the rights are being asked.

The first stopping place for would-be snaparazzis interested in making their historic pictures available online is to go to one of the many different online picture repositories, such as Moblog or Flickr. These two sites favur the publication of the posted images using a Creative Commons licence. This creates interesting questions, such as the type of licence that is used. For example, if an image of the London bombings is posted in Flickr under a CC non-commercial licence, then all non-commercial sites could post it, but mainstream news outlets could not (unless one considers the BBC to be non-commercial, my head hurts!). The only way would be to a news organisation to negotiate directly with the author to obtain the permission to use it in a commercial setting.

But now, there is another option. Scoopt.com is a Scottish firm that helps snaparazzis negotiate their pictures and videos with news agencies (insert joke about greedy Scots here). Apparently, their cut is 50% (ouch!).

Another rising phenomenon is the picture essay, or picture statement. As far as I know, it all started with the "We're sorry everybody" site, a collection of pictures of people saying sorry for the Bush election. Most recently, there is the "We're not afraid" site, a collection of pictures against terrorism. Here is my favourite (from Karine F):

CIE preliminary report

I just realised that I have not publicised this enough. The preliminary report of the study about the use of Creative Commons for the Common Information Environment(CIE) is now online. This report is asking whether the member institutions from the CIE can adopt CC licences. These institutions include Becta, the British Library, DfES, JISC and the MLA.

Technological adoption: Firefox

French research firm Xiti Monitor has released some data about Firefox's share of the market (if you haven't been using Firefox, what are you waiting for?). Global figures for Firefox remain low, while Europe is the continent with the highest percentage of Firefox users at 14%. Of those European countries, Finland is crazy for Firefox with 31% of all internet users browsing the net with it.

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What I find remarkable about these figures is that they demonstrate the difficulty of shifting mainstream perceptions and technological use. In almost any measurable manner, Firefox is superior to Internet Explorer. But IE comes pre-installed with Windows, and people are remarkably reluctant to shift their usage patterns. People in general do not want to install new software, and to learn a new manner of doing things is not a priority. When the average users learns how to use something, they will stick with it, even if there is something much better in the market.

I think that this demonstrates some interesting policy implications. For example, I think that official efforts to push a specific technological solution are doomed to fail, because users will not always choose what's best for them.

IP Criminal Enforcement Directive

The proposed EC Directive on criminal measures aimed at ensuring the enforcement of intellectual property rights has been making the news and blogs recently. I have finally managed to read it, and it is scary. The Article 3 of the proposed directive states that:

Member States shall ensure that all intentional infringements of an intellectual property right on a commercial scale, and attempting, aiding or abetting and inciting such infringements, are treated as criminal offences.

Although I agree with the stated purpose of the directive – to send counterfeiters and criminal gangs to jail – I would say that the language is too broad. My worry, and that shared by many people, is that this can be misused by some unscrupulous IP owners to threaten potential competitors. This could make patent infringement into an entirely different field. Imagine a cease-and-desist letter, saying “comply or you’ll go to jail”.

It is true that many firms will not go to these lengths against users, but can we really be assured about that?

On the net, nobody knows you're not a girl

Playing City of Heroes over the weekend I came across an odd conversation from two fellow players from Spain. They were talking about a female character who had admitted to them that she was a man in Real Life (RL is that place where players go to eat). They were shocked by the news, and wondered about the player's sexual preferences, amongst other things. I was thoroughly amused by this discussion. Call me cynical, but every time I see a female character wearing nothing but a tiny bikini and calling herself "Naughty Gal" or "Babelicious", I assume that the player is in fact a 47-year-old guy from Hull named Bob.

These musings were confirmed by the excellent Daedalus Project (via Terra Nova). The project is attempting to study the psychology of MMORPGs through the use of polls and qualitative research. The first results are now online, collected from World of Warcraft (WoW). Taken as a whole, some of the statistics are rather surprising. For example, male players tend to be in their 20s, while female players average 28-40 years old. About 60% of male players are single or single and dating, while 60% female players are married, engaged or separated. But some of the most interesting figures are the gender bending-ones. In WoW, 84% of players are male and 16% female. Of the total of those male characters, 23% play with female characters, while only 3% of all females play males.

It is difficult to know why exactly there is so much gender-bending online. I believe that some of it may be due to gender-baiting, a term invented by William Gibson to refer to males impersonating females online to elicit positive responses. Or the answer could be encapsulated by the words of Francis from PvP: "If I'm going to be staring at an ass in tights all day, it might as well be a nice ass!"

FFII domain taken down

After their success in bringing down the Computer Implemented Inventions Directive, the Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure (FFII) has managed to become one of the best examples of a powerful and influential civil society organisation that has managed to educate and inform the public with regards to a complex legal technical issue like software patents. But now FFII is under attack... from German spammers.

FFII had some examples of bad software patents on their site about the German company Nutzwerk. This company has been set as an example of a software company that profits from software patents. But Nutzwerk is also a well known web advertiser that profits from typo domains (see for example www.yaho.co.uk), and other practices such as Google spamming with link farms. Their complaint against FFII? That FFII has been damaging their reputation because of the high visibility of FFII's pages in Google. Nutzwerk has then been threatening people who are linking to FFII's information.

Now Nutzwerk has succeeded in threatening FFII's ISP in Germany to the point that they have taken down the site that they hosted. All of the pages on the domain ffii.org have gone, including swpat.fii.org, which had become the starting point for research in this area. The site is still available through FFII's own machine, which can be located at 212.72.72.97.

This case is worrying for many reasons. Foremost is the use of the law to bring down a critic. I find it appalling that a company will go to these lengths to shut down a potential critic. The potential negative publicity that they could get from this should be enough to discourage some companies from taking such tactics, but I guess that link farmers are a different breed altogether.

Free Software, again

It seems like Free Software advocates are actively criticising Creative Commons after Stallman has decreed that CC does not meet with the FS seal of approval. The criticisms seem to be centered on three main points: CC is not centered on ethical principles; some of the licences are not entirely free (in the Free Software sense), and the uncertainties caused by a wide range of licences covering different freedoms. This article by Benjamin Mako Hill follows those same lines. Creative Commons is attacked because it does not offer the certainty of Free Software and is not based on the strict ethical principles that FS is based upon.

I think that the problem here is that Free Software advocates should realise that there is a very basic difference between software code and creative works. There cannot be any doubt any more that open source development and the Free Software movement have produced some amazing results, and that many of those results are awe-inspiring and should be applauded. The availability of millions of lines of code within the software community allows many developers around the world to tinker and modify software to produce a different result. But software code writing is in itself a very communal experience, where the sharing of code is a good in itself because it can be used by other developers to produce new software in a much easier way. This does not take place in creative works. If I write a poem, another poet does not need to look at my poem and copy lines from it to write his own work. If I take a picture, another photographer does not need to look at my picture in order to take his own picture. Yes, there are remix elements in culture that enhance and enrich existing works, but this is only part of the protection awarded by Creative Commons.

In my opinion, Creative Commons serves to fill a legal gap. Everybody connected to the internet can be a publisher. The staggering growth of blogs, moblogs, personal websites, wikis and open access journals have created a legal void, people need to find an easy way to publish those works. Some people are happy to just slap a © symbol and it solves their copyright issues, but it is nice to have a set of ready-made licences that can be used to share the work under certain conditions.

There is also a basic difference in the rights required. Free Software is very useful in the reuse of software code. But the reuse of creative works is less important. What is vital is to have access to the work, and the licences reflect this difference.

Another sticking point with FS defenders is the existence of licences that do not provide freedoms to the entire world, such as the much maligned Developing Nations licence. I do not understand those criticisms. What is wrong with providing a licence that will hopefully help more works being used in developing countries? Some developers may want to exploit their work in developed countries, but they may not have a market in developing nations. A licence that recognsies such a situation and provides more flexibilities should be applauded, not criticised.

Where are the suits?

I have been waiting for a full-scale patent war over open source to take place in the near future. Yet, the war has not broken, other than the issuing of cease-and-desist letters to some open source projects, the war has failed to surface.

I have been reading this very good article by Heather Meeker, who I criticised before for another article on software patents. She makes an interesting point as to why there has not been an open source patent suit yet. While I agree with many of her points, I am not so sure that open source is truly free from patent infringement suits. It is true that litigation is expensive, but with so many ludicrous low-quality software patents out there, it is just a matter of time until some company decides to test the waters and enforce a patent in court against an OSS project.

Free as in Free Beer, and as in Free Speech

This is the story of Vores Øl (Our Beer), the world's first open source beer. The beer is distributed using an Attribution-Share Alike Creative Commons licence. The recipe produces a 6% energetic beer (it uses Guarana), and according to the makers, it is very tasty and they have drank all of it. The people at Creative Commons have decided to try brewing their own version, but with some remixing taking place as the beer was not coming out as planned (they have removed the Guarana beans, is nothing sacred any more?).

Any chance of getting some OSS beer sent to Edinburgh? All this talk of beer has made me thirsty.

Network Law

This is an image taken from a discussion about emergent networks, terrorism and open source (it does make sense after you've read it). However, I found it interesting because it follows some research that I have been conducting regarding the application of complex network topology to the law. This graphic displays an emerging online community. Each dot is a node, in the community context it is an individual. There are super-nodes, or hubs; which are the nodes that have the larger number of connections and hold the community together. This core of nodes is joined by less connected active nodes, and then an ever-decreasing number of connected nodes until we reach the lurker, the individual dot that does not have active links.

What does it have to do with the law? This model describes all sorts of communities, from online fora to P2P networks, passing through child pornography circles and online gambling. One of the results of complex networks is that they tend to be very difficult to attack, which has all sorts of consequences to law enforcement online. If you wanted to bring down a child pornography network, you could spend a lot of time picking individual nodes without bringing down the entire network. However, if you knew who the hubs were, then the network could be attacked in an easier manner. Pick out the hubs, and the network may follow.

I think that this explains the tactics against P2P networks. There seems to be a concerted effort from the copyright industry to eonforce rights against individual users. It is my theory that they may want to provoke a collapse of P2P networks by picking out the hubs.

Halliburton loses software patent case

[First seen here] This is a new case from the High Court of England and Wales (Patent Court). The case is Halliburton Energy Services, Inc. v Smith International. The litigation involved two different types of technology, a cone drill to dig for gas and oil, and a software simulation program used to design the bits.

Halliburton sued Smith International because it claimed that it had patents in both the drill and the software to design it (patent EP1117894), and that Smith had been using similar software (called IDEAS) to produce similar results. Smith International questioned the validity of the patents.

The patent has a long description of drills and drill bits, which I did not read. The interesting part is the algorithm description of the software. It seems way too detailed, nothing like some of the general software patents that have plagued the industry. If I have ever seen a software patent that encompasses and fulfils the definition of "technical effect", this is it. I cannot see any situation in which this could be claimed to be a broad and damaging patent, and unless one is into creating software for simulating drill bits, there is no reason to worry. Judge Pomfrey seemed to agree, as there appears to be no question about the obviousness of the patent. It is not obvious.

The problem for Haliburton was that it was considered that the patent application had inadequate disclosure. For those unfamiliar with patent law, one of the (alleged) points of having a patent system is that the applicant will disclose enough information so that the patent can be worked once it expires. Pomfrey mentions the fact that in very technical subjects, the threshold of disclosure is much higher. Therefore, the stated disclosure in this case was not sufficient.

This is quite an interesting result. A valid computer implemented invention struck down for disclosure. Sweet irony?

French Phishing

I have just received my first phishing email in French. Here it is:

Monsieur/Madame le possesseur de carte de crédit MasterCard,

Nous sommes désolés de vous informer que nous avons dû bloquer temporairement l'accès à votre carte de crédit pour avoir été avisés qu'il avait été compromis par des personnes inconnues. Nous avons remarqué certaines activités concernant votre carte de crédit qui indiquaient le fait que des personnes inconnues pourraient avoir accès ou contrôler votre compte.

Pour réaccéder à votre carte de crédit, nous devons vérifier votre identité. Veuillez, s'il vous plaît, introduire les données personnelles dans le formulaire ci-dessous afin de pouvoir réaccéder à votre carte de crédit.

Nom :
Prénom :
Numéro de carte de credit :
Épingle (pin):
Date d'expiration :
Code de Sécurité (cvv2) :

Veuillez prendre connaissance du fait que, jusqu'à ce qu'on ne vérifie votre identité, l'accès à votre carte de crédit sera bloqué et nous ne serons plus sûrs que les transactions effectuées découlent en sécurité ou qu'elles soient faites par des personnes autorisées ou pas. Nous vous remercions pour l'attention accordée concernant ce problème.Nous vous prions de comprendre que c'est une mesure de sécurité prise pour protéger vous et votre carte de crédit.

Nous nous excusons pour les possibles ennuis.
MasterCard, Département de Sécurité

What a work of art.

The War on Piracy

From the same people who brought us the War on Terror, and who has successfully continued to wage the War on Drugs, here comes the War on Piracy.

The Commerce Secretary of the United States, Carlos Gutierrez, is appointing the new anti-piracy tsar in the United States. He commented that: "Intellectual-property theft is a major problem around the world. We believe that it is costing U.S. businesses about $250 billion in lost sales". Two inaccuracies in one sentence. Theft is the first one (don't even get me started on that) and then the assumption that a pirated copy of something is immediately to be considered a lost sale.

Still, there is no doubt that actual commercial piracy is a problem, and that it needs to be tackled, but I doubt that this is the way to do it. A simple solution? Raise living standards, so that people may actually be able to afford your products. Just a suggestion from the utopian brigade.

Open Source water

A light story for Sunday. I met some of the people involved during the OSS 2005 Conference, led by Roland Alton-Scheidl. They are also involved with Creative Commons Austria, and have decided to release open source water.

The water comes from a source in Dornbirn, Austria, that has been exploited since 1616 for non-commercial purposes. The water can be drawn if it is not goign to be sold. The clever people in CC-Austria have designed the bottles and protected them with a CC licence, and then they are placing water from the source, and giving it away at events. Because the water comes from a non-commercial source, it is truly open source.

I am afraid that I didn't try the water, the bottles that they had was for display purposes only.

RSS implementation by Microsoft

This is an excellent article in PC Magazine (how can that co-exist with Dvorak's now infamous article?). Microsoft is planning to implement RSS support into their future version of Internet Explorer and Windows (Windows Vista, formerly known as Longhorn). The point of the article is that this could very well kill the many RSS clients and applications used at the moment, just like Internet Explorer annihilated Netscape.

At a time when Microsoft has been accused of anti-competitive practices, it seems that the balance is going to be difficult to be kept. The inclusion of RSS into Windows will probably mean that RSS will become mainstream and that the blogging revolution will continue. Aggregation will be the next step in web design, with Explorer and Outlook playing the key role to make it available everywhere. But I still feel uneasy about the fact that this will spell doom for the early RSS developers, those who made sure that aggregation works here and now. Microsoft just bets on the winner technology and takes it over.

Legal downloads triple in 2005

The International Federation of Phonographic Industries (IFPI) has released data announcing that music downloads from licensed providers (that sounds better than legal downloads, doesn't it?) has trippled in 2005. According to the site:

Single track downloads in the US, the UK, Germany and France have risen to 180 million in the first half of 2005 compared to 157 million for the whole of 2004. This is more than three times the 57 million downloads of the first half of 2004.

This is good news for the industry as a whole, and serves to ensure that the music industry will not disappear. However, I find it telling that the IFPI feels the need to add to their press release some of their usual rants against "illegal" music downloads. When will they learn that the market has moved on?

Ranking universities by web presence

Many of us are familiar with university rankings. There is a new index that ranks universities by their web presence. This index is achieved by a combination of factors. The first is the size, the actual amount of files in each university. Then there is the impact, which is the amount of incoming links. Then they measure rich files, the amount of downloadable files (such as handouts, presentations and others).

The results are extremely interesting, and perhaps not very surprising. The top university is MIT. The first non-American university is Cambridge, ranked at 20, beating Oxford, ranked 27. The University of Edinburgh is the 4th European university, ranked 48 overall. The top Asian university is the University of Tokyo, at 50. The top Latin American one is UNAM (Universidad Autónoma de México) ranked 108 overall. My old alma mater, Universidad de Costa Rica, is ranked 912 (well, at least they are ranked).

I think that these ranking tell us quite a lot. For example, universities should be making more efforts to keep good websites, filled with useful and downloadable information. One way of making information accessible online is by hosting open access journals, online databases and online repositories. Information breeds links, and links breed prestige.

Another point is the obvious dominance by universities in developed countries. Latin America and Africa only have 27 universities listed. Is this the digital divide at work?

Worst. Article. Ever.

This is perhaps the worst researched column that I have ever read. It is so wrong that it is difficult to choose from many of the statements. Here are some choice pickings:

First, Creative Commons is similar to a license.

No, it IS a licence. A set of licences to be more precise.

You sign up with the group and post a message saying that your material is protected or covered by Creative Commons. This means that others have certain rights to reuse the material under a variety of provisos, mostly as long as the reuse is not for commercial purposes. Why not commercial purposes?

I am guessing that he did not research at all, and did not discover that there is actually a licence that allows commercial uses.

In fact, the suggestion is dangerous, because if someone were sued by the Creative Commons folks over normal fair use and Creative Commons won the suit, then we'd all pay the price, as fair use would be eroded further.

Creative Commons is not a party to the licence.

There's another thing that bugs me about Creative Commons. When you see its licenses the wording will say something like "Creative Commons License: Public domain."

This is not a licence, the CC-PD is a public domain dedication.

That's what's bothersome. Creative Commons trying to insert itself as another layer into a system that already protects content developers like me to an extreme. I mean my grandkids will own all my writing exclusively until 75 years after I'm dead, unless I sell all the rights to someone else. What more do I want from copyright?

This is more nonsense that confuses Creative Commons. It fails to understand that CC is just a licensing scheme, and that it is just another way of using copyright. It does not attempt to force Mr. Dvorak to give away his copyright, or choose the licence.

There is now a discussion in Slashdot on the subject. There is also a discussion in PCMag's forum, where Mr. Dvorak wrote "I do have the problem of writing more than I read -- a hazard of the job. That said I'll read the Lessig tome. Is it online under a Creative Commons license? :) ". I felt really well by providing links to Free Culture and Code v2.

FS v CC again

More developments in the growing war between Creative Commons and Free Software.

There has been an interesting debate in the iCommons list and other lists. The growing animosity between the FS and CC camps have come to a boil at the Copyright 2005 conference, where Richard Stallman launched a fierce attack against Creative Commons. Then, we have had communication directly from Stallman to the iCommons list, stating that the rift that I have been charting for a while is now official. Am I a prophet of doom? Am I the Nostradamus of our time? Not really, the signs were already there (although my last name rhymes with Nostradamus).

I must say that I find the growing "FS v CC" discourse futile. Both movements are different, have different goals and are directed towards different audiences. In my opinion, one of the main strengths of CC is that it is a strong attempt to make the mainstream aware of the debate regarding freedoms, openness and balance in IP. To me it is useless to pontificate and preach to a converted techno-elite about the evils of proprietary models, while the large number of users doesn't care and cannot be bothered to become informed about the debate.

I believe that OSS and CC are really good in realizing that the battle must be won in the middle. The geeks are convinced of the problems of an imbalanced IP system, but can we convince my mother to use non-proprietary models?

The way to do it is through education and by making people aware of the different licences and about the basic concepts present in copyright. This cannot be done by adopting the stance of the fanatic. Zeal will convince a few, but if we care about free culture and open standards, we must be prepared to make some compromises to the mainstream. Otherwise, we are just another small group of inward-looking technophiles, irrelevant in the grand scheme of things.

The Software Patent debate goes on

It has been more than a week since the Commission text of the Directive on Computer Implemented Inventions was defeated 648 to 14 votes, proving that the Commission's dodgy strategies have failed. This is already old news in the Blogoshpere, but as I missed the entire round of posts the first time around, but I thought that I would have a second look at what has happened now that the dust is settling and as there has been some time to reflect on what is taking place.

The scrapping of the Commission text is good news, as it was the closest proposal to the American system that we have had so far. It also proves that their tactics to try to circumvent the democratic institutions of the European Union by passing an unpopular directive by stealth have seriously backfired on them. What is bad news is that we now find that the patenting system in Europe is going to have to follow the flawed and often contradictory practices of the last few years. We will have to live with the many broad and obvious patents being awarded in Europe, and this is not a good thing. We do need a directive, but we will not get one in the near future.

I have spoken with a couple of people who are in favour of software patents, and they seem to be happy with the result. This bothers me.

OSS goes corporate

I am back from my conference spree in Italy, and I have brought back a good number of ideas. The OSS 2005 was particularly interesting, and I was struck by the presence of many industry representatives, and particularly by the presence of people from the Business Software Alliance, Microsoft and the European Patent Office. Does this mean that OSS has gone mainstream? It seems to me that the worries by some FS activists may be coming to fruition, and OSS is in danger of being hijacked by corporate and commercial interests. The implication that Microsoft and the BSA might join the open source bandwagon could spell trouble.

Another interesting development from the conference was the presence of some public administration types who talked about the public push towards adopting open source. This worried me because in some cases, there is a considerable amount of public expenditure into supporting FLOSS models. I don't think that it is appropriate for government to put their weight behind a specific model of software development.

As for the conference itself, I thoroughly enjoyed it. Although this was not a legal conference, there were a number of papers that were extremely interesting. I was surprised by the width and depth of research in Open Source Software, particularly with regards to the success of the business model and the organisational and strategic aspects of OSS projects.

The quality of the actual papers was very high, although the actual presentations often left considerable room for improvement. People must understand that PowerPoint is a tool, and that droning with a boring voice will send people to sleep.

Here is a list of some papers that I liked:

• Measuring Success of Open Source Projects Using Web Search Engines, D. Weiss.
• Fun and Software Development, B. Luthiger.
• Evolution of volunteer participation in libre software projects: evidence from Debian, G. Robles et al.
  
• Open Source software, intrinsic motivations and profit-oriented firms. Do not firms practise what they preach? A. Bonaccorsi and C. Rossi.

SCRIPT-ed June issue

I have finally been able to get the June issue of SCRIPT-ed bug free. This issue was delayed because the website has been moved to a different server. The contents of this issue are:

Editorial
- HUGO Ethics Committee: Ten Years On, Ruth Chadwick.

Special feature
- Workshop: Intellectual Property Rights Issues of Digital Publishing - Presence and Perspectives, Introduction by Burkhard Schafer.

Peer-reviewed articles
- The Protection of Traditional Knowledge Related to Genetic Resources, Marko Berglund.
- The Protection of Expressions of Folklore Through the Bill of Rights in South Africa, ES Nwauche.

Analysis
- Legal Challenges to Open Source Licences, Andrés Guadamuz González.
- Should There Be an Obligation of Disclosure of Origin of Genetic Resources in Patent Applications? – Learning Lessons from Developing Countries, Graeme Laurie.

Book Reviews
- The Digital Sublime: Myth, Power, and Cyberspace by Vincent Mosco, Reviewed by Jun Gu.
- Media, Technology and Copyright: Integrating Law and Economics by Michael A. Einhorn, Reviewed by Christopher T. Marsden.

OSS 2005 Conference

I am at the OSS 2005 Conference in Genova, Italy. Internet connection is a bit sketchy, so I will not be able to blog this fully.

I don't see any other lawyers present, so I am getting a bit nervous. I am going to be presenting this paper, which is very small comment on some of the latest legal developments. Unfortunately, it came out after last week's vote on the CII Directive, so it is already outdated. The conference is extremely interesting so far. It is mostly a developer conference, which is really interesting because will be getting a better idea of the problems faced by the people in the trenches.

Italy

I am in Italy for two weeks for the ICABR and OSS 2005 conferences.

G8 protests in Edinburgh

What an amazing day yesterday. This is actually related to Technology Law, as some of the solutions to the problems of poverty can be found with technology and with policy solutions, particularly with regards to IP protection of technology and the access to knowledge in developing countries. This is my favourte picture from yesterday:

The police were out in force. These horses look bored, but cool in their sunglasses. Oops, sorry, they are not sunglasses, they are anti-riot goggles. Easy to confuse.

Libre Commons

Interesting new set of licences from some of the people at Loca Records. I like seeing new licences and ways of thinking, so congratulations to the drafters.

I do have some problems with the licences though. The licence is described as "non-legal licenses that will operate in the shared space that can non-bureaucratically and non-instrumentally be formed resisting law, the intellectual property regime and state violence." Fine, but if they are not really licences, then what are they? In the Creative Friends mailing list some of the proponents have called it an anti-licence, someone else called it apseudo-licence. What does it mean? The licences are supposed to be a political and social movement that does not rely on the "law or legal fictions". Fair enough, but why call it a licence? It is not a licence, it is a manifesto, a declaration or a pamphlet.

I am also confused by the objectives and the target audience. It seems to me that the target audience is a certain type of well-educated political activist that can understand the intricacies of the language, and therefore the target is not the mainstream. Such exercises strike me as slightly elitist, but we will see how it pans out.

Open Source in league with al-Qaeda

A man in Utah knows who is to blame for all the evils of this world. It's not Osama Bin Laden, it's not North Korea, it's not even George W. Bush. The blame lies at the feet of the open source movement. Yes, those evil people at Groklaw, Slashdot and Sourceforge are guilty for everything, from WMDs to the fall of the dollar and the decline of American civilization. The U.S. is losing the War on Terror^TM because open source has placed large chunks of American technology in the hands of terrorists. You can read the entire thing here. Some choice claims:

40. Among other things, the OSS advocates the dismantling of all intellectual property laws that restrict the trade in free software, including the overthrow of the US patent system, intellectual property laws, and the overthrow of the European Union attempts to create a patent system to protect the intellectual property rights of individuals, and computer technology companies.

43. As a result of these activities, a large portion of US technology has been unwittingly placed into the hands of various groups around the world, including Al-Queda, and other groups who sponsor international terrorism.

44. As a result of these activities, a large portion of US technology has been unwittingly placed into the hands of various groups around the world, including radical governments and groups who sponsor and have used the technology in support of the creation of weapons of mass murder and mass destruction designed to murder American Citizens and their families.

46. The beheading and murder of United States Citizens in Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and other countries have been videotaped, converted to MPEG and other images for viewing on the public Internet through the use of OSS and Linux software and computer technology developed and purloined by Linux and OSS members and illegally exported from the United States.

I am not sure what they smoke over there in Utah (according to Merkey, it's not peyote), but this guy must be on something.

Parliament report on Open Source

(via David M. Berry). This is a report on OSS by the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology, which is charged with offering a balanced view on key policy issues. The report is well-balanced and measured, and it comes out very strongly in favour of open source, and it even mentions the software patent debate, while calling them software patents and not computer implemented inventions, which is a good step.

The report concludes with the following remarks:

• Acceptance of open source software is increasing in both the public and private sector. The Office of Government Commerce report states that it is a viable and credible alternative to proprietary software for infrastructure and for most desktop users.
• The government'’s OSS policy promotes a ‘level playing field’ in which OSS solutions should be considered alongside proprietary ones in IT procurements.
• It is increasingly acknowledged that there is a role for both open source and proprietary approaches and that a combination of both approaches stimulates creativity and innovation.

This is a very welcome development, and it should help to bring forward the availability and viability of OSS as a valuable businness model.