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.

Grokster

So, I come back to the UK and the biggest decision in Cyberlaw in recent years has finally taken place. It was expected that the U.S. Supreme Court would produce a negative ruling against P2P manufacturers, and if one reads the press, this would seem to be the case. However, the ruling is more nuanced than what we are being told. The Court decided unanimously on two main points:

• The distributor of a dual-use technology may be liable for the infringing activities of third parties where he actively seeks to advance the infringement.
• Sony does not need revision.

However, there was a 6-3 split in the point of inducement. The court found that there was enough evidence that StreamCast and Grokster communicated an inducing message to their software users. Inducement is defined as an advertisement or solicitation that broadcasts a message designed to stimulate others to commit violations. This ruling is much less damaging than expected. What this means is that the technology appears to be fine, as long as the manufacturers do not induce users to infringe.

But the real question is, who cares? Is this going to stop one single music download? The answer is likely to be negative, because the ruling attacks clients, not the networks themselves. You can shut down Kazaa tomorrow, and the Fastrack network will still exist.

This is the end...

The end of the conference is a discussion asking three questions:

1. How communicate?
2. How decide?
3. Who will report?
   

The answers are at the heart of the future of international Creative Commons. The success of the movement so far has been due to the energy and belief of a number of enthusiasts in many countries. How can this energy be directed? How can it be brought forward? The danger in my opinion is that by trying to direct the energy, CC would end up being a stiff international organisation. Choosing the wrong structure could kill the momentum dead.

DRM

What is Digital Rights Management? This may seem like a rather straightofward question as there is quite a lot of information already on what is a digital rights management. Yet, maybe there is not.

There are many people who equate DRM with restrictive technical protection measures, yet this is inaccurate. The broader definition of DRM accepts that it covers all sorts of handling rights, this includes tracking, metadata, watermarking for authorship purposes, etc. This is much more accurate description in my opinion.

As such, what is generally known as DRM is better defined as Technical Protection Measures, which better describes some the access restrictions that bother some people.

Science Commons

The morning session started with a presentation by John Wilbanks about Science Commons. To me, this is one of the most important parts of the entire weekend, but I am biased because I am an advocate of open access. The possible application of FLOSS ideals into the scientific domain has have to be one of the most important questions in the open licensing movement. John talked about the many problems with the academic publishing industry, but specified that Science Commons is not attempting to enter into some of the debates about OA business models.

He did mention some successful examples of the OA philosophy that use CC licences, such as BioMed Central, and Rice Connexions.I didn't know about Connexions, so I am grateful for this, it looks like a great resource.

There was mention by both John Wilbanks and James Boyle that there are some serious considerations about the porting of licences for patented materials, and this is an area that requires more research.

The day after

Ohhhh me head... The event yesterday finished with a lively BBQ at Charles Neeson's house. This involved a pool, lots of beer and an international group of enthusiastic geeks.

Lots of tired faces around, and blogger to blogger, I am as well.

Hummocracy

Something cool coming out of the conference, there is no longer a show of hands to measure the popularity of an ideal or a proposal. Now proposals are put through "hummocracy", the speaker asks the audience to hum if they agree to something.

Professor Charles Nesson is giving an inspired speech about the CC movement. Who are we? Why are we here? What is our goal?

Damn, I am already talking as "we".

Legal questions in Creative Commons

Now we get to the nitty gritty of the conference, where some of the important legal questions are being discussed. The first question is that of moral rights. A very lively discussion has taken place regarding moral rights. There was an interesting proposal to add the right to integrity as a new element called the Integrity Element (IN), in addition to the main four elements. This has prompted some comments, particularly dealing with compatibility of international licences and the problem of implementing the integrity right to countries that do not allow the waiver of moral rights. The issue was not resolved, but there was a proposal to differentiate the moral rights issues with endorsement issues. That means that there could be an addition to the attribution element to include a line that states that the use of the work is not considered an endorsement towards the user.

The other legal discussion has been the issue of collection societies. Some collective societies have already placed restrictions to the their subscribers not to use CC, as is the case with Australia. The other problem is the collecting societies using FUD to attack CC because they see it as a threat to their monopolistic model. One of the discussions was precisely that creative societies are monopolistic, therefore anti-competitive, and could be attacked in those lines. The bottom line has to be that any move to solve this problem has to come from the artists that make up these societies.

This has been a very worthwhile event so far.

Live from Harvard!

I always wanted to say that.

I will be blogging some of the hottest news from the Creative Commons summit. The first news is that the updated Creative Commons UK site is now live.

Some other interesting news is that the Creative commons generic licence will soon become the U.S licence, while there will be a generic licence that is WIPO compliant. This is a very welcome development as it helps to stress the international nature of the movement.

The most memorable snippet from the first day was the introductory videos from John Perry Barlow and Jack Valenti. Yes, you read correctly, Jack Valenti supports Creative Commons. Watch out for flying pigs.

So far there has been some interesting discussion about the international aspects of the movement. Is international iCommons an international organisation? Should it operate as one? Who chooses the representatives? What legitimacy do I have to be here?

Boston.

I'm off to Harvard for the Creative Commons Summit.

A Costa Rican representing Scotland. What is the world coming to?

Burning for fun and profit

So, the IFPI global piracy report is out. I must admit that the figures are extremely worrying, I must admit that while I have a liberal view of IP, people who sell burnt CDs are wrong. One thing is legitimately sharing, another to profit from other people's work.

Well, at least it makes sense in my mind.

Debates galore!

The CC-UK list has resurrected with some lively debate. If you are interested in following some of the arguments, visit the archive here.

OECD music downloads report

This is a very thorough report from the OECD about music downloads. It is a rather impressive document, which attempts to bring together the latest research on the subject. I haven't finished reading it, but the section about P2P networks is very balanced and well referenced.

The result is that, despite what the IFPI says, there is still no evidence that music downloads have affected sales as seriously as they claim.

What price infringement?

The mother of a teenage girl who serves and downloads music online is being charged £4000 for her daughter's infringement. This seems to be part of a clever strategy by the music industry to attack P2P networks (I will talk more about it next week after I have presented my ideas at this conference).

What I can't possibly figure out is how the music industry calculates infringment. It is very difficult to calculate damages in an online environment because a song downloaded does not equate a lost sale. Another problem is that the price for "legal" music downloads has dropped considerably, and I honestly think that this should be taken into consideration when attempting to calculate damages. For example, Napster.co.uk gives users unlimited amount to music for £9.95 a month. Music is becoming cheap, why isn't this taken into account by the lawyers?

Open vs. Free again

I have been noticing a resurrection of the "open" vs "free" debate in several lists, particularly in discussions about Creative Commons. This is rather disheartening, because I have been hoping that Creative Commons could stay away from the quasi-religious debates that have been affecting the Free/Open Source camps for years.

The proponents of Free Software and the "free" philosophy claim that their movement has more certainties and better direction than the proponents of Open Source and "open" philosophies. This may be true, but certainty is not always a good thing. Whenever I talk to free software proponents I am struck by how much they sound like religious fundamentalists, who are emboldened and guided by the certainty that they are right. I am also generally struck by the strange use of the term "freedom" in the movement, given that generally the movement advocates one specific type of freedom. People have the freedom to maintain the source code open, but they do not have the freedom to choose their own licence, this is done for them by the viral restrictions of the GPL. One cannot elevate freedom to the highest pedestal and yet begrudge those who choose to exercise their freedom, unless freedom means "you are free to do as you are told".

The Open Source patent war has begun

This has been a long way in the making, but I just found out about it due to some discussions in a couple of mailing lists and because of some research I'm conducting on software patents. I am afraid that this may be the first shot in the oncoming patent war.

The problem is that LIBDCA, an open source project part of the VideoLAN project that produces the excellent VLC media player, has received a threatening letter from Digital Theater Systems Inc. The company claims that the OSS project infringes its "invention" called DTS, a proprietary multichannel encoder that delivers high quality, low latency and high bitrate DVD audio. The technology is protected by European Patent EP0864146 and US Patent 5,956,674. I am not too sure about the technical aspects of the claim, but this seems like another broad patent claim for an audio encoder, which pretty much takes audio streams coming from one format and converts it into another, which has been deemed to be bloated and inefficient by some.

The field of software development has become a patent minefield because of broad software patents protecting multimedia standards. Take the case of the popular audio format AC-3 (AKA Dolby Sound), which has become the industry standard in recent years. Dolby became involved in a patent dispute with Lucent Technologies, who claimed that they had two patents (5,341,457 and 5,627,938) which protect technologies for encoding and decoding digital audio. These claims are as broad as you can get, and a court has initially declared that Dolby was not infringing, while they may yet be declared invalid at a later date. DTS should be happy about this development because from reading the two Lucent patents, their DTS technology appears to be infringing as well. What a complete madhouse!

It seems to me that this is more evidence against the current text of the Computer Implemented Invention Directive. We have been repeatedly told that the new directive will not lead to American-style software patents, but it seems clear that ridiculously broad patents like DTS are getting through the system with a supposed prohibition against patenting software as such. What will happen when a much broader text is adopted? We could see a flood of claims, where everything will be subject to a patent.

This case has very serious implications for open source development. Large companies like Dolby can fight some of the more preposterous claims in court, but small open source projects cannot.

London

I'm in London for a series of meetings related to the CIE.

Hunting piracy goes against data protection

Very interesting note about data protection and hunting for IP addresses of P2P file-sharing users. For a while now it has been felt that the efforts to gather data from P2P users could have adverse privacy implications and may infringe data protection. Now there is an official declaration from the data protection regulatior in Sweden.

Could this open the door for similar declarations in the UK?

More discussion about copyright term extension

Earlier this week there was a report that the UK may be considering extending copyright terms for sound recordings from 50 years to 90. The Wired article makes it clear that the UK project may be part of a wider strategy from the IFPI and the music industry to push for European change.

The problem is the arguments used to support this extension, which are blatantly about extending the period of profit-making by the music industry, this at a time where the model is under threat by new technologies. With more and more musicians choosing to use the internet to bypass the intermediary, there is a slim possibility that the market could change entirely. As evidenced by this article, there is growing criticism that some people are not so willing to listen to the inflated statistics and pleas from an industry that is doing the best to alienate their customers.