A word of warning…
…which probably comes too late for most or all of you. This is pretty much how it happened to me.
Summary of copyright goings-on
Over at netzpolitik.org, Markus Beckedahl has done something very helpful: He has summarised current activity around copyright law in Europe and Germany, in a single blog post (in German, as usual).
Even though I obviously follow these topics, I find it hard to keep up to speed with everything that’s going on. So thanks Markus!
How about making this a monthly activity? đ
EC has a copyright day: term extension, Green Paper
Just before heading off into their summer vacations, the European Commission has decided [press release] to extend the copyright term for sound recordings, from 50 to 95 years.
This significantly lengthens the period during which new creators will be taxed by rightsholders. The EC says this will benefit elderly session musicians who would otherwise now start losing royalties for recordings made in their 20s, and denies that the extension does anything to gold-plate Keith Richards’ swimming pool.
The Register mentions a "use it or lose it" termination clause without going into specifics. I haven’t seen this discussed anywhere else so far.
The EC’s other decision today was to adopt a "Green Paper" [what’s this?] on copyright in the knowledge economy. This is supposed to be the start of "a structured debate on the long-term future of copyright policy", and supposedly
The Green Paper is an attempt to organise this debate and point
to future challenges in fields that have not been a focal point
up to now, e.g. scientific and scholarly publishing, and the role
of libraries, researchers and the persons with a disability.
While this doesn’t sound so bad, right below the text is a link to a speech that Commissioner McCreevy gave at a BSA-sponsored conference on Digital Restrictions Management (DRM), which contains choice paragraphs like:
So today we are here to talk about how we in the Commission can
assist the ICT sector in putting the innovation that is at the
heart of DRM technologies to use – so that other parts of the IP
community can deliver protected content securely to consumers.
I hope he’s just flogging a dead horse. But this doesn’t bode well for the broadened focus of the Green Paper debate.
Hell freezes over as WSJ says patents stifle innovation
After Nobel prize winners Joseph Stiglitz and John Sulston last week, now the Wall Street Journal carries an article about the problem that the patent system has become. It’s US-focused, but it pretty neatly outlines how the debate on a mild patent reform there sets the pharmaceutical industry against technology companies:
Yet the fault line over patent reform signals the deeper problems. Many pharmaceutical companies lobbied against the proposals, fearful of reduced value in their key intellectual property. In contrast, most technology firms supported the reforms, worried more about uncertainty in the law than about the value of their patents.
Both sides may be right. New empirical research by Boston University law professors James Bessen and Michael Meurer, reported in their book, "Patent Failure," found that the value of pharmaceutical patents outweighed the costs of pharmaceutical-patent litigation. But for all other industries combined, they estimate that since the mid-1990s, the cost of U.S. patent litigation to alleged infringers ($12 billion in legal and business costs in 1999) is greater than the global profits that companies earn from patents (less than $4 billion in 1999). Since the 1980s, patent litigation has tripled and the probability that a particular patent is litigated within four years has more than doubled. Small inventors feel the brunt of the uncertainty costs, since bigger companies only pay for rights they think the system will protect.
Better living with mutt
During a chat about the pros and cons of gmail, a colleague told me that he especially likes how gmail inserts your sent messages into the same thread as the one you’re replying to.
The idea that a webmailer should be more useable than my beloved mutt simply didn’t fit my view of the world. I’m allergic to webmail.
A bit of web search soon brought me this nugget for insertion into my .muttrc:
set record = "^"
Got it from here, and it works like a charm. You’ll need mutt version > 1.5.10 or the current_folders patch.
I’m probably the last person on earth to find out about this.
Bye bye, "sent" folder.
Data Loss Weekly, Germany
Germany has always prided itself on being a nation of engineers. So it’s not surprising that unlike the British, who prefer to leave their confidential data on trains or lose it in the post, Germans opt for the technologically more advanced solution of making it available online to all comers (DE):
Bei EinwohnermeldeĂ€mtern in Deutschland ist es nach einem Bericht des ARD-Magazins "Report MĂŒnchen" zu einer schweren Panne gekommen: Den Recherchen zufolge waren die Daten von BĂŒrgern aus rund 200 StĂ€dten und Gemeinden ĂŒber Jahre hinweg frei im Internet zugĂ€nglich.
Die verantwortliche Softwarefirma habe die Zugangscodes auf ihrer eigenen Homepage veröffentlicht,
berichtete das Magazin vorab. Die Passwörter seien erst am vergangenen
Freitag geÀndert worden.<></>
Markus has proposed publishing a magazine called "Data Loss Quarterly", and is looking for contributors.
Why did you castrate xserver-xorg?!
Though it’s Monday morning and I have lots of work on my desk, I’m looking back at a very frustrating weekend.
I decided to do reinstall my desktop machine, moving it from Debian Etch to Ubuntu Hardy. My laptop is running Ubuntu, and administering one system is hassle enough for me.
The initial install went without a hitch. After the obligatory reboot, the login screen came up, and I saw that the resolution was too low – 800×600 instead of the 1280×1024.
Well, that’s a familiar issue – X has a hard job to do, and isn’t particularly good at autodetecting everything. Still surprising, since both graphics card and monitor are fairly garden-variety stuff: An Nvidia GeForce 6100, and a Samsung SyncMaster 710n.
So what does one do in this case? Right:
$ sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg
That used to be the height of technical complexity for me, short of editing /etc/xorg.conf, where the syntax is slightly less user-friendly than that of procmail (quite a feat, if you ask me).
But on my new hardy system, this command only let me configure the keyboard, which was working fine, thank you very much. The options for configuring video had disappeared.
Hours of web search, driver installation, configuration etc. followed. I wouldn’t have minded spending a sunny Sunday with my family instead.
So I found this thread on launchpad, which was already running from here to Beijing with people complaining about the newly powerless xserver-xorg.
Turns out that at Canonical, they’ve taken away the most common text-based way of making your video card run, and replaced it with a half-baked GTK application called displayconfig-gtk. This app reminds me of the people who deal with complaints at the German railways company: it looks friendly, but does absolutely nothing useful.
There’s also a small problem here for people who are even less lucky than me. If you can’t start your graphical environment, a GTK application is not much use.
Another tool is xrandr, which I can’t find any information about other than that it’s fairly beta. This seems to be the program that is supposed to do the autoconfiguration, but doesn’t do it right.
The Ubuntu Xorg maintainer responded quickly:
displayconfig-gtk is a user interactive method for configuring
xorg.conf. Like dpkg-reconfigure it also often produces invalid
configurations. We recommend using the autoconfiguration approach, and
if that does not work for some reason, please report it as a bug. This
way we can roll out a true fix for everyone.
<rant>
Dear Ubuntu folks, so far you’ve done an excellent job at giving us a GNU/Linux distro that was both newbie-friendly and highly configurable. So what have you been drinking that gave you the idea of taking away a tool that worked fairly ok, and replacing it with several that don’t work at all?
And how is it a sensible idea to tell people who complain that autoconfiguration doesn’t work for them to please use the autoconfiguration method?
</rant>
Your answers in the comments, please. Thanks.
Creative Commons licence upheld in Bulgarian court
Veni Markovski tells us that a Bulgarian court has ruled that the terms of a Creative Commons licence are valid and must be obeyed when distributing the work in question.
The Bulgarian blogger Elenko Elenkov filed a lawsuit against the newspaper "24 hours" for having used one of his photos, licenced under the CreativeCommons BY-SA, in one of their edition on 20 September 2007 on the cover page and on page 3. The picture did not mention the author or the licence used, but rather attributed the photo on page 3 to "The Internet".
Ouch.
via EDRI-gram
Interview ĂŒber Interview-Rechtsprechung
Telepolis hat ein Interview mit Andreas Buske gefĂŒhrt. Der fĂ€llt am Landgericht Hamburg beeindruckend weltfremde Urteile zum Persönlichkeitsrecht in den Medien, insbesondere im Internet.
Und er gibt keine Interviews.
In diesem Fall distanziere ich mich von diesem Interview und
bestreite, es jemals gefĂŒhrt zu haben.
Buske: Das bestreite ich ebenfalls. Ich bezweifle allerdings, dass Ihre
Distanzierung unseren Kriterien genĂŒgt.
Danke, dass Sie nicht mit uns gesprochen haben.
Buske: Gerne, jederzeit wieder nicht!
Schon beeindruckend, wohin sich die deutsche Rechtsprechung in den letzten Jahren so bewegt hat. <!–
[via netzpolitik.org]
ACTA: the next front in the A2K fight?
For the moment, WIPO is busy with its new Director General (Francis Gurry just got elected to the post), and the Development Agenda process has forced the advocates of strict copyright to at least re-shuffle their cards for a moment.
But another front is opening up elsewhere. There’s an agreement that’s being prepared for negotiation. Under the name of ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement), rich country governments in cahoots with some business lobbies are trying out yet another way to impose their agenda on the rest of us.
In Knowledge Ecology Studies, Aaron Shaw has recently published an excellent write-up explaining why this is a problem. According to him, it wouldn’t just mean that overly strict rules for copyright and patents are foisted upon people that don’t need them. It would also set a very bad precedent for global governance:
So why is ACTA such a big deal? If signed, the agreement would constitute a diplomatic putsch by a handful of wealthy states and corporations against the rest of the world. Already, it signals an overt and troubling rejection of multilateralism. The so-called âplurilateralâ approach represents an outdated model of international treaty-making whereby the unelected representatives of Northern states and a few corporate lobbyists dictate the rules of global markets. Such arrangements were commonplace during the 1990s under the neo-liberal âWashington Consensusâ and prior to the Doha Round of negotiations in the WTO. Today, however, this kind of blatant disregard for global consensus and the needs of developing regions poses a threat to the world’s prosperity, security and health.
So keep your eyes peeled. And go do something about it.