Microsoft-Novell deal highlights difference between Free Software and “open source”

Posted by gerloff on 0

Much has been written already about the deal between Microsoft and Novell, and I don’t need to replicate it here. Just now, Andrew Orlowski posted a piece on The Register (yes, I know, don’t worry: some day I’ll get back to citing other sources again) that describes how this tie-up logically follows precisely that "open source" path which the Free Software community keeps refusing to set foot on.

 Free Software advocates have always insisted that "free" and "open" were two movements loosely aligned, and that the Johnny Come Lately "open source" term was just a media-friendly marketing moniker. The "open source" lobby replied with some annoyance that this was an unimportant semantic issue.

Now, however, that distinction is painfully apparent, and Microsoft
is exploiting it to the full.

The money that Microsoft is paying to Novell will likely turn out to have been a clever investment:

 

Microsoft wanted this agreement so badly it’s agreed to pay an unspecified sum to Novell for the Covenant. This might strike you as odd – and you’d be right. Companies that license intellectual property do so in the expectation that they receive a royalty, rather than dish one out. But the downstream benefits to Redmond are enormous. Novell has handed it a priceless legal filip, and as it begins to collect royalties from other businesses that use Linux, it’ll doubtless see it as a worthwhile down payment.

SuSe GNU/Linux, anyone?

Further reading: 

Groklaw: Novell sells out

Groklaw: MS FUDs like SCO, Red Hat Responds, and Novell/MS Transcript Available

Dana Gardner, ZDNet blogs: Microsoft and Novell: Fox marries chicken, both move into henhouse

Bruce Perens: Novell-Microsoft: What They Aren’t Telling You

…and so on… 

Insider bashes music majors — Interview with Peter Jenner

Posted by gerloff on 0

No, after a long day at work I’m not coming up with a better headline than The Register:

Big labels are f*cked, and DRM is dead – Peter Jenner

This is a wonderful interview with Peter Jenner, ex-manager of Pink Floyd and The Clash, now secretary general of the International Music Manager’s Forum. Live, he’s a very enticing speaker, and he doesn’t hold back in this interview either. Do not read on if you object to explicit language:

You said that at In The City, the big label executives have lost their faith in DRM – they don’t believe in it any more.

They don’t. Not anymore.

And that was done by Sony BMG – what the fuck was that [rootkit DRM] about? The other was iTunes – and they’ve seen how kids don’t like it. The unitary payment doesn’t suit the technology, it doesn’t suit how they’re actually using downloads – which is to explore and move around. You don’t want to pay a dollar for each track when you want to explore music.

Ranting about the music industry majors can be a bit gratuitous, considering that everyone with an eyeball or two of their own can see the sorry state they’re in. But Peter Jenner actually knows his stuff. Yes, it’s a rant, but it’s pretty well-founded. Whether it’s about blanket licensing, the broken business model of major labels, or the sharing of profits — Jenner gives us the works:

What’s important is what’s your bottom line, for Christ’s sake.

The blanket licensing thing is obviously going to slash your unit margin. The record companies have increased their margin on downloads, because the costs have been ripped out. So they’ve cut the artists royalties and raised their margin.

But because they’ve replaced an album with a single they’ve helped destroy the retail industry, they’re now in a position where they’re completely fucked.

No one’s got any sympathy or love for them, because they’ve systematically been shoring up their figures in the short run – squeezing money into Universal to make up for their catastrophies; Warner Brothers have been coping with huge debt; EMI have been desperately trying to hold their stock price up so somebody would buy them; BMG has been wondering how the fuck they’re going to pay somebody back money for whatever it was, so they don’t go public – and Sony are in a terminal mess.

So all of them have been draining profit. It’s "get the money in, boys, get the money in. "

So they’ve raped them. They’ve raped their whole business model, and no one’s got the time or energy to think about their business.

I’d love to believe him that DRM is dead and blanket licenses for music are just a few years away . But somehow I don’t think it’s all going to come that easily. It’ll take us a lot of work.

 

via drm.info

 

Filesharing “accepted social practice”, says Spanish judge [Update]

Posted by gerloff on 0

A judge in Santander, Pais Vasco Cantabria, Spain, has ruled that a man who had been sharing music files on the Internet has not commited a crime, as El Mundo reports (in Spanish). Instead, his activities were found to be protected by the Spanish right to make private copies.

The sentence says that considering filesharing a crime would mean "the criminalisation of socially accepted and widespread behaviour", and that what he has done "does not merit penal sanctions".

 His accusers had demanded that for his abominable deeds, he be sentenced to two years in prison, a fine of EUR 7.200 and EUR 18.361in damages. (I wonder where the last figure came from. Did they count the songs on his hard drive and price each at iTunes’ 99 ct? Had they asked the BSA to compile the figures, they would have been even higher.)

Let’s see how the industry reacts, and how well the sentence holds up. The article implies that he was sued under laws that prohibit illicit copying for profit. This would mean that in effect the charges were dismissed not because they were ludicrous, but because they were simply not applicable.

It is good to see, in any case, that the judge grasped the fine distinction between for-profit and not-for-profit filesharing. The part about this being socially accepted conduct is of course the cherry on top of the pie.

via netzpolitik.org 

UPDATE: The Register also has the story. It says that the Spanish authorities are taking the logical next step: Since putting a man in prison over filesharing has been ruled an impractical and inacceptable criminalisation of  an accepted social practice, they’re planning to criminalise the practice on a greater scale:

Justice Minister Juan Fernando Lopéz Aguilar says Spain is
drafting a new law to abolish the existing right to private copies
of material.

RFID no good for ID, says US gov report

Posted by gerloff on 0

In an ideal world, an authoritative statement that something is a bad idea would actually stop the implementation of the concept in question. But not here, not now.

As The Register reports, an advisory committee to the US government has published a draft report (and draft it may well stay) which says that while RFID tags are pretty good for inventory management, they’re no good for for identification purposes:

 

Where the technology falls down is where it’s used to verify identity, where the experts reckon it offers little advantage over previous technology while creating the possibility that data held on RFID chips might be intercepted by undesirables.

"RFID appears to offer little benefit when compared to the consequences it brings for privacy and data integrity. Instead, it increases risks to personal privacy and security, with no commensurate benefit for performance or national security," the report states.

 

iTunes restrictions management cracked

Posted by gerloff on 0

BBC News reports that the DRM system which Apple uses to reduce the value of the songs it sells via the iTunes online shop has been cracked.

Jon "deCSS" Lech Johanson’s company DoubleTwist plans to license the crack to rival makers of music players. His company nicely describes its core business as "interoperability solutions for digital media".

Quality worries: Strikes at European Patent Office

Posted by gerloff on 0

heise.de (in German) reports that patent examiners at the European Patent Office (EPO) are protesting changes to the patent assessment process. The protests, which have been going on for a while, have repeatedly culminated in strikes.

 While EPO head Alain Pompidou publicly touts high quality of patents as his goal, it seems that in reality there are "efficiency" guidelines being set which emphasise quantity over quality, leaving examiners less time to look at patent applications. This results in a higher number of poor quality patents.

The EPO also continues to grant patents on software, despite such monopolies on ideas being illegal in the EU. Perhaps putting a stop of that practice would yield some capacities to raise quality in areas where patents are legal?

 

Access to Knowledge in a Network Society: master’s thesis ready

Posted by gerloff on 0

After several months of hard work (which have led to a lot of silence on this blog), I have finally finished my Master’s thesis. It’s titled "Access to Knowledge in a Network Society".

In the thesis, I describe the WIPO discussion on a development agenda in the context of the ongoing discussion about how we manage our knowledge. Here’s the abstract:

 As the network has become the dominant organising pattern of society,
knowledge has taken centre stage in the economy. Having access to
knowledge determines who can participate in this informational economy,
and on what terms. But knowledge is different from physical goods: it is
nonrival and non-exclusive. It is also the input of its own production
process: Knowledge builds upon knowledge. A key player in the
international system of the regulation of knowledge is the World
Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO). Its approach presently relies
mainly on intellectual monopoly powers (often called "intellectual
property"). Other models, such as commons-based peer production, are
usually not considered.

After providing an overview over recent work in the field, this thesis
examines how access to knowledge is regulated, and what conflicts are
caused by this regulation. The debate on a development agenda for WIPO
offers a vantage point from which to describe the tensions that exist in
the international framework for the regulation of knowledge.

Looking at the first year of the WIPO debate, it becomes clear that
there are two major lines of conflict. One is between developing and
developed countries, which often have different understandings of the
purpose of IMPs. As a consequence, they prefer different solutions to
the problems at hand: while developed countries are looking to create a
global system of regulation with uniformly strict standards for
intellectual monopolies, developing countries require room for
experimentation. The second line of conflict is between rightsholders
and the users of knowledge. Rightsholders generally would like to
tighten standards, while user groups highlight the importance of access.

Besides a reform of WIPO, experimentation is needed to find viable and
sustainable strategies for governing knowledge. The project of a treaty
on access to knowledge provides ideas and offers an opportunity for
debate on the way ahead.

Get a .pdf here (600 kb) or download the LaTeX source here (420 kB). It’s published under a Creative Commons by-sa license, so spread it far and wide.

Kid’s book about DRM

Posted by gerloff on 0

Wow, this one is great. A Canadian programmer and artist got so pissed off about his government indoctrinating grade school children about the sanctity of copyright, that he decided to do something about it.

He drew and wrote a children’s book. It’s about how you can share things that you don’t lose when you give them away. And about how much better life is for everyone when you do it.

The Pig and the Box is about a pig who finds a magic box that can
replicate anything you put into it. The pig becomes so protective of it,
and so suspicious of anyone that wants to use it, that he makes people
take their copied items home in special buckets that act as… well,
they’re basically DRM. It’s like a fable, except the moral of the story
is very modern in tone.

 

I made the book after hearing how the entertainment industry in Canada
is keen on teaching young kids about how to "respect" copyright. That
was a bit heavy-handed, I thought, and otherwise despicable. Preying on
small kids, brainwashing them so they believe what you’re doing is
honourable and good… Feh. So I wrote this book partly as a response to
that venture, to counter-act the confused ideals that young’ns are being
exposed to these days. Also, I wanted to write potty humour.

Get the book here (.pdf, 1.6Mb, CC sampling+ license) and spread it far  and wide. Make sure your children see this before Captain Copyright and those scary WIPO comics get their brains all screwed up. If you don’t have children, get it anyway and make yourself smile for at least ten minutes.

If you want to translate the book or rework it otherwise, the sources are here. A German translation seems to be in the works already – check the comments if you want to help.

 via BoingBoing

Build a pet bunker now

Posted by gerloff on 0

As a little distraction from my current master’s thesis bootcamp, I followed an advertisement on the thesaurus site I’m using because it looked slightly irritating. I ended up at the US Department of Homeland Security. Though I had had the perception before that these guys were in a state of paranoia that was way beyond the healthy, what I found was worse than I expected: A guide on how to prepare your pets for  "an emergency such as a fire or flood, tornado or terrorist attack".

Now, please don’t get me wrong. I have a cat myself, which I love a lot and the company of whom I enjoy.  I would certainly go to some length to protect it. But this here is a bit over the top, right?

If you must evacuate, take your pets with you if possible. However, if you are going to a public shelter, it is important to understand that animals may not be allowed inside. Plan in advance for shelter alternatives that will work for both you and your pets.

Excuse me, but I’m off to the back yard to build a cat bunker. Will stash some tins of catfood in there, along with a cat-operable tin opener and some felt mouses for entertainment. This way, my furred friend will be safe from harm while the rest of us retreats into the woods, there to heroically fend off the bearded barbarians of al-Qaeda.

But for some reason they didn’t include the bunker blueprints in their high-gloss pdf brochure. Damn. Must be somewhere else on the site. 

 

Absurd WIPO quotes (2): Sorry, we don’t have internet access

Posted by gerloff on 0

Here’s another gem from the WIPO meetings on a Development Agenda, which followed the proposal of 14 developing countries (the "Friends of Development") for WIPO to steer away from bluntly foisting IMP maximalism upon everyone, in serfdom to rich-country rightsholders.

This time, it’s not the quote that is absurd, but rather the text it refers to. At the first IIM in April 2005, the US had made a counterproposal. It tried to appease calls for a structural reform of WIPO by setting up a website. This website should be a place where those needing a copyright or patent licence could meet the rich-country rightsholders, and beg to them for it. The US considered that in this way, WIPO would take development concerns sufficiently into account.

That might have been true, had there not been those pesky have-nots. Morocco, speaking for the African countries, reminded the US (I’m quoting from the protocols, p. 18):

However, the African Group had some reservations regarding the
conceptual basis of the US proposal. For the African Group, the US
proposal assumed, as a pre-established fact, the existence and the
availability of infrastructures enabling access to the Internet in all
countries.  The Delegation pointed out that, due to the digital divide,
not all countries had the same facilities with respect to the Internet
access […]

In clear: A website might be all well and good, but sorry, some of us don’t have internet connectivity.<!–

So much for the very valuable and thoughtful proposal by the honorable delegation of the United States.