Karsten on Free Software

It is with sadness that I read that Cory Doctorow” has retired from his job as the European Coordinator of the EFF. It is with joy that I learn that he has done so in order to write full-time.

Until now, Cory has something like three novels and a decent supply of short-stories under his belt. I just finished reading “Someone comes to Town, someone leaves town”, and it was the best read I’ve had in a while. Feel free to have a look at it: Fittingly, Cory has published all his books under a Creative Commons and keeps them available for download on his site.

Good luck with your new life, Cory!

And thanks to my friend Meike who gave Cory’s book to me as a thank you for proofreading her master’s thesis!

Update: Link to Meike fixed.

Thorough information is still hard to find, but it seems that the French parliament has taken a step I have long hoped for. As Bjoern Schiessle and Markus Beckedahl of netzpolitik.org write in accordance with the Register, the assembly voted 30-28 in favour of setting up a collection model for the remuneration of artists and rightsholders, while sort-of-legalising the peer-to-peer sharing of music and movies.

This would mean a monthly fee on internet connections of two to five euros. Just as it has been the practice with offline music for a long time, there will be a collection society distributing this money to rightsholders and artists.

However, I do not know yet what exactly this amendment to the French copyright law brings. This started as an initiative by the rightsholding industry to ban filesharing and Free Software. Until my information is complete, I will not have much of an opinion on this.

The San Francisco Chronicle carries an interesting article linking rich-country farm subsidies and developing countries’ inaction towards (or resistance to) “anti-piracy” measures.

The push to get rid of agricultural subsidies is linked, in the minds of poor countries, to any expansion in exports from Hollywood and Silicon Valley. The leaders of poorer countries of the world are offering a grand bargain that would be of immense value to California’s producers of “intellectual property.” The poor countries want a clear path to dominate agriculture, while supporting the expansion drive by Silicon Valley and Hollywood.

This dependency is an important point. Yet the author misses a point: Developing countries’ governments usually do not refuse to control unauthorised copying (let’s keep the term “piracy” reserved to robberies on the high seas, where it belongs) out of defiance, but rather because they see little point in acting against it.

Why should they waste their scarce resources on protecting and enlarging the wealth of some of the world’s richest companies, when they don’t have enough to feed their own citizens? Especially if the governments to which these companies are connected keep poor countries firmly on the losing side of world trade?

The International Herald Tribune has a wonderful article on the stupidity that is the EU Commission’s proposed IPRED2 directive.

Heavyweights like Nokia and Microsoft on one hand, and the grass-roots Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure on the other, are making common cause against wide-ranging legislation proposed by the European Commission that would criminalize all intellectual property infringements, including patent violations. The law would provide blanket protection to all forms of intellectual property across the 25 countries of the Union.

Tim Frain, director of intellectual property at Nokia, called the inclusion of patents within the scope of a European law “ludicrous.” Frain, who is based near London, advises managers at Nokia on the risks of infringing existing patents when they develop new functions for mobile phones. Frain indicated that patent holders wanted protection but not penalties of imprisonment as they tested the boundaries of other patents. “It’s never black and white,” he said. “Sometimes third-party patents are so weak that I advise managers to go ahead and innovate because, after making a risk analysis, we feel we can safely challenge the existing patent.”

Not even the music and film industry claim to want IPRED2, as it does not help them. So why, if anybody with any idea in the field wants the directive gone and forgotten, does the Commission insist on it?

The Vienna Manipulations story has reached one of the hubs of the Free Software universe: The comic strip site Everybody Loves Eric Raymond

I heavily advise swallowing any liquids you might be consuming at the moment before clicking this link. Otherwise your keyboard and screen might suffer.

Maybe it’s just me today, but this outburst of ignorance reported on The Register really has me fuming.

The latest in a series of idiocies in the publishing industry’s campaign against Google Books features Francisco Pinto Balsemao, head of the European Publishers Council, ranting about “parasitic” search firms:

The Associated Press reports that Francisco Pinto Balsemao told a conference in Brussels that Google and others were attempting to reverse the traditional permission-based copyright model. Warming to his theme, he said it was fascinating to see how these companies help themselves to copyright-protected material, build up their own business models around what they have collected, and parasitically, earn advertising revenues off the back of other peoples content. While Balsemao slated Google and the like, he accepted that consumers too had to be weaned off free content, so that the publishing industry could legal certainty and the confidence that their intellectual property will be protected.The Associated Press reports that Francisco Pinto Balsemao told a conference in Brussels that Google and others were attempting to reverse the traditional permission-based copyright model.

Mr Balseamo follows the music industry down the well-trodden path to the commercial lunatic asylum where everyone looking at material you hold rights to means a lost sale, and customers are criminals. He entirely fails to realise that Google Books amounts to the greatest advertising campaign for books he could never imagine.

The point he so gloriously misses is that books and computers are different media altogether. Mr Balseamo, I challenge you to introduce me to a single individual on this planet who will read through Shakespeare’s collected works on Google Books.

The Austrian daily “Der Standard” has published an open letter to Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer (in German) by FSF Europe Reinhard Müller.

Müller refers to the secretly modified Vienna Conclusions, the statement of a high-level panel discussion which was changed without the consent (or even consultation) of the undersigned from a document pointing out the value of Free Software to society, into a text expounding the need for Digital Restrictions Management.

If you want to stay up to date on the issue, you can follow Georg Greve’s blog.

A host of organisations working for a reorientation of copyright laws towards the public interest have published a paper (.pdf) on Digital Restrictions Management.

I don’t quite get why they insist on calling it “digital rights management” – you don’t call a prison “movement rights management”, do you? -, but the paper highlights the dangers of digital restrictions management for the developing world. This is a welcome addition to the debate highlighting the damage such systems do to knowledge and culture.

This paper discusses the failure of Digital Rights Management (DRM) in the developed world, where it has been in wide deployment for a decade with no benefit to artists and with substantial cost to the public and to due process, free speech and other civil society fundamentals. This paper also discusses the special risks to the developing world posed by DRM through restrictions on liberty, distance education, development efforts, criticism, and the creation and dissemination of culture.

The rightsholding industry is fighting tooth and nail to keep its outdated business models functioning. Let’s fight back.

In Ireland, a new group working for digital civil rights has formed: Digital Rights Ireland.

With members in a range of specialised legal and technical areas, Digital Rights Ireland will act as a focal point for policy makers who wish to gauge the impact of their regulation in this complicated, and sometimes esoteric, area. In addition, the group aims to provide an informed position on issues in the digital rights field, free from any commercial or political bias. Current areas of concern include data retention, rights to privacy/data protection, helping people to fight spam, and intellectual property issues.

While I don’t believe that any information on this field is to be had “free from any commercial or political bias”, this initiative is definitely a good thing. We should not leave it to Big Business to “inform” politicians about what’s good for us.

Welcome to the family!

In France, big business (read: Vivendi) and politics have gotten into bed together once again, and the result of the affair is as awful a child as can be: A bill on copyright and related rights in the information society, which comes directly from the legal labs of Vivendi-Universal and the Business Software Alliance.

The plan is to push the bill through in an emergency procedure right before Christmas, as an activist website reports.

They write what the French will have foisted upon them by one of their “national champions”:

An amendment to the proposed DADVSI bill has the aim of making criminal counterfeiting out of publication, distribution and promotion of all software susceptible to being used to open up data protected by author’s right and not integrating a method of controlling and tracking private usage (technical measure). All software permitting downloads is concerned, such as certain instant messaging software (chat) and all server software (P2P, HTTP, FTP, SSH).

While this has been flying under everyone’s radar for a while, now it’s going big. There’s a post on BoingBoing, and the technorati list of trackbacks to it. For German readers, heise.de has an excellent article as well.

It seems that the only way to stop this bill is for parliament to remove its “urgent” tag, so that it can be discussed reasonably. Apparently, this is what the law’s backers would like to avoid.

I will not start to enumerate the consequences and defects of this bill now, as there would be no end to the job. Just this: If someone seriously proposes a law decrying the HTTP protocol as a tool for copyright infringement, they suffer from so serious lack of understanding as to be pathological. Remember, the same company – Vivendi-Universal – is behind the IPRED2 directive.