Karsten on Free Software

Linux Journal has an article about the Free Software Foundation India by Frederick Noronha. It has lots of quotes by their central figure Nagarjuna G, and nicely portraits their work.

Markus Beckedahl has done a lot of writing, interviewing and podcasting from Tunis, which was great for everyone interested (not only those of us who did not have the funds to make it there). Now he has a real goody on his blog: Four videos (1,2,3,4) of Richard Stallman and Gilberto Gil performing songs together. Fun!

The Guardian has an Essay by Andrew Brown titled “Owning ideas”. While not going into great detail, the text covers many problems that arise from treating ideas as if they were spare parts for cars.

It starts:

The difference between ideas and things is obvious as soon as someone hits you over the head with an idea – so obvious that until recently it was entirely clear to the law. Things could have owners and ideas could not. Yet this simple distinction is being changed all around us. Ideas are increasingly treated as property – as things that have owners who may decide who gets to use them and on what terms.

And it ends:

This is madness. Ideas aren’t things. They’re much more valuable than that. Intellectual property – treating some ideas as if they were in some circumstances things that can be owned and traded – is itself no more than an idea that can be copied, modified and improved. It is this process of freely copying them and changing them that has given us the world of material abundance in which we live. If our ideas of intellectual property are wrong, we must change them, improve them and return them to their original purpose. When intellectual property rules diminish the supply of new ideas, they steal from all of us.

I highly recommend reading the middle part for yourself.

While everyone was digging into their Windows machines to check if they had been hit by one of Sony’s rootkits (no, no link here; you can’t go online these days without stumbling about five stories on the topic), the EFF people took the pains of actually reading the EULA (end user license agreement) on those CDs.

It is just as amazing, if not more so, as the technical rootkit. (Hm, I wonder what other legalese treasures are hidden in those windows people simply click away when installing proprietary software?)

Here are a few of my faves:

If your house gets burgled, you have to delete all your music from your laptop when you get home. That’s because the EULA says that your rights to any copies terminate as soon as you no longer possess the original CD. Sony-BMG can install and use backdoors in the copy protection software or media player to “enforce their rights” against you, at any time, without notice. And Sony-BMG disclaims any liability if this “self help” crashes your computer, exposes you to security risks, or any other harm. If you file for bankruptcy, you have to delete all the music on your computer. Seriously.

Uhm. If these are the terms you agree to when listening to a CD you legally bought, is it a surprise that people get to prefer alternatives that do not impose such absurd restrictions.

The Register has an article on the UK government’s plans to build a vehicle surveillance network along the country’s roads:

A “24×7 national vehicle movement database” that logs everything on the UK’s roads and retains the data for at least two years is now being built, according to an Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) strategy document leaked to the Sunday Times. The system, which will use Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR), and will be overseen from a control centre in Hendon, London, is a sort of ‘Gatso 2’ network, extending. enhancing and linking existing CCTV, ANPR and speedcam systems and databases.

This will doubtlessly be useful in the war on terror. Even a public as tolerant towards public surveillance as the British might start to find this a bit overdone. I’m taking the train, thank you very much – until they start taking my fingerprint when I buy the ticket.

The last phase of the World Summit on the Information Society has hardly started, but the choice of host country already looks more questionable than ever. Markus Beckedahl has an interview (.mp3 – I hope the .ogg version is coming up) on his blog where Rikke Frank Joergenson, the coordinator of the international civil society’s Human Rights Caucus, describes how Tunisian “security” forces physically attacked participants of a Civil Society meeting. The interview gives a good impression of what happened.

She talks of people being beaten by the police and a journalist nearly arrested, while the group tried several times to assemble at different locations. Remember, this are not the protests outside a G8 summit taking place behind closed doors (where similar repression frequently occurs). At the WSIS, Civil Society groups are registered participants in a meeting of the United Nations. Tunisian police are attacking the participants of an international diplomatic conference. Usually, these events are so overly civilised as to be rather boring. Physical aggression against anyone taking part in one is entirely unacceptable.

The European Consumer’s Organisation (BEUC) has launched a campaign for consumer’s digital rights.

The time has come to guarantee consumers certain basic rights in the digital world, and to tell them what they can do with their digital hardware/content. This is our message in this campaign.

* Right to choice, knowledge and cultural diversity * Right to the principle of “technical neutrality” – defend and maintain consumer rights in the digital environment * Right to benefit from technological innovations without abusive restrictions * Right to interoperability of content and devices * Right to the protection of privacy * Right not to be criminalised

The BEUC people have assembled some texts that make it easy to plunge into the marvelous world of copyright, most importantly a glossary and a FAQ. This site provides an easy entry for consumers who are starting to wonder why they are being denounced as criminals all the time. I whish more consumer’s organisations would take up this topic.