Karsten on Free Software

The new edition of the bi-weekly EDRI-gram newsletter is out.

1. UK Presidency attacks European Convention of Human Rights 2. UK police workshop and paper on data retention 3. New French anti-terrorism surveillance plans 4. Preview Montreux conference Data Protection Authorities 5. UK wants to ban viewing of violent porn 6. Finnish ISPs must voluntarily block access 7. UK cancels Internet voting plans 8. New court case Microsoft against European Commission

A note on point 8: Microsoft has launched a second appeal case against the anti-trust decision by the European Commission […], asking for annulment of the decision to open up the Windows source code enough to create interoperability and allow open source vendors to distribute Windows source code. This is in accurate. No one is asking for the release of any source code. What Microsoft has been ordered to release is the interface information of the Windows server, which is needed to make other software fully interoperable with Windows networks.

So to speak: Microsoft has only been ordered to reveal the design of the wall socket, not that of the wiring behind it.

Please keep this in mind whenever you speak about this court case. It is Microsoft’s strategy to claim that they would have to release their source code, which they, not surprisingly, see as a business secret. Propagating this erroneous information does not help the case for freedom.

Waiting for patch day, eh? ZDNet is running a story titled “Microsoft security chief bitten by rogue dialler”:

“Gibson revealed that he has recently been hit by a £450 bill from BT after his computer was infected with a rogue dialler.”

In case you wondered why there are so many security holes in the world’s most widespread virus operating system, this might give you an indication of where to start looking.

My old friend Tom Giovanetti on ipblog.org finally is back in shape. While I do know a number of cholerics, he is the only one who can actually write cholerically in a credible manner. This time, he has taken issue with an article by Larry Lessig in Wired magazine. Lessig highlights the real risk behind the US Supreme court’s Grokster decision. Taking the complexity of Lessig’s reasoning down a notch or five, TomG does not actually have anything to say about Lessig’s article, but prefers to complain: “You’re always whining, Larry.”

While, intellectually, not going much beyond saying “YOU ARE WRONG”, TomG’s contribution to mankind’s progress nicely lists his basic views – and provides the opportunity to point out what is wrong with them. Generally speaking, what he writes suffers from over-simplification and his programmatic failure to distinguish between material property and intellectual monopoly rights. Here we go.

“Property is good. Intellectual property is good. Exclusion is good. Stealing is bad. Copying isn’t innovation. Copying and pasting isn’t innovation. Remixing isn’t invention. Sampling isn’t invention.”

Although I am aware of differing opinions, let us for now agree that property rights are good. Within human society, they provide economic incentives for caring about what is given to you, and for making it prosper. Moreover, property rights – at least in western societies – do have a fairly long tradition. They have proved useful.

As for the hypothesis that “Intellectual property is good”: This merits a bit of discussion, one which is carried out in countless courts (SCO, music industry against filesharers, you name it), parliaments (and adjoining expensive restaurants), and WIPO. Many of these debates suffer from a fundamentally flawed understanding of what “intellectual property” really is: One or more of various forms of monopoly rights, bestowed by society on someone who has an idea, or someone who paid for the right to market that idea. The question is not whether intellectual monopoly rights are “good” or not. The question is whether they are useful to society as a whole, and applied in ways that make them useful to society.

The fundamental difference from physical property is that ideas are non-rivalrous, i.e. that they can be shared losslessly. If you have an idea, and you tell me about it, I have the idea – and you still have it, too. This basic principle makes all the difference. It is especially marked in digital environments, where ideas are not bound to a single physical medium.

This has long been a blessing for mankind. By sharing knowledge about such things as the wheel, paper, medicine, and the best way of preparing steaks, the world has become a finer place to live. Why this should not apply to, say, medicine today, is not entirely obvious to me. Of course, people who come up with ideas should be remunerated for their effort, and an incentive system is just fine with me. However, the way remuneration is currently handled in many sectors obstructs the sharing and subsequent creation of knowledge, which has been so propitious to mankind in the past.

Grasping this basic concept, it does not appear that “Exclusion is good”, but rather that it is bad. It reduces the number of people who are exposed to ideas, and thereby the number of new ideas created.

The sentence “Stealing is bad” is non-functional on this background. Stealing means physically taking something away from someone. But ideas are impossible to steal. They can be copied, they can be used without permission – but they cannot be stolen. Mind your language.

Now for the second part of Tom’s quote. “Copying isn’t innovation. Copying and pasting isn’t innovation. Remixing isn’t invention. Sampling isn’t invention.” Innovation, from its latin root, means “to bring in something new”. The sentence represents an oxymoron, as copying is by definition the multiplication of something already in existence. What this simplicity obscurs is a fact that goes right to the root of TomG’s misunderstanding with the modern world: Innovation requires copying!

If you want to write a book, it is advisable that you read a number of other books first. This will probably make your book more interesting. For this, you need access to copies (sic) of those books. Then, by copying and pasting, you learn to identify the elements of what you’re looking at, and to rearrange them in a new manner. While this is not strictly innovation, it is a necessary part of every creative process. Ask any academic, who spends ages reading books, extracting individual arguments, rearranging and mixing them, to then come up with an idea of her own which takes the topic to a new level.

Considering this, it seems that remixing is indeed invention. Remember that Warhol guy with those Campbell soup cans of his? If he were to publish his famous pictures today, he would probably never have made it past the soup company’s lawyers. A more recent issue of remixing in art is that of Mark Chamberlain, who has produced a number of watercolour drawings showing Batman and Robin engaging in homosexual activities. He, of course, did not have to wait long for a “cease and desist” letter from DC Comics. What was fair and legitimate use of public culture some decades ago is now a copyright infringement.

So, yes, remixing is invention, and so is sampling. If you’re listening to music – any music, really – it would seem that musicians are taking inspiration from each other’s works. If you’ve ever played an instrument yourself or remixed something, you know about the enormous creative energy that goes into this process. DJ Danger Mouse’s Grey Album provides a good example of how creative “just” remixing can be.

So why does Tom make all these mistakes? Because he is confusing ideas with things. He does this because he is the head of an institute that is dedicated to the promotion of positions that suit a few big US corporations and their shareholders. These corporations have something of a hard time adjusting to the fact that their business models, mostly conceived in a totally analogue world, do not work anymore in the face of broadband internet connections. Instead of inventing to stay ahead in fair competition, they attempt to use their and their country’s clout to turn intellectual monopoly rights into real monopolies.

These rights are not granted by society for this purpose. They are granted for the good of society as a whole. If they do not serve this purpose, the way the system works needs to be changed. Whenever it comes to this point, TomG leaves us stumped with an amazing mixture of utilitarian (“it’s good because it’s useful”) and natural rights (“it’s good because God or the Flying SpaghettiMonster want it this way”) argumentation. Until he gets his thinking straight, I remain unconvinced. C’mon, Tom, you can do better than this.

Yesterday, Reuters ran a story about the upcoming GPLv3 process. It was based on the official GPLv3 press release (also here) and a telephone discussion with Georg Greve, the president of the Free Software Foundation Europe.

While there are really enough factual news to go around, Reuters picked up on two possible issues to address with the upcoming GPLv3.

One is that GPLv3 would have a patent retaliation clause. While it is true that the GPLv2 was written before software patents were as big an issue as they are now, and therefore some language with respect to the matter should find its way into the GPLv3, the Reuters story originally quoted Georg saying that anyone claiming a software patent would lose the right to use Free Software. This is obviously nonsense.

Georg explained that the next GPL version might include a clause somewhat similar to that in the Mozilla Public License (MPL), based on the idea […] that if someone uses software patents against free software, that company or person loses the right to distribute that particular programme and use it in their product. Unfortunately, the story was published with the wrong quote at first. Moreover, it was not marked as speculation, but rather as a hard fact. By the time they corrected it, it was already all over the place, including Slashdot, which did not react to emails pointing out the mistake.

The second issue is that of an “internet tax”. Obviously, people who create something should be remunerated. While the question of how to do this is not really related to the GPL in any of its versions, the Reuters journalist asked Georg about this topic. Georg answered that while this is not really one of FSFE’s topics, he knows of several ideas, but does not necessarily endorse any of them. Among those is that of a “cultural flatrate”, which could be implemented by levying a small fee on internet connections.

Georg’s clarification of this “internet tax” bit can be found here.

While I’m sceptical of the practice of having interviews approved before publishing, not doing so requires careful handling of the quotes. This does not appear to have been done here.

The Financial Times has an article on the Public Patent Foundation, set up by US attorney Dan Ravicher (who has also done some Free Software work with FSF in the past).

The foundation mainly reviews pharma patents which they believe to be bad for the public. If they find that the patent should not have been granted, they try to get it revoked.

In June, the US Patent and Trademark Office ruled that Pfizer’s patent for Lipitor, a $12bn (£6.6bn)-a-year cholesterol drug, might be invalid. Did the pharmaceutical company “get punked by a non-profit?” asked Stephen Albainy-Jenei, a patent lawyer and blogger.

The foundation is doing an important job. Public review of patents is normally minimal, and the market does not sort things out. If a big company goes after another’s patent, in the end they usually come to some sort of cross-licensing agreement. That is fine for the Top Ten, but pretty much everyone below that line is barred from using knowledge under patent protection, however wrongly that patent might have been granted.

Besides, the US Patent Office works in a way that makes it much easier for their employees to accept a patent application than to reject it. As they are constantly under pressure to reduce their considerable backlog, most likely a good number of granted patents may not be quite up to snuff. Someone should be watching this, and the Public Patent Foundation seems to do a good job there.

Sorry I didn’t do anything for almost a month now. I whish it was due to my being on vacation, on a sunny, sandy beach. Unfortunately, my apparent inactivity was really due to my being extremely busy.

Fortunately, pretty much everyone else was on vacation, so I didn’t miss too much. Now things are slowly starting up again.

While some might deem data retention to be somewhat objectionable from a civil rights perspective – after all, it treats every innocent citizen like a criminal suspect -, a few days ago, German businesses spoke up as well. They rather clearly called for limits on obligations to providers, as they consider the idea far too expensive to implement.

The current EDRIgram has a nice, short summary of the position paper.

Data retention is a hot debate at EU level right now: Should ISPs, telephone companies and other communication businesses be obliged to accumulate and retain detailed data about their customer’s every activity?

This is something that paranoid “public safety” (read: police state) advocates have been on to ever since they realised how easy it is to store and analyse digital data. If you don’t have to move paper files around or place plainclothes observers on the street, it becomes so much easier to keep tabs on everyone. So if it’s possible, why not do it? (Lawrence Lessig provides a nice discussion of this in his book (yes, on paper) “Code and other Laws of Cyberspace”).

For some comic relief after so much Big Brother, you could check out South Park’s take on filesharing (.avi, 2MB).

While I was having fun with pseudo-scientific language yesterday, Cisco Systems was busy spending a whopping $ 97.000.000 on wonderful marketing terminology like this:

“Just as leading scientists worldwide have succeeded in cracking the human genome, so Sheer Networks has decoded the network genome to identify and abstract the four basic elements of the network – forwarding tables, protocol stacks, interoperable interfaces and links – using these elements Sheer has constructed a library of three ‘network genes’ that can abstract any type of: Network element, Network technology, and Network service.”

I have no idea what the company Cisco acquired there makes, but they certainly deserve respect for this daring combination of silicon and biotech.

(via The Register)

After a thorough railroad sauna session, I arrived at What The Hack! Festival in Liempde, near Eindhoven, Netherlands. Even though the weather is so-so, the mood is pretty good. Relaxed in any case.

I’m looking forward to a lot of interesting presentations. Mine, on WIPO and the Development Agenda (surprise), will take place on Saturday at 21:00.

Since Markus Beckedahl is usually anywhere where there is action, he’s keeping you up to date in detail (and in German) on netzpolitik.org.

All sorts of blog entries from the festival are to be found at What the Planet.

For the evening, thunderstorms are forecast. I’d better go and move my tent to higher ground.

After digesting all the diplomatic slang at WIPO, a bit of nonsense really soothes the ear and eye. Today I stumbled upon an article on spiegel.de (in German) about three MIT students who have finally written the program every academic dreams about: An automatic research paper generator.

SCIgen is extremely easy to use. It just asks for one or several author’s names. When you then hit “Generate”, an article appears that just sounds great – but is guaranteed to make no sense at all. Here’s the start of one I got:

SCSI Disks Considered Harmful Johannes T. Unger and Kristian Sand Abstract

“Fuzzy” algorithms and agents have garnered profound interest from both statisticians and analysts in the last several years [7]. In this work, we prove the exploration of Scheme. In this position paper, we confirm not only that superpages can be made multimodal, authenticated, and adaptive, but that the same is true for 802.11 mesh networks.

***

If you have ever suffered from overblown science lingo, you’ll love sentences like “ Reality aside, we would like to synthesize a model for how our approach might behave in theory.” The program even generates graphics and a list of the works used. (“Raman, K. Bungo: Study of Internet QoS. In POT the Conference on Omniscient, Compact Methodologies (Jan. 2004).“)

Be warned: Though actually reading these automatically produced texts seems relaxing at first, it will eventually turn your brain to mush. Feels good, though. And it’s GPL software too!

Those delegations exclusively dedicated to the well-being of their country’s rightsholder industries have made this IIM meeting end in extreme deadlock: The only report there will be is to be the delegation statements of the past three IIM meetings.

The US delegation is hell-bent on destroying the Development Agenda before it is even conceived. Japan is helping them (I should have asked the Japanese delegations if all or only a part of their salary is paid by Sony). The EU and Canada are usually aligning themselves with these Enemies of Development (well, what else is one to call this unholy alliance?). Though sometimes putting on a compromising face, they falter at the slightest grumble from the US.

Together with some of the comments ascribed to one of the German delegates, which referred to development being “a disease that is spreading all over Europe”, this gives a rather clear picture. Industrialised countries, with the US leading the way, Japan restating US positions and the EU whimpering behind, will never voluntarily give a single sliver of their countries’ industries’ entrenched superior position in intellectual exclusion rights.

If you live in one of the G8 countries, which only weeks ago in Gleneagles made high-flying statements about their commmitment to development: Don’t believe a word they tell you. If there is to be a more just order concerning copyrights and patents, it is not going to come from these countries.

The deadlock was so complete that the meeting had to be adjourned. A draft report will be available electronically on 15 August. Then comments can be made until 31 August. The meeting will then be resumed to adopt the report some time first week of September. This is going to be tough.