Karsten on Free Software

A long day is almost over. As I’m writing this, Georg is sitting on a panel discussing about Free Software in public administrations. It’s the conclusion of a day he started with his keynote, much too early: at 9:15.

This was not easy, since yesterday we had been out and about with kyrah. The evening was a sort of crash course in Vienna culture: Schnitzel and Ottakringer beer. Actually a lot of beer. At least, neither me nor Georg fell asleep during the day.

I got to meet a number of interesting people I had until now known only through mailing lists. As the weather was the best since a very long time, we tried to spend as much of the day outside as possible. It was there that I actually became a CAcert assurer – but hold your horses, I still have to activate my account. I’ll probably be ready to certify you next week.

With the Fellowship Cryptocards around our necks, Georg and I attracted some attention. The corporate identity will soon get even better: This morning, we ordered lanyards in the Fellowship design. We should have them ready at the GNU/Linuxtag, and will start selling them there.

This week is especially tough for me, since I had no weekend. There was an interesting class in my university, about “the order of the information society”. The teacher was Barbara van Schewick, a young scientist from Berlin and doctorand of Lawrence Lessig. For my taste, there was too much “open source” fudgy terminology in there; but that detail aside, I learned a lot of interesting things.

One of those was the end-to-end-argument: The principle that a network should be laid out in the most generalized way possible, while everything specific to an application is running only on the end hosts only. For me being the example of a non-techie, that was a bit of informatics to swallow. It went down surprisingly smoothly, though.

Speaking of going down smoothly: This day defenitely warrants a beer or five. Right now, I am waiting for kyrah to pick us up, take us somewhere where there is food – and a generous supply of cold Ottakringer beer.

After flying back to Hamburg tomorrow evening, I will take Friday and Monday off. I’m looking forward to a long weekend with my girlfriend. See you then.

Just as I was going to turn off my machine now, the best quote I heard all day was pronounced on the panel. A representative of the Austrian social security administration said: “There really are a lot of great Linux companies in Vienna. There is no operating system in Vienna for which I get better support than for Linux. The trouble is: I get it only from ten o’clock onwards.”

Half of my internship has passed already. Today I realized that this is not really what most people would call a “normal” internship. One of the people next door from our Hamburg office, whom I’ve met daily for a month now, realized only today that I’m an intern.

That was already the second pointer this week. The first one came on Wednesday, when we went to a meeting with a magazine editor. While I was sitting at the conference table with Georg and JJ (our press spokesman), the magazine’s intern was busy downstairs at the photocopying machine. That made me realize what a good choice I made in picking the FSFE for my internship.

After so many exciting experiences, it will be hard to go back to university and just write my thesis. I still have about seven weeks left to enjoy working with this highly motivated team. I’ve learnt a lot about organisational structures, managing a network of people, getting things done with a group. But most of all, I have gotten used to being challenged and challenging myself more than I did before.

I would like to describe my regular work, but that turns out to be somewhat hard: There is so little regularity. Days usually start with reading and answering emails by external and internal people. But that’s where the routine ends. Usually, a bit of travel planning for Georg slips in at some point. The last few weeks, we have been extremely busy with the Fellowship cards, printing and mailing them. Now, I’m looking into next steps: People might want lanyards to wear the cards on their necks, and stickers, and…

I’m also writing news entries for the websites, making sure that the right mail goes to the right people (and gets answered), and generally coordinating things. I like it that FSFE is such a lean and small organisation, and that I am located right were the action is. This gives me the chance to learn a lot. It helps that people trust me with work that is actually meaning ful. Anything else would be a waste of capacities.

Handling all the technical stuff, which had made me a bit nervous in the beginning, has turned out alright. After all, this organisation is full of techies. I just have to be open to being taught a new trick every now and then. It helps that the team members seem to realize that not everyone has grown up exclusively in front of a computer screen, and that they respect this. Still, I started to do things with my computer that I never supposed I was capable of.

If anyone is thinking about becoming my successor on this internship, I can only recommend it. It’s time well spent.

Stefano just tipped me off on an interesting site. It makes quite clear why everyone should care about copyright, or at least be informed. Check out www.unhappybirthday.com. It’s also quite a laugh.

Back in Hamburg, and tired. Luckily, the issues I had to deal with today were relatively straightforward, compared to the extremely complex situation in Geneva. My recovery from a diplomacy overdose was also greatly helped by half a thursday spent relaxing at the sunny shore of Lake Geneva.

Georg Greve is still in Geneva, attending another WIPO meeting: That of the Permanent Committee on Cooperation for Development Related to Intellectual Property (PCIPD). (They do have catchy names, don’t they?) As the word “Development” in the committee name implies, the discussions begun during the Intersessional Intergovernmental Meeting carried on to some degree. Georg delivered a statement of the FSFE, demanding not only the proprietary, but also the Free Software model should be promoted, and that all WIPO activities should be fully available with Free Software. The statement highlights Free Software’s essential role for development and growth.

In case you’re still not over the last meeting from Monday to Wednesday, I have some links for you. IP Watch brings you a comprehensive overview over what happened. I tip my hat to the Electronic Frontier Foundation people, who have been working hard to summarize almost all (!) statements delivered during the meeting. Their posts can be found here. The WIPO story also made it onto heise.de, one of Germany’s most important tech/society news sites, yesterday.

Most PINGO statements (as mentioned before: “Public Interest NGOs”) are by now to be found on A2K mailing list archives. There, you will also encounter India’s statement, which in my opinion is the shortest and punchiest summary of the issues raised by the Friends of Development group.

Want to know more? Looking for something beyond the minutiae of the WIPO process, I was pointed to IPRsonline.org. Many people will already know this resource site for “IP” issues. Those who do not might want to pay it a visit.

More on the immediately practical side of things, today I would like to point out to you a site that many Free Software users may have yearned for, without knowing it already existed. The FSF/UNESCO Free Software Dictionary is an excellent overview of Free Software packages, ordered by what they’re used for. Very usable, and extremely useful. Whoever set this up deserves more respect than she or he is getting.

After long deliberations behind closed doors, the delegates finally came up with a solution: There will be two more meetings like the one just finished, lasting three days each. The first one will take place on June 20 to 22; the second one in July, with the exact dates to be determined asap by the Secretariat. The Paraguayan representative, Chairman of this meeting, will probably chair the meeting in June as well.

The African group demands that of each meeting, draft reports be prepared and made available within 10 days. Nigeria, Egypt, Botswana join in on the request.

Pakistan: calls for a “clustering” of the ideas of the proposals for the next meetings, to make discussion more efficient.

Brazil calls this meeting “an important first round of statements”, where the viewpoints of countries have become clear. In future meetings, the discussion should be organised around focal topics, as Pakistan suggested.

Jamie Love of CPTech asks for a clarification of the accreditation status in the next two meetings for those NGOs that were accredited ad hoc. The promise of being accredited again is especially important for underfunded NGOs that can’t afford to buy plane tickets and pay for visa if they’re not sure they can participate. In this last-minute thriller, Italy proposes an according amendment to the final text of the draft report summary. Egypt joins in, and many delegations raise their flags. The proposal is approved, which means that the ad-hoc NGOs are in.

The process of a change at WIPO has started and is rolling. Now the question is which direction it will take, and at which speed.

A personal note: I will be leaving Geneva tomorrow, to resume the regular office work in Hamburg. I hope to live through such an interesting and challenging time again soon. Thanks for reading my blog.

Please note that the views I express here are purely my own. This site is my private refuge; here, I am not speaking on behalf of the Free Software Foundation Europe. If you want to learn about their position on anything, please go to www.fsfeurope.org.

“WIPO is not about creativity. It is about protection of intellectual property!” Thus spoke Mr Thomas Giovanetti, sent to the WIPO meeting by the Institute for Policy Innovation, a conservative think-tank in Texas, USA. It’s good to know that those opposed to reform at WIPO care so deeply about the thing they are claiming to foster.

In keeping with good sportsmanship, I’m posting a link to their latest press release, here. Read it if you want to see what the progressive part of Civil Society is up against.

This is the morning of the NGOs. The session started more than an hour late, as the regional groups of countries were working on their positions ins closed sessions. As yesterday was a conflictive day, this took a while. At the beginning of the session, Mexico – most likely on behalf of the United States – harshly complained about the tone of Brazil’s and Argentina’s comments on its position. The Argentinian emissary replied that she was just carrying out the orders of her government.

After the last few statements by intergovernmental organisations, the meeting started where it had left off yesterday: With comments by the NGOs. Mostly due to good tactics by progressive, reform-oriented NGOs, but also with a bit of plain old luck, the proponents of WIPO reform got to speak after the various organisations of the rights holders, many of which already made their statements yesterday evening – as tired delegates were out for coffee and a chat.

The progressive NGOs had coordinated their statements well. There was an almost uninterrupted string of about eight interventions by organisations calling for a better taking into account of the needs of developing countries, as well as the need to preserve – and, in many cases, give back – breathing room for creativity.

Georg made a statement on behalf of the Free Software Foundation Europe, which can be found here. Myself, I had the honor to be asked to read the statement of the FFII. The rights-holding industry emissary to my right reacted with grimaces and desperate gestures to what to him must have seemed pure lunacy: The demands for a strengthening of Free Software, and the call to see the system of patents, copyrights and trademarks not as an end in itself, but as a tool for development.

As Ellen Thoen of Medicins Sans Frontiers explained, the issue of patents on pharmaceuticals is literally a matter of life and death for people in developing countries. Having put forward the example of the Polio vaccine, which was announced almost exactly 50 years ago and, handled as a public domain idea, led to the near eradication

There was also a considerable amount of concerns expressed about the ever stricter enforcement of regulations in developed countries. An example would be the legal protection of Digital Restrictions Management against circumvention, as Volker Grassmuck explained on behalf of the European Digital Rights Initiative.

By the way: The real conservatives around here believe that there is a “communist conspiracy” to take WIPO away from the rights-holding industry. It’s always good to talk to people with such subtle and articulate viewpoints.

Again and again, the term “Intellectual Property” is showing itself to be misleading. In my view, it works for the rights-holding industry. Every time we say “Software Patents are not a good idea”, these people go: “So you want to tear down the intellectual property system and abolish patents, copyrights, trademarks? Are you crazy? You’re communists, that’s what you are.”

In an interesting private conversation Geoff Tansey, member of the Food Ethics Council and consultant to the Quaker UN Office, suggested to me an alternative term:

“We should be talking about monopoly privileges, not IP rights, because that’s what they are, as Peter Drahos said in his book “A philosophy of Intellectual Property”. This is an idea that for example the Food Ethics Council has argued for. They called for a change in the language we use to more accurately reflect the reality of what these things are – monopoly privileges. They’re privileges granted to me as an author, for example, to exclude others from my work.”

For further elaborations, he pointed to the 2003 report “TRIPS with everything” – Intellectual property and the farming world, which he helped prepare.

He also offered a way of clarifying the diffuse term “Civil Society”, by replacing it with “BINGOs” and “PINGOs”: Business Interest Organisations and Public Interest Organisations. Though it was a rather informal suggestion, he definitely has a point. I may want to adopt that terminology.

The WIPO secretariat just published the summary of a draft report for this session. It says that member states need more time to “examine” the proposals “indepth”. This will take place on a second IIM on 2005-06-20 to 24. Submissions by member states possible until 2005-05-30.

If the fact that another meeting is planned already means that there was no consensus – not exactly surprising after the tense debates -, it also means that the conservative side, namely the USA and the lobby of the rights-holding industry, have not succeeded in pushing the issue into a subcommittee to “disappear” it.

After haggling about expressions for a bit, the debate almost instantly reached a boiling point when Trinidad and Tobago, who are on the progressive side, suggested that more than one additional meeting might be needed to manage the “transition” of WIPO. That comment prompted a sort of shock, as it referred to a massive change in WIPO as an established fact.

Instantly, the debate reached a boiling point and was interrupted. The representatives of the rich countries hectically huddled together:

Then, the regional coordinators disappeared into a side room to negotiate. The degree of transparency at WIPO is indeed striking.

That the next IIM in June is to last a full five days means that members expect that session to be no less conflictive than the present one. It also means that the conservative side, namely the USA, have not succeeded in pushing the issue into a subcommittee to “disappear” it.

At the moment, the Friends of Development and the United States with their allies are confronting each other at eye level, without either backing down. This might go on for quite a while. The Chairman is already suggesting that a third IIM might be necessary.

The procedure for preparing a report is the usual one. The Chairman, in this case the representative of Paraguay, has great power over what will appear in the final report. He is an interesting figure: While obviously acceptable to both sides of the debate, I’ve been told that during the beginning of his work with WIPO, he expressed views similar to those now expressed by the Friends of Development.

Just in case you want to read more than just my getting all worked up about the workings of international politics, there are (at least) two more blogs about this meeting. Both are more news-style and have better background than mine. That of IPWatch seems to be more comprehensive, while the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s blog is very thorough. I recommend checking out both of them. (I’d be glad to have you come back anyway.)

If you want to delve into the original texts, a list of the proposals can be found here. For getting the hang of the topic, I suggest reading the extreme positions: The US proposal, which has the traditional WIPO line of strict patents, copyrights and trademarks protection; and the Friends of Development proposal, which says many things that NGOs have been saying for years.

We’re about to head into another exciting morning of statements by governments and intergovernmental organisations. I’m curios how the climate will be this morning.

This Tuesday morning, the situation is rather tense. The extreme positions are held by India on the side of the Friends of Development, and by the USA on the side of those who want to avoid reform. Each side has its helpers. While India simply expresses most clearly the views of the Friends of Development group, the US have mobilised interesting friends such as Sudan to perpetuate their views.

The US show themselves “concerned” with the proposal of the Friends of Development. They accuse the group of wanting to dilute the “intellectual property” system and WIPO’s work. In their view, the strict enforcement of patents, copyrights and trademarks is a precondition for development and growth.

India contests this view. It calls for a mainstreaming of development aspects into WIPO’s work. Being very clear in tone, the Indian statement described “intellectual property” as a tool for development, not an end in itself. It called the demand for stricter enforcement of patents, copyrights and trademark regulation “unrealistic”, as developing countries are grappling with far more severe problems.

Personally, I find it cynical to demand of a developing country that it dedicate scarce resources to the persecution of violations of eg. copyright, while the same country does not have the means to provide its population with a dignified standard of living (dignified not as in “DSL connections for everyone” but rather as in “not starving or dying of easily curable diseases”).

This demand – which WIPO has been obedient to so far – turns international and national agencies, which in theory are obliged to pursue public interest, into mere agents of the rights-holding industry’s whishes.

Oh, by the way: Why am I putting “intellectual property” in quotes? Because I agree with Richard Stallman in that the term is imprecise to the point of being harmful. You can find Richard’s reasoning right here. The distinctions he elaborates on are substantial to avoiding being labelled as “anti-IP” by conservative groups.