freedom bits

In response to the GROKLAW feature on the Vienna Manipulations, Sean DALY wrote an interesting comment:

When I read your first statements in the media regarding this sleight-of-hand trickery I became indignant enough to become a Fellow of the Free Software Foundation Europe. 

My first impulse is to thank Sean for joining the Fellowship: Most of the political work — especially that at the United Nations — is slow, frustrating and has to be done with a very long-term perspective.

This means there are usually no flashy fireworks to attract support. It is unfortunately not sexy. Furthermore, large companies prefer to not support this work as we treasure our political independence too much to allow them to dictate the terms, and smaller companies often (have to) think in much shorter periods of time.

This makes the Fellowship an absolutely essential part of the political work: Every Fellow helps making this work possible, and allows us to do more. So thank you, Sean!

My second thought was that maybe you would like to express this feeling to others, and maybe others would also like to contribute to this work. So I fired up the GIMP and created this:

But since I am not a GIMP wizard and others would most likely do a better job, here is the XCF source, published dual-licensed for your discretion under CC Attribution Share Alike (by-sa) license, and the GNU General Public License (GPL). Feel free to use, study, modify and distribute.

Put it on web pages, use it to link to this blog entry or to http://www.fsfe.org in order to encourage others to also join the Fellowship and contribute to the work of FSFE at the United Nations so we can work to prevent similar manipulations and uncover them when they happen.

Recommended reading: GROKLAW now carries a complete account of the entire history of the Vienna Manipulations, which I wrote up on request by Pamela Jonas. Should be an interesting read, I hope, and also an example lesson in applied politics.

Also, there are two more articles for those who can read German:

• pressetext.at has another article in which Mr Lutz, Prof Bruck, Ralf Bendrath and myself are all quoted with equal space. derStandard.at carries the same article.
• computerwelt.at features a comment by Roland Kissling who complains about the lack of democracy in the Vienna Conclusions process, and the bad light this casts on the Austrian WSIS activities.

Today there is finally a reply of Mr Lutz and Prof Bruck, both saying in unison in a computerworld.at article that there is proof of an email going to the conference participants to inform them about the existance of the blog and that the outcome of the process was democratic. It also quotes Lutz as saying:

"Die Annahme unserer Änderungsvorschläge seitens des Veranstalters unterstreicht gleichzeitig den Wert einer gleichrangigen Darstellung unterschiedlicher Geschäftsmodelle der IKT Industrie" 

("The acceptance of our requests for change by the organiser also underlines the value of displaying different business models of the ICT industry on equal level.")

To know or not to know?

Indeed I received an email by Prof Bruck last night, in which he attached a PDF containing a couple of emails that should disprove the manipulation of the process. It contains the following emails:

• 18 May 2005: Prof Bruck to drafting committee with first draft
• 24 May 2005: Prof Bruck to participants of "Digital Rights/Creative Commons" workshop with organisational information
• 1 July 2005: Prof Bruck to drafting committee, informing about the blog and that people should involve themselves actively in the post-conference discussion.
• 24 August 2005: Prof Bruck to conference participants, informing about the blog url, and inviting for discussion.
• 25 August 2005: (anonymous) to Prof Bruck about problems opening a PDF contained in email of 24 August 2005.
• 19 September 2005: Thomas Biebl to Ralf Bendrath in reply to a mail by Ralf Bendrath asking about outcomes of the Vienna Conference, not having seen anything. Thomas Biebl asks whether Ralf Bendrath knew about the blog.
• 19 September 2005: Ralf Bendrath to Thomas Biebl replying that he knew of nothing.

None of the emails were digitally signed, and they were obviously edited to turn valid email addresses and in one case a name into two-letter acronyms. So it is hard to really discern what happened to the email of 24 August 2005, which is the one that Prof Bruck claims informed all participants of the blog.

As I have the habit of archiving all my incoming and outgoing email and could not find this mail, I can only suspect that the mail never reached me for whatever reason. This fate appears to be shared by the chair of our workshop, Mr Nii N. Quaynor, who confirmed in personal email that he had no idea of any modifications or any process to modify. None of the other participants of my workshop so far replied to my inquires saying that they did know about it.

Choice of tool?

In any case: Relying on a single email in the age of spam, spamfilters and blacklists is arguably a very weak link. Whether this fulfills the criteria of a transparent process is rather questionable.

Furthermore: When Ralf Bendrath was apparently informed about the blog on 19 September 2005, it was still empty with the exception of the two procedural posts of the drafting committee.

What did they expect him to do? Alert us to the emptyness? Go back to the blog every day to check whether someone maybe finally posted something? Is this realistic to expect from hundrets of high-level experts who are regularly having 14hr days, travelling a large part of their year?

Choosing a blog for such a process is indeed a very peculiar decision for someone with experience in digital media: a public mailing list with public archives would seem much more natural. Setting up GNU Mailman on a GNU/Linux system takes significantly less than an hour, comes with a very convenient web interface, and allows all people to participate in the discussion easily and with the most wide-spread, available and efficient tool for asynchronous coordination: email. Indeed, this is what the global Civil Society has been using with great success to coordinate itself and discuss its documents throughout the entire WSIS process.

Editorial process

In any case: none of this changes in any way the fact that when Microsofts comments were made three days before the official closing of the blog, they were not communicated in any way to the participants of the workshop. And even though they were made without argument to back them up and their statements are simple to disassemble for anyone with a little knowledge in the area, they entirely overrode the conclusions of the workshop.

Because unlike what Mr Lutz said in his statement quoted earlier in this posting, this is not about "giving equal mention." The original text very clearly stated that old models and approaches will coexist with the new for the forseeable future. So the change was really only about one thing: not mentioning Free Software at all.

The proposed changes to the final text were then in no way communicated to the blog or the participants of the workshop, the participants of the workshop were indeed not involved in the revision of their text in any way.

But someone else was: Ms Felzmann, CEO of the PR and lobbying company Cox Orange, member of IFPI and austrian parliamentarian got to work her own positive remarks about Digital Restriction Management (DRM) into the final text, as she was also part of the drafting committee.

As the workshop during the conference was highly critical of DRM because of the danger it poses to human rights, in particular the freedom of speech, it decided by consensus to not mention DRM as a promising way forward. We would have been glad to explain the reasons behind this if Ms Felzmann had given us the chance.

By inserting her statement, Ms Felzmann inverted this part of the Vienna Conclusions into the opposite of what they actually were. Again with no opportunity for the workshop participants to react to this change.

Transparent and democratic?

Does such a process qualify as transparent and democratic? Not in my understanding of transparency or democracy. For one, the entire process of how the final document would be reached, including the decision procedures, should have been available before the conference. It should have been put online on the web page for reference, sent by email to all participants before the conference, added as printout to the conference papers and also sent to the participants once more by email after the conference.

If a blog is used for the discussion, participants of the workshops should have received email notification whenever someone posted something related to their workshop. They should also have been given a final chance to comment on the proposed final version of the text.

As it were, all power was with the drafting committee, and it was impossible to know what they were doing or deciding. The committee was entirely intransparent, their discussions and reasons for decisions were not communicated or made available in any other form.

And finally, the committee was not elected.

Decide for yourself whether this is what you consider transparent and democratic. Mr Lutz and Prof Bruck seem to think so, I tend to disagree.

In fact, when taking a look at the infamous blog, there is something else that seems interesting: The posting by Ms Felzmann to promote DRM was made on October 5, 2005, although the procedural notes cleary state "This blog will be closed on 30 September 2005.".

So it seems that however flawed from the onset, the rules defined by the organisation for the process did not matter when it came to adding some DRM promotion.

Background

As the whole story is getting bigger and bigger, here is a wrap-up of links to the different parts that together make up the whole story:

• 16 November 2005: The Vienna Conclusion: Sponsorship+Politics=Influence
• 22 November 2005: The next Vienna Conclusion: So it WAS Microsoft that asked to delete Free Software
• 22 November 2005: And the price for DRM promotion goes to…
• 23 November 2005: Vienna manipulations in the press
• 25 November 2005: More news about the Vienna Manipulations
• 25 November 2005: Microsofts implementation of democracy
• 29 November 2005: Vienna Manipulations update: Microsoft unhappy about reality

It seems that the blatant manipulation of the "Digital Rights and Creative Commons" panel outcome has created quite a storm. Besides those already referenced in earlier blog entries, I found this featured in Linux Weekly News, derStandard.at, de.internet.com, boingboing.net, netzpolitik.org, , Slashdot and some others.

Yesterday, ITworld.com carried a feature by John Blau of the IDG News Service, who apparently interviewed Thomas Lutz, public affairs manager and a member of the management board at Microsoft Austria GmbH. I found

We did nothing behind closed doors. 

the funniest quote. It seems short enough to go on a t-shirt. He apparently also reiterated Microsofts unhappiness with the part of the panel conclusions that read:

Increasingly, revenue is generated not by selling content and digital works, as they can be freely distributed at almost not cost, but by offering services on top of them. The success of the Free Software model is one example. 

Given that all proprietary approaches at bringing about something like the internet (including Microsoft Network) failed miserably, it was freedom and openness that made the internet possible. The internet, in fact, largely runs on Free Software today. Maybe that is why Microsoft considered the internet something that would pass and realised so late that networked functionality would be important for Windows.

That digitalisation in general and the internet in particular made it possible to distribute works at almost no cost is a fact. So is the existance of Creative Commons or the business success of companies like IBM, who are transforming themselves into companies primarily offering services and know-how.

While no official numbers exist, conservative estimations say that IBM alone is making billions of USD based on Free Software. But IBM is only one of many companies, although a very large one. But there are thousands, if not hundrets of thousands small and medium sized companies successfully incorporating Free Software in their business model.

So what their statement really seems to say is: Microsoft is unhappy about reality and prefers denial over adaptation, ignoring a multi-billion dollar industry.

I can’t help but wonder. Does Mr Lutz know that his company apparently just released three Free Software licenses, one of which with distinct copyleft characteristics? Is this a sign of Microsoft Austria having no idea what Microsoft is doing in the United States? Or is this simply saying one thing, and doing another?

But as the summary of the quintessenz e-zine correctly points out: It is normal that a paid spokesperson will make any statement for a company, no matter how nonsensical or stupid. If the railway company paid someone to say that planes would never fly, I am sure they would also say that.

But it would be odd for a 2005 UN transportation conference to remove a statement that "people are increasingly travelling by airplane" from the conclusions of a panel simply because the spokesperson of the largest railway company felt "unhappy" about that statement and insert notions about the need for legislation to prevent air travel.

This, however, is exactly what Prof Peter Bruck did.

So far he has not given reasons for the modification of agreed-upon language that had officially been accepted by parties involved, including the United Nations World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO).

Changing agreed-upon language is highly irregular at the United Nations, and it has (to my knowledge) never happened anywhere else in the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS).

Changing it without giving the original parties a chance to participate in that process is outright scandalous.

Background

As the whole story is getting bigger and bigger, here is a wrap-up of links to the different parts that together make up the whole story:

• 16 November 2005: The Vienna Conclusion: Sponsorship+Politics=Influence
• 22 November 2005: The next Vienna Conclusion: So it WAS Microsoft that asked to delete Free Software
• 22 November 2005: And the price for DRM promotion goes to…
• 23 November 2005: Vienna manipulations in the press
• 25 November 2005: More news about the Vienna Manipulations
• 25 November 2005: Microsofts implementation of democracy

The best overall analysis and description of the situation so far was written by Germanys largest IT news provider, the Heise Verlag. They have the story online in both English and German.

Software developers already know the tendency of Microsoft to have its own implementation of everything — which is generally and on purpose incompatible with the standard to allow Microsoft to force its desktop monopoly into other areas. That is essentially what the workgroup server issue in the European Union antitrust case against Microsoft is about.

That they also have their own implementation of democracy was new to me.

ZDnet UK features an article about the Vienna Manipulation under the title "Microsoft: Linux is anti-commercial". In this article, Thomas Lutz, the manager of public affairs at Microsoft Austria, is quoted saying:

"The Vienna Conclusions document was created through a democratic feedback process as requested by the committee and stated on the committee blog. Each and every participant of the conference was invited to publish contributions, share feedback and offer changes which facilitated discussion and an open exchange of positions," he told ZDNet UK. "All of our change requests were approved by the committee." 

Calling comments to a blog that apparently noone but Microsoft, IFPI and a few other selected individuals (including the committee) knew about "democratic feedback" shows an interesting understanding of democracy.

Saying that all participants were invited to give feedback in this setting vaguely reminds me of Douglas Adams: Why do you complain? You could have protested against earths’ destruction, the documents were publicly available on Alpha Centauri — if you got past the alligator pit in the dark cellar where the light is broken.

If Microsoft was so interested in dialog I wonder why they deliberately avoided talking to me at the conference, avoided participating in the panel the findings of which they had later modified, and (apparently) tried to prevent my speaking at the conference.

And yes. We already knew that the committee approved all the changes Microsoft wanted. That is precisely the problem.

Background

As the whole story is getting bigger and bigger, here is a wrap-up of links to the different parts that together make up the whole story:

• 16 November 2005: The Vienna Conclusion: Sponsorship+Politics=Influence
• 22 November 2005: The next Vienna Conclusion: So it WAS Microsoft that asked to delete Free Software
• 22 November 2005: And the price for DRM promotion goes to…
• 23 November 2005: Vienna manipulations in the press
• 25 November 2005: More news about the Vienna Manipulations

The best overall analysis and description of the situation so far was written by Germanys largest IT news provider, the Heise Verlag. They have the story online in both English and German.

Since their German article was so good, I asked Heise whether they would provide an English version of it, and they did. So you can now read the best analysis to date in English.

Even more interesting: I received email from Mag. Stefan D. Zotti, parliamentarian employee of Carina Felzmann, containing her official statement about the Vienna Conclusions and the process that led to their publication. If she had put them online on her web page, I would have linked to it. But as she did not, I need to summarise in order to comment:

Point 1: "Living Document"

Ms Felzmann emphasises as her first point that the Vienna Conclusions were planned as a "living document" and that Mr Bruck, chairman of the conference, emphasised this multiple times. She also points out her disappointment that the people who disagree with the modifications did not participate in the third phase of editing after the conference.

This finally seems to clarify the way these conclusions were reached: There were apparently a first (pre-conference) and a third (post-conference) drafting phase, with the conference being the second phase.

Point 2: "I don’t get money from Microsoft"

Secondly, Ms Felzmann points out that there is no economic connection between herself and Microsoft, and that her company also has nothing to do with this discussion.

Point 3: "I am no industry servant"

And finally, Ms Felzmann distances herself from the overall impression that she mainly represents industry interests. She emphasises how much she has sought to balance interests in the past and also repeatedly promoted Free Software.

My reply

Point 1: Given the level of transparency of the decision and editing structures of the documents, I can only consider this to be a cynical remark. Yes, Mr Bruck did speak about "living documents" repeatedly during the conference, which was the second phase. Most participants I spoke to would indeed have liked very much to contribute to these discussions in all three phases.

Unfortunately the participants were not informed of the organisational approach and its details during the first, second or third phase.

I remember this so cleary because it was an item of discussion among the conference participants to find out where the text for the conference came from and what would happen with the text after the conference. Noone seemed able to give a clear answer to these questions.

If a dialog was the goal, I still wonder why the people who have shown so much interest in these issues during the first and third phase remained essentially invisible during the conference itself.

Point 2: It is funny that Ms Felzmann would deny so strongly any connection with Microsoft, because I never made that connection in any of my articles. I connected her to IFPI and the music rightsholders it represents, a connection she did not deny, by the way; but I never connected her to Microsoft.

But if someone denies so strongly, that makes you wonder. Joachim Jakobs, FSFEs media coordinator, stumbled upon the "INTERNATIONALER MEDIENKONGRESS ZUM THEMA KINDER UND MEDIEN – AUFWACHSEN IN EINER DIGITALEN MEDIENWELT" ("International Media Congress on Children and Media — Growing up in a digital Media World.") — a congress for which Telekom Austria AG is the main- and Microsoft is the co-sponsor.

Guess who does the "Creative and Press Care"? Right in one: Cox Orange, the company of Ms Carina Felzmann.

If you check out the conference program, you will find Microsoft among the speakers, as well. I could not find any speaker from any of the Free Software in Education projects, however.

Point 3: Given that it was the Austrian people who elected Ms Felzmann, and not the US industry, I am happy to hear Ms Felzmann is still is sensitive enough to deny being a servant of the industry. Her pro-DRM statement speaks somewhat differently, though. And her signature did contain the name of her company, so she did make that connection herself.

Also, there was nothing balanced in her statement on DRM, as it ignored all the human-rights and consumer issues that DRM poses, as well as the threats to freedom of speech, freedom of press and democracy. She also failed to mention that DRM is unlikely to benefit the artists, as the overhead costs for maintenance of a DRM system are often estimated to end up being similar to those for physical distribution models. Ultimately DRM is to the benefit of large multinational rights-holding industries only.

The panel at the conference did touch upon these issues, and thus very deliberately did not recommend DRM as a viable way forward. But as Ms Felzmann wasn’t there, she probably did not know this.

And finally, I am of course very delighted to hear that Ms Felzmann has repeatedly promoted Free Software. Unfortunately her promotion of Free Software does not seem to include using it: The mail containing her statement was sent with "Microsoft Exchange V6.5.7226.0" — and the statement itself was sent as a Microsoft Word attachment.

Too bad she apparently never read Richards article that we all can and should put an end to word attachments because they keep people from switching to Free Software.

Background

As the whole story is getting bigger and bigger, here is a wrap-up of links to the different parts that together make up the whole story:

• 16 November 2005: The Vienna Conclusion: Sponsorship+Politics=Influence
• 22 November 2005: The next Vienna Conclusion: So it WAS Microsoft that asked to delete Free Software
• 22 November 2005: And the price for DRM promotion goes to…
• 23 November 2005: Vienna manipulations in the press

The best overall analysis and description of the situation so far was written by Germanys largest IT news provider, the Heise Verlag. They have the story online in both English and German.