blog

"Tragedy of the anticommons" reading

So, 10 Aug 2008 21:28:02 +0200

Something useful from Slashdot for a change:

The New Yorker has a short article on how restrictive handling of patents (in this case) stifles innovation and social welfare. If you like things more scientific, there's an "experimental investigation of anticommons dilemma", showing what happens when everyone insists on monopolising their little idea.

And there's also a new book down this road that looks interesting: Michael Heller, "The Gridlock Economy".

A word of warning...

Mi, 30 Jul 2008 09:57:23 +0200

...which probably comes too late for most or all of you. This is pretty much how it happened to me.

Summary of copyright goings-on

Fr, 25 Jul 2008 14:08:15 +0200

Over at netzpolitik.org, Markus Beckedahl has done something very helpful: He has summarised current activity around copyright law in Europe and Germany, in a single blog post (in German, as usual).

Even though I obviously follow these topics, I find it hard to keep up to speed with everything that's going on. So thanks Markus!

How about making this a monthly activity? ;-)

EC has a copyright day: term extension, Green Paper

Mi, 16 Jul 2008 18:51:16 +0200

Just before heading off into their summer vacations, the European Commission has decided [press release] to extend the copyright term for sound recordings, from 50 to 95 years.

This significantly lengthens the period during which new creators will be taxed by rightsholders. The EC says this will benefit elderly session musicians who would otherwise now start losing royalties for recordings made in their 20s, and denies that the extension does anything to gold-plate Keith Richards' swimming pool.

The Register mentions a "use it or lose it" termination clause without going into specifics. I haven't seen this discussed anywhere else so far.

The EC's other decision today was to adopt a "Green Paper" [what's this?] on copyright in the knowledge economy. This is supposed to be the start of "a structured debate on the long-term future of copyright policy", and supposedly

The Green Paper is an attempt to organise this debate and point 
to future challenges in fields that have not been a focal point
 up to now, e.g. scientific and scholarly publishing, and the role
 of libraries, researchers and the persons with a disability.

While this doesn't sound so bad, right below the text is a link to a speech that Commissioner McCreevy gave at a BSA-sponsored conference on Digital Restrictions Management (DRM), which contains choice paragraphs like:

So today we are here to talk about how we in the Commission can 
assist the ICT sector in putting the innovation that is at the 
heart of DRM technologies to use - so that other parts of the IP 
community can deliver protected content securely to consumers.

I hope he's just flogging a dead horse. But this doesn't bode well for the broadened focus of the Green Paper debate.

Hell freezes over as WSJ says patents stifle innovation

Mi, 16 Jul 2008 11:16:32 +0200

After Nobel prize winners Joseph Stiglitz and John Sulston last week, now the Wall Street Journal carries an article about the problem that the patent system has become. It's US-focused, but it pretty neatly outlines how the debate on a mild patent reform there sets the pharmaceutical industry against technology companies:

Yet the fault line over patent reform signals the
deeper problems. Many pharmaceutical companies lobbied against the
proposals, fearful of reduced value in their key intellectual property.
In contrast, most technology firms supported the reforms, worried more
about uncertainty in the law than about the value of their patents.

Both sides may be right. New empirical research by
Boston University law professors James Bessen and Michael Meurer,
reported in their book, "Patent Failure," found that the value of
pharmaceutical patents outweighed the costs of pharmaceutical-patent
litigation. But for all other industries combined, they estimate that
since the mid-1990s, the cost of U.S. patent litigation to alleged
infringers ($12 billion in legal and business costs in 1999) is greater
than the global profits that companies earn from patents (less than $4
billion in 1999). Since the 1980s, patent litigation has tripled and
the probability that a particular patent is litigated within four years
has more than doubled. Small inventors feel the brunt of the
uncertainty costs, since bigger companies only pay for rights they
think the system will protect.

Link

Better living with mutt

Mi, 02 Jul 2008 13:12:37 +0200

During a chat about the pros and cons of gmail, a colleague told me that he especially likes how gmail inserts your sent messages into the same thread as the one you're replying to.

The idea that a webmailer should be more useable than my beloved mutt simply didn't fit my view of the world. I'm allergic to webmail.

A bit of web search soon brought me this nugget for insertion into my .muttrc:

set record = "^"

Got it from here, and it works like a charm. You'll need mutt version > 1.5.10 or the current_folders patch.

I'm probably the last person on earth to find out about this.

Bye bye, "sent" folder.

Data Loss Weekly, Germany

Mo, 23 Jun 2008 13:39:54 +0200

Germany has always prided itself on being a nation of engineers. So it's not surprising that unlike the British, who prefer to leave their confidential data on trains or lose it in the post, Germans opt for the technologically more advanced solution of making it available online to all comers (DE):

Bei Einwohnermeldeämtern in Deutschland ist es nach einem Bericht des ARD-Magazins "Report München"
zu einer schweren Panne gekommen: Den Recherchen zufolge waren die
Daten von Bürgern aus rund 200 Städten und Gemeinden über Jahre hinweg
frei im Internet zugänglich.

Die verantwortliche Softwarefirma habe die Zugangscodes auf ihrer eigenen Homepage veröffentlicht,
berichtete das Magazin vorab. Die Passwörter seien erst am vergangenen
Freitag geändert worden.<<>>>

Markus has proposed publishing a magazine called "Data Loss Quarterly", and is looking for contributors.

Why did you castrate xserver-xorg?!

Mo, 23 Jun 2008 10:04:49 +0200

Though it's Monday morning and I have lots of work on my desk, I'm looking back at a very frustrating weekend.

I decided to do reinstall my desktop machine, moving it from Debian Etch to Ubuntu Hardy. My laptop is running Ubuntu, and administering one system is hassle enough for me.

The initial install went without a hitch. After the obligatory reboot, the login screen came up, and I saw that the resolution was too low - 800x600 instead of the 1280x1024.

Well, that's a familiar issue - X has a hard job to do, and isn't particularly good at autodetecting everything. Still surprising, since both graphics card and monitor are fairly garden-variety stuff: An Nvidia GeForce 6100, and a Samsung SyncMaster 710n.

So what does one do in this case? Right:

$ sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg

That used to be the height of technical complexity for me, short of editing /etc/xorg.conf, where the syntax is slightly less user-friendly than that of procmail (quite a feat, if you ask me).

But on my new hardy system, this command only let me configure the keyboard, which was working fine, thank you very much. The options for configuring video had disappeared.

Hours of web search, driver installation, configuration etc. followed. I wouldn't have minded spending a sunny Sunday with my family instead.

So I found this thread on launchpad, which was already running from here to Beijing with people complaining about the newly powerless xserver-xorg.

Turns out that at Canonical, they've taken away the most common text-based way of making your video card run, and replaced it with a half-baked GTK application called displayconfig-gtk. This app reminds me of the people who deal with complaints at the German railways company: it looks friendly, but does absolutely nothing useful.

There's also a small problem here for people who are even less lucky than me. If you can't start your graphical environment, a GTK application is not much use.

Another tool is xrandr, which I can't find any information about other than that it's fairly beta. This seems to be the program that is supposed to do the autoconfiguration, but doesn't do it right.

The Ubuntu Xorg maintainer responded quickly:

displayconfig-gtk is a user interactive method for configuring
xorg.conf. Like dpkg-reconfigure it also often produces invalid
configurations. We recommend using the autoconfiguration approach, and
if that does not work for some reason, please report it as a bug. This
way we can roll out a true fix for everyone.

<rant>

Dear Ubuntu folks, so far you've done an excellent job at giving us a GNU/Linux distro that was both newbie-friendly and highly configurable. So what have you been drinking that gave you the idea of taking away a tool that worked fairly ok, and replacing it with several that don't work at all?

And how is it a sensible idea to tell people who complain that autoconfiguration doesn't work for them to please use the autoconfiguration method?

</rant>

Your answers in the comments, please. Thanks.

Creative Commons licence upheld in Bulgarian court

Mi, 04 Jun 2008 19:27:20 +0200

Veni Markovski tells us that a Bulgarian court has ruled that the terms of a Creative Commons licence are valid and must be obeyed when distributing the work in question.

The Bulgarian blogger Elenko Elenkov filed a lawsuit against the newspaper "24 hours" for having used one of his photos, licenced under the CreativeCommons BY-SA, in one of their edition on 20 September 2007 on the cover page and on page 3. The picture did not mention the author or the licence used, but rather attributed the photo on page 3 to "The Internet".

Ouch.

via EDRI-gram

Interview über Interview-Rechtsprechung

Di, 03 Jun 2008 13:30:23 +0200

Telepolis hat ein Interview mit Andreas Buske geführt. Der fällt am Landgericht Hamburg beeindruckend weltfremde Urteile zum Persönlichkeitsrecht in den Medien, insbesondere im Internet.

Und er gibt keine Interviews.

 In diesem Fall distanziere ich mich von diesem Interview und 
bestreite, es jemals geführt zu haben.

Buske:
 Das bestreite ich ebenfalls. Ich bezweifle allerdings, dass Ihre 
Distanzierung unseren Kriterien genügt.

 Danke, dass Sie nicht mit uns gesprochen haben.

Buske:
 Gerne, jederzeit wieder nicht!

Schon beeindruckend, wohin sich die deutsche Rechtsprechung in den letzten Jahren so bewegt hat.

[via netzpolitik.org]

ACTA: the next front in the A2K fight?

Fr, 16 Mai 2008 17:19:36 +0200

For the moment, WIPO is busy with its new Director General (Francis Gurry just got elected to the post), and the Development Agenda process has forced the advocates of strict copyright to at least re-shuffle their cards for a moment.

But another front is opening up elsewhere. There's an agreement that's being prepared for negotiation. Under the name of ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement), rich country governments in cahoots with some business lobbies are trying out yet another way to impose their agenda on the rest of us.

In Knowledge Ecology Studies, Aaron Shaw has recently published an excellent write-up explaining why this is a problem. According to him, it wouldn't just mean that overly strict rules for copyright and patents are foisted upon people that don't need them. It would also set a very bad precedent for global governance:

So why is ACTA such a big deal? If signed, the agreement would constitute a diplomatic putsch by a handful of wealthy states and corporations against the rest of the world. Already, it signals an overt and troubling rejection of multilateralism. The so-called “plurilateral” approach represents an outdated model of international treaty-making whereby the unelected representatives of Northern states and a few corporate lobbyists dictate the rules of global markets. Such arrangements were commonplace during the 1990s under the neo-liberal “Washington Consensus” and prior to the Doha Round of negotiations in the WTO. Today, however, this kind of blatant disregard for global consensus and the needs of developing regions poses a threat to the world's prosperity, security and health.

So keep your eyes peeled. And go do something about it.

German "online search" engine

Di, 11 Sep 2007 12:13:20 +0200

In Germany, a discussion is raging on whether the police should be allowed to search a suspect's computer by hacking into it (rather than by confiscating it and reading out the hard drive).

Interior Minister Wolfgang Schäuble is the chief advocate of this. The youth organisation of the Social Democrats -- a party that shares the government with Schäuble's Conservatives and isn't necessarily opposed to the measure -- has developed its own vision of what such a tool might look like.

Research paper on WIPO Broadcasting Treaty

Do, 28 Jun 2007 17:20:55 +0200

The talks about a broadcasting treaty at WIPO have collapsed for now. But I bet this wasn't the last time we've heard of it.

The South Centre has just published a research paper (.pdf, 350 kB), looking at the broadcasting treaty from the perspective of developing countries. Here’s what it says in a nutshell:

The research paper concludes that there is a lack of evidence indicating that the array of additional rights and protection for broadcasting and cablecasting organizations, as incorporated in the text of a Revised Draft Basic Proposal for a WIPO Treaty on the Protection of Broadcasting Organizations, are either necessary or desirable from a developing country perspective. On the other hand, evidence suggests that the proposed treaty in its current form would create more costs thanbenefits in the short- and long-term for developing countries and is not conducive to social and economic development.

You might think that it’s tough luck for the authors, Viviana Munoz of the South Centre's Innovation and Access to Knowledge (IAKP) Programme and Andrew Chegue Waitara, a researcher at the Plato Institute in Nairobi: Now that the paper is out, the talks have collapsed.

But I wouldn’t be so sure. Firstly, the South Centre’s research papers are usually very insightful and substantial, so I suppose this one will go on to influence a lot of discussions.

And secondly, the phrase is floating around that the Broadcast Treaty now is “a problem waiting for a place to happen”. The treaty’s backers will take their worries to other fora, or try to strike bilateral deals. If keeping bad regulation out of one treaty is bad, try keeping it out of some fifty to hundred bilateral agreements.

My advice is to grab the paper now, give it a read, and save it for another day, when the Broadcast Zombie will start roaming the lands again.

Finally: WIPO has a Development Agenda

Fr, 22 Jun 2007 19:00:55 +0200

Last week brought truly good news. After two years of negotiations, it looks like the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) may finally turn into an organisation that works for the interest of society at large, rather than just those of a small group of major holders of intellectual monopolies.

Last week’s meeting of the “Provisional Committee on a Development Agenda” (PCDA) resulted in a total of 45 recommendations (derived from 111 proposals).

WIPO's General Assembly still has to approve the recommendations in September.

While this is not quite cherry pie and whipped cream for all, it's a little step in a new direction. It gives me hope that there may be a day when WIPO no longer, as Cory Doctorow says,

has the same relation to bad copyright that Mordor has to evil.

A large coalition of civil society groups got together for this debate under the banner of Access to Knowledge (A2K). Thanks are due to all of them, here are links to just a few. FSFE was involved from the beginning, and I'm proud of having contributed something to this process. FSFE's participation was only possible thanks to support from the community. It's always difficult to find the money to attend WIPO meetings; Geneva is expensive. Thank you all!

Sangeeta Shashikant from the Third World Network has posted a first analysis of the outcome. Developing countries didn't get all they hoped for, and had to abandon some of their core proposals. On the other hand, two years ago nobody thought that this was actually possible.

IPWatch says:

Negotiators concluded a weeklong meeting with agreements on a wide range of proposals for new development-related activities - some hard to imagine for WIPO two years ago - and a recommendation to set up a new committee to implement the proposals.

“This is a major achievement,” said a participating official. “It’s a complete overhaul of the WIPO concept, broadening it to reflect society’s growing concern with ownership of technologies and knowledge, and its effects for the future, both in developed and developing countries.”

Recommendations cut across al areas of WIPO, from its work in “technical assistance” (advice to developing countries on building systems for the enforcement of intellectual monopolies) to WIPO’s own mandate and governance. The recommendations about the organisation’s mandate could prove crucial. The PCDA recommends that WIPO should coordinate its work more closely with other UN organisations, something that more conservative members were reluctant to do. After all, a discussion about copyright exceptions for educational materials might turn out slightly different when UNESCO is involved.

Another recommendation is ” To request WIPO, within its mandate, to expand the scope of its activities aimed at bridging the digital divide, in accordance with the outcomes of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), also taking into account the significance of the Digital Solidarity Fund (DSF).” This may help to introduce more progressive views on the digital world into WIPO, and would have been unthinkable two years ago

The recommendations still need to be adopted by WIPO’s General Assembly in September. I’m curious to see how this goes - the whole process was a heated battle, and progressive texts have a tendency of disappearing at WIPO. But if these recommendations are adopted, WIPO will be on a path that’s much more helpful not only for developing countries, but for everybody on this planet who isn’t a major record label, movie studio or pharmaceutical giant. The latter three may suffer if they cling to their outdated business models, but don’t worry about them just yet. They’ll retain more than enough political influence.

The United States, which had been the staunchest opponents of a Development Agenda for WIPO during the negotiation process, emphasised that the decisions taken were within WIPO’s mandate. In what looks like an attempt to establish a give-and-take, they also sought to link the results to renewed work on harmonising national patent laws across the globe. This has long been a pet goal of the US, but developing countries are sceptical, as they think they are unlikely to benefit.

Extensive reporting on last week’s negotiations and the Development Agenda in general can be found at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (in English), at FGV law school (in Brazilian Portuguese), and at Knowledge Ecology International (in English). They were some of the numerous civil society groups that put a huge amount of work into making this happen.

Anti-climax at WIPO: Broadcasting treaty not quite dead

Fr, 22 Jun 2007 18:29:02 +0200

It's been a harrowing day, and I'm not even near Geneva, where the negotiations on a WIPO broadcasting treaty went through some ups and downs today. After yesterday's session, it looked as if the treaty would be gone for good, as numerous delegations had piled in to make new demands just before closing time.

Today, on the last day of the relevant committee's session, the chairman (who's been on the job for decades, apparently) came back with the recommendation - to the sound of jaws dropping - to convene a diplomatic conference next year. A conference means that the treaty is basically a done deal.

In today's afternoon session, negotiators finally reached an anti-climax, which is quite typical for WIPO. The treaty will stay on the committee's agenda, but that's it for now:

The General Assembly decides that the subject of protection of broadcasting and cablecasting organizations be retained in the agenda of the SCCR for its regular sessions, and considers the convening of a diplomaticconference only after agreement on object and scope of the treaty [...].

Thanks to KEI's Manon Ress for quickly posting the decisions. They'll take weeks to appear on the WIPO website; so much for transparency.