Boingboing gave us an incredible collection of posts last week and there follows some links to these ...
Our first is to The Cost of Knowledge - a website protesting against the publisher Elsevier's restrictive policies on access to academic scientific knowledge. I cannot freely access anything published in Elsevier's scientific journals but am forced to pay an arm and a leg for the knowledge contained therein.
The Cost of Knowledge declares
1. They charge exorbitantly high prices for subscriptions to individual journals.
2. In the light of these high prices, the only realistic option for many libraries is to agree to
buy very large "bundles", which will include many journals that those libraries do not actually want.
Elsevier thus makes huge profits by exploiting the fact that some of their journals are essential.
3. They support measures such as SOPA, PIPA and the Research Works
Act, that aim to restrict the free exchange of information.
...and has an online petition asking you to boycott Elsevier.
The Cost of Knowledge also pointed me to Polymath - "a collection of links to information, opinion, activism, and other
issues concerning the practices of research journal publishers".
Which then pointed me to this campaign against the US Research Works Act ... "A recently introduced bill, H.R. 3699, the
Research Works Act, would seriously threaten public access to federally
funded research.
The bill would not only restrict internet
access to articles published in scholarly journals and books; it would
also severely hamper Creative Commons content.
Why is Open Access
so important? Internet access to federally funded research allows
people with medical conditions to stay informed about new studies and
innovations.
Access also helps professionals, including doctors,
to continue their educations by keeping up to date on the research
literature in their fields.
In developing nations, Open Access
is especially important, as institutions often don't have the funding to
provide health care professionals with scholarly literature through
other means."
In this post on boingboing Cory Doctorow writes everything I have thought about the SOPA and PIPA legislation currently before the US Congress. I quote in full ...
"On January 18, Boing Boing will join
Reddit and other sites around the Internet in "going dark" to
oppose SOPA and PIPA, the
pending US legislation that creates a punishing Internet censorship
regime and exports it to the rest of the world. Boing Boing could
never co-exist with a SOPA world: we could not ever link to another
website unless we were sure that no links to anything that infringes
copyright appeared on that site. So in order to link to a URL on
LiveJournal or WordPress or Twitter or Blogspot, we'd have to first
confirm that no one had ever made an infringing link, anywhere on that
site. Making one link would require checking millions (even tens of
millions) of pages, just to be sure that we weren't in some way
impinging on the ability of five Hollywood studios, four multinational
record labels, and six global publishers to maximize their profits.
If we failed to take this precaution, our finances could be frozen,
our ad broker forced to pull ads from our site, and depending on which version of the bill goes to the vote, our domains
confiscated, and, because our server is in Canada, our IP address
would be added to a US-wide blacklist that every ISP in the country
would be required to censor.
This is the part of the post where I'm supposed to say something
reasonable like, "Everyone agrees that piracy is wrong, but this is
the wrong way to fight it."
But you know what? Screw that.
Even though a substantial portion of my living comes from the
entertainment industry, I don't think that any amount of
"piracy" justifies this kind of depraved indifference to the
consequences of one's actions. Big Content haven't just declared war
on Boing Boing and Reddit and the rest of the "fun" Internet: they've
declared war on every person who uses the net to publicize police
brutality, every oppressed person in the Arab Spring who used
the net to organize protests and publicize the blood spilled by their
oppressors, every abused
kid who used the net to reveal her father as a brutalizer of
children, every gay kid who used the net to discover that life
is worth living despite the torment she's experiencing, every grassroots political
campaigner who uses the net to make her community a better place
-- as well as the scientists who collaborate online, the rescue
workers who coordinate online, the makers who trade tips online, the
people with rare diseases who support each other online, and the
independent creators who use the Internet to earn their livings.
The contempt for human rights on display with SOPA and PIPA is more
than foolish. Foolishness can be excused. It's more than greed. Greed
is only to be expected. It is evil, and it must be fought.
SOPA Strike is compiling a list of
sites that are also going dark for Jan 18. If you want an Internet where
human rights, free speech and the rule of law are not subordinated to
the entertainment industry's profits, I hope you'll join us on it.
Thank you."
We have also opted to "go dark" tomorrow (if the code on the SOPA Strike site works).
Sure,
we are most happy to answer questions about the addons, and tech people
can check them out for themselves as well as it's open source.
>
The immediate impact of this is that I cannot select a country-specific
proxy, for example a UK proxy allowing me to view BBC programming via
the BBC iPlayer
No you cannot, and for good
reason. It would make it easier for particular countries to stomp down
on proxies, this way they dont even know if their countries proxies will
be used for sure.
UK proxies are anyway avoided because we want to
make sure everyone can get to sites like Newsbin if they need to, which
is supposed to be banned in the near future.
We do not use French proxies for the same reason.
>
A repressive regime, China or Syria or Israel, can set up a proxy server (or many) and MAFIAA Fire selects it randomly
It is possible, but unlikely.
The
reason it's unlikely is we will "cycle" the proxies, so even if one of
their proxies end up on our list, it wont be there long because on the
next cycle a new bunch of proxies end up on the list and the old are
out.
We randomly chose our proxies from many places of
the internet (which we don't disclose where), the chance that the
Chinese setup a proxy, put it in the right place for us to find it, it
passes all our tests and beats out the other 1000s of free proxies to
come on our list are pretty tiny.
But yes, it is possible just as given enough time a monkey sitting
at a typewriter can accidently type out one of Shakespeare's entire
plays.
>
is MAFFIA Fire selecting its proxies randomly Or is it filtering which
countries, ISPs etc are legitimate for hosting proxies - in which case
which countries and which ISPs?
Yes, we do pick proxies randomly and yes we do filter proxies depending on which country they are hosted.
France, Denmark, Italy, UK and a few others cannot come on our list. If SOPA passes the US proxies will also be excluded.
Basically, the countries that offer proxies to the full, uncensored internet end up on our list.
Lots has been happening on Internet access and censorship in the last few months.
Western/Northern governments have been praising the attributes of social networking sites, such as Twitter and Facebook, in the last few months as northern African and Middle Eastern goovernments topple and fall.
These very governments tacitly support the efforts of organisations and activist groups, such as the Electronic Freedom Foundation (EFF), Anonymous etc in their work to set up proxy networks which allow users in "non-democratic regimes" to read Western/Northern "propaganda" websites.
The efforts of EFF through its promotion of Tor, Privoxy etc have been admirable in the extreme. The latest offering is MAFIAA Fire which allows you to connect to any Internet site anonymously and automatically via proxies. It avoids the configuration difficulties of the Tor/Privoxy solution but has the disadvantage that you cannot choose your proxy. The immediate impact of this is that I cannot select a country-specific proxy, for example a UK proxy allowing me to view BBC programming via the BBC iPlayer (see previous posts) ... but I see problems here. A repressive regime, China or Syria or Israel, can set up a proxy server (or many) and MAFIAA Fire selects it randomly ... is MAFFIA Fire selecting its proxies randomly Or is it filtering which countries, ISPs etc are legitimate for hosting proxies - in which case which countries and which ISPs?
The very same networking sites are being used by activists in the cities of the Americas and Europe in the current Occupy Wall Street protests, in the UK to avoid police kettling strategies (Sukey), by international relief organisations in natural disasters (Ushahidi).
As the police and other other security agencies across the world, from Western/Northern governments to those "repressive" regimes the former express the wish to do away with the latter, all are increasingly dependent on gathering intelligence from social networks as their own "secure" communications networks are failing ... we learn that the UK police network's whistle-and-bells new VHF radio system failed dismally during the recent disturbances and individual police officers had to use their personal mobile phones ,,,
"Among the failings highlighted by the [Police] federation, which represents 136,000 officers, were chronic problems, particularly in London with the hi-tech digital Airwave radio network. Its failings were one reason why officers were "always approximately half an hour behind the rioters". This partly explained, it said, why officers kept arriving at areas from where the disorder had moved on.
The Airwave network was supposed to improve the way emergency services in London responded to a crisis after damning criticism for communication failures following the 7 July bombings in 2005.
It is being relied upon to ensure that police officers will be able to communicate with each other from anywhere in Britain when the Olympics come to London next summer. The federation wants a review into why the multibillion-pound system collapsed, leaving officers to rely on their own phones.
"Officers on the ground and in command resorted, in the majority, to the use of personal mobile phones to co-ordinate a response," says the report.
Ironic that during the July 2005 London Underground terrorist attacks large sections of the London mobile telephone network were shut down.
As Alex saays "And it's the UK, for fuck's sake. We do radio." http://yorkshire-ranter.blogspot.com/2011/12/can-you-hear-me-now.html
At the same the Western/Northern governments want to curb internet freedom, under entertainment (film, music, sex etc) industry (RIAA and MPAA to name just two of hundreds) pressure.
So the Western/Northern governments seem to be in a Catch 22 and cannot resolve it.
The latest is this ...
"The New America Foundation's Open Network Technology Initiative, a US State Department-funded project to build an "Internet in a suitcase" that can be dropped into repressive zones where protesters need network access and the state is trying to take it away. The project -- a very complex piece of technology -- has gotten to the point where it needs a live test, and lucky for the Open Technology engineers, Occupy DC is just down the street, and that's a great testbed.
The idea is that the system will automatically set itself up. Drop a unit near another unit and they’ll start talking to one another and trading data. Add another and all three will talk to one another. Add a thousand and you can cover a whole city. Then if one of those routers is hooked up to an internet connection, everyone on the network can connect. If that connection disappears, users can still try to update an application like Twitter or send e-mail to the larger internet and the outgoing notes will go into a holding pattern until the mesh network finds another connection to the greater net.
That’s harder to pull off in practice, even under ideal conditions — as anyone who’s tried to link even two Wi-Fi access points in their own home could attest. Now throw in the variables that the access points should work in urban and exposed environments, as well as protest zones like Tahir Square. You’ll want to protect dissidents with encryption and deniability. And you don’t want your beta-testers to be arrested or even killed because of a software bug. All together it’s the kind of challenge engineers like to call “non-trivial”.
“Finding a place to use the system is difficult,” Meinrath said. “Thank God for the Occupy movement.”
So the USG is using its democratically legitimate Occupy Wall St movement which it diametrically opposes to testdrive cyberweapons it can use against countries/regimes it opposes? And if I am in Egypt, Syria, China, I can then bittorrent download what the fuck I like ...
... but hang on wasn't the US just getting heavy with China about "intellectual piracy"?
Social Communication and Social Networks, in Egypt, Libya, Syria, China, any regime about to be overthrown by disgruntled populations, and which the"West" disapproves of, are cool ... although the Wests' favourite IT corporates (Microsoft, Cisco, Google. Yahoo etc etc ... yawn) seem to have little regard for their own governments' stated policies, but much for the unstated ones.
Social Communication and Social Networks. What the hell do these expressions mean? Since language developed, and even before, we have communicated socially.
Even insects socially communicate. Every morning I watch ants going up and down a house column - the ones going up "kiss" the ones going down (or vice versa) communicating the way forward or back, up or down. There is a social network.
Humans have always talked to each other. Along came the written word, newspapers ... and this all incited unrest. Putting a broadsheet on a 18th century wall in Britain is the same as a broadsheet on a wall during the Cultural Revolution in China,
Telecommunications came along so social communications were faster (not further - I could always talk to my aunty in Australia by snail-mail). Telephones, telegraph, telex etc etc. And then came computers, modems, computers talking to computers, wifi and mini-computers (i,e. mobile phones) talking to each other.
Or rather - humans talking to each other.
Through human-inventions - writing. the printing press, the broadsheet, the newspaper, the telegraph, the radio, the telephone, the television, the computer, the modem, data networks, the Internet, mobile phones, VoIP, Facebook, Twitter, and BBM.
humans talking to each other.
humans talking to each other
Earlier in the year I wrote about the "social communication" application Sukey that aims to alert people via their mobiles to police "kettling" strategies whereby the police encircle an entire geographical area where a demonstration is taking place and prohibit all movement directly connected to the demonstration. Or not! The result you cannot leave your office, your place of employment and go home, you cannot visit Macdonalds, you cannot visit a public toilet to take a piss or have a shit.
A subsequent high court judgement condemned the kettling strategy. As a result the police have supposedly abandoned it ... but with social communication networks, applications such as Sukey, the protesters, are one up on the establishment.
But the recent civil disturbances, "riots", in the UK seem to have provoked a counter-reaction from the establishment to the power of the new technologies.
Two men, youths, young adults, have been imprisoned for for years for inciting disturbances via Facebook on their mobiles. They did not manage to incite a disturbance and they did not participate in a disturbance.
"A number of people have appeared in court in recent weeks for organising or attempting to organise disorder on social Perry Sutcliffe-Keenan and Jordan Blackshaw were jailed for four years for incitement on Facebook
Jordan Blackshaw, 21, from Marston, Cheshire, and Perry Sutcliffe-Keenan, 22, from Warrington, Cheshire, were jailed for four years for online incitement.
Blackshaw had created a Facebook event entitled "Smash Down Northwich Town" while Sutcliffe-Keenan set up a Facebook page called "Let's Have a Riot in Latchford". Both have said they will appeal.
Meanwhile, 21-year-old David Glyn Jones, from Bangor, north Wales, was jailed for four months after telling friends "Let's start Bangor riots" in a post that appeared on Facebook for 20 minutes.
And Johnny Melfah, 16, from Droitwich, Worcestershire, became the first juvenile to have his anonymity lifted in a riot-related case for inciting thefts and criminal damage on the site. He will be sentenced next month. Plotting violence
In the aftermath of the riots, which spread across England's towns and cities two weeks ago, Mr Cameron said the government might look at disconnecting some online and telecommunications services if similar circumstances arose in the future.
"We are working with the police, the intelligence services and industry to look at whether it would be right to stop people communicating via these websites and services when we know they are plotting violence, disorder and criminality," he told MPs during an emergency session of Parliament.
Tim Godwin, the Met police's acting commissioner, also said last week that he considered requesting authority to switch off Twitter during the riots.
However, he conceded that the legality of such a move was "very questionable" and that the service was a valuable intelligence asset.
Meanwhile, Guardian analysis of more than 2.5 million riot-related tweets, sent between 6 August and 17 August, appears to show Twitter was mainly used to react to riots and looting, including organising the street clean-up.
The newspaper found the timing of the messages posted "questioned the assumption" that Twitter was used to incite the violence in advance of it breaking out in Tottenham on 6 August.
Currently, communications networks that operate in the UK can be compelled to hand over individuals' personal messages if police are able to show that they relate to criminal behaviour.
The rules gathering such queries are outlined in the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA)."
The heavy sentences look like Establishment and Government kickback to anti-kettling,
So then we had the government putting the heavies on the social communications networks both in public and parliamentary forums:
"The government and police have not sought any new powers to shut social networks, the Home Office said after a meeting with industry representatives.
Instead they held "constructive" talks aimed at preventing violence being plotted online through existing co-operation, the Home Office said.
The meeting with representatives from Twitter, Facebook and Blackberry was held in the wake of English city riots.
The prime minister has said police may need extra powers to curb their use.
Networks such as Blackberry Messenger - a service which allows free-of-charge real-time messages - were said to have enabled looters to organise their movements during the riots, as well as inciting violence in some cases.
Criminal behaviour
Following Thursday's meeting, a Home Office spokeswoman said: "The home secretary, along with the Culture Secretary and Foreign Office Minister Jeremy Browne, has held a constructive meeting with Acpo (the Association of Chief Police Officers), the police and representatives from the social media industry.
"The discussions looked at how law enforcement and the networks can build on the existing relationships and co-operation to prevent the networks being used for criminal behaviour.
Nick Clegg: ''We are not going to become like Iran or China. We are not going to suddenly start cutting people off''(OH NO ?)
"The government did not seek any additional powers to close down social media networks."
Dispelling rumours
Prime Minister David Cameron has also said the government would look at limiting access to such services during any future disorder.
A Twitter spokeswoman said after the meeting that it was "always interested in exploring how we can make Twitter even more helpful and relevant during times of critical need".
She added: "We've heard from many that Twitter is an effective way to distribute crucial updates and dispel rumours in times of crisis or emergency."
A Facebook spokesperson said: "We welcome the fact that this was a dialogue about working together to keep people safe rather than about imposing new restrictions on internet services."
The company said it had highlighted the role Facebook played during the riots, such as people staying in contact and organising the clean-up.
"There is no place for illegal activity on Facebook and we take firm action against those who breach our rules."
A spokesman for Blackberry maker Research In Motion said the meeting was "positive and productive".
The company said: "We were pleased to consult on the use of social media to engage and communicate during times of emergency. RIM continues to maintain an open and positive dialogue with the UK authorities and continues to operate within the context of UK regulations."
But it seems the governnment had preempted the "social networks":
MI5 joins social messaging trawl for riot organisers
Intelligence agency asked to crack encrypted messages – especially on BlackBerry Messenger – to help police
AA looted O2 mobile phone store in Tottenham Hale. MI5 has joined the hunt for riot organisers A looted O2 mobile phone store in Tottenham Hale. MI5 has joined the hunt for riot organisers who used smartphone messaging. Photograph: Ray Tang/Rex Features
The security service MI5 and the electronic interception centre GCHQ have been asked by the government to join the hunt for people who organised last week's riots, the Guardian has learned.
The agencies, the bulk of whose work normally involves catching terrorists inspired by al-Qaida, are helping the effort to catch people who used social messaging, especially BlackBerry Messenger (BBM), to mobilise looters.
A key difficulty for law enforcers last week was cracking the high level of encryption on the BBM system. BBM is a pin-protected instant message system that is only accessible to BlackBerry users.
MI5 and GCHQ will also help the effort to try to get ahead of any further organisation of disturbances. The move represents a change as officially MI5 is tasked with ensuring the national security of the United Kingdom from terrorist threats, weapons of mass destruction, and espionage, with the police taking the lead on maintaining public order.
However, they have a statutory right to target criminals or those suspected of being involved in crime, officials have said.
Police struggled to access the BBM network last week, though some who were sent messages planning violence were so outraged they passed them on to law enforcement agencies.
GCHQ's computers and listening devices can pick up audio messages and BBM communications. MI5 and the police can identify the owners with the help of mobile companies and internet service providers. The agencies can intercept electronic and phone messages, identify where they have been sent from and their destination. That allows other investigations to take place and other efforts to develop intelligence.
One source said: "The hope is this will boost the intelligence available. It always useful to get some boffins in."
In his speech on Monday David Cameron made no mention of his threatened clampdown on social media. Last week in the House of Commons emergency debate, he said: "There was an awful lot of hoaxes and false trails made on Twitter and BlackBerry Messenger and the rest of it. We need a major piece of work to make sure that the police have all the technological capabilities they need to hunt down and beat the criminals." One of MI5's functions under the 1989 Security Service Act is to support "the activities of police forces … and other law enforcement agencies in the prevention and detection of serious crime".
MI5 intercepts communications though officially can only do so with warrants signed by ministers. It seeks technical help from GCHQ.
GCHQ's functions, according to the 1994 Intelligence Services Act, include "to monitor or interfere with electromagnetic, acoustic and other emissions and any equipment producing such emissions and to obtain and provide information derived from or related to such emissions or equipment … "
It can do so "in support of the prevention or detection of serious crime".
On its website, MI5 stresses such a distinction: "For the most part the activities of domestic extremists pose a threat to public order, but not to national security. They are generally investigated by the police, not the Security Service."
For law enforcement, the difficulty with BBM is that it boasts semi-private – and instant – access to a network of like-minded users.
BlackBerry handsets are the smartphone of choice for the 37% of British teenagers, according to Ofcom. BBM allows users to send the same message to a network of contacts connected by "BBM pins". For many teenagers, BBM has replaced text messaging because it is free and instant.
Unlike Twitter or Facebook, many BBM messages are untraceable by the authorities. And unlike Facebook, friends are connected either by individual pin numbers or a registered email address. In short, BlackBerry Messenger is more secure than almost all other social networks.
So-called "broadcasts" can be sent to hundreds of disparate users within minutes, away from the attention of law enforcement agencies.
In the 12 years since it released the first BlackBerry, Research in Motion (RIM) has built a formidable reputation for the impenetrable security of its smartphones. RIM has always struggled to explain to the authorities that, unlike most other companies, it technically cannot access or read the majority of the messages sent by users over its network.
One of the biggest problems for law enforcement in the digital age is the inability to get real-time access to messages sent by potential criminals.
In England, RIM has said it will actively cooperate with law enforcement as they investigate those behind the unrest. Although it cannot hand to police the contents of rioters' messages, it can disclose information that could assist any investigation.
A clause in the Data Protection Act allows RIM to disclose the names, contacts and times of prominent BlackBerry Messenger users in a certain area and at a certain time."
i.e. although the police could tap Twitter and Facebook they couldn't hack BBM so have to call on the skills of GCHQ.
Now there are concerns that Freedom of Information legislation will be compromised under the government's proposals to "reform" Tony Blair's NHS - not that FOI and NHS procurement were ever so compatible.
On a lighter note surveillance technology is not foolproof.
Now the UK Parliament's Public Accounts Committee produces The National Programme for IT in the NHS: an update on the delivery of detailed care records systems. This follows on from last week's report by the Public Administration Select Committee A Recipe for Rip-Offs - Time for a new approach which we reported on here.
The latest report (again only in html) recommends that the detailed care record database system is scrapped according to the BBC piece.
Ironic that on the one hand eveyone is condemning Tory-Lib proposals for NHS reform and on the other the NHS IT initiative, in its many aspects, is coming under such flack.
This has just been published by the UK Parliament's House of Commons Public Affairs Committee: Public Administration Committee - Twelfth ReportGovernment and IT- "A Recipe For Rip-Offs": Time For A New Approach". Unfortunately only available as html pages and not as an entire pdf. We will therefore give you the Summary ...
"Information Technology (IT) plays a fundamental role in the provision of public services. However, despite a number of successful initiatives, government's overall record in developing and implementing new IT systems is appalling. The lack of IT skills in government and over-reliance on contracting out is a fundamental problem which has been described as a "recipe for rip-offs".
IT procurement has too often resulted in late, over budget IT systems that are not fit for purpose. Given the cuts that they are having to make in response to the fiscal deficit it is ridiculous that some departments spend an average of £3,500 on a desktop PC. This Government, like many before it, has an ambitious programme aimed at reforming how it uses IT. This Report sets out what the Government must address if these reforms are to succeed where previous attempts have failed.
We found that government is currently over-reliant on a small "oligopoly" of large suppliers, which some witnesses referred to as a "cartel". Whether or not this constitutes a cartel in legal terms, current arrangements have led to a perverse situation in which governments have wasted an obscene amount of public money. Benchmarking studies have demonstrated that government pays substantially more for IT when compared to commercial rates. The Government needs to break out of this relationship. It should do this by:
i. Improving its own information. The Government's own information about its IT is woefully inadequate. This lack of data means that governments have failed to benchmark the price it pays for IT goods and services; this data must be collected centrally to allow the Government to obtain the best possible price from the market.
ii. Publishing more information. The Government has already started publishing large amounts of information about its expenditure as part of its transparency agenda. The Government should go further and make public not just information about how much its IT costs, but also about how its systems run. All IT procurement contracts should be published in full to ensure transparency and restore trust. This would allow external experts to challenge current practices and identify ways services could be delivered differently as well as more economically.
iii. Widening the supplier base. The Government must expand its supplier base by promoting fair and open competition and engaging with innovative SMEs. To widen the supplier base the Government needs to reduce the size of its contracts and greatly simplify the procurement process. It must also adopt common standards and ensure that systems interoperate to eliminate over-reliance on a small group of suppliers, and commoditise where possible. Most importantly, departments need the capacity to deal directly with a wider range of suppliers, especially SMEs.
iv. Working in an "agile" manner. The challenges that government seeks to address are constantly changing. Often the IT systems that government develops are already out of date before they have been implemented. The Government needs to move towards the use of agile and iterative development methods which enable IT programmes to adapt to changes.
Above all, to address these challenges successfully, the Government needs to possess the necessary skills and knowledge in-house, to manage suppliers and understand the potential IT has to transform the services it delivers. Currently the outsourcing of the government's IT service means that many civil service staff, along with their knowledge, skills, networks and infrastructure has been transferred to suppliers. The Government needs to rebuild this capacity urgently.
Finally, we outline our own vision for how the delivery of public services online could be reformed through a combination of data release, giving individuals control of their own personal records, engaging users in the design and continuous improvement of services and opening up the delivery of online services to a greater range of organisations.
The Government has set out its own milestones for success in its ICT Strategy. We shall be returning to this topic to monitor the Government's progress against these targets, and the recommendations set out in this Report."
The government did not want to tell me how much it was paying Microsoft for deliverables in the NHS IT programme when I made a FOIA request.
I mentioned this report last week. I spent some time on it this weekend but at 140 pages could not get through it all and the NAO NHS IT report.
However, here are its principle recommendations which seem reasonably ok to me ...
Recommendations
1. Evidence. Government should ensure that development of the IP [Intellectual Proprerty] System is driven as far as possible by objective evidence. Policy should balance measurable economic objectives against social goals and potential benefits for rights holders against impacts on consumers and other interests. These concerns will be of particular importance in assessing future claims to extend rights or in determining desirable limits to rights.te
2. International priorities. The UK should resolutely pursue its international interests in IP, particularly with respect to emerging economies such as China and India, based upon positions grounded in economic evidence. It should attach the highest immediate priority to achieving a unified EU patent court and EU patent system, which promises significant economic benefits to UK business. The UK should work to make the Patent Cooperation Treaty a more effective vehicle for international processing of patent applications.
3. Copyright licensing.
• In order to boost UK firms’ access to transparent, contestable and global digital markets, the UK should establish a cross sectoral Digital Copyright Exchange. Government should appoint a senior figure to oversee its design and implementation by the end of 2012. A range of incentives and disincentives will be needed to encourage rights holders and others to take part. Governance should reflect the interests of participants, working to an agreed code of practice.
• The UK should support moves by the European Commission to establish a framework for cross border copyright licensing, with clear benefits to the UK as a major exporter of copyright works. Collecting societies should be required by law to adopt codes of practice, approved by the IPO and the UK competition authorities, to ensure that they operate in a way that is consistent with the further development of efficient, open markets.
4. Orphan works. The Government should legislate to enable licensing of orphan works. This should establish extended collective licensing for mass licensing of orphan works, and a clearance procedure for use of individual works. In both cases, a work should only be treated as an orphan if it cannot be found by search of the databases involved in the proposed Digital Copyright Exchange.
5. Limits to copyright. Government should firmly resist over regulation of activities which do not prejudice the central objective of copyright, namely the provision of incentives to creators. Government should deliver copyright exceptions at national level to realise all the opportunities within the EU framework, including format shifting, parody, non-commercial research, and library archiving. The UK should also promote at EU level an exception to support text and data analytics. The UK should give a lead at EU level to develop a further copyright exception designed to build into the EU framework adaptability to new technologies. This would be designed to allow uses enabled by technology of works in ways which do not directly trade on the underlying creative and expressive purpose of the work. The Government should also legislate to ensure that these and other copyright exceptions are protected from override by contract.
6. Patent thickets and other obstructions to innovation. In order to limit the effects of these barriers to innovation, the Government should:
• take a leading role in promoting international efforts to cut backlogs and manage the boom in patent applications by further extending “work sharing” with patent offices in other countries; • work to ensure patents are not extended into sectors, such as non-technical computer programs and business methods, which they do not currently cover, without clear evidence of benefit; • investigate ways of limiting adverse consequences of patent thickets, including by working with international partners to establish a patent fee structure set by reference to innovation and growth goals rather than solely by reference to patent office running costs. The structure of patent renewal fees might be adjusted to encourage patentees to assess more carefully the value of maintaining lower value patents, so reducing the density of patent thickets.
7. The design industry. The role of IP in supporting this important branch of the creative economy has been neglected. In the next 12 months, the IPO should conduct an evidence based assessment of the relationship between design rights and innovation, with a view to establishing a firmer basis for evaluating policy at the UK and European level. The assessment should include exploration with design interests of whether access to the proposed Digital Copyright Exchange would help creators protect and market their designs and help users better achieve legally compliant access to designs.
8. Enforcement of IP rights. The Government should pursue an integrated approach based upon enforcement, education and, crucially, measures to strengthen and grow legitimate markets in copyright and other IP protected fields. When the enforcement regime set out in the DEA becomes operational next year its impact should be carefully monitored and compared with experience in other countries, in order to provide the insight needed to adjust enforcement mechanisms as market conditions evolve. This is urgent and Ofcom should not wait until then to establish its benchmarks and begin building data on trends. In order to support rights holders in enforcing their rights the Government should introduce a small claims track for low monetary value IP claims in the Patents County Court.
9. Small firm access to IP advice. The IPO should draw up plans to improve accessibility of the IP system to smaller companies who will benefit from it. This should involve access to lower cost providers of integrated IP legal and commercial advice.
10. An IP system responsive to change. The IPO should be given the necessary powers and mandate in law to ensure that it focuses on its central task of ensuring that the UK’s IP system promotes innovation and growth through efficient, contestable markets. It should be empowered to issue statutory opinions where these will help clarify copyright law. As an element of improved transparency and adaptability, Government should ensure that by the end of 2013, the IPO publishes an assessment of the impact of those measures advocated in this review which have been accepted by Government.
Cory Doctorow of boingboing informs us in his Guardian column that Joe Karaganis, lead author and editor of the Media Piracy in Emerging Economies report we discussed in our last post, is now on a lobbying tour.
It is somewhat of a shame this does not seem to include the emerging economies the report discusses. However, I guess he needs to go where the power and money brokers are.
To me this is as an important an issue as the manufacture of drugs against HIV in the "3rd World".
I know my friends and colleagues throughout Africa are downloading music, films and software using every which means they can. We cannot afford the prices that Europe or the See this report.
To me this is as an important an issue as the manufacture of drugs against HIV in the "3rd World".
I know my friends and colleagues throughout Africa are downloading music, films and software using every which means they can. We cannot afford the prices that Europe or North America fork out on music, paper or software.
When I get round to reading it all, I'll probably post some more.
A shame that at 440 pages long we cannot afford the paper or ink to print it!
Seemingly Bahnhof as yet has received no threats of legal action - a bit of a surprise given Sweden's efforts to "get" Julian Assange of Wikileaks over previously dismissed sex offence accusations and Sweden's equivalent of the MPAA's former efforts to "sting" Bahnhof over file-sharing (see previous posts). The Swiss Internet company Switch is also resisting pressure ...
From the Guardian:
"WikiLeaks site's Swiss registrar dismisses pressure to take it offline
Swiss registrar Switch says there is 'no reason' why WikiLeaks should be forced off internet, despite French and US demands
WikiLeaks has been fighting to stay online since releasing a cache of sensitive diplomatic cables to five international media organisations.
WikiLeaks received a boost tonight when Switzerland rejected growing international calls to force the site off the internet.
The whistleblowers site, which has been publishing leaked US embassy cables, was forced to switch domain names to WikiLeaks.ch yesterday after the US host of its main website, WikiLeaks.org, pulled the plug following mounting political pressure.
The site's new Swiss registrar, Switch, today said there was "no reason" why it should be forced offline, despite demands from France and the US. Switch is a non-profit registrar set up by the Swiss government for all 1.5 million Swiss .ch domain names.
The reassurances come just hours after eBay-owned PayPal, the primary donation channel to WikiLeaks, terminated its links with the site, citing "illegal activity". France yesterday added to US calls for all companies and organisations to terminate their relationship with WikiLeaks following the release of 250,000 secret US diplomatic cables.
The Swiss Pirate Party, which registered the WikiLeaks.ch domain name earlier this year on behalf of the site, said Switch had reassured the party that it would not block the site.
An email sent by Denis Simonet, president of the Swiss Pirate Party, to international members of the liberal political group said: "Some minutes ago I got good news: Switch, the registrar for .ch domains, told us that there is no reason to block wikileaks.ch."
Laurence Kaye, leader of the UK-based Pirate Party, tonight told the Guardian: "International Pirate Parties now have an integral role in allowing access to WikiLeaks. I wish some of our other politicians had the same guts.
"We support the WikiLeaks project as access to information is the prerequisite for an informed and engaged democracy."
"The Obama administration is forbidding government employees to call up the wikileaks documents on government computers, including those at the Library of Congress and on military bases. That policy is just plain stupid, and unworthy of Obama’s renowned intellect. I don’t want my intelligence analysts not knowing about the fall-out from the wikileaks cables!"
I confirmed this with a US government source in the International Broadcasting Bureau (the USG's media bureau - Voice of America, Radio Marti etc etc) this morning:
"I believe there is an Executive Order prohibiting any unauthorized USG computer from accessing Wikileaks. That would cover VOA reporters too."
The weekend seems to have been relatively quiet on the Wikileaks front.
Only two real breaking stories but some interesting commentary and background.
The breaking stories are that the latest release of US State Dept. cables includes one requesting an inventory of strategic points of interest to the US in each country where it is represented.
In this story the lawyers of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange claim they are being hassled by the security services.
Then we have Marc Ambinder in the US National Journal questioning the IT systems that allowed how US military private Bradley Manning had access (in Iraq at the time) to so much classified material.
You can no longer donate to Wikileaks using Paypal.
Finally, extremely well-argued commentary from Juan Cole (which I don't entirely agree with) on Informed Comment.
We are not medically trained. While we will endeavour to be as accurate as possible with medical information, we cannot accept responsibility for any errors. Medical details given apply only to our daughter, the form of Acute Lymphoblastic Leukaemia she has and the treatment she is receiving. Please consult your doctor if you have questions or doubts of any kind
Our daughter, Kezia, came down with Acute Lymphoblastic Leukaemia at the age of two years in 2006 and was evacuated to the UK for treatment. Mum, Nanda, accompanied her and later Nanda's son Jaime went to the UK. Dad, Angus, stayed in Africa earning to support them and periodically visited them. Kezia finished treatment in 2008 and the family returned to Sao Tome e Principe mid-2009. Kezia is doing fine and hasn't relapsed but won'nt be considered "clear" until 2013. Meanwhile Dad was made redundant - at the best of times he's a consultant, sometimes a teacher and often unemployed. Poor White Trash.
We reserve the right to go off topic and talk about anything we damn well like.
If we failed to take this precaution, our finances could be frozen,
our ad broker forced to pull ads from our site, and depending on which version of the bill goes to the vote, our domains
confiscated, and, because our server is in Canada, our IP address
would be added to a US-wide blacklist that every ISP in the country
would be required to censor.
