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European Parliament Written Declaration 12/2010 is now ready for signature. The Declaration establishes principles by which ACTA will be judged when it finally uncloaks and we discover how it is in fact armed. It’s time to use your preferred means to contact your MEPs and ask them to sign it.

Maybe if they do a good job Oracle would consider retiring CDDL and using this instead?

Paul Carr with a relatively fair and balanced view of the Digital Economy Bill – seductively so. But I don’t agree with his conclusions.

While the social contract behind copyright has merit (creating a protected ‘space’ where a copyright creation can be monetised in exchange for its dedication to the public domain), the digital age has driven a switch from a control-centric (‘hub-and-spoke’) society to an emergiunbg peer-to-peer society. There are no ‘fixes’ we can do to copyright to make it work right; we need to start again and invent a copyright for the digitial age.

The Digital Economy Bill is well intentioned, but there are no fixes available to make analogue copyright law work for a digital society and I fear the Bill will just make things worse, unleashing a “sorcerer’s apprentice” effect of unintended consequences the way the US DMCA has done. The Bill has to be stopped, not patched.

A great potted history from Dries Buytaert, timeline-style.