Love this video. Pass it on.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3iIkOi3srLo]Filed under: Issues, Zeitgeist | Tagged: Conservation, Video | 1 Comment »
Apple and Connector Standards
Posted on September 15, 2012 by Simon Phipps
It seems Apple wasn’t serious when it promised the European commission it would use micro-USB. Read more about it in my article in ComputerWorldUK this week.
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Software Patent Solution Under Our Noses
Posted on September 14, 2012 by Simon Phipps
I was blown away by a paper by legal scholar Mark Lemley when I read it in full this week. He plausibly claims there’s a very simple and elegant solution to software patents in the USA that simply needs a future defendent to use it in their defence. Read about it in this week’s InfoWorld article.
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It’s Not Just The Hugos
Posted on September 5, 2012 by Simon Phipps
DRM farces are like London buses. You wait for ever, and then several come along at once. After writing my story for ComputerWorld about the blackout of the Hugo awards by a copyright enforcement robot with no concept of “fair use”, along came an even more stunning story. Yes, the big rally to reselect Barak Obama as candidate for the upcoming US elections was hit by a shoot-first-ask-questions-afterwards bot claiming to be protecting just about every content provider imaginable.
So I’ve updated and expanded the story for InfoWorld – take a look. The key quote:
“When a technologist embodies their or their employer’s view of what’s fair into a technology-enforced restriction, any potential for the exercise of discretion is turned from a scale to a step, and freedom is quantized. That quantization of discretion is always in the interest of the person forcing the issue.”
When you assign algorithms to make subjective judgements, they can’t. Instead, they impose the biases of the people who created them. The content distributors, like UStream and YouTube have a bias, created by US law, to block anything that might turn out to be infringing, because that’s how they get “safe harbor”. Thus the technology they wrote or bought from snake-oil suppliers is imposing their bias.
We fix it not by getting the suppliers to do better bots – they can’t, algorithms are incapable of subjective judgement – but by fixing the law so it doesn’t incent the providers to have this bias.
Filed under: Copyright, DRM, InfoWorld | Comments Off on It’s Not Just The Hugos
“Fair Use” Robots Are Science Fiction
Posted on September 4, 2012 by Simon Phipps
The black-out of the Hugo Awards by a “robot” that thought the clip of Doctor Who shown just before Neil Gaiman spoke was proof positive of piracy is educational. My article on ComputerWorldUK today explains why.
Filed under: ComputerWorldUK, Copyright, DRM | Comments Off on “Fair Use” Robots Are Science Fiction
Apple v Samsung
Posted on August 28, 2012 by Simon Phipps
Patents are now an anti-trust weapon rather than a reward for innovation. That’s my conclusion after a weekend trying to decided whether I has happy or sad Apple had beaten Samsung in the billion-dollar-suit in San Jose. It’s just a part of a deeper narrative around the fight by the winners of the 20th century to stop the upstarts of the 21st century from succeeding.
The case is an inevitable consequence of the fact the patent system has not kept pace with the realities of globalised business, the complex, fast-paced technology sector or the reality of open source software. Patents were supposed to protect the instantiation of ideas, not the ideas themselves. But the system has been thoroughly, impossibly gamed, to the point where only a Grand Master can play it.
Patent law is now being used as an anti-competitive weapon so much that I begin to wonder whether it’s the anti-trust/competition laws rather than patent law that should be updated first. Read more in InfoWorld.
Filed under: InfoWorld, Patents | Tagged: Apple, Samsung | 1 Comment »
Why The Communications Data Bill Should Concern You
Posted on August 23, 2012 by Simon Phipps
I wrote today on ComputerWorldUK about the draft Communications Data Bill. As I explained at OggCamp (my slides are online) last weekend in Liverpool, it is yet another attempt by the Home Office to get the government of the day to legalise sweeping permanent surveillance powers that allow the automated aggregation of all the details of your online life. Well, all but the actual “payload” – the message bodies themselves in e-mail for example. But the other information surrounding your communications provides plenty of data to fill a “big data” tank and analyse heuristically to detect trends in who you communicate with, when, why, where from and how.
The legislation is modelled on (and absorbs) existing postal surveillance laws but to use those the police have to go to the sorting office and look at envelopes. The cost in time and effort to go there creates “friction” that means the power is not used all the time on all your mail. But CDB is “frictionless”, allowing automated gathering of all the meta-data of all your communications (not just e-mail) and making it available over the next 12 months for analysis.
CDB makes us all a suspect, all the time. Instead of being under surveillance when there is evidence of wrongdoing, you will be under surveillance by default, with a wide range of people able to “go fishing” for information to support accusations against you without your knowledge. No amount of “access controls” can make this sort of resource safe; once created, it can only grow in scope and use.
It’s now too late for you to offer the Joint Select Committee your input on the draft, but you can still join the Open Rights Group who are at the forefront of defending your digital rights in the UK.
Filed under: ComputerWorldUK, Open Rights Group | Tagged: CDB, OggCamp | 2 Comments »
EU Procurement Failures
Posted on August 6, 2012 by Simon Phipps
How do you do open procurement for ICT solutions? The answer, according to the European Commission, is to ensure that all procurement that requires tendering (and not all does) is specified in terms of the functions required rather than expressing a preference for the brands involved in the solution. But despite the clear regulations there seem to be plenty of public authorities across Europe which ignore them. This is bad news for European businesses and very bad news for open source, as I explain in ComputerWorldUK today.
Filed under: ComputerWorldUK, Procurement | Tagged: European Union, Procurement | Comments Off on EU Procurement Failures
How ACTA Nearly Won
Posted on July 4, 2012 by Simon Phipps
ACTA was defeated today in the European Parliament, but one British Liberal-Democrat MEP voted for it. Understanding why helps us to understand how the political system needs fixing for the internet age. Please read my long article in ComputerWorldUK to see why.
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ACTA Needs You
Posted on July 3, 2012 by Simon Phipps
Just posted on ComputerWorldUK – why you need to call or write to your MEP now, ahead of Wednesday’s vote on ACTA, and how to do it.
By the way, is anyone else concerned that it takes an international call to contact your political representatives for Europe? It ought to be a UK call, surely?
Filed under: ACTA, ComputerWorldUK | Comments Off on ACTA Needs You
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