machine-envy

Our conference packs here in Buenos Aires included a map I had not seen before - showing the distribution of royalty fees paid in 2002. From the site, creator, Worldmapper:

Over half (53%) of the value of all royalty and license fees paid in 2002 were received in one territory: the United States. Large proportions of these fees were also received in Japan and the United Kingdom.

These fees are the payments made by someone who wants to use an idea, invention or artistic creation that legally belongs to someone else. To receive these fees a copyright or patent is needed, which may remain active for years after the initial invention…

Read the rest here.

After James showed me the web is us/ing us video, I wrote about it for my latest openDemocracy piece. It’s the first time I’ve been able to join up my interest in linguistcs with my interest in the information age, and I’m quite proud of the result.

After the Sandinista government took power in Nicaragua in 1979, its reform of the education system included expanding the country’s schools for the deaf. The schools’ methods had been harsh and broadly ineffective, consisting of drilling the children in lip-reading and spoken Spanish. But eventually - simply by bringing previously isolated deaf children together - they generated an unexpectedly positive side-effect.

Largely, the children had been living with hearing relatives, and had had no opportunity to communicate with other deaf children. Brought together, however, they pooled the makeshift gestures they had used at home. What resulted was a usable jargon that was all the children’s own. When new groups of deaf pupils arrived at the schools - their minds ripe for natural language-learning - they took the jargon of the older children and turned it into a fully-fledged, expressive language. Now known as Nicaraguan Sign Language, or Idioma de Señas de Nicaragua (ISN), this was the type of language, according to the Harvard psychology professor Steven Pinker, with which “a child can watch a surrealistic cartoon and describe its plot to another child”. It is a language that can be used in poems, jokes and life histories, one that “is coming to serve as the glue that holds the community together”.

Read the rest here.

Yesterday was my first day working with the Open Rights Group. It’s going to take me a while to gain pace with the rest of the team, and the bevvy of projects they’re working on both in terms of campaigns (e-voting, more IP stuff, and the European Television without Frontiers legislation are all under the spotlight right now) and behind-the-scenes work.

I’ve been trying without success to get the widget in del.icio.us working so I can post links direct to this blog. In the meantime, here are a couple of titbits:

• Lawrence Lessig on net neutrality and municipal broadband in Wired
• Unsigned punk band make top 40 (health warning: they are represented by the PR company Quite Good, who were responsible for all the noise about Sandi Thom last year)

Like many Brits, the BBC’s Radio 4 holds a very special place in my heart. After two weeks away from home, I was craving two things - a cup of tea made without UHT milk, and the mellow sound of received pronunciation washing over me from the wireless on my bedside.

Imagine my surprise, then, when late on Sunday night I heard this broadcast. It’s a niche show called In Business, and this week’s episode was completely dedicated to companies which use and produce open source software. It’s worth listening to just to hear the wonderful voice of presenter Peter Hall endlessly repeating the words “source code”. Download it here.

I’m pleased to announce that as of 15 January next year, I’ll be joining the Open Rights Group as their new Executive Director!

Suw Charman, ORG’s outgoing Exec Director, has just posted the announcement on the ORG website. I’m looking forward to working with her, ORG’s Ops Manager Michael Holloway, and the incredibly diverse and talented group of people who make up ORG’s board, advisory council and army of expert volunteers.

It’s a big year ahead for digital rights. ORG scored a massive success with their Release The Music campaign against the extension of copyright terms in sound recordings, but this recommendation will need pursuing in Europe, where the music industry has vowed to take its rhetoric next. And there’s a lot more going on which requires the scrutiny of the digital rights community - like the e-voting pilots scheduled for this year’s local elections in March.

Of course, joining ORG means I’ll be leaving my post of Technology Director at openDemocracy. I’ve had a great two years there - watching the website go from strength to strength and working to build and launch a sister website, ChinaDialogue. I’ll miss the friends I’ve made there, they’re some of the most dedicated and talented people I’ve ever worked with. I wish them all the best of luck in continuing to develop what I believe is a worthwhile and necessary exercise in political analysis on the web.

I’ll still be writing my columns for openDemocracy and the New Statesman. All in all, it’s going to be a pretty busy year - I’m looking forward to it already.

Some really fab coverage on Gowers in the Guardian and the Observer, starting with this Leader from Friday’s edition:

“…The report was given a guarded welcome by the recently formed Open Rights group which campaigned strongly against extending the 50-year limit, but the war is not won yet. The Gowers report is only a staging post, a way of influencing UK government thinking before Whitehall submits its own policy to Brussels where the final decisions will be taken. The real lobbying has only just begun.”

Then on Saturday one of my favourite writers, Marina Hyde, throws in her twopence worth:

“It was, of course, barely a fortnight ago that readers of these pages were pleased to take a lesson in political theory from my temporary Guardian colleague Mick Hucknall, the lead singer of Simply Red and a signatory of the aforementioned ad, who opened a presumably self-parodic opinion piece with the statement “copyright is fundamentally socialist”. Mick then contrived to conflate notions of intellectual property - and there’s something about “property” that grates with our fifth-form Marxist’s thesis - with solid leftwing values, though I’m afraid I’d rather lost track of his point by the second mention of “the free flow of ideas”, and realised we were being asked to conceive of a Beverley Sisters track as such.”

And finally, new media heavyweight John Naughton files his analysis on Sunday:

“American neocons like to say that the only things found in the middle of the road are ‘white lines and dead armadillos’. Much the same applies to intellectual property (IP)…”

As someone who’s devoted the last two years to getting accessible arguments about IP into the national press, I’m celebrating.

My interview with Andrew Gowers has gone up on openDemocracy.

“‘Look at the debates that there have been on intellectual property since the arrival of the internet. They have been loud and shallow. They have been between people who say everything’s free and you shouldn’t pay for anything and people who say everything’s mine, and you should pay for everything. And actually neither of them are right.’ Andrew Gowers is sitting in a back room of the British government’s vast Treasury building. It’s just a few hours after the launch of his year-long reviewof the framework governing intellectual property, a text he hopes will change the nature of the debate not just in Britain, but internationally.

“The Gowers Review of Intellectual Property has been broadly welcomed by copyright campaigners…”

Read the rest here.

The House of Commons have started debating Gordon Brown’s speech and the Gowers Review has been published online. Here it is.

I’m reading over it now. Eye-catching recommendations include:

• tougher penalties for online copyright infringement - with a maximum 10 years imprisonment
• consulting on the use of civil damages as a deterrent for IP infringement
• business representatives sit on a new independent Strategic Advisory Board on IP Policy, advising the Government (what, no public interest groups?)
• a strictly limited ‘private copying’ exception to enable consumers to format-shift content they purchase for personal use. For example to legally transfer music from CD to their MP3 player
• clarifying (library) exceptions to copyright to make them fit for the digital age
• recommending that the European Commission does not change the status quo and retains the 50 year term of copyright protection for sound recordings and related performers’ rights

UPDATE: Those with a particular interest in the term extension debate might like to check out this report, commissioned by the Review, into the economic arguments for and against.

Gordon Brown has so far made a few mentions of intellectual property in his pre budget speech, stating that a “robust intellectual property regime” was needed to encourage innovation in the UK, vital to the UK’s competitiveness in the global marketplace. He has stated that the Secretary for Industry (Alistair Darling) will announce tighter penalties for piracy and new rights for private copying, as well as tighter trademark safeguards for SMEs.

Will there be more? Listen at the BBC Parliament channel.

I’m logged on to the BBC Parliament channel this morning, awaiting Gordon Brown’s pre budget report, which should start in 15 minutes. The Gowers Review of Intellectual Property will be released after this speech.

As a precursor to the report, my column in openDemocracy asks whether the government will go with Gowers’ leaked recommendation, that copyright on sound recordings remain at 50 years.

“The review has attracted submissions from the British Libraryto the National Union of Journalists, from digital-rights campaigners to the Open Rights Group to recording industry representatives the British Phonographic Institute (BPI). All in all, around 500 individuals and organisations submitted evidence to the review, a figure widely believed to have set a record for submissions to any independent review commissioned by the UK government.

“Why has there been so much interest? Perhaps because, until this point, there has been no effective, accessible forum for debating IP in the UK - or indeed anywhere. “The sense that democratic dialogue is failing on this topic is a serious one”, write Kay Withers and William Davies of the Institute for Public Policy Research in their recent paper Public Innovation, concluding a nine-month research project into the UK’s current intellectual-property framework. Gowers, it seems, opened the doors to such a dialogue. How his review is interpreted by government later this week will be crucial…”

Read the rest here.

Once the review has been published, I’ll be interviewing Andrew Gowers face to face. I’ve only got fifteen minutes, but if anyone has anything they’re burning to ask, leave them in the comments and I’ll try and include them.