machine-envy

I’ve just seen that TechnoLlama name-checked me on blog day, and I’m chuffed to bits, especially as I get a lot of my most interesting legal titbits from his blog, like this observation on a spurious software patents winning BBC’s Dragon’s Den.

I’m gutted I can’t be at the VI Computer Law World Conference in Edinburgh, which starts today, and which was organised by Andrés, the man behind TechnoLlama.

This fortnight’s column for openDemocracy centres on a book I discovered while researching a paper I am currently writing for the Ford Foundation on freedom of expression in the networked information age. The book is written by Ithiel De Sola Pool, a prolific scholar of political science and sociology. Although it was written in 1983, it is eerily prescient, and thus rather humbling. I believe it is out of print - a great shame:

“When we are caught in the centre of an emerging phenomenon, in the eye of the networked information age’s storm, only the clearest thinkers can lead us to safe harbour. Historians have the benefit of hindsight, while those writers who have predicted everything from the demise of the English language through SMS messaging to the disappearance of musical innovation thanks to peer-to-peer filesharing will no doubt be silenced in the passing of time.
“A half dozen books have informed my thinking about the effects of the internet…”

Read the rest here.

This fortnight’s column for openDemocracy is about darknets, anonymisation and crypto-anarchy. Horray!

“People who want to hide their activities online already have the tools to do so. We’re just giving those tools to the general public.” These were the words of Rickard Falkvinge, chairman of Sweden’s Piratpartiet(Pirate Party), when he revealed that the political party dedicated to copyright reform would be supporting a controversial new commercial “darknet”, Relakks. “Until we have changed the laws to ensure that citizens’ right to privacy is respected, we have a moral obligation to protect citizens from the effects of current routine surveillance”, says Falkvinge.

“So, for a fee of €5 per month, Relakks offers to provide that protection increasingly being eroded from our civil liberties…”

Read the rest of the piece here.

I contacted Ben Laurie, who among other things is a longtime supporter of TOR, for some last minute advice, which was so last minute, it didn’t make it into the piece. On TOR adoption, he had this to say:

“Tor is an interesting problem - it seems that although many individuals of good standing are prepared to endorse tor or run tor nodes almost no companies are. It seems to me that if a less thorough hatchet job had been done on anonymity (only paedophiles and terrorists have any need for it, after all) then companies would be able to get behind it and it could become a pervasive tool.”

When I was a kid, I used to think working in the music industry would be, like, the coolest thing ever. In my early twenties, I started doing music writing, and started having my doubts. Then, as a tech journalist, I started meeting people from the BPI and I knew the mirror had cracked.

At twelve, this kid is never going to have that experience. She already knows the industry sucks. That’s why she flash-mobbed BPI headquarters on Tuesday, after they took her single off the fledgling “kiddie-chart”. The BPI’s logic? Her single was released on Flowerburger records, a label currently petitioning the BPI to stop suing filesharers. From The Inquirer:

“12 year-old singer-songwriter Amy Thomas staged a protest outside the headquarters of the British music industry yesterday, following a decision to ban her from a new school kids’ music chart because of her views on downloading.”

Read the rest here. (via Techdirt)

This week’s column for the New Statesman is on AOL’s search data blunder of a fortnight ago.

Since filing, there’s been some interesting developnments worth linking to, such as this story from the NYT of one searcher who identified herself from the data and this piece in the WSJ on what the search trends say about us. If you want to do your own research, try this little search tool. And if you’re worried your search data might be intercepted and published in a national newspaper one day, follow this advice from the EFF.

“Everyone has a billboard ad they hate. For me, it’s “AOL/discuss”. Perhaps it’s because I spend a good part of my working life pondering the eight-foot-high questions plastered across them (”Is technology killing the art of conversation? AOL/discuss”) that whenever the bus is driving past one, I strain my neck to see it just so that I can hate it more.

AOL will have been asking itself some tough questions lately. This month, to the horror of the blogosphere, it released 658,000 personal, three-month-long search histories for US users. So, AOL, is the internet the ultimate invasion of privacy? Let’s/discuss…”

Read the rest here.

Via Technollama, this story in last weekend’s Sunday Times focuses on Cliff Richard’s campaign (blogged here in 2004) to extend the term of copyright on sound recordings, and on the Blair family’s habit of holidaying at Sir Cliff’s Barbados pad gratis since 2003. From a written record obtained by the newspaper of an internal Labour meeting, the Sunday Times reveals that:

“Two of those present at the Labour meeting say Blair indicated he would support an increase in the copyright term to 70 years and expressed surprise that the prime minister seemed well informed about the issue.”

Read the rest here.

With news in today’s UK papers that the Deleting Online Predators Act went down a storm at the House of Representatives last week, this fortnight’s column for openDemocracy asks if legislation is the right response to cases of child molestation involving social networking sites:

“Warning: this article cites language that some readers may find offensive

Supa Sam’s blog and profile on the social-networking site Xanga looks pretty innocuous at first glance. Not updated since January 2005, the blog features poor spelling and a liberal use of expletives in its detailing of the ups and downs of life as a teenage girl who is into rugby and singing (but not in public!). The profile image of a pretty blonde lying in her bedroom staring into her webcam confirms that this chick is just bored, bored, bored and looking for friends online.

Only one thing hints that things might not be as they seem. Tucked underneath the latest post, a comment dated 31 July 2006 reads: “Have fun in jail, you fucking child molesting cunt…”

Read the rest here.

Links used to research this piece can be found here.

This week’s column in the New Statesman is on the Gowers Review of Intellectual property and a report from Rufus Pollock for the ippr:

“As the British Phonographic Industry, the body that represents the UK music business, begins a fresh assault on those who use peer-to-peer file-sharing networks to download music illegally off the internet, it’s worth asking if there might be a better way to protect the creative industries than by punishing potential customers.

This autumn, the government will wind up a nine-month review tasked with examining intellectual property (IP) law…”

Read the rest here:

Useful links:

• The value of the public domain, Rufus Pollock
• Inside the Creative Industries: Copyright on the ground, Anthony Lilley
• Innovating for Success: The intellectual property review and economic competitiveness, Lord Sainsbury
  

My fortnightly column for openDemocracy has just gone live, an extension of this post of last week:

“It is nearly two decades since the British government tried to ban Spycatcher, and you would expect them to have learned their lesson. After throwing £2 million in legal expenses after the biography of former MI5 operative Peter Wright, her majesty’s government was forced to admit defeat in October 1988, leaving ministers red-faced and Wright seriously in the black, thanks to the free publicity afforded his book by his repeated trips to courts across the globe. Eighteen years on, it’s the turn of the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) to have a go. But this time they have a new weapon in their armoury – the vagaries of the British copyright system.”

Read the rest here.

The ippr have just posted audio from an event I attended on Friday last week, the last in their series to accompany the UK Gowers Review of Intellectual property. Hear Lord Sainsbury (DTI), Chris Parker (Microsoft), Rufus Pollock (Open Knowledge Foundation) and Dr Richard Jennings (Cambridge Enterprise) on Innovation in the Information Age, then listen to the assembled audience of IP lawyers, rightsholder lobbyists, free culture folk and journalists give them a grilling. My favourite part is when Bobbie Johnson of the Guardian asked Sainsbury if the Tories had patented sleaze, and if so, were Labour licensing it off them…

• Part I
• Part II (questions from the floor)