Lawrence Lessig has, after discussions with the publishers Random House, managed to ensure that his book The Future of Ideas will be freely available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license. The book can be downloaded for free here.
With this move all four of Lessig’s books are available under CC licenses.
The Wall Street Journal have an interesting article on the upcoming file sharing case involving the Pirate Bay. In the article Showdown Looms Over Pirated Media-Directory the WSJ presents a balanced view of the situation but writes:
While Sweden might seem to be an unlikely harbor for pirates of any kind, weak copyright laws, lax enforcement, high broadband penetration and general antipathy toward the entertainment industry have made it a file-sharing free-for-all.
This opinion that Sweden is somehow exceptional when it comes to file sharing has been cropping up a lot recently – both in print media and in conversations and I must say that I am surprised. Yes, the Pirate Bay is a Swedish outfit but anyone who thinks it is a problem in Sweden has fundamentally misunderstood the situation.
Ask around most teenagers in most countries are involved in copyright violations. Most of this is copying music and films. A bit more difficult (but not much) is to get an honest response from adults. Many adults are doing the same thing.
Remove all of Sweden and the Swedes and you would not significantly impact world copyright violations. Remove the Pirate Bay and you would have created nothing more than a hiccup or temporary annoyance.
The pirates are all around you. This is not about weak laws and lax enforcement it is about a fundamental change in the way in which we view right and wrong in relation to copyright and having the technological base with which to act.
It’s all about the digitalization of copyrightable material coupled with the development of technological gadgets such as iPods, iPhones, cheap storage and good broadband. Piracy is inevitable.
Copyright never was what it used to be and the struggle to define the purpose and limits over the protection of intellectual property (or indeed the idea of intellectual property) continues daily.
One example of the ongoing debate is an op-ed in the Swedish paper Expressen a group of Swedish politicians called for the legalization of file sharing. One of the politicians was a police officer. But this is more an example of the exception than the rule.
The real attempt to draw the lines that may limit copyright occur every day and are defined in the way in which we all collectively use our technology. The act of file sharing by an individual is, in of itself, an unimportant act. Taken collectively file sharing is a massive active form of resistance and a re-interpretation of the the general consciousness of justice, right, wrong & morality.
Another important position is taken by those who actively comment and interpret the acts of all those involved in the re-definition of copyright. An important contribution to this is the film Steal this Film II. It features scholars such as Yochai Benkler, Felix Stalder, Siva Vaidhyanathan, and Howard Rheingold and portrays file sharing and the copyright debate as a historical development in the urge to regulate the spread of information.
Over at the Industrial IT Group blog Jonny has written a very good analysis of the importance of the film. Watch the movie, read the analysis and get involved in the most interesting re-defition of law in our time.
Creative Commons have announced the launch of the CC+ (aka CC Plus) and CC0 (aka CC Zero) programs. These are major additions to the Creative Commons array of legal tools.
In a nutshell, CC+ is a protocol to enable a simple way for users to get rights beyond those granted by a CC license. Meanwhile, CC0 is a protocol that enables people to either assert that a work has no legal restrictions attached to it or waive any rights associated with a work so it has no legal restrictions attached to it. The program also provides an easy way to sign these assertions or waivers.
On Friday and Saturday it’s time for FSCONS which is a conferences where the goal is to allow:
Top notch programmers, hackers, lawyers, and government representatives will speak to idealistic programmers, hackers, lawyers, companies and ordinary computer users. Spreading the buzz for Free Software in the region and keeping people informed about what is happening are just the very obvious goals.
The speakers at the conference promise to make this an event to remember, not to mention the many visitors who will be attending. The conference is a good mix between hard-core programmers and the activists. In particular I am looking forward to meeting and listening to presenters from organisations like EFF, Wikimedia Sweden, Google & Skolelinux.
The BBC reports that a Dutch teenager has been arrested for allegedly stealing virtual furniture from “rooms” in Habbo Hotel, a 3D social networking website.
(via Virtual Law)
While on the train between Stockholm and Lund I peered out of the window into the darkness and saw snow. Yes, it’s inevitable and it’s on its way. So break out the thermal underwear and prepare to survive the cold dark period. The good news is that this year I plan to learn how to ski. Good luck, or break a leg?
Ah, well… anything beats hibernation…
The Wikipedia Foundation was being sued by three French nationals for invasion of privacy and defamation after a wikipedia page identified them as being gay activists. The French judge Emmanuel Binoche dismissed the case, stating that wikipedia was not responsible for information introduced onto its Web site and stated that web site hosts are not legally bound to monitor information stored on their websites.
In the written ruling Binoche writes: “Web site hosts cannot be liable under civil law because of information stored on them if they do not in fact know of their illicit nature”
This position is in line with the accepted approach to ISP liability. Gavin Sutter has written extensively on this topic see for example Gavin Sutter (2003) FE/HE Institutions and Liability for Third Party Provided Content.
(via Slashdot)
The latest idiotic proposed legislation comes from Italy. The proposal is that all blogs and websites need to be registered (and taxed).
Beppe Grillo writes
Ricardo Franco Levi, Prodi’s right hand man , undersecretary to the President of the Council, has written the text to put a stopper in the mouth of the Internet. The draft law was approved by the Council of Ministers on 12 October. No Minister dissociated themselves from it. On gagging information, very quietly, these are all in agreement.
The Levi-Prodi law lays out that anyone with a blog or a website has to register it with the ROC, a register of the Communications Authority, produce certificates, pay a tax, even if they provide information without any intention to make money.
Oh my God, Lets start with the easy stuff.
First, How will they intend to police this law. The law can apply to all Italian sites. What is an Italian site? Is it:
Second, what happens when the site is based in several locations with data pulled from several sources? Do they get a tax reduction?
Third, what is a website? Can you define it legally? Is there a difference between the site, server and domain? What about:
These may be unique individual websites – but they can also be seen as part of a larger domain.
Fourth, what about free speech rights? Basically an unregistered website would be in violation of the law but would/should the reaction be to close down the site? What happens if a newspaper does not register can they be closed down?
Fifth, administration. How much money and resource can be used to police a law such as this? Can the revenue it brings in even begin to cover the investigative resources required? No of course not. Imaging attempting to chase every Italian blog. How do you know when they are Italian?
Proposals to regulate the Internet come at regular intervals. Often they are barely thought through and will collapse before they even reach the enactment stage. Some laws on Internet regulation have been enacted but are then thankfully forgotten by those who should enforce them.
In the end proposals such as these show that regulators seem to lack even a basic understanding of the technology which most of us use. They also lack a fundamental modern historical approach to regulation. It is really a case of being condemned to repeat the past since we cannot remember it. All the earlier crappy failed attempts to regulate the Internet have failed but since the people proposing regulation have no memory of this we are doomed to see the same mistakes repeated again and again.
At best this provides a form of light relief and humor.
(via BoingBoing)
Creative Commons is going to celebrate its fifth birthday in December and it’s adoption and spread is nothing short of amazing.
The green/grey countries have adopted CC, the yellow or on the verge of adopting and the red have not begun to work on the licenses. Seen as a bottom-up movement the spread of Creative Commons shows its amazing success.
In the five years since our launch, we have grown up fast. In 2004, we incubated an international movement supporting the ideals of the Internet and cultural freedom (iCommons). This year we spun that organization out as an independent UK-based charity. In 2005, we launched a project to support a commons within science (Science Commons). This year Science Commons launched the Neurocommons, an e-research project built exclusively on open scientific literature and databases, and the Materials Transfer Project, an extension of the ideas of the commons to physical tools such as gene plasmids and cell lines. And just two months ago, we announced a significant grant that has enabled us to launch a project focused on learning and education (ccLearn). There is now a staff of over 30 in four offices around the world, supporting thousands of volunteers in more than 70 local jurisdiction projects around the world, who, in turn, support the millions of objects that have been marked with the freedoms that CC licenses enable.