Cyberlaw

Creative Commons v3

A bit late to blog about the obvious but at the same time it feels wrong not to blog about such a central event in the Creative Commons project. Anyway the news is (if you haven’t heard about it already) that CC now has released its latest versions of the license. Welcome to version 3.0.

The latest version of the Creative Commons licenses â?? Version 3.0 â?? are now available. To briefly recap what is different in this version of the licenses:

Separating the â??genericâ?? from the US license

As part of Version 3.0, we have spun off the â??genericâ?? license to be the CC US license and created a new generic license, now known as the â??unportedâ?? license. For more information about this change, see this more detailed explanation.

Harmonizing the treatment of moral rights & collecting society royalties

In Version 3.0, we are ensuring that all CC jurisdiction licenses and the CC unported license have consistent, express treatment of the issues of moral rights and collecting society royalties (subject to national differences). For more information about these changes, see this explanation of the moral rights harmonization and this explanation of the collecting society harmonization.

No Endorsement Language

That a person may not misuse the attribution requirement of a CC license to improperly assert or imply an association or relationship with the licensor or author, has been implicit in our licenses from the start. We have now decided to make this explicit in both the Legal Code and the Commons Deed to ensure that â?? as our licenses continue to grow and attract a large number of more prominent artists and companies â?? there will be no confusion for either the licensor or licensee about this issue. For a more detailed explanation, see here.

BY-SA â?? Compatibility Structure Now Included

The CC BY-SA 3.0 licenses will now include the ability for derivatives to be relicensed under a â??Creative Commons Compatible License,â?? which will be listed here. This structure realizes CCâ??s long-held objective of ensuring that there are no legal barriers to people being able to remix creativity in the way that flexible licenses are intended to enable. More information about this is provided here.

Clarifications Negotiated With Debian & MIT

Finally, Version 3.0 of the licenses include minor clarifications to the language of the licenses to take account of the concerns of Debian (more details here) and MIT (more details here).

As part of discussions with Debian, it was proposed to allow the release of CC-licensed works under DRM by licensees on certain conditions â?? what was known as the â??parallel distribution languageâ?? but this has not been included as part of Version 3.0 of the CC licenses.

Below is a list of CC blog posts about Version 3.0:

Getting to Version 3.0
Version 3.0 â?? Public Discussion Launched
Version 3.0 â?? Revised License Drafts
Version 3.0 â?? Itâ??s Happening & With BY-SA Compatibility Language Too

Posted on by mklang

Technology and Human Rights

On Friday it’s time for me to give a lecture on Technology and Human Rights for the local masters course on human rights. The nice part about this lecture is that it gives me the opportunity to collect and explore different strands of my work and present them to a new audience. My interest in this area began some time ago and resulted in 2005 in the collected edition Human Rights in the Digital Age which I edited together with Andrew Murray.

Discussing technology and rights can at times feel a bit banal. Human rights activists struggle to free people from torture and death so isn’t technology a small waste of time? There is no way in which it would be fair to compare technology and rights to the work of activists against the death penalty. But there is a major problem if all issues must be resolved in the order of magnitude. Speech rights may be less important to someone facing the death penalty but this does not mean that we should ignore speech rights until we have managed to abolish the death penalty.

For the lecture on Friday I am planning to look at three different areas.

The first area is going to be the use of the Internet as a “place” for political participation. I want to discuss the Internet as an area of political discourse and in particular show its possibilities and its fundamental flaws and limitations. This area should include freedom of speech and freedom of association.

The second area is privacy. In particular I want to focus on the merging of online and offline data. Or to put it another way the combination of spatial information (where you are) with the information traces stored in databases (who you are) to show the advanced control mechanism being created.

The final area is the aggregate use of technology. In this section I want to show the audience that with each piece of technology we may implement for our comfort we also form and shape our lives. In particular we also shape the way in which our lives may be controlled by others. This incremental implementation of technology does not bring large protests since no large rights are threatened overall. However the net long term result is darker than anything Orwell would have dreamed about.

Eric Drooker

The overall goal is to make the audience a bit paranoid about technology – to make them question the choices we are all making in our rush towards a more convenient way of life. Not bad for a Friday…

Posted on by mklang

Sweden to criminalise DoS attacks

It does not come as a surprise to read (in Swedish here) that Sweden is on it’s way to criminalise denial of service attacks. This is unsurprising since it is simply another step in the obvious direction of EU harmonisation following the framework decision on attacks against information systems. The latter framework decision is part of a general scheme to fight against terrorism and organised crime within the information society.

The problem is that criminalising DoS attacks in this way makes all DoS attacks illegal. Even if an attack is carried out in the form of political protest, in other words, not terrorism, not organised crime. For example, in a case settled in 2006 where the Frankfurt Appelate Court found the groups â??Libertadâ?? and â??Kein Mensch ist illegalâ?? (No Human is Illegal) had carried out a legitimate form of political protest when they organised 13000 people in an online blockade (With a script- client- based distributed denial of service attack) of the airline Lufthansa. The protest was against the companies part in the deportation of asylum seekers (for more see links below).

When states now criminalise the act of DoS they also make sure that this tool cannot be used as a form of political protest. Therefore the regulators go far beyond their intention and scope of preventing terrorism and organised crime.

A more paranoid person may suspect that the regulator is using the label of terrorism to create rules which limit our ability to use technology in political communications… Read more about the “unintended” negative consequences for democracy, which occur when regulators attempt to control technology in my thesis: Disruptive Technology.

—

Decision by the Frankfurt Appellate Court (in German only, 22.05.2006)
http://www.libertad.de/service/downloads/pdf/olg220506.pdf

Statement by Libertad on the ruling (in German only, 1.06.2006)
http://www.libertad.de/inhalt/projekte/depclass/verfahren/libpe010606.shtml

In German (1.06.2006)
http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/73755
In English (2.06.2006)
http://www.heise.de/english/newsticker/news/73827

Posted on by mklang

More free books

Books that are free (as in beer) are simply irresistible and these two seem particularly relevant to my interests thats a big additional bonus! They are available online for free download or the old fashioned dead-tree version. Actually I shouldn’t be like that – I prefer the dead tree versions…

A collection of essays (edited by Joseph Feller and others) called: Perspectives on Free and Open Source Software some of it is familiar but it is nice to have it all collected in one place. It can be downloaded all at once here or chapter by chapter here.

The second one is John Logieâ??s book Peers, Pirates and Persuasion which is about the rhetoric of the peer-to-peer debates. A good analysis of the rhetorics of file sharing has been missing so I am really looking forward to reading this book. Download if here.

(Via Lex Ferenda)

Posted on by mklang

Propaganda, but it's well written

Via Boing Boing I came across to Oscartorrents.com which is a new game from the people at The Pirate Bay. Basically its a search engine for films from this year’s Oscar nominees. But my favourite part is a piece of colorful, but well written propaganda filed under the heading ‘Legal’ Notice

To all intellectual property landlords: we are aware that OscarTorrents might annoy you — but contain your righteous indignation for a while, and think: we’re only linking to torrents that already exist. Face it: your membrane has burst, and it wasn’t us who burst it. Your precious bodily fluids are escaping.

You haven’t beaten us, so why not join us? Think of a new business model that doesn’t involve overpriced pieces of plastic and skanky cinemas hawking cheap carbohydrates while relying on $6/hr projectionists who can’t keep a film in focus — not to mention insulting your audiences by (to pick a few examples) surveilling us with nightvision glasses, searching bags, 30 minutes of commercials and bombarding us with ridiculous anti-piracy propaganda. Take a look at yourselves. Is it really any wonder we’re winning?

You got to hand it to them, they sure know how to annoy the people they dislike. They also know how to hit the right buttons.

Posted on by mklang

Incompatible Licenses

This morning a short question was posed on one of the Creative Commons mailing lists (cc-community).

I have a simple question. Why are all the Creative Commons licenses incompatible with the GPL?

This was an excellent little question and since then the mailing list has been busy sending in responses and thoughts. Since this is an open mailing list it is ok to quote one of the answers which I found very well written and helpful in explaining this important issue. The reply comes from Greg London and is as follows:

(broad brushstrokes follow.
Nit-pickers need not apply)

If you’re talking about converting
content between the CC-SA and GNU-GPL
licenses, then the problem is basically
a side effect of copyleft.

Copyleft licenses keep the content Free
by demanding that the content and any
derivatives are always available under
the same license as the original.

This prevents someone from putting more
restrictions on the work and taking a
version of Free content private.

Almost counter intuitively, copyleft
protects the content by disallowing
someone from removing restrictions on
the work. This could be abused by allowing
someone to first convert the content from
a copyleft license to a public domain license,
and then allowing the person to create
proprietary forks.

So, copyleft keeps the work Free by demanding
that the content and its derivatives must always
be held under the same license as the original.

Which means that if you have two copyleft
licenses, but they have different requirements,
they are incompatible. The GNU-GPL and CC-SA
licenses are both copyleft. But the GNU-GPL has
a source code requirement that the CC-SA does not.

If you took CC-SA content and converted it to
GNU-GPL, you would be adding a source code
requirement to the content that did not exist
before. And if you took GNU-GPL content and
converted it to CC-SA, you’d be removing the
source code requirement.

And since both say you can’t change the requirements,
converting between either license is disallowed.

The idea CC is apparently working on for making
licenses inter-operable is to put language into
the license that allows the content to be licensed
under the original license, or any license that is
deemed to be similar enough, for some fuzzy definition
of “enough”.

They already have something like this that makes sure
that, for example, the different language versions
of CC-SA are compatible with each other. The way I
understand it, they’re are going to try to use the
same approach to expand compatibility outside of the
CC-SA licenses.

Since no CC license has a “source code” requirement,
I don’t think any CC license will ever be directly
interchangable with GNU-GPL. But they are trying to
solve the problem of license proliferation by building
in a mechanism that will allow all the content to be
transferred to licenses that are deemed “close enough”.

I hope this helps.

You can join the list and/or read the archives.

Posted on by mklang

Oh, Shit

I cannot believe it. It’s 28 degrees in Mumbai and I have managed to catch a cold. A summer cold is tiring thing to have but this is made worse by the fact that we have several days worth of meetings left and a conference at the end. Not to mention the long flight home.

The meeting today is particularly lively moving from philosophy of copyright (and in extension property), learning and teaching. The crux of the discussion is what is it we are attempting to achieve. Purity for purities sake or striving for higher principles.

The settings of the day are the Tata Institute for Fundamental Research (TIFR Colaba) at the most southern end of Mumbai. The research center is set within the Naval base which therefore increases security but it also has a beautiful garden by the sea.

Posted on by mklang

Everything is different

In India everything is different. It’s exciting, challenging and a bit frustrating. But very interesting. The main annoyance right now is the flaky Internet connection which seems not to be so bad – but very temperamental…

Posted on by mklang

Emerging Patterns

I cannot believe it! The &%#â?¬&%â?¬#&%â?¬#&%â?¬ web has been down since Friday. Once again proving that the technical support seems to be close to useless. Thus far in January the web has been down 20% of the time. Do we pay this people? If so – WHY? I would probably have a better level of service with blogger but what &%&#â?¬ would I do with my non-blog stuff.

Sorry about venting my frustration like this but I am incapable of understanding what the technical bods seem to be thinking about when they turn of the web before going off home for the weekend.

BAH!

Posted on by mklang

Train day 2

Yesterday included a six hour train ride from Stockholm and back again. The point was to go meet some people and organise my visa for the Indian trip next week. Today was another six hours on the train. This time it was off to Linköping to give a Creative Commons presentation. The journey was with Jonas �berg who was presenting the third draft of the GPLv3 which is about to be officially released in a matter of hours.

Interesting stuff and an enthusiastic audience made the brief stay in Linköping worthwhile. Unfortunately the last train home left at 8pm so we were pressed for time.

On the train home and I have just bugged Jonas to put his presentation online – download the pdf here.

Posted on by mklang