Cyberlaw

BSD license question

Brendan Scott of Open Source Law has written and posted an interesting article on Groklaw. The article posits that this is a broad misconception about the freedoms granted by the BSD license. In particular that code licensed under the BSD is not re-licensable (after modifications to the code) under “closed source” licenses as commonly believed (article in pdf).

From the arguments presented four consequences may be drawn

(a) the BSD appears to require that modifications be distributed only under the terms of the BSD, and that this requirement therefore cascades down to subsequent generations of code;

(b) the license does not appear to permit the relicensing of BSD code under the terms of any other license, at least in so far as any restrictions in other licenses would seem not to be binding;

(c) there may be some scope for arguing that the term â??modificationâ?? to the code is restricted or limited in some fashion. However, as the license only permits redistribution of â??modificationsâ?? the BSD does not permit the redistribution of any derivative work which is not a modification;

(d) the BSD does not have a requirement for the distribution of source code. It is not clear whether this means there is a deficiency in the Open Source Definition.

Posted on by mklang

Procrastination with technology

Questioning the social affects of technology is not necessarily a knee-jerk luddite approach to technology. One of the affects of technology is the increase in annoyances they create. For example: complex manuals, batteries running down, updates, failures and incompatibilities with other gadgets etc.

Another area is the scope for procrastination digital technology offers. A whole major area is the Internet which enables everything from simple surfing to losing real-life identities due to prolonged participation in online worlds.

Via Question Technology here is an interesting study showing a study that technology increases the amount of procrastination in the world. Prof Piers Steel states that procrastination is natural and not procrastinating takes planning, effort and will. (Globe & Mail).

In the meantime, it seems the Luddites were onto something. Technology has hastened the pace of procrastination, according to Prof. Steel’s research.

“Multitasking destroys performance,” Prof. Steel said as he chided our BlackBerry addicted culture of instant messaging.

So stop checking e-mail! Yes, this one is such a time-sucker it deserves an exclamation point. Turning off the e-mail icon that alerts users to new messages will increase productivity by 5 or 10 per cent per day, Prof. Steel figures. Check e-mail only when it’s convenient — perhaps as you scarf down lunch at your desk — and finally shun that Pavlov’s dog-type reaction to the e-mail alert.

The professor of procrastination also maintains a website called Procrastination Central.

Posted on by mklang

Thesis discussed on radio

The strange thing is that PhD students spend so much time actually writing and thinking the thesis that they forget that the product is important even after the defence. After my defence the thesis as a product has played a marginal role. It seems almost forgotten. Then “out of the blue” (as they say) freelance journalist (and free speech expert) Anders R Olsson discusses my thesis online.

What a thrill to hear someone else discuss my work – not with me but in a general review kind of way. Very, very nice feeling – thank you Anders.

Swedish radio has the recording online (only for thirty days) so if you want to spend seven Swedish minutes with Anders and my thesis then click here.

Posted on by mklang

Andrew "Da-Man" Murray

Can you believe that I almost forgot to tell everyone about it? My friend Andrew has just published his first solo work! Too cool. Andrew’s book is called “The Regulation of Cyberspace: Control in the online environment” and is an excellent mix of academia, anecdote, politics, law, raw power and technology.

He cites examples as varied as the online coffee pot at Cambridge to the Live8 ebay scandals of 2005, draws from academic fields of information technology, law, philosophy and physics. His point? Basically the world of Internet regulation is much more complex than we care to accept. Regulation is neither hierarchical nor a question of social practice therefore we must bravely accept this and come to terms with the uncertainty of the situation…

Andrew D. Murray – The Regulation of Cyberspace is going to be influential and long lived. Get it from Amazon here!

Posted on by mklang

The horror, the horror

After a serious review of my library the stark realization that something must be done has finally arrived. Some of the books have been donated to causes, some have actually been thrown away (this post is entitled â??the horrorâ??).

Then to finish the list of things that can be done to books â?? here is a list of books that are being given away. Just add a comment of which books you would prefer and I will send them to you.

Alfred Basil Lubbock â?? The Log of the Cutty Sark

The Memoirs of Field Marshall Kesselring

Karateâ??s History and traditions â?? Bruce A. Haines

Kreuger: Genius & Swindler â?? Robert Shaplen

The Condition of Modernity â?? David Harvey

The Philosophy of Schopenhauer â?? Edited Irwin Edman

The Gay Science â?? Fredrich Neitzsche

The Age of Capital â?? E. J. Hobsbawm

This is a totally odd list. Looking at it now makes me wonder what kind of library I have. Actually have, Since I am getting rid of these books…

Posted on by mklang

Christmas Reading

So when you have tired of the good company, food and presents here is a hot tip on what to take a look at. Its a pdf entitled “Best Practice Guide” for “Implementing the EU Copyright Directive in the Digital Age” written by Urs Gasser and Silke Ernst released in December 2006. Here is a short extract from the intro:

At a time where the existing EU copyright framework is under review, this best practice guide seeks to provide a set of specific recommendations for accession states and candidate countries that will or may face the challenge of transposing the EUCD in the near future. It is based on a collaborative effort to take stock of national implementations of the EUCD and builds upon prior studies and reports that analyze the different design choices that Member States have made.

I shall be saving it for Boxing day 🙂

Posted on by mklang

The Sting, or why suckers happily pay

Much of the visible focus of the Free Software vs Proprietary Software discussion revolves around products such as the browser, or the operating system. But what really gets me depressed is the fact that my own faculty has chosen to use proprietary software (the Norwegian Fronter) as their course management system. The best thing is that none of the teachers are particularly happy with this choice. But I doubt that anyone is ever happy about software.

But the fact that we have chosen proprietary software which we cannot develop (even if we wanted to) increases the sense of: â??No, no please let us pay for the privilege of being unhappy with software we cannot improve.â??

UPDATE: The system our faculty uses is the Open Source system called Fronter. The fact is that we have the legal technical ability to make changes to the system. The faculty have contributed in the past (Thank you, Aleksander!). The lack of understanding about this among the teachers (me included) can only be seen as a lack of internal communication.

Just to make sure that I maintain that unhappy feeling â?? UCLA have decided to rub salt into my wound. The UCLA have decided to adopt the Moodle as their sole course management system. Moodle is licensed under the GNU General Public License and is under active development in collaboration by universities all over the world.

Moodle is a course management system (CMS) – a free, Open Source software package designed using sound pedagogical principles, to help educators create effective online learning communities. You can download and use it on any computer you have handy (including webhosts), yet it can scale from a single-teacher site to a 50,000-student University.

If my own department is too dumb to see the merits of this argument then what hope is there for Free Software? People seem to want to be part of the P. T. Barnum worldview “There’s a sucker born every minute…and two to take ’em.” But why do I have to work with the ones who want to be conned and pay happily for the privilege?

The misleading title of this post may suggest that I have an answer to this question beyond human stupidity. But I don’t – or maybe I am just tired and cranky?

Posted on by mklang

Resistance Studies Network

For some time now I have been dropping (subtle?) hints about another project in my life. It’s now time to come clean admit what I am doing. Some university colleagues at the Dept. of Peace and Development Studies and at the History of Ideas and Theory of Science and I have formed the Resistance Studies Network at Göteborg University.

While the whole thing is in its infancy the idea is to develop the topic of resistance studies and eventually establish it as a legitimate field of research and as a subject in its own right. Resistance has been studied before but usually it is about technical resistance (ohm and stuff) or the Belgian resistance of WWII but the subject has not been studied as a topic of its own.

The idea is to find and define the concept of resistance. To attempt to understand the nature of resistance. When is resistance resistance? When is resistance legitimate? Resistance to what? The questions seem endless…

Anyway right now we have a web page, blog, wiki pages and a mailing list. Next term we start seminars and text discussions. This will be followed by publications and conferences. Ah, academia… So far there is a natural inclination for hands on “action research” so there may even be some prison time (not sure if this will help you get tenure…)

Posted on by mklang

RTFM

Nobody wants to read a manual. Most of them are written by people with decidedly odd senses of humor since they seem to skip over a small detail which makes most processes impossible to complete. It’s kind of like cooking recipes  which demand that you have  a tablespoon of port wine at home. Simply annoying.

My favorite kind of manuals are the ones which spend an enormous amount of space describing the blatantly obvious such as “this is the screen” or “plug in the electricity” or “insert batteries” but then when it gets to the stuff which is specific (and complex) for the new machine the instructions get very vague.

Posted on by mklang

DRM & Dog Poo

I wrote an article which has been published on the Swedish Green Party website Cogito.nu. The article discusses the dangers to democracy posed by digital restrictions management (DRM). In the article I discuss the way in which regulation works by using an example of picking up dog poo. Strange mixture of DRM & dog poo but I think it works. The article is available here (in Swedish).

Posted on by mklang