Cyberlaw

I forgot to read the license

Recently the Norwegian browser released version 10, a nice slick browser and a good alternative. But I forgot to read the license. Thanks to Olav Torvund for reminding me by presenting the most important section on his blog:

By uploading Content to Opera’s site, you grant Opera an unrestricted, royalty-free, worldwide, irrevocable license to use, reproduce, display, perform, modify, transmit, and distribute such material in any manner, including in connection with Opera’s business, and you also agree that Opera is free to use any ideas, concepts, know-how, or techniques that you send Opera for any purpose. For the avoidance of doubt, this clause does not apply to the files you share as an End-User of the Opera Unite, as such files are never uploaded to Opera’s site. Opera will not make a claim to own or use those files.

This is not a totally unusual claim to rights but it should make you think. Any ideas or knowledge shared via Opera belong to Opera 🙂

Posted on by mklang

Runes and churches from the RAÄ

Another selection of photographs from the Swedish National Heritage Board have gone online at Flickr Commons. The latest batch (20 images to begin with) are photographs of churches and ancient monuments and the Heritage Board hopes that these images will both be appreciated by the public and that the public will contribute with information about the images as well as tagging and commenting them.

How about a nice rune?

Runic inscription (U 308) on a rock at Ekeby, north-west of Skånela Church.

The inscription says: “Gunne had these runes carved to his memory, while he was alive. Torgöt carved these runes.” – is this the twitter of the past?

Commenting on their selection the National Heritage Board write on their blog:

We on the Flickr Commons team at the National Heritage Board think that these plain and sometimes even a bit anonymous pictures have  something to tell us about the Swedish Cultural Heritage – not in a glamorous or fanciful, but in an honest way. Some of the photographs are taken by scientists or devoted scholars with the purpose to document. Some of the photographers are unknown to us.

We hope these photos will raise an interest in Old Time Sweden with its people, churches and ancient monuments. Welcome to share a part of our Heritage!

Posted on by mklang

Gikii 4 programme

Registration is now closed, but here is the programme for this year’s Gikii. The good news is that I am in the first session.

17 September

09:15-09:30 Opening

09:30-10:45 First morning session (3): Doomsday

  • Christopher Lever, Fortun@e 500: A Consideration of the Contract Law Consequences of Cache Poisoning
  • Clive Feather, Resilience of the PGP “web of trust” and the disruption of criminal networks (no abstract)
  • Mathias Klang, Strangelove and Salami: An illustration of the unintended consequences of technical solutions

10:45-11:15 Coffee Break

11:15-12:30 Second Morning session (3): Digital Identities and Legal Life After Death

  • Burkhard Schafer, ZombAIs and family law: technology beyond the grave
  • Lillian Edwards, Death 2.0
  • Wiebke Abel, Shawn H.E. Harmon, Future Tech: Governance & Ethics In The Age Of Artificially Enhanced Man (Or ‘Beware The Zombais At The Gate’)

12:30-13:30 Lunch (on location)

13:30-15:15 First Afternoon session (4): Robots and Interfaces with Humans

  • F.E. Guerra-Pujol, Blade Runner, Time Scarcity and the Optimal Lifespan of Robots and Clones’
  • Miranda Mowbray and Burkhard Schafer, EAT ME
  • Dr Richard Jones, ‘CyberTags: The third generation of electronic offender-monitoring systems’

15:15-15:45 Coffee Break

15:45-17:30 Second Afternoon session (4): Copyright: Take A Bite!

  • Bernt Hugenholz, ‘A Future of Levies: The Taxification of Copyright’
  • Ot van Daalen & Iris Kieft, Towards new methods for resolving the conflict between copyright and the free flow of information
  • Nicolas Jondet, France: the land of the Linux? The case of DRM interoperability and reverse-engineering

19:30 Sponsored conference diner.

18 September

09:15 Opening

09:15-10:30 First morning session (3): New Media Harms

  • Andrea Matwyshyn, Intended Data Beneficiaries
  • Arno R. Lodder, Is it possible to control personal information that was uploaded by others without the intention to harm or infringe?
  • Caroline Wilson, Twit or Tweet? Legal Issues Associated with Twitter and other Micro-Blogging Sites”

10:30-11:00 Coffee Break

11:00-12:30 Second Morning session (4): Making and Sharing

  • Maarten Brinkerink, Inge van Beekum, Incentives and Constraints for Dutch Public Broadcasters to Adopt Creative Commons Licensing
  • Melanie Dulong de Rosnay, Creative Commons licenses incompatibilities : when sharing needs to be rationalized
  • Steven Hetcher, Location, Location Still Matters: Pop Stars, User-Generated Popular Culture & The Dislocation Of Non-Location
  • Ray Corrigan, Protecting the public domain: a five point plan’

12:30-13:30 Lunch (on location)

13:30-15:15 First Afternoon session (4): The World Explained

  • Andrés Guadamuz, Luddism 2.0, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Web
  • Peter K. Yu, The Crossover Point
  • Chris Marsden, Net Neutrality as a Debate About More Than Economics

15:15-15:45 Coffee Break

15:45-17:30 Second Afternoon session (4): Fundamental rights

  • Joris van Hoboken, Search Engine Censorship: New Metaphors for the Suppression of Findability
  • Judith Rauhofer, “Get out of my head, bloodsucker!” Notions of surveillance in the vampire mind
  • Martin Jones, Sousveillance: The Emergent Digital Eye Witness
  • TJ McIntyre, Won’t somebody please think of the children!?
Posted on by mklang

Mininova must remove infringing torrents

TorrentFreak reports that the torrent search engine Mininova:

…has lost its civil dispute with Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN. The judge ruled that Mininova is not directly responsible for any copyright infringement, but ordered it to remove all torrents linking to copyrighted material within three months, or face a penalty of up to 5 million euros.

The courts attitude towards the site was very different to the Swedish Pirate Bay case since it was not BREIN’s intention was not to shut down the site. But they demanded a filtering of infringing keywords to ensure that copyright holders were protected.

The court agreed with BREIN’s assessment that Mininova is not doing enough to protect the rights of copyright holders, and ordered the site to remove all torrent files that link to infringing content within three months, or pay a penalty up to 5 million euros ($7 million).

The interesting thing is that the courts are demanding that Mininova do more than apply a takedown policy that allows copyright holders to remove infringing torrents but stop short from demanding the site is liable for everything straight away (which was the Swedish approach). The fact that “doing more” is extremely complex (and therefore costly) did not impress the courts.

Posted on by mklang

Cyberbullying on Facebook

It was obviously just a matter of time before it would happen. The only question is what took it so long. The Guardian reports that a teenager was jailed for bullying on Facebook:

A teenager who posted death threats on Facebook has become the first person in Britain to be jailed for bullying on a social networking site.

Keeley Houghton, 18, of Malvern, Worcestershire, has been sentenced to three months in a young offenders’ institution after she posted a message saying that she would kill Emily Moore. She pleaded guilty to harassment.

Posted on by mklang

Google Books goes Creative Commons

Some interesting news from the Creative Commons blog

Google launched a program to enable rightsholders to make their Creative Commons-licensed books available for the public to download, use, remix, and share via Google Books.

The new initiative makes it easy for participants in Google Books’ Partner Program to mark their books with one of the six Creative Commons licenses (or the CC0 waiver). This gives authors and publishers a simple way to articulate the permissions they have granted to the public through a CC license, while giving people a clear indication of the legal rights they have to CC-licensed works found through Google Books.

The Inside Google Books post announcing the initiative talks a bit about what this all means:

We’ve marked books that rightsholders have made available under a CC license with a matching logo on the book’s left hand navigation bar. People can download these books in their entirety and pass them along: to friends, classmates, teachers, and so on. And if the rightsholder has chosen to allow people to modify their work, readers can even create a mashup–say, translating the book into Esperanto, donning a black beret, and performing the whole thing to music on YouTube.

Posted on by mklang

Can a license be too ethical?

The Gnu General Public License (GPL) holds an amazing position as the premier free and open source software license but this position may be slipping since its move to version 3 in 2007. In an article entitled Does GPL still matter? Yahoo Tech News reports:

A June study conducted by Black Duck Software, an open source development tools vendor, shows that the Free Software Foundation‘s GPL — although far and away still the dominant open source licensing platform — could be starting to slide. The survey found that despite strong growth in GPLv3 adoption, the percentage of open source projects using GPL variants dropped from 70 to 65 percent from the previous year.

This is interesting. But the question is what does this decrease (if it should be seen as a decrease) mean? The GPL has been in controversies before during its history (Wikipedia historical background) – in fact it’s monunmental position in free and open source software is built upon its unflinching ideological stance which has often been the root of controversy.

The question is whether the GPL has gone too far and is losing its position or if this should be seen as the GPL taking a new moral stance and waiting for the rest of the world to realise the wisdom of its position?

Posted on by mklang

I'm a Gikii

It’s soon time for the Gikii 4 conference which will be held in Amsterdam during 18-19 September – this year it is organized by the Institute for Information Law (IViR). I am particularly happy since I will be attending with a paper of my own.

The program for the conference is here. Just to give you an idea of the type of stuff presented there here are a couple of papers being presented (full list here).

Luddism 2.0, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Web

ZombAIs and family law: technology beyond the grave

“Get out of my head, bloodsucker!” Notions of surveillance in the vampire mind

EAT ME

Robot Law?

Future Tech: Governance & Ethics In The Age Of Artificially Enhanced Man (Or ‘Beware The Zombais At The Gate’)

As you can see from this short list Gikii is definately on the bizarre side of technology law.

Posted on by mklang

Online Norwegian internet privacy protest

This post is in support of the Norwegian’s struggle for preserving internet freedom. The question concerns the choice to implement the Data Protection Directive (2006/24) into Norwegian law. Since Norway is not an EU member state they have the right to reserve themselves and not implement directives. The protest for digital privacy is an attempt by the Norwegians not to follow the same integrity-violating policies being adopted throughout Europe.  The protest action is an attempt to get the Norwegian government to state that they will not be adopting the directive.

Personvern er en grunnleggende verdi i et demokrati. Personvernet innebærer en rett til å være i fred fra andre, men også en rett til å ha kontroll over opplysninger om seg selv, særlig opplysninger som oppleves som personlige. Etter EMK artikkel 8 er personvern ansett som en menneskerettighet.

Med en mulig norsk implementering av Datalagringsdirektivet (direktiv 2006/24/EF), som pålegger tele- og nettselskap å lagre trafikkdata om borgernes elektroniske kommunikasjon (e-post, sms, telefon, internett) i inntil to år, vil nordmenns personvern bli krenket på det groveste.

Datalagringsdirektivet ble vedtatt av EU 15.mars 2006, men fremdeles har den norske regjeringen ikke offisielt tatt stilling til om direktivet skal gjøre til norsk lov eller ikke. Gjennom EØS-avtalen har Norge en reservasjonsrett. Denne har aldri før blitt brukt, men så har man heller aldri stått overfor et direktiv som representerer en så stor trussel mot demokratiets grunnleggende verdier som det datalagringsdirektivet gjør.

Vi krever at regjeringen sier ifra nå før valget om de vil gjøre datalagringsdirektivet til norsk lov eller ikke. Å ikke ta stilling, slik regjeringen har gjort i over tre år, er det samme som stilltiende aksept.

Regjeringen må ta stilling nå – si nei til datalagringsdirektivet!

Følgende støtter saken og har samme eller et lignende innlegg på sin blogg (denne listen oppdateres fortløpende):

Lars-Henrik Paarup Michelsen, 2.kandidat – Hordaland Venstre
Mads Munthe-Kaas, Bergen Venstre
Carl Christian Grøndahl, Bergen Venstre
Vox Populi; Blogger Knut Johannessen
Virrvarr; Blogger Ida Jackson
Per Aage Pleym Christensen, Liberaleren (også på VG-blogg)
Even Sandvold Roland, evensr/#drittunge
Torstein Dahle, Partileder Rødt
Robert Sørensen, www.teknonytt.com
Boye Bjerkholt, Leder Skedsmo Venstre
Runar Mæland, ungdomskandidat Hordaland Venstre
Jonas Eilertsen, 1. nestleder Unge Venstre
Tanketom, Andreas H. Opsvik
Jon Lien, master på Politisk Økonomi
Svein Ølnes, It-forsker & bonde
Stian Skår Ludvigsen, Bergen Venstre
Vampus, Blogger Heidi Nordby Lunde
Bjørn Magne Solvik, høyremann i Nordkapp
Erlend Sand, Leder Europeisk Ungdom
Bjørn Stærk, Blogger
Bjørge Solli, Blogger
Bjørn Smestad, Lærer
Odd Bovim, Blogger & advokat
Unge Venstre/Den tredje vei
Pål Hivand, Blogger og kommunikasjonsrådgiver
Linn Beate Kaald Thoresen, Venstrepolitiker Oslo
unknownrebel
Gisle Hannemyr, Forsker, informatikk/internett

Posted on by mklang

Running the distance

Since I survived my first real running event and managed to get around despite my lack of character in relation to serious training I have decided to make it an annual event. So next year on the 22 May I will be running the GöteborgsVarvet again. I registered today.

is it worth it by wrote

This year I ran with a camera and took pictures of the race. Many of the pictures were really bad but those which I liked ended up here. Not sure if I will take the camera with me next year, maybe I should try liveblogging! But then again my hope is to take the race more seriously and dramatically reduce my time from 2:17 to under two hours… so maybe just twitter?

Posted on by mklang