GPL

Unrelated things: GPL conference & Filesharing

Some unrelated things which I put together in one post because I have been away from my blog until today (without any serious side effects).

Yesterday I was in Stockholm at the Swedish Parliament to discuss filesharing. No â?? not in the chamber! It was an enjoyable, open and interesting discussion â?? thanks for inviting me.

I also found out yesterday that the date for my thesis defence has been finalised. Once again travel plans of others had forced changes but now the date is set (for the last time! I hope.) So I will defend on October 2nd.

In addition to this I have been invited to join a panel at The 3rd International GPLv3 Conference: CCCB, Barcelona, Spain, June 22nd & 23rd. This is going to be very interesting.

I seem to have accidently forgotten (Freud who?)
to return my visitors badge…

Posted on by mklang

Raiding Pirate Bay

What is The Pirate Bay (TPB) supposed to have done?

TPB is the site of a BitTorrent tracker. In other words it helps users to locate BitTorrent files. BitTorrent is a variant (some would say development) of the Peer-to-Peer networks. It (the BitTorrent protocol) is a method for advertising and sharing files over a network.

Basically users looking for files (this can be films, music, texts, software etc) go to the search engine (TPB) and conduct a search. If they find what they are looking for they can download a â??.torrentâ?? file. This is not the actual end file they are looking for. It is a file which contains meta data about the file which they are looking for.

This data contains two sections. One that specifies the URL of the tracker and the other that contains the filename, fragment size, key length and a pass. The torrent file can contain information about many end files.

By activating the torrent file one begins the download of the end file or files. These are downloaded from several computers where the file is stored. As soon as part of the file is downloaded the downloader also becomes a source where others may download this part of the file. Once the download is complete the downloader may decide to keep this file available to others or remove it from the swarm.

Torrents are used to coordinate file sharing of copyrighted material both with and without the copyright holders consent. The technology cannot define whether the actions are legal or illegal. At present I have two complete files which I have been sharing for some time via BitTorrent. Since I am sharing complete files I am called a Seeder.

I have the most recent version of UBUNTU which is a Linux operating system licensed under the GPL license where sharing (and more) it is allowed. I have a film called Elephants Dream which is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution License and it is therefore permissible to share. In both these cases I am providing a service and helping the legal distribution of material.

OK â?? so that was the technical side. What does TPB do?

TPB is a search engine which helps people find the small tracker (.torrent) files. In other words the small files which contain information about where the end files are within the network. These tracker (.torrent) files are possibly not even capable of being copyrightable. If they are protected by copyright then they are the property of the author â?? in other words their creator. Not the creator of the end files that they track.

TPB case is going to be exciting to watch because the people in control of TPB are well aware of their legal position and of what they are doing. They will not have made the newbie mistake of having copyrighted material on their servers without permission.

Is it illegal to do what TPB does? If I tell you that you can buy a Gucci wallet knockoff at a well known marketplace am I guilty of the crime of â??facilitating copyright infringementâ??? Better still if I tell you how to make your own Gucci wallet am I still innocent? If I could sow and I create a copy of a fashionable suit for my own use is this copyright violation? If I instruct someone else is this â??facilitating copyright infringementâ???

If TPB are â??facilitating copyright infringementâ?? then what about Google? or Flickr? Google helps me find images and texts of masses of copyrighted material. Flickr not only helps me find it but also helps me store it?

What about the local library? They help me find and copy the material I needed to write this postâ?¦

The next step is obviously the question of the police action. The police have removed property from TPB. Removing property is a serious step and the question is whether the alleged crime motivates such action. In the case of computer equipment the question of surplus information must also be taken into consideration. In other words have the police taken too much?

TPB website today states that even servers containing material from organisations not connected with TPB were taken â?? in this case this amounts to a serious violation of an organisations ability to communicate. Can this amount of force justified â?? is the police action proportional to the alleged crime? Especially when other non-accused organisations are affected by police action.

Posted on by mklang

GPLv3 Conference

On the 22nd & 23rd June its the 3rd International GPLv3 Conference which will be held in Barcelona.

The focus will be on the GPLv3 – this is from the press release

The goal of the GPL is to ensure that recipients of GPL covered software are free to examine it, to modify it, to pass on copies, and to distribute modifications. Version two of the GPL was released fifteen years ago, in 1991. The new version is being drafted to account for changes in the legal and technical environment in which software licences operate.

The main changes in version three are to minimise the harm of software patents, to prevent Digital Restrictions Management from being used against software users, and to make the licence compatible with certain classes of other Free Software licences.

Speakers will include, amongst others, Richard Stallman and Eben Moglen.

Posted on by mklang

"We see you" protest today

Sweden has been erratic in moving into the surveillance society. While the bureaucratic tools such as personal identity numbers and identity cards have been used (and abused) for a long time the icon of the surveillance age â?? the camera has not.

This may be due to the Swedish trust in government. State surveillance and control is in place to make society efficient for all therefore it is to be tolerated. Private surveillance is however suspicious â?? or at least it has been.

Legal changes in camera surveillance rules in 1998 began a trend of privatised surveillance which is today causing the massive use of surveillance cameras. Amongst the more unusual uses â?? which are novel in Sweden â?? are camera surveillance of schools and workplaces.

So with the late development of the surveillance state, Swedes are also slowly developing a reaction to it. Today an organisation called Vi Ser Dig (We See You) based at the University of Linköping will stand in a central square in Stockholm take pictures of passers by in an attempt to awaken interest in the almost dead surveillance debate.

Sergels Torg – picture from D. Kolb’s cool site Sprawling Places

So if you are anywhere near Sergels Torg (between 2pm-7pm) â?? bring a camera and become part of the protest.

VISERDIG.SE Uppmanar Allmänheten/Medier/Politiker att Närvara vid Manifestationen den 27/4 kl 14-19 med Syfte att Personifiera �vervakningen!

Posted on by mklang

RMS & CC

Hows that for a title which demands that you know what its all about?

Richard Stallman (RMS) was recently interviewed in LinuxP2P and was asked “…what differences are there between generic CC licensing and the GPL?”

Some Creative Commons licenses are free licenses; most permit at least noncommercial verbatim copying. But some, such as the Sampling Licenses and Developing Countries Licenses, donâ??t even permit that, which makes them unacceptable to use for any kind of work. All these licenses have in common is a label, but people regularly mistake that common label for something substantial.

This has caused a minor blog/email rumble of surprise that RMS is against CC. (Its even on Slashdot). I know of, respect and support RMS views. Even though I am project lead for CC Sweden I am also a member of FSF Sweden team and I dont see any contradictions with this or any contradictions in RMS on this topic. Therefore I am a bit surprised at the effect RMS’s statement has caused.

CC cannot be understood as one principle. It is a set of licenses offering the user many different options. The GPL is more ideologically stringent and therefore one can be “for” the GPL on ideological or political grounds. Claiming to be “for” CC on ideological or political grounds can only mean that you are for a simple licensing system which helps creators which is admirable but hardly as ideologically deep as creating an accessible infrastructure based for all.

Posted on by mklang

GPLv3 update

Kalle was obviously paying more attention than I was – so here is an update from his blog:

Additional reading to the draft you will find the â??rationale documentâ??. There is apparently a good discussion in #gplv3 on irc.freenode.net.

In addition to this there is a good overview by Andy Oram entitled “Initial report from GPL 3 conference” at ONLamp.com.

Posted on by mklang

Draft GPLv3

Here is a copy of a mail about the GPLv3 process:

The first draft of the GPLv3 is now available at http://gplv3.fsf.org/draft

This means that a global discussion has begun. The FSF expects to receive several thousand comments on the draft. Coordinating all these comments will be a challenging task indeed. A unified single point of coordination is percieved as necessary for this.

As the FSF web site for the GPLv3 is now operational and ready to accept comments in a way that will make this process much smoother for everyone involved, we will close this list down and ask everyone with an interest in the license to sign up at:

http://gplv3.fsf.org/

In case you are interested in general discussions on Free Software, our mailing list discussion@fsfeurope.org will remain available for that.

Best regards,
Georg Greve
FSFE, President

Posted on by mklang

Rättigheter & Besk

På ITceum i Linköping finns avtalet mellan Svenska Aeroplan Aktiebolaget och Matematikmaskinnämnden för att utveckla den första svenska datorn Besk. Lite kul att se att avtalet som ligger till grund för IT industrin naturligtvis innehåller ett stycke om rättigheter.

Avtal mellan Matematikmaskinnämnden, här nedan kallad nämnden, och Svenska Aeroplan Aktiebolaget, här nedan kallad bolaget, har följande avtal träffats om teknisk information för tillverkning av matematikmaskin av typ Besk.

§4. Avtalet innebär rättighet för bolaget att utan licenskostnad nyttja alla eventuella patent som nämnden eller av nämnden anställd personal kan erhålla berörande konstruktion Besk i dess nuvarande utformning jämte kommande modifieringar under tiden fram till den 1 januari 1958.

1958
Stockholm (Matematikmaskinnämnden)
Linköping (Svenska Aeroplan Aktiebolaget)

Besk
BESK på Drottninggatan

BESK (Binär Elektronisk Sekvens Kalkylator) var uppbyggd av 2.400 elektronrör och var mest använd till meteorologiska beräkningar och för att beräkna skjuttabeller till militären. Saab ville ha BESK bl.a. till att beräkna vibrationer i flygplansvingar. Under en kort tid var BESK världens snabbaste dator.

Posted on by mklang

Does Creative Commons free your content? – CNET reviews

An excellent article on Creative Commons was published on CNET, here is a quote to give you an idea…

“Here’s the concept of a Creative Commons license, as I understand it. Every creative work receives copyright protection automatically the moment you fix the work by putting pen to paper, hitting save, or pressing record. This protection reserves all rights to the work’s creator. Nobody can use that work without express written permission except where there is legally determined fair use. (We’ll get to what constitutes fair use in a minute.)

Creative Commons provides a somewhat standardized set of licenses that a creator of copyrighted works can use to give extra rights to people. This is similar to the GPL, used for software. (What was hard for me to wrap my head around in writing this column is that Creative Commons is actually more about protecting the audience you’re hoping will use your work than it is about protecting you. You still hold on to whatever rights you reserve, but you’re abandoning some of those rights on purpose.)

Copyright law protects any creative work you create whether you want it to or not. Nobody can legally use your work beyond fair use without a license. Creative Commons serves as a license that people who want their work to be shared can issue. Don’t want your work to be shared? No problem. Don’t use a Creative Commons license. ”

Does Creative Commons free your content? – CNET reviews

Posted on by mklang