Corporate

…and one EULA to rule them all…

Sorry for the geeky title but when I came across this over on Boing Boing it struck me that licensing is going way, way beyond contract theory in an attempt to control the rights over the users. From Boing Boing:

The Software may contain third party software which requires notices and/or additional terms and conditions. Such required third party software notices and/or additional terms and conditions are made a part of and incorporated by reference into this EULA. By accepting this EULA, you are also accepting the additional terms and conditions, if any, set forth therein.

Most EULAs (end user license agreements) tend to make sure that the user has little or no rights at all. EULA’s can also conveniently be changed without notifying the user of the changes. This means that the software user should consider herself lucky if her equipment works at all.

The example above goes beyond that. By agreeing to the EULA you also agree to any terms or conditions of third party software the original company may choose to install. This makes it impossible for the user to even attempt to control her rights against the software manufacturers.

For more on EULA’s see, for example, this article I wrote on Spyware.

Posted on by mklang

Can we afford the humanities?

The humanities can be seen as the beginning and the backbone of the academic world. From the early origins the university was based on the study and humanism. The oldest still operating university (University of Bologna) began in 1088 when masters of grammar, rhetoric and logic began to devote themselves to law.

Despite the age and pedigree of the humanities they do not live a protected life. The position of the humanities is not as guaranteed in the world of the university – economic reality and a focus on invention and innovation have created an environment where research for its own sake is too often neglected. The mantra of the day is research that can be rapidly exploited by companies in making or improving necessary or unnecessary widgets.

This means that the university is not about study but that the focus should be more geared to being a prolonged arm of the corporate research and development.

Naturally in times when such production counts for everything those parts of the university that do not produce are seen as liabilities and face grim economic realities.

One such example is the humanities faculty at the University of Göteborg. Our university has decided to reduce the number of departments here. At present the faculty has 17 departments and the university plans to reduce this number to between four and eight.

Naturally a faculty cannot consist of an innumerable number of departments and the reduction is most probably a prudent and necessary move. But axing departments in the humanities is not a good method of promoting fundamental research in any society.

While the decision may be sound economics – is it really the right way to go?

Posted on by mklang

Six questions about open standards

The question of open standards is a challenging and important one. Unfortunately most people tend to lose interest very quickly when standards are being discussed.

The FSFE has presented six questions which national standardisation bodies should ask before adopting the ECMA/MS-OOXML format as an IEC/ISO standard. Unless a national standardisation body has conclusive and affirmative answers to all of them, it should vote no in IEC/ISO and request that Microsoft incorporate its work on MS-OOXML into ISO/IEC 26300:2006 (Open Document Format).

1. Application independence?

No standard should ever depend on a certain operating system, environment or application. Application and implementation independence is one of the most important properties of all standards.

Is the MS-OOXML specification free from any references to particular products of any vendor and their specific behaviour?

2. Supporting pre-existing Open Standards?

Whenever applicable and possible, standards should build upon previous standardisation efforts and not depend on proprietary, vendor-specific technologies.

MS-OOXML neglects various standards, such as MathML and SVG, which are recommendations by the W3C, and uses its own vendor-specific formats instead. This puts a substantial burden on all vendors to follow Microsoft in its proprietary infrastructure built over the past 20 years in order to fully implement MS-OOXML. It seems questionable how any third party could ever implement them equally well.

What is the benefit of accepting usage of such vendor-specific formats at the expense of standardisation in these areas? Where will other vendors get competitive, compatible and complete implementations for all platforms to avoid prohibitively large investments?

3. Backward compatibility for all vendors?

One of the alledged main advantages of MS-OOXML is its ability to allow for backward compatibility, as also referenced in the ECMA International press release.

For any standard it is essential that it is implementable by any third party without necessity of cooperation by another company, additional restricted information or legal agreements or indemnifications. It is also essential to not require the cooperation of any competitor to achieve full and comparable interoperability.

On the grounds of the existing MS-OOXML specification, can any third party regardless of business model, without access to additional information and without the cooperation of Microsoft implement full backward compatibility and conversion of such legacy documents into MS-OOXML comparable to what Microsoft can offer?

4. Proprietary extensions?

Proprietary, application-specific extensions are a known technique employed in particular by Microsoft to abuse and leverage its desktop monopoly into neighboring markets. It is a technique at the heart of the abusive behaviour that was at the core of the decision against Microsoft by the European Commission in 2004 and Microsoft is until today continuing its refusal to release the necessary interoperability information.

For this reason, it is common understanding that Open Standards should not allow such proprietary extensions, and that such market-distorting techniques should not be possible on the grounds of an Open Standard.
Does MS-OOXML allow proprietary extensions? Is Microsoft’s implementation of MS-OOXML faithful, i.e. without undocumented extensions? Are there safeguards against such abusive behaviour?

5. Dual standards?

The goal of all standardisation is always to come to one single standard, as multiple standards always provide an impediment to competition. Seeming competition on the standard is truly a strategic measure to gain control over certain segments of a market, as various examples in the past have demonstrated.

There is an existing Open Standard for office documents, namely the Open Document Format (ODF) (ISO/IEC 26300:2006). Both MS-OOXML and ODF are built upon XML technology, so employ the same base technology and thus ultimately have the same theoretical capabilities. Microsoft itself is a member of OASIS, the organisation in which the ODF standard was developed and is being maintained. It was aware of the process and invited to participate.

Why did and does Microsoft refuse to participate in the existing standardisation effort? Why does it not submit its technological proposals to OASIS for inclusion into ODF?

6. Legally safe?

Granting all competitors freedom from legal prosecution for implementation of a standard is essential. Such a grant needs to be clear, reliable and wide enough to cover all activities necessary to achieve full interoperability and allow a level playing field for true competition on the merits.

MS-OOXML is accompanied by an unusually complex and narrow “covenant not to sue” instead of the typical patent grant. Because of its complexity, it does not seem clear how much protection from prosecution for compatibility it will truly provide.

Cursory legal study implies that the covenant does not cover all optional features and proprietary formats mandatory for complete implementation of MS-OOXML. So freedom of implementation by all competitors is not guaranteed for the entire width of the proposed MS-OOXML format, and questionable even for the core components.

Does your national standardisation body have its own, independent legal analysis about the exact nature of the grant to certify whether it truly covers the full spectrum of all possible MS-OOXML implementations?

All these questions should have answers that should be provided by the national standardisation bodies through independent counsel and experts, and in particular not by Microsoft or its business partners, which have a direct conflict of interest on this issue. If there is no good answer to any one of them, a national body should vote no in ISO/IEC.

Posted on by mklang

Free Aunty Beeb

The BBC is one of those world institutions, a social and cultural backbone which we almost always take for granted. Naturally one does not achieve such status without making wrong turns. Thankfully there are those who are quick to point out the errors and attempt to show the correct path. Much like one may lead an old aunty to the table there are activists who disagree with the BBC’s use of DRM technologies.

The site Free the BBC contains a letter to the BBC with the main arguments (relevant to the BBC) against DRM. Many of the arguments have been heard before but I particularly liked this new one:

The BBC royal charter establishes a number of goals and operating conditions including “promoting education and learning”, “stimulating creativity and cultural excellence”, and “bringing the UK to the world”. DRM runs contrary to all of these purposes. DRM limits education by restricting copying for public educational purposes, and even inhibits private study. It stifles creativity by trying to make even incidental remixing impossible. Finally, it arbitrarily limits the BBC’s reach by forcing viewers to use particular proprietary software applications. DRM advances corporate interests over the public interest, which is in flagrant opposition to the charter.

So what are you waiting for? Go there, read the letter containing the arguments and sign it!

For those of you who found the title slightly cryptic: The BBC is sometimes referred to as Aunty Beeb.

Posted on by mklang

Economist Against DRM

Not bad. The Economist is against DRM making bold statements in a recent article:

Belatedly, music executives have come to realise that DRM simply doesnâ??t work. It is supposed to stop unauthorised copying, but no copy-protection system has yet been devised that cannot be easily defeated. All it does is make life difficult for paying customers, while having little or no effect on clandestine copying plants that churn out pirate copies.

and

While most of todayâ??s DRM schemes that come embedded on CDs and DVDs are likely to disappear over the next year or two, the need to protect copyrighted music and video will remain. Fortunately, there are better ways of doing this than treating customers as if they were criminals.

Nice to see that serious media has begun to realise that rhetoric alone is not enough to legitimize DRM. Articles such as this show that media is beginning to practice journalism and report not only what is written in corporate press releases but are looking at what is happening all around them.

(via Boing Boing)

Posted on by mklang

The Third Draft

The third draft of the GPLv3 has been released. The draft is a result of feedback from various sources (general public, official discussion committees, and two international conferences held in India and Japan). The draft incorporates significant changes since the previous draft (July 2006). This draft is planned to be the penultimate draft prior to the formal release of the official GPLv3.

Changes in this draft include:

* First-time violators can have their license automatically restored if they remedy the problem within thirty days.
* License compatibility terms have been simplified, with the goal of making them easier to understand and administer.
* Manufacturers who include the software in consumer products must also provide installation information for the software along with the source. This change provides more narrow focus for requirements that were proposed in previous drafts.
* New patent requirements have been added to prevent distributors from colluding with patent holders to provide discriminatory protection from patents.

    The draft will be open for comments and discussion for sixty days. Following this the FSF will release a “last call” draft, followed by another thirty days for discussion before the FSF’s board of directors approves the final text of GPL version 3.

    Richard Stallman, president of the FSF and principal author of the GNU GPL, said, “The GPL was designed to ensure that all users of a program receive the four essential freedoms which define free software. These freedoms allow you to run the program as you see fit, study and adapt it for your own purposes, redistribute copies to help your neighbor, and release your improvements to the public. The recent patent agreement between Microsoft and Novell aims to undermine these freedoms. In this draft we have worked hard to prevent such deals from making a mockery of free software.”

    Posted on by mklang

    Back in Sweden

    Just returned from the London trip which went very well. I gave two lectures and a seminar at the London School of Economics. The first and second (same lecture on two different days) was on Internet Civil Disobedience. The focus was on the use of Internet technology in acts of civil disobedience with a focus on  denial of service attacks. The seminar was on the Democratic Effects of Attempts to Regulate Internet Technology – this is basically my thesis work and the discussion is on the negative effects that attempts to regulate the Internet have on democratic participation via the Internet. Both lectures and the seminar went very well.

    The rest of the time was spent both in meetings and in a well deserved relaxation. As usual London offered the opportunity for lots of interesting new additions to my reading list. Besides the two mentioned earlier (Peter Singerâ??s One World: The ethics of globalization and a book edited by Roth, Worden and Bernstein called Torture: Does it make us safer? Is it ever OK? A Human Rights Perspective). I came across John Pilger Freedom Next Time (a fantastic book I have already read half of it – it is a wake up call for anyone who wants to see the way in which mainstream media stifles important stories relevant to human rights.

    Insurrection: Citizen Challenges to Corporate Power (by Kevin Danaher and Jason Mark), From ACT UP to the WTO: Urban Protest and Community Building in the Era of Globalization (Benjamin Shepard and Ronald Hayduk Eds) and Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (James C. Scott) are three books which are highly relevant to my resistance work.

    The list is nicely rounded up by Peer-to-Peer: Harnessing the Power of Disruptive Technologies (Andy Oram editor) and Computer Ethics and Professional Responsibility (edited by Terrell Ward Bynum and Simon Rogerson).

    To me this is a very exciting list of books the only problem is to find the time they deserve to be able to read the properly. To me book shopping in London is not really about the large and wonderful bookstores that contain everything. I tend to get lost among so many books, become indecisive and leave empty handed. I much prefer the eclectic mix to be found in good second hand or remainder bookstores.  These also have the additional benefit of being really cheap. The most expensive among this list was Pilger’s book which cost only 8 pounds for a new hardback.

    Posted on by mklang

    Virtual Property

    The worst thing about trying to catch up on my blog reading and writing is that some of the stuff becomes dated – but this is still relevant from Technolama.

    According to Slashdot, eBay has caved-in to increasing pressure from the games industry and has de-listed all in-game items from its database. However, I’ve made a search and you still can find some items. If you want to buy gold, rare items, swords of power and exotic pets, you will have to go to other websites. In many instances, you may have to go to officially sanctioned websites, such as Sony’s Station Exchange, in order to get your goodies. Why? Because this could be another profitable source of income for MMORPG providers.

    The economics of gaming is a fascinating subject which has just begun to be explored. Here are some interesting starting points:

    Lastowka, F. G. & Hunter, D. The Laws of Virtual Worlds

    Taylor, T. L.  Whose Game is this Anyway?

    Klang, M. Avatar: From Deity to Corporate Property

    Posted on by mklang

    Cultural Relativism and Resistance

    Itâ??s difficult to identify and define resistance but one basic feature (which is overlooked) is the fact that resistance can very rarely be unconscious. Resistance is a conscious act carried out for the purpose of resistance. This is usually not a problem since it is reasonably easy to see that those who resist have made a conscious decision to do so. The issue with conscious choice is usually discussed in situations where the courts believe that the act is criminal rather than activism.

    But there is another side of the coin. Should resistance studies also advocate a normative approach? In other words should those studying resistance also advocate resistance? This question of the normative approach is actually not so unique. It stems from the discussion of cultural relativity. This discussion (simplified) is engaged in the argument whether a culture has the right to condemn or condone acts it finds abhorrent when these occur within another culture?

    These thoughts are sparked off by a trip to India. Mumbai is an energetic city filled with young educated people looking for good, well-paid jobs â?? preferably with a multinational corporation. This in itself is not a problem. But within this modern culture they also manage to incorporate traditional values. In a discussion on marriage and relationships the young and educated all felt comfortable with traditional family life. This included, naturally, the role of the women as subservient to the man, the wife subservient to the mother-in-law etc.

    India is a complex fascinating society. But it also challenges many of my values. In particular the family values and gender roles â?? but it also places demands on me. Should the Indians resist their traditional family roles? Or is my approach to family and frustration at the lack of resistance among them simply a western approach on steroids?

    Should the resistance scholar advocate resistance? Is this a question of academic detachment or method?

    Posted on by mklang

    Video Campaigns and Responses

    Starbucks and the government of Ethiopia have been discussing the trademark rights to some of the finest coffee in the world. The root of the conflict is that Starbucks has not recognised Ethiopia’s ownership of the Sidamo, Harar and Yirgacheffe names. (BBC News 26 October & 30 November 2006).

    Oxfam began a campaign against Starbucks in order to help the Ethiopian coffee farmers. The idea is that if Starbucks signs the agreement with the Ethiopian intellectual property office the Ethiopian farmers will have more control over their products and this will result in better prices.

    The Oxfam campaign is a typical online/offline mix with physical demonstrations being augmented with an information website containing documentation, photographs etc, and an â??act nowâ?? part where individuals can get involved on their own. A textbook example of an information campaign.

    Oxfam have also created a video shot from their â??The Starbucks Day of Actionâ?? on December 16. The most natural place to leave a video on the Internet today is on the site YouTube so naturally Oxfam posted their video on YouTube (Watch it here). The video features demonstrators explaining their views and the positive reactions of people they meet.

    What is interesting is not that the Internet is being used in this way but rather the Starbucks response. Starbucks created their own video response on December 20th  featuring the Head of Starbucks Coffee team answering questions. They too posted their video on YouTube (watch the Starbucks response on YouTube).

    What is unique about the whole story is the way in which Starbucks as a corporation reacted to the unconventional protest use of YouTube. By responding in kind they showed that they understand the way in which information is created and consumed on the Internet.

    Digital video cameras – and in particular mobile phone video cameras – have made the documentation of resistance a necessity. Websites such as YouTube and Google video have created an infrastructure for sharing of the results. By removing the need for camera crews, production teams and broadcast capabilities the creation and distribution of film has fallen into the hands of the creative amateur. The implications of this is that both the protesters and their corporate targets need to quickly master and use this medium of communication.

    Whatever the outcome of the Oxfam campaign â?? this is the future of resistance information warfare.

    Posted on by mklang