Earth: Mostly Harmless

UK digital rights group sets up

Good show, chaps! It’s about time we had a European version of the EFF!

UK digital rights group sets up:

A UK-based organisation to preserve digital rights and freedoms has been set up thanks to pledges of money by those passionate about such rights. It says it wants to highlight European and UK legislation which could threaten the rights of digital citizens.

Still at early stages, the Open Rights Group (Org) will serve as a hub for other cyber-rights groups campaigning on similar digital rights issues.

Org emulates US’s Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) digital rights group. The EFF has campaigned against entertainment industry attempts to limit what people can do with digital media. It has also provided guidelines and legal advice to bloggers at work, and has helped shape e-voting policies.

Org aims to nurture a grassroots community of volunteers to campaign on digital rights issues, such as ID card proposals, biometric passports, data protection, “fair use” rights over digital content, and vehicle tracking technologies.

(Via BBC News | TECHNOLOGY.)

What UK’s copyright industries are up to

The latest developments in the ongoing and ill-informed IP debate from my well-informed fellow copyfighter Cory Doctorow. The very phrase ‘intellectual property‘ gives me the shivers, but that’s a story for another day. I’ll let Adam Singer’s rhetoric speak for itself.

What UK’s copyright industries are up to:
Cory Doctorow: The BBC’s Matt Locke has written a great report on yesterday’s meeting on copyright in the UK that was held by a minister who is reported to have called for extending copyright on performances to the performer’s life plus one hundred years.

Adam Singer gave a response from the stage that was full of fantastic rhetoric, describing the emerging market for 3D printers as a harbinger of a world in which all creative IP is under threat from piracy: “It doesn’t matter if the button says ‘print’ [in reference to 3D printers] or ‘burn’ - all design will become simply a file to be shared”. He saw strong IP as the “intellectual hygiene of a networked world”, suggesting that IP law should be taught as the “new domestic science” in schools, as it was the most important future skill for creative entrepreneurs. His rhetoric, although very entertaining, was from the dystopian end of the telescope - “each time bandwith increases, another industry will fall [because of IP theft]“. You could try to unpick all the false assumptions in that last sentence, but frankly, its not worth it. Just sit back and bask in the warm glow of his fire and brimstone. In fairness, Adam Singer is far more measured and informed than the above quotes suggest (despite describing Lawrence Lessig as the “Martin Luther of copyright” that the music industry had failed to burn…), but he’s a great public speaker, and it’s his job to provoke.

I asked a question to the panel about the kind of industry trends that the DCMS were looking into when developing new IP models for the creative industries. Writers like Henry Chesbrough and Eric Von Hippel have documented trends in ‘old’ industries like Pharma and Engineering towards ‘open innovation’ models. Emerging best practise is to maximise your return from IP through a range of licensing models outside your own company, moving from old models of patent enforcement to open licensing models with peer companies and even Von Hippel’s ‘Free Revealing’, where IP is given up in order to drive other competitive advantages.

Link

(Via Boing Boing.)

On a related note, it looks like the late Sonny Bono is posthumously taking his views global via proposed European legislation. It is indeed a sad day.