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i totally suck, too, which is why I have to reply to my own post -- I failed to link to No2ID.org and recommend interested UK types to tip them a tenner if they can afford it. Oh well, having failed to do so the first time, I may as well get ORG in the frame too.

Well, with this and Nov 4th and some hope for proper action on climate change and all... I'm starting to wonder about paying my subs to the Total Fucking Cynic Club this year. Perhaps if Obama doesn't get shot or co-opted I'll start to believe it...

Nah, Boris Johnson's election was unverified so I call into question any laws he institutes.Drink and be merry!

The UK Government has released a consultation into potential legislation aimed at curbing illicit filesharing on the net. Several of the legislative options on the table are worrying, and mirror schemes being discussed in various national and international fora. They include streamlining the legal process to require ISPs to provide personal data relating to an IP address, handing responsibility for taking action against illicit filesharers to a third party body, or requiring ISPs to take action against users themselves or to install filtering equipment to block infringing content.

At the same time a "Memorandum of Understanding", negotiated behind-the-scenes with strong influence from the Government, between the UK's six major ISPs (Virgin Media, Sky, Carphone Warehouse, BT, Orange and Tiscali) and the British Phonographic Industry and the Motion Picture Association. Signatories endorse five principles in the MoU:

1. That a joint industry solution is the best way forward
2. That they will work together to educate consumers about why illicit filesharing is wrong
3. That making content available in a wide range of user-friendly formats is important
4. That they will engage in a 3 month trial to send letters to 1,000 subscribers per week suspected of downloading or uploading unlicensed, copyrighted material
5. That they will work with OfCom to identify effective measures to deal with repeat offenders

The Open Rights Group has more details

How about your local Internet cyberfreedom group? That means EFF (US), Open Rights Group (UK), European Digital Rights Initiative, Digital Rights Ireland, Free Software Foundation or other civil liberties/human rights groups. Just an idea.

I'd say give out lots of small donations. One group worth targeting in your donation are college students - often they are short on cash, and if they are trying to make the decision about whether to spend an hour hunting a bug in some open source code or get a crappy McJob flipping hamburgers, your donation may flip the balance for them. Having good experiences contributing to the free software world in one's formative years may also help a person avoid the temptation of crappy development jobs in the future.

As a Brit, I envy the differences in policies you're likely to be offered if Obama wins the nomination: on healthcare alone he offers a clear break with the past. Here, nobody with any chance of gaining power ever suggests such a dramatic change, it's always incremental - usually for the worse. This is how we were able to have a report into copyright which essentially said: "everything's fine, but we need tougher penalties for filesharers."

The closest EFF equivalent in the UK is the Open Rights Group (ORG).

It states several times "customers suspected of making illegal downloads."

I'll add some facts here ...

The way this works is like this: IFPI (or more likely some contracted-out company) will connect to "Teeney_Spears_best_of.torrent" bittorrent, and will note down the time and IP address of all the other machines in the swarm. Any which belong to a UK ISP will result in a notification being sent to the ISP who will forward it along to the customer. Three srikes etc.

The ISPs won't be monitoring connections, because (surprisingly) that is illegal interception and can only be done under carefully controlled conditions as specified in the RIP Act. Oh actually, it can be done by everyone and their dog in local government, but that is a separate issue.

Encryption and suspicion don't really come into this. Plausible deniability, neighbours and visitors using your wifi connection, challenges over the chain of evidence, compromised machine, etc. are all possible, assuming any of these cases ever makes it to court. The whole point of the voluntary agreement is to avoid cases coming to court and needing solid evidence.

Rich.

http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20071021231933899
http://www.openrightsgroup.org/2007/11/09/iplayer-open-rights-group-on-groklaw/
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20071108235140236
http://www.opensourceconsortium.org/content/view/77/55/
http://www.opensourceconsortium.org/content/view/78/55/
http://www.opensourceconsortium.org/content/view/79/55/

Until recently we would have had to rely on the Register as the only UK-based organisation that would get it on this sort of thing; however we now have the Open Rights Group, who I hope will be saying something about this at least, which might merit an inch or two below the fold on p22 of one or two of the broadsheets in the next week or so.

As the Open Rights Group reported yesterday

BBC U-turn: Full iPlayer service may never be available to Mac and Linux Users

Yesterday, the BBC announced that a cross-platform "streamed" version of its on-demand service the iPlayer would be available by the end of the year. According to this report from BBC News Online:

"At the end of the year users of Windows, Mac or Linux machines will be able to watch streamed versions of their favourite TV programmes inside a web browser, as well as share the video with friends and embed programmes on their own websites, sites such as Facebook and blogs."

If the idea sounds vaguely familiar, that's because back in March, when the BBC Trust put the iPlayer out for consultation, the Open Rights Group gently suggested that streaming was a far better short term solution to on-demand services than DRM-restricted market-distorting technologies that would serve to widen the digital divide. We observed that:

"Such an approach is cheaper, lower risk, more inclusive (it works for example in libraries) and more flexible than the current BBC proposal. It may not appeal to consultants looking to make huge profits at public expense however, precisely because it is simple, clean and low-risk.

"It does not, of itself, address the desire for users to obtain content in DRM-free downloadable form for any platform, but it provides a basis until the BBC is able to identify more open solutions for the download of content, preferably ones which do not depend upon DRM... The Open Rights Group considers it is quite possible that, as already is clearly happening in the music world, the use of DRM will soon be abandoned by the market itself."

You can read our full submission to the BBC Trust here. But enough of the I-told-you-so-s. Is yesterday's move good news for licence fee payers who do not use Windows? Well, not really. Although they will now be given online access to content their licence fee has helped pay for, there are still fundamental inequities between users on different platforms, and this still leaves the BBC deforming the market in favour of Microsoft DRM and Windows. People on Macs, Linux, PDAs and other handheld devices are still losing out on all the features that make the downloadable iPlayer different from, say, the kind of streaming that the BBC has done for years with the RadioPlayer.

And that's not all. Ashley Highfield, director of Future Media and Technology at the BBC has now indicated that the full, downloadable iPlayer may never be made available to those who do not use the latest versions of Windows. When the iPlayer launched in June, Highfield was quoted as saying:

"I am fundamentally committed to universality, to getting the BBC iPlayer to everyone in the UK who pays their licence fee."

But yesterday, he admitted:

"We need to look long and hard at whether we build a download service for Mac and Linux. It comes down to cost per person and reach at the end of the day."

The BBC could avoid all this mess if it eschewed DRM and instead employed standard formats. The Open Rights Group believes that the BBC cannot be truly public service in the 21st century until it gives the British public access to the programmes that they have paid for without DRM or restriction. This is not a technology problem, but cuts to the heart of what the BBC is for and how it makes and commissions programming. ORG challenges the BBC and the BBC Trust to re-examine the BBC's commissioning and rights frameworks with th

As the Open Rights Group reported yesterday

BBC U-turn: Full iPlayer service may never be available to Mac and Linux Users

Yesterday, the BBC announced that a cross-platform "streamed" version of its on-demand service the iPlayer would be available by the end of the year. According to this report from BBC News Online:

"At the end of the year users of Windows, Mac or Linux machines will be able to watch streamed versions of their favourite TV programmes inside a web browser, as well as share the video with friends and embed programmes on their own websites, sites such as Facebook and blogs."

If the idea sounds vaguely familiar, that's because back in March, when the BBC Trust put the iPlayer out for consultation, the Open Rights Group gently suggested that streaming was a far better short term solution to on-demand services than DRM-restricted market-distorting technologies that would serve to widen the digital divide. We observed that:

"Such an approach is cheaper, lower risk, more inclusive (it works for example in libraries) and more flexible than the current BBC proposal. It may not appeal to consultants looking to make huge profits at public expense however, precisely because it is simple, clean and low-risk.

"It does not, of itself, address the desire for users to obtain content in DRM-free downloadable form for any platform, but it provides a basis until the BBC is able to identify more open solutions for the download of content, preferably ones which do not depend upon DRM... The Open Rights Group considers it is quite possible that, as already is clearly happening in the music world, the use of DRM will soon be abandoned by the market itself."

You can read our full submission to the BBC Trust here. But enough of the I-told-you-so-s. Is yesterday's move good news for licence fee payers who do not use Windows? Well, not really. Although they will now be given online access to content their licence fee has helped pay for, there are still fundamental inequities between users on different platforms, and this still leaves the BBC deforming the market in favour of Microsoft DRM and Windows. People on Macs, Linux, PDAs and other handheld devices are still losing out on all the features that make the downloadable iPlayer different from, say, the kind of streaming that the BBC has done for years with the RadioPlayer.

And that's not all. Ashley Highfield, director of Future Media and Technology at the BBC has now indicated that the full, downloadable iPlayer may never be made available to those who do not use the latest versions of Windows. When the iPlayer launched in June, Highfield was quoted as saying:

"I am fundamentally committed to universality, to getting the BBC iPlayer to everyone in the UK who pays their licence fee."

But yesterday, he admitted:

"We need to look long and hard at whether we build a download service for Mac and Linux. It comes down to cost per person and reach at the end of the day."

The BBC could avoid all this mess if it eschewed DRM and instead employed standard formats. The Open Rights Group believes that the BBC cannot be truly public service in the 21st century until it gives the British public access to the programmes that they have paid for without DRM or restriction. This is not a technology problem, but cuts to the heart of what the BBC is for and how it makes and commissions programming. ORG challenges the BBC and the BBC Trust to re-examine the BBC's commissioning and rights frameworks with th

Yep, been a paid up member for a while now, The Open Rights Group are also doing good work and are worth supporting. Right now it seem to bad idea of the week with all these laws, for a bunch of technophobes they sure do seem to have a lot of faith in technology, hopefully they will see sense or at least allow proper debate.

I am quite willing to consider alternatives to my own viewpoint. I just think that the argument you make is a very dangerous one.

You focus on one side of the debate: the potential benefits of using cameras in this way. In fact, I would state the case for this more strongly than you do:

Well someone, in fact a whole committee, has sat down and used common sense. They accept that widespread use of the cameras for all crime prevention would be against the public interest.

That clearly isn't true: use of cameras for crime prevention unquestionably is in the public interest.

The danger, which you gloss over in making your case, is that in allowing the use of cameras in ways that might prevent crimes, you also open the door to deliberate abuse and accidental mistakes.

For example, take your opening comment:

The police have been criticised during recent cases because it has become apparent that the individuals concerned were known to the police before they conducted whatever attack they are accused of but the police had insufficient resources to maintain 24 hour surveillance on each individual it has in its database. The known individuals have associated data linked to them which includes any vehicle that they own or are known to be associated with.

Did you know that one of the recent leaks suggested that simply driving along in front of or behind a suspect's vehicle could put your own car on a watch list?

Fortunately, we have a system of due process that guards against the dangers of guilt by association. But then in your very next paragraph, you attempt to undermine this:

Having a name on a database is not the same as having sufficient evidence to persuade a judge that a warrant for surveillance should be granted. Now, what a dilemma. We have the information available but we cannot give it to the police because they haven't got a warrant until someone gets killed. But how do we protect people and try to prevent them from getting killed?

You make the flawed assumption that in such cases, someone will die if there is no time to convince a judge to award a warrant. Clearly this is not always the case. You also make the implicit assumption that if a judge declined to award a warrant in these circumstances, that would be a bad thing, rather than effectively protecting an innocent person from unreasonable persecution. This also is not necessarily true.

We live in a society where the government is increasingly taking your line, to the point that an innocent citizen can now have their freedoms abruptly curtailed just for being a suspect in an investigation. Freedoms that can be removed so easily are just illusions.

Of course, it's easy to rationalise this away. There's no smoke without fire, right? And anyway, it only applies to Bad People:

They are NOT tracking everybody.

Unfortunately, this is simply not true. They are deliberately tracking everybody, and as the statistics released under a Freedom of Information request earlier this week demonstrated, more than half of the people arrested in recent terrorism investigations have later been released without charge, so obviously the authorities do make mistakes, and often.

So I'm afraid I don't agree with you when you say this:

This is just about as measured a response as is possible taking into account everyone's rights and interests.

There will be some, perhaps even yourself, who will scoff and claim that this is a useless measure. If so, please enlighten us all as to your preferred solution to the problem.

It is good to see the report out and see in measured words what those of us watching saw; that the preparation was below standard, procedures far from robust and the systems more black box than the public, candidates and parties happy to cope with.
I was proud to be part of this observation team and am looking forward to the next project I can give time to.

If anyone here wants to support the Open Rights Group either financially or buy volunteering to join in in further projects, scoot on over to http://www.openrightsgroup.org/support-org and sign up!

...and as a founder member (well, OK, one of the first thousand :) could I point out to UK readers that this would be a great time to join us. Very cheap! Recursive acronym! Promotional T-shirts coming soon! ;)

The Open Rights Group(Think UK EFF) have a wiki page that provideds more information on this an othere issues with the British Biometric Passport The European version of the biometric passport is planned to have digital imaging and fingerprint scan biometrics placed on the Radio Frequency chip. The government of UK thinks that the public has a negative opinion of RFID chips so instead they call it a contactless chip.

The Open Rights Group(Think UK EFF) have a wiki page that provideds more information on this an othere issues with the British Biometric Passport The European version of the biometric passport is planned to have digital imaging and fingerprint scan biometrics placed on the Radio Frequency chip. The government of UK thinks that the public has a negative opinion of RFID chips so instead they call it a contactless chip.

The Open Rights Group is running a Release The Music campaign, with a petition against term extension that you can sign. There's also one asking for the right to privately copy CDs to iPods.

Are Slashdot readers as good at signing petitions as dead musicians?

I'm not sure why the Slashdot editors trimmed the ORG petition off my original submission - do they prefer whinging to doing something politically influential?

You could try supporting the Open Rights Group - http://www.openrightsgroup.org/

It is well worth reading the actual report. The key points of the report:

* A recommendation that the Office of Fair Trading (OFT) bring forward appropriate labelling regulations so that it will become crystal clear to consumers what they will and will not be able to do with digital content that they purchase.

* A recommendation that OFCOM publish guidance to make it clear that companies distributing Technical Protection Measures systems in the UK would, if they have features such as those in Sony-BMG's MediaMax and XCP systems, run a significant risk of being prosecuted for criminal actions.

* A recommendation that the Department of Trade and Industry investigate the single-market issues that were raised during the Inquiry, with a view to addressing the issue at the European level.

* A recommendation that the government do not legislate to make DRM systems mandatory.

* A recommendation that the Department for Culture, Media and Sport review the level of funding for pilot projects that address access to eBooks by those with visual disabilities and that action is taken if they are failing to achieve positive results.

* A recommendation that the Department of Trade and Industry revisit the results of their review into their moribund "IP Advisory Committee" and reconstitute it as several more focused forums. One of these should be a "UK Stakeholders Group" to be chaired by the British Library.

* A recommendation that the Government consider granting a much wider-ranging exemption to the anti-circumvention measures in the 1988 Copyright, Designs and Patents Act for genuine academic research.

* A recommendation that having taken advice from the Legal Deposit Advisory Panel, the Department for Culture, Media and Sport hold a formal public consultation, not only on the technical details, but also on the general principles that have been established.

The Open Rights Group have more information and they took part in the consultation. If your in the UK I highly recomend you join them as they act like the the EFF does in the USA.

• Lynne Brindley, Chief Executive, British Library
• Laurie Kaye, Laurence Kaye Solicitors
• Other speakers to be confirmed

• Lynne Brindley, Chief Executive, British Library
• Laurie Kaye, Laurence Kaye Solicitors
• Other speakers to be confirmed

from my blog
I broadly agree with Paul Graham's essay on Software Patents, but I do think he underestimates the damage from patent trolls, and from what he calls the mafia-like behaviour of some patent holders.
Paul has been lucky in the field he has worked in, but in the Audio and Video area there are many patent thickets. Perhaps it is the history of Farnsworth's victory over RCA that makes video engineers patent hungry.
My first startup, The MultiMedia Corporation, was a spin-out from the BBC in 1990. One of our products was a program called MediaMaker that combined video from tape or videodisc, CD Audio, Pictures, digitised audio and Director animations into picture icons on a timeline for making presentations. It was demoed on stage at Macworld by the CEO of Apple, and we got Macromind to publish it.
Then the patent troll showed up. A company called Montage had made a video editing system that included several video monitors showing edit points from tape. The company had gone out of business but a lawyer had bought up the patents, including one on using a still image to represent a video sequence. The troll was working his way round the video companies, and he caused enough trouble to stop work on the product while we worked on a legal defence instead.
Later, while I was at Apple on QuickTime, there was a steady stream of patent trolls claiming that Apple should pay them royalties; enough to keep several lawyers busy, and a lot of engineers spending time working on prior art evidence demonstrations.
Several potential features were excluded from QuickTime due to patent thickets. The obvious one was the Unisys LZW patent that encumbered GIF, but there were other more subtle pressures that meant adopting open source codecs was discouraged. Working on the patent license agreements for MPEG meant that technology ready to ship was deferred pending legal agreement on more than one occasion.
So I'm much lass sanguine than Paul about this. I think software patents should not be granted, and the European Union's banning of them is the right decision. I hope the Gowers Review in the UK makes this UK law as well.

from my blog
I broadly agree with Paul Graham's essay on Software Patents, but I do think he underestimates the damage from patent trolls, and from what he calls the mafia-like behaviour of some patent holders.
Paul has been lucky in the field he has worked in, but in the Audio and Video area there are many patent thickets. Perhaps it is the history of Farnsworth's victory over RCA that makes video engineers patent hungry.
My first startup, The MultiMedia Corporation, was a spin-out from the BBC in 1990. One of our products was a program called MediaMaker that combined video from tape or videodisc, CD Audio, Pictures, digitised audio and Director animations into picture icons on a timeline for making presentations. It was demoed on stage at Macworld by the CEO of Apple, and we got Macromind to publish it.
Then the patent troll showed up. A company called Montage had made a video editing system that included several video monitors showing edit points from tape. The company had gone out of business but a lawyer had bought up the patents, including one on using a still image to represent a video sequence. The troll was working his way round the video companies, and he caused enough trouble to stop work on the product while we worked on a legal defence instead.
Later, while I was at Apple on QuickTime, there was a steady stream of patent trolls claiming that Apple should pay them royalties; enough to keep several lawyers busy, and a lot of engineers spending time working on prior art evidence demonstrations.
Several potential features were excluded from QuickTime due to patent thickets. The obvious one was the Unisys LZW patent that encumbered GIF, but there were other more subtle pressures that meant adopting open source codecs was discouraged. Working on the patent license agreements for MPEG meant that technology ready to ship was deferred pending legal agreement on more than one occasion.
So I'm much lass sanguine than Paul about this. I think software patents should not be granted, and the European Union's banning of them is the right decision. I hope the Gowers Review in the UK makes this UK law as well.

It is perfectly legal to download copyrighted music if the copyright owner grants you permission. Even in the narrow context of music, many do. The Grateful Dead, with certain conditions, as do many indie bands. But keep in mind that in all countries that have signed onto the Berne convention, everything is copyrighted even those podcasts you listen to. So each and every blog entry, Usenet post, e-mail, or podcast you download is copyrighted. It's up to the owner to decide if you are allowed to and what you are supposed to do with the material once you have it.

So not only is the blanket statement "if you download copyrighted music, you're commiting a crime" wrong, it's wrong in two ways. Copyright infringement is not even a "crime" it is under civil law. However, if nothing is done by us, that may change for the worse.

The Open Rights Group have been writing on this for a while.
Do join them in fighting this and other legislation that limits our digital freedoms.

And there's good reason to worry about record companies asking for access: the Directive allows access to traffic data for the investigation of any crime covered by the European Arrest Warrant, which includes "counterfeiting and piracy".

I wrote to my MEP about this but I was too late. Does anyone know if there's a chance of getting the Directive overturned or amended before it's implemented by member states?

The Open Rights Grou have been tracking this legislation, and have details on how to lobby your Meps
Do join us in fighting this.

The ORG are having a public meeting in London next week, so RSVP if you can make it.
The pledge drive is getting close to completion, so if you want to be one of the thousand founding donors, you need to hurry as there are 39 places left.

For some reason neither zdnet nor the submitter give a link to the site and article they are talking about:

an openrights.org blog entry.

The page has a cool link to WriteToThem where UK readers at least can quickly find out who their MEP is and how to contact them.

What is distressing is that the chap in charge of European e-commerce and telecoms regulation is waffling away like this while the record labels are hijacking EU anti-terrorism regulations so they can get everyone's browser histories to start vexatious prosecutions.

Government is standing up to IP owners? That must be why the US Congress keeps on extending the copyright term, or why just yesterday, it became known that the music industry is trying to hijack serious crime legislation in Europe, which would equate file sharers with terrorists and mobsters.

The suggestion that the IP debate is balanced against IP owners seems ludicrous to me. See this article for more more arguments (Bugmenot - countrywise/globalportal).

This kind of Government over-reach is exactly why we have founded the Open Rights Group - read the detailed analysis and rebuttal of Clarke's proposal there.
Join the 800+ of us already supporting ORG by signing the pledge to fund it.