Like I said, read the judgment, which cites 100 years of cases in the UK, under laws essentially similar to NZ's.
Also note that this is about "conspiracy to defraud" -- which is a specific thing in law, significantly broader and *different* to fraud. Again, see the judgment for the statutory definition in NZ law.
Thinking that this is about "fraud" is a mistake. It's not. And news reports that write about it as "fraud" are significantly misleading.
The New Zealand Herald has the full text of the judgment with its article here
Paragraph 77 onwards of the judgment are an absolutely crushing demolition of the Dotcom team's arguments that facilitating copyright infringement on an industrial scale should not be considered "conspiracy to defraud".
"Conspiracy to defraud" is extradictable to the USA; Dotcom & co are likely to be going away for a long time.
The bill contains sweeping powers to allow warrants to be served on "communication service providers in the UK and overseas." (CSPs)
An operator of a VPN is surely a CSP, as would be the operator of a server farm.
So yes, you can use a secure tunnel. But whatever server that tunnel goes to, the UK wants to be able to compel people to install whatever software and logging onto that they wish -- or else be hit with massive civil lawsuits in the UK courts, and/or have their operatives face arrest if they touch UK soil (rather like the U.S. does for overseas operators of U.S.-facing gambling sites, or indeed Kim Dotcom).
Steinberg is really thinking about the low-budget, non-commercial, very effective sites that his charity MySociety has set up over the last 10 years in the UK, which aim to help non-party democracy at a grass roots level, by helping make citizens more powerful against government at all levels, by creating systems that give them more information, help them work together, and track and share the outcomes of what happens when they tangle with power.
What Steinberg is saying is that systems like that, that make the citizen more powerful, are far more impressive to him than systems which make a particular political party more effective.
It's a bit surprising that so far seemingly every poster here has missed Steinberg's point.
Tom Steinberg's sites are in the UK, so probably not well known in the USA, but they *are* about grass-roots democracy, and *are* about helping people -- using the internet for democracy in a different way than party politics.
So for example:
TheyWorkForYou -- a site which took the official record of the UK Parliament, and transformed it, making it searchable and commentable, and easy to track MPs by what they'd said. MPs were so impressed, they changed crown copyright law to make it legal.
The Public Whip -- easily browsable index of how MPs have voted on any particular issue or issues
Write to Them -- originally an email to fax gateway to allow constituents to contact their MPs, in the days when few MPs used or knew about email. Still helps UK citizens identify exactly who are their elected representatives, and how to reach them, at different levels of government.
WhatDoTheyKnow Site making it very easy to file Freedom of Information requests, and to track and share their progress, in a way that anyone can browse.
FixMyStreetSite allowing residents to publicly report problems with their local neighbourhoods to their local council, and browse other such reports, council responses etc.
These are the sort of sites Tom Steinberg is talking about -- sites that change the balance between people and government at a grass roots level, by allowing people to work together and see what each other are doing.
I've used eg the FoI tool, and it works. Think of these as force-multipliers for the individual's voice and clout in society.
Unfortunately there does not appear to be a copy of the "Compromise Amendments", including the disputed amendment in question, "Compromise 20". One of the MEPs complains in the video at the end of the agenda item (10:51) that the text of these were only circulated on the night before the meeting.
It's not unusual for new texts to appear as heads get bashed together in the days immediately before the actual voting (in fact, it is an essential part of the system); but in this case they don't appear to have been placed on the website, or at any rate I didn't know where to find them.
The amended report from JURI, consolidating the results of these votes, appears now to have been formally prepared with the document reference A7-0055/2012, though I couldn't find the text of it yet on the Parliament website. This will now go forward for a short debate before the whole parliament, before voting on the amendments proposed by JURI, the amendments proposed by the other two committees, and any other amendments to the Commission text proposed by a sufficient number of MEPs.
Video of the voting is available on the EP website.
The agenda item starts at 10:27, and the voting runs from 10:31 to 10:51.
The amendment in question appears to be "Compromise 20", voted on at 10:39, which is indeed rejected by 12 votes to 14.
This was an all-party amendment that the centre-right EPP party then withdrew support from, because they were not entirely happy with the wording, according to one of their MEPs at the start of the meeting. (10:29).
As the video shows, the EP tends to machine-gun through amendment votes, which are held in one swoop after months of discussion.
You really need the papers for the meeting and your preferred faction's voting guide to turn them into an acceptable spectator sport.
One of the extra votes could perhaps have been the chairman's casting vote; but it's not clear how there could have been two.
Wrong.
The owner is Rackspace.com of San Antonio, but the server itself is located in the UK, which is why SOCA could indeed have been able to get to it.
The judge got it wrong. In fact he admits he's going against case law. To quote from the judgment:
HHJ Ticehurst (@ para 71) in Rock & Overton held "make available should bear its ordinary and natural meaning". He distinguished between providing money "directly to" another as opposed to a financial adviser who may "point" another to a bank meaning the bank alone "makes available the money".
I have endeavoured to weigh these subtle distinctions. The diagrams of how as a matter of electronic mechanics (if I may term it) the TVShack websites actually operated favour HHJ Ticehurstâ(TM)s restrictive construction. To my mind there is much in the distinction factually...
In copyright law terms, O'Dwyer wasn't making the films "available". The person that made them available was the person who uploaded them to a download site.
What O'Dwyer was doing was pointing to those sites, and (allegedly) thus encouraging people to download from them. In civil law, that is known as indirect or contributory infringement, as opposed to direct infringement which is the actual making available of copies.
It is "making available" that can be a criminal offence under s.107(2A), not the encouragement or inducement of people to go ahead and download from such sites.
Thus, for example, a briefing for UK Trading Standards officers, compiled by the Federation Against Copyright Theft, and hosted on the UK Intellectual Property Office's website, advises them that:
The offence in s107(2A) is now available as a tool to
trading standards officers to prosecute uploading file
sharers of digital product, such as film and music,
whether or not they do so in the course of a business.
[Emphasis added].
Interestingly, this may also be the position in the United States, where the law on contributory infringement is said to be civil law that has been developed by judges, but not reflected in any provisions of the criminal law. However this point appears not to have been argued by O'Dwyer's lawyers.
What should have happened here is that the extradition proceedings should have been thrown out, on the basis that O'Dwyer's actions are not in fact covered by s.107(2A). But he should then have faced a full-on civil action in the UK courts from a consortium of content owners for the alleged indirect infringement.
It is also about time that UK judges in extradition cases were directed to consider where a case should best be heard under conflict-of-laws provisions: the so-called "forum clause". In this case, with the alleged infringer being UK-based, and the alleged infringement being worldwide in scope, if this is supposed to be a crime under UK law it should have been tried under UK law.
Othe the other hand, if somebody *already* knows who you are, the lesson is that it can take surprising little public information to identify your entire history of ratings at Netflix.
For example, the authors found for 40% of individuals, accurate ratings on a scale of 1-5 for only *two* random movies,together with a knowledge to within 14 days of when they were seen, would be sufficient to identify an individual in the dataset. As they comment, that's the kind of information cooleagues give out every day around the water cooler.
Repeating the experiment with a knowledge of 8 movies, 6 hits in the database would be sufficient to identify the personal histories of 99% of the people in that data.
Their lesson is that it can take surprising little public information to identify you.
For example, ratings on a scale of 1-5 for 2 movies, and a knowledge of when they were seen to within 14 days, was suffiecient to identify the complete data histories of 40% of the Netflix clients.
As the authors say, that's the kind of information cooleagues give out every day around the water cooler.
Repeating the experiment with a knowledge of 8 movies, 6 hits in the database would be sufficient to identify the personal histories of 99% of clients included in the Netflix data.
First, we can immediately find his political orientation based on his strong opinions about "Power and
Terror: Noam Chomsky in Our Times" and "Fahrenheit 9/11." Strong guesses about his religious views can
be made based on his ratings on "Jesus of Nazareth" and "The Gospel of John". He did not like "Super
Size Me" at all; perhaps this implies something about his physical size? Both items that we found with
predominantly gay themes, "Bent" and "Queer as folk" were rated one star out of five. He is a cultish
follower of "Mystery Science Theater 3000". This is far from all we found about this one person, but having
made our point, we will spare the reader further lurid details.
1. A problem between Firefox and IE affects my ability to read stuff, which I can see, and if necessary I can work around. But a problem with OOo and Excel affects (unsuspectedly) my ability to communicate, which I can only fix by going to Excel.
2. A problem between Firefox and IE will in general at worst only uglify the display - but I can still understand what's there. and if necessary I can look at it in IE. But if formulas don't compute, that's content -- thw whole information I'm trying to convey, the results and how to calculate them, all is lost.
That's why at the end of the day the problem between Firefox and IE is a fleabite that I can live with. But the problem with OOo is (for me) a showstopper that I can't.
I was trying to share analyses of genealogical DNA data with other people online. The sad truth is that at the moment an overwhelming majority of random users turn to Excel as their default spreadsheet. That makes any differences between the two OOo's problem, not Excel's. At the very least, OOo could use an "Excel preview mode".
Is Excel "defective by design" in this area? Regarding Excel's greater pickyness about data integrity, arguably that design choice is actually an Excel feature, not a defect. But I wonder if the correct handling by formulas of such mixed data is actually explicitly addressed by either of the would-be standards, ODF or OOXML.
Whatever, this is the kind of detail that implementations must agree on, if document exchange is to be a reality. And at the moment accurate document exchange with Excel is a make-or-break requirement for OOo.
Too easy to make sheets that don't work on Excel
on
OpenOffice 2.3 Released
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
My biggest problem with OOo was that it was far too easy to create spreadsheets that simply didn't work for other people looking at them with Excel. For a new user, playing with spreadsheets for the first time, to find this out having created some quite big and complicated spreadsheets in OOo was a huge turn-off. I now invariably use my old version of Excel '97.
AFAIK, there is not even a snag list of things to be careful of, that will work on OOo, but will break the sheet on Excel.
As well as formatting and display issues, as far as I remember the most systematic mistake I'd made was using mathematical formulas on ranges of cells including cells that are empty or contain strings. OOo would just treat them as having the numerical value zero, and carry on fine; but on Excel it would make the whole formula return an error.
Going through and debugging this (finding workarounds to make it work on Excel) is something I don't want to have to do again. Because I don't know what other things are there that may then not work on Excel, I no longer use OOo for spreadsheets.
What would it mean for there to be more than one time dimension?
The dimensions may not be quite what you think.
This paper sounds to me very like technology which is already being used in games engines and robotics applications, eg for lighting models and collision detection.
The idea is that there are various things that make rotations of objects much nicer to handle than translations. But if you add some extra dimensions, you can turn the translations into rotations. It's to do with conformal projection. Translations on a 2D plane are difficult to handle (at least in the framework of Clifford algebra), but if you map that plane onto the surface of a sphere in 3D, then you can identify the 2D translations with rotations on the surface of the 3D sphere. Similarly, you can exchange 3D translations for rotations in 4D, if you create a new dimension which allows you to have an origin for your rotations which is lifted outside "real" 3D space. It turns out to be nice to be able to do rotations about a point at infinity, too, which you can achieve by doing the same trick to go up to 5D. A consequence is that each no-D point in 3D gets represented by a 2D surface in the 5D, a line gets turned into a 3D hypersurface, etc.
The nice thing about rotations is that you can do them with spinors, and you can use spinors to rotate lines and planes directly without having to break them down into points. In the 5D system you can also use geometric algebra to compute directly whether and how different hypersurfaces meet, again without having to compute points and normals and things, which is good for collision detection.
It looks to me that this article is doing pretty much the same trick, turning 4D into 6D, that the geometric algebra people are using turning 3D into 5D.
There's also a company called Geomerics based in Cambridge in England that has used the technology to develop a new lighting engine, which it has just released for the Unreal platform.
Re:Strange way to prosecute in the US
on
The Future of ReiserFS
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
You're right. The press in the UK are very limited in how they can report before and during criminal cases -- the journalists must take extreme care to avoid any "substantial risk" that the fairness of a jury could be "seriously prejudiced" as a result. Otherwise the judge can find them guilty of contempt of court, and send them to jail. So pre-trial reports on UK cases tend to be quite limited, both as to facts and even more so as to speculation, and presented in extreme neutral language.
On the other hand in the States what the journalists have more or less a free hand to slant things how they want, both before and during the case -- this is seen as part of their free speech, protected by the First Amendment. So in the U.S. there is a tendency for both sides to go very public, and for both the defence and the prosecution (and the police) to try to spin their point of view.
Some BBC stories discussing the difference:
* Q&A about journalists and contempt -- following the 2001 discharge of a jury after a "prejudicial" newspaper article, in the case of 2 Leeds footballers accused of attacking a student.
Note that many of those who voted YES did so because they supported our amendments, wanted to see them passed, and wanted to see the Council respond to them.
That goes in particular for Zuzanna Roithova, who co-ordinated the breakaway group in the Conservative (PPE) faction, in favour of our amendments against her own party line.
It also goes for Andrew Duff (one of the 14 abstainers), who brought 70% of the Liberal (ALDE) group round to our position.
It wasn't necessarily good guys that voted NO; and it wasn't necessarily bad guys that voted YES.
I thought this was the 2nd or 3rd time that software patent directive has come up. How do anyone know that there won't be another version for us to talk about months from now?
According to the rules, if it gets rejected outright by the Parliament tomorrow, it can't come back for at least three years (if ever).
A more likely eventual route to "harmonisation" allowing software patents could be through decisions of a proposed Community-wide Patent Court, if the EU ever manages to agree to set the thing up.
The CPC has been a long-standing goal of the EU system for a long time.
EICTA has published a pro-swpat counter-response to Rocard's paper,
here, in advance of today's crucial meeting of the European Parliament's legal affairs committee (JURI).
IMO, EICTA's characterisation in the paper of how the proposed "controllable forces of nature" test was received at the recent UKPO worshops is highly misleading.
Is there some relatively concise document summarising the history of the issue, and how it should develop? From what I've heard so far, 'labyrinthine' would be an understatement...
Slashdot Mirror
Like I said, read the judgment, which cites 100 years of cases in the UK, under laws essentially similar to NZ's.
Also note that this is about "conspiracy to defraud" -- which is a specific thing in law, significantly broader and *different* to fraud. Again, see the judgment for the statutory definition in NZ law.
Thinking that this is about "fraud" is a mistake. It's not. And news reports that write about it as "fraud" are significantly misleading.
The New Zealand Herald has the full text of the judgment with its article here
Paragraph 77 onwards of the judgment are an absolutely crushing demolition of the Dotcom team's arguments that facilitating copyright infringement on an industrial scale should not be considered "conspiracy to defraud".
"Conspiracy to defraud" is extradictable to the USA; Dotcom & co are likely to be going away for a long time.
The bill contains sweeping powers to allow warrants to be served on "communication service providers in the UK and overseas." (CSPs) An operator of a VPN is surely a CSP, as would be the operator of a server farm. So yes, you can use a secure tunnel. But whatever server that tunnel goes to, the UK wants to be able to compel people to install whatever software and logging onto that they wish -- or else be hit with massive civil lawsuits in the UK courts, and/or have their operatives face arrest if they touch UK soil (rather like the U.S. does for overseas operators of U.S.-facing gambling sites, or indeed Kim Dotcom).
Crypto AG
Steinberg is really thinking about the low-budget, non-commercial, very effective sites that his charity MySociety has set up over the last 10 years in the UK, which aim to help non-party democracy at a grass roots level, by helping make citizens more powerful against government at all levels, by creating systems that give them more information, help them work together, and track and share the outcomes of what happens when they tangle with power.
What Steinberg is saying is that systems like that, that make the citizen more powerful, are far more impressive to him than systems which make a particular political party more effective. It's a bit surprising that so far seemingly every poster here has missed Steinberg's point.
So for example:
These are the sort of sites Tom Steinberg is talking about -- sites that change the balance between people and government at a grass roots level, by allowing people to work together and see what each other are doing.
I've used eg the FoI tool, and it works. Think of these as force-multipliers for the individual's voice and clout in society.
It includes the following documents for this dossier:
* Text proposed by the EU Commission
* Committee rapporteur's draft report, with her proposed amendments (1 to 48)
* Amendments proposed by other members of the committee (49 to 170)
* Opinion of the Culture committee (CULT), and their proposed amendments (CULT 1 to CULT 55)
* Opinion of the committee on the Internal Market (IMCO), and their proposed amendments (IMCO 1 to 41).
Unfortunately there does not appear to be a copy of the "Compromise Amendments", including the disputed amendment in question, "Compromise 20". One of the MEPs complains in the video at the end of the agenda item (10:51) that the text of these were only circulated on the night before the meeting.
It's not unusual for new texts to appear as heads get bashed together in the days immediately before the actual voting (in fact, it is an essential part of the system); but in this case they don't appear to have been placed on the website, or at any rate I didn't know where to find them.
The amended report from JURI, consolidating the results of these votes, appears now to have been formally prepared with the document reference A7-0055/2012, though I couldn't find the text of it yet on the Parliament website. This will now go forward for a short debate before the whole parliament, before voting on the amendments proposed by JURI, the amendments proposed by the other two committees, and any other amendments to the Commission text proposed by a sufficient number of MEPs.
Video of the voting is available on the EP website. The agenda item starts at 10:27, and the voting runs from 10:31 to 10:51. The amendment in question appears to be "Compromise 20", voted on at 10:39, which is indeed rejected by 12 votes to 14. This was an all-party amendment that the centre-right EPP party then withdrew support from, because they were not entirely happy with the wording, according to one of their MEPs at the start of the meeting. (10:29). As the video shows, the EP tends to machine-gun through amendment votes, which are held in one swoop after months of discussion. You really need the papers for the meeting and your preferred faction's voting guide to turn them into an acceptable spectator sport. One of the extra votes could perhaps have been the chairman's casting vote; but it's not clear how there could have been two.
Wrong. The owner is Rackspace.com of San Antonio, but the server itself is located in the UK, which is why SOCA could indeed have been able to get to it.
inetnum: 83.138.166.64 - 83.138.166.127
netname: RSPC-UK-RACKSPACE-INTERNAL
remarks:
descr: Rackspace Managed Hosting
country: GB
admin-c: IA247-RIPE
tech-c: IA247-RIPE
remarks: rev-srv attribute deprecated by RIPE NCC on 02/09/2009
person: IP Admin
address: Rackspace Managed Hosting
112 E. Pecan St. Suite 600
San Antonio, Texas 78205
phone: +1 210 892 4000
fax-no: +1 210 892 4329
e-mail: ipadmin@rackspace.com
nic-hdl: IA247-RIPE
remarks: ### Rackspace Abuse Department
remarks: ### Please send any complaints to the following:
remarks: ### abuse@rackspace.com
mnt-by: RSPC-MNT
source: RIPE # Filtered
In copyright law terms, O'Dwyer wasn't making the films "available". The person that made them available was the person who uploaded them to a download site. What O'Dwyer was doing was pointing to those sites, and (allegedly) thus encouraging people to download from them. In civil law, that is known as indirect or contributory infringement, as opposed to direct infringement which is the actual making available of copies. It is "making available" that can be a criminal offence under s.107(2A), not the encouragement or inducement of people to go ahead and download from such sites. Thus, for example, a briefing for UK Trading Standards officers, compiled by the Federation Against Copyright Theft, and hosted on the UK Intellectual Property Office's website, advises them that:
Interestingly, this may also be the position in the United States, where the law on contributory infringement is said to be civil law that has been developed by judges, but not reflected in any provisions of the criminal law. However this point appears not to have been argued by O'Dwyer's lawyers. What should have happened here is that the extradition proceedings should have been thrown out, on the basis that O'Dwyer's actions are not in fact covered by s.107(2A). But he should then have faced a full-on civil action in the UK courts from a consortium of content owners for the alleged indirect infringement. It is also about time that UK judges in extradition cases were directed to consider where a case should best be heard under conflict-of-laws provisions: the so-called "forum clause". In this case, with the alleged infringer being UK-based, and the alleged infringement being worldwide in scope, if this is supposed to be a crime under UK law it should have been tried under UK law.
One of my favourite examples of "transformative" fair use ever.
Othe the other hand, if somebody *already* knows who you are, the lesson is that it can take surprising little public information to identify your entire history of ratings at Netflix.
For example, the authors found for 40% of individuals, accurate ratings on a scale of 1-5 for only *two* random movies,together with a knowledge to within 14 days of when they were seen, would be sufficient to identify an individual in the dataset. As they comment, that's the kind of information cooleagues give out every day around the water cooler.
Repeating the experiment with a knowledge of 8 movies, 6 hits in the database would be sufficient to identify the personal histories of 99% of the people in that data.
For example, ratings on a scale of 1-5 for 2 movies, and a knowledge of when they were seen to within 14 days, was suffiecient to identify the complete data histories of 40% of the Netflix clients. As the authors say, that's the kind of information cooleagues give out every day around the water cooler.
Repeating the experiment with a knowledge of 8 movies, 6 hits in the database would be sufficient to identify the personal histories of 99% of clients included in the Netflix data.
1. A problem between Firefox and IE affects my ability to read stuff, which I can see, and if necessary I can work around. But a problem with OOo and Excel affects (unsuspectedly) my ability to communicate, which I can only fix by going to Excel.
2. A problem between Firefox and IE will in general at worst only uglify the display - but I can still understand what's there. and if necessary I can look at it in IE. But if formulas don't compute, that's content -- thw whole information I'm trying to convey, the results and how to calculate them, all is lost.
That's why at the end of the day the problem between Firefox and IE is a fleabite that I can live with. But the problem with OOo is (for me) a showstopper that I can't.
Is Excel "defective by design" in this area? Regarding Excel's greater pickyness about data integrity, arguably that design choice is actually an Excel feature, not a defect. But I wonder if the correct handling by formulas of such mixed data is actually explicitly addressed by either of the would-be standards, ODF or OOXML.
Whatever, this is the kind of detail that implementations must agree on, if document exchange is to be a reality. And at the moment accurate document exchange with Excel is a make-or-break requirement for OOo.
AFAIK, there is not even a snag list of things to be careful of, that will work on OOo, but will break the sheet on Excel.
As well as formatting and display issues, as far as I remember the most systematic mistake I'd made was using mathematical formulas on ranges of cells including cells that are empty or contain strings. OOo would just treat them as having the numerical value zero, and carry on fine; but on Excel it would make the whole formula return an error.
Going through and debugging this (finding workarounds to make it work on Excel) is something I don't want to have to do again. Because I don't know what other things are there that may then not work on Excel, I no longer use OOo for spreadsheets.
The dimensions may not be quite what you think. This paper sounds to me very like technology which is already being used in games engines and robotics applications, eg for lighting models and collision detection.
The idea is that there are various things that make rotations of objects much nicer to handle than translations. But if you add some extra dimensions, you can turn the translations into rotations. It's to do with conformal projection. Translations on a 2D plane are difficult to handle (at least in the framework of Clifford algebra), but if you map that plane onto the surface of a sphere in 3D, then you can identify the 2D translations with rotations on the surface of the 3D sphere. Similarly, you can exchange 3D translations for rotations in 4D, if you create a new dimension which allows you to have an origin for your rotations which is lifted outside "real" 3D space. It turns out to be nice to be able to do rotations about a point at infinity, too, which you can achieve by doing the same trick to go up to 5D. A consequence is that each no-D point in 3D gets represented by a 2D surface in the 5D, a line gets turned into a 3D hypersurface, etc.
The nice thing about rotations is that you can do them with spinors, and you can use spinors to rotate lines and planes directly without having to break them down into points. In the 5D system you can also use geometric algebra to compute directly whether and how different hypersurfaces meet, again without having to compute points and normals and things, which is good for collision detection.
It looks to me that this article is doing pretty much the same trick, turning 4D into 6D, that the geometric algebra people are using turning 3D into 5D.
Here's a paper from a group at Amsterdam university discussing some of this stuff, using it for a ray-tracing program. See also the previous two papers in the series, here. They've also just got a book out, "Geometric Algebra for Computer Science" (links to Amazon etc).
There's also a company called Geomerics based in Cambridge in England that has used the technology to develop a new lighting engine, which it has just released for the Unreal platform.
You're right. The press in the UK are very limited in how they can report before and during criminal cases -- the journalists must take extreme care to avoid any "substantial risk" that the fairness of a jury could be "seriously prejudiced" as a result. Otherwise the judge can find them guilty of contempt of court, and send them to jail. So pre-trial reports on UK cases tend to be quite limited, both as to facts and even more so as to speculation, and presented in extreme neutral language.
On the other hand in the States what the journalists have more or less a free hand to slant things how they want, both before and during the case -- this is seen as part of their free speech, protected by the First Amendment. So in the U.S. there is a tendency for both sides to go very public, and for both the defence and the prosecution (and the police) to try to spin their point of view.
Some BBC stories discussing the difference:
* Q&A about journalists and contempt -- following the 2001 discharge of a jury after a "prejudicial" newspaper article, in the case of 2 Leeds footballers accused of attacking a student.
* UK silence over bombings deafens -- Why much more information about the 2005 London bombings came from the NYPD than the Met.
* Media coverage and the 2005 Michael Jackson trial.
That's what Vasari says, in his Lives of the Artists (1550): http://www.fordham.edu/HALSALL/basis/vasari/vasari 5.htm
That goes in particular for Zuzanna Roithova, who co-ordinated the breakaway group in the Conservative (PPE) faction, in favour of our amendments against her own party line.
It also goes for Andrew Duff (one of the 14 abstainers), who brought 70% of the Liberal (ALDE) group round to our position.
It wasn't necessarily good guys that voted NO; and it wasn't necessarily bad guys that voted YES.
A more likely eventual route to "harmonisation" allowing software patents could be through decisions of a proposed Community-wide Patent Court, if the EU ever manages to agree to set the thing up.
The CPC has been a long-standing goal of the EU system for a long time.
English language version of Rocard's paper is here
IMO, EICTA's characterisation in the paper of how the proposed "controllable forces of nature" test was received at the recent UKPO worshops is highly misleading.
The Wikipedia article "Proposed EU Directive on the Patentability of Computer-Implemented Directive" has a concise but fairly thorough history of the political backwards-and-forwardses so far.