In the EU, it has to be approved by the Council of Ministers and the European Parliament.
I'm not sure if there's any diagram that would make things clearer. Diagrams present formalities that mask the political reality of the decision making process.
Remember when software patents were put on the agenda of the fisheries committee? Procedures include flexibility...
Blocking ACTA isn't about spotting something on a map, it's about talking to our representatives and saying "We don't want this". (Council of Ministers is made up of the relevant ministers from the national governments, and the European Parliament is made up of our MEPs).
But that's not the point. For a number of weeks or months, there's a cloud hanging over the target company and investors don't know if a device will ever be on sale in the USA. It's serious FUD, for free.
An actual import ban would just be monopolist icing on the FUD cake.
It's an API. Tacking "Open" onto doesn't change the fact that it's just an interface to a black box.
As Stallman's been saying for the last few years, having software freedom is about having control over your computing, and that requires that your computing is done on *your* computer:
> If we block all advertising that isn't self hosted, we'll get > server-side systems that automatically copy adds from advertisers > servers and then share tracking info back to the advertiser.
But the site I choose to visit would be a layer between my data and the harvester.
That changes everything because, not only could they decide to not pass on the data or to scramble identifying elements before passing it on, but they would also share responsibility - which means they would be answerable to questions about what is being collected, and could be criticised for nasty policies.
Adblock would continue to work. It'd just need regex's (which I think it already uses).
I'm not 100% anti-advertising, but the privacy issue is deeper than just being on a "Do not track" list.
If the ad is served from a host controlled by the advertiser, then they have my IP address, the date and time, the number of times I saw the ad, and (by the "referer" header) what page(s) I was viewing when I saw the ad.
For me, "acceptable" ads are those served by servers which I've opted into correspond with, either by typing into the address bar or by clicking a link.
From the point of view of technological progress, proposing the use of 20-year old technology is shameful, but it really is the only solution. (until software patents get abolished)
This was also suggested by Nokia during the html5 standard discussion of the video tag:
I saw them personally in the EU lobbying from 2003-2005 where they pushed with all their might for software patents.
And then recently, when New Zealand announced it would legislate to clarify that software *isn't* patentable, who stepped in to kneel on the government? IBM (with MS).
So, yeh, I'd be happy if all patent trolls disappeared tomorrow, but trolls aren't even the biggest problem, and the existence of the whole problem is in a large part due to IBM.
Computer programs that enable the installation and execution of lawfully obtained software on a personal computing device, where circumvention is performed by or at the request of the device's owner.
So, for any device you buy, you can install GNU/Linux, or Rockbox, or OpenWRT, or Sugar, OpenMoko, etc.
Their argument is based on recognising the value of the jailbreak-exemption which was granted in 2009, and saying that SFLC's suggested exemtion is what's needed in 2012 and beyond to achieve that same sort of goal.
There's no dense legalese in the document. It's a readable set of arguments with numbers and examples to back them up.
Regardless of what the issue at hand is, the ECJ's legal advisor has said that being able to monopolise software ideas is "to the detriment of technological progress and industrial development".
As an anti-software-patent campaigner, I see great news.
I downloaded the source for Kindle_src_3.3_611680021.tar.gz (randomly picked).
The contents of their tarball is the below list of files. Which of these sub-tarballs contains the Amazon reader and interface software? Or are they just releasing the bare minimum required by the GPL and keeping their stuff proprietary? Can Kindle owners blank their devices and use the published tarball to restore all functionality?
Put another way: is there a contribution here, or are they just doing what's necessary to avoid getting sued?
If that argument has any value, then it has an equal negative value because by telling the child they're born to do one of the two sports categories, you're also telling them they're not born to the other category.
But I don't think the argument has significant value. Factors such as living near a pool/mountain/pitch, and whether their friends are involved in a particular sport, and whether their school has good (motivating) coaches are much bigger factors, and you're much better off letting the child do what they choose rather than guiding them to certain sports and away from certain others.
Mono has its uses - it could help people remove.Net dependencies from their software packages.
But for new software packages, choosing a Microsoft technology is a mistake. Microsoft calls free software an enemy - "cancer" to be "extinguished", so building on their technologies is folly, especially when there are lots of non-Microsoft languages and frameworks that we can use. The problems of software patents are only getting worse, so we need to prepare for the future by applying some caution today.
I hope this is indeed the real reason for taking Mono-dependent software out of Ubuntu.
If it's all the same to you I'd like to skip some parts... like for example their trips to the toilet.
I hope you realise that any such toilet exception would lead to the bulk of the G20 summit being conducted in the mens toilets. Leaving Germany, Brazil, Argentina and Australia to strike up a bizarre alliance in the women's toilet.
When a GPL'd project gets bought out, we can end up with one freerider: the purchaser.
With BSD/MIT/Apache licences, we get lumped with unlimited freeriders, no purchase necessary. That's why companies who aren't interested in freedom put so much work into advocating those licences.
Free software is about setting minimum levels of respect: the four freedoms.
Many projects go beyond this, by using copyleft, by assisting community participation, by being transparent, etc.
By abandoning this standard, Oracle shows itself as just another free software freerider, not to be trusted and not worthy of community support or good will.
It's a real pity that Ghostery isn't free software.
It has a look-but-don't-touch licence for the source code. Being able to look is better than nothing, but if no one can modify or fork it, then it's unlikely that anyone's reading the source code at all. I wouldn't trust my privacy to something with no community or third-party oversight.
Slashdot Mirror
In the EU, it has to be approved by the Council of Ministers and the European Parliament.
I'm not sure if there's any diagram that would make things clearer. Diagrams present formalities that mask the political reality of the decision making process.
Remember when software patents were put on the agenda of the fisheries committee? Procedures include flexibility...
Blocking ACTA isn't about spotting something on a map, it's about talking to our representatives and saying "We don't want this". (Council of Ministers is made up of the relevant ministers from the national governments, and the European Parliament is made up of our MEPs).
Almost all applications for an ITC import ban are rejected:
http://en.swpat.org/wiki/United_States_International_Trade_Commission
But that's not the point. For a number of weeks or months, there's a cloud hanging over the target company and investors don't know if a device will ever be on sale in the USA. It's serious FUD, for free.
An actual import ban would just be monopolist icing on the FUD cake.
read the linked article.
He says that using services to access big stores of data (as search engines do) is a legitimate reason to use these APIs.
It's worth a read. Go on.
It's an API. Tacking "Open" onto doesn't change the fact that it's just an interface to a black box.
As Stallman's been saying for the last few years, having software freedom is about having control over your computing, and that requires that your computing is done on *your* computer:
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-serve.html
This is a topic for tonight's monthly meeting of Irish Free Software Organisation:
http://mail.fsfeurope.org/pipermail/fsfe-ie/2011-December/003005.html
Other mail starting the discussion:
http://mail.fsfeurope.org/pipermail/fsfe-ie/2011-December/003006.html
> If we block all advertising that isn't self hosted, we'll get
> server-side systems that automatically copy adds from advertisers
> servers and then share tracking info back to the advertiser.
But the site I choose to visit would be a layer between my data and the harvester.
That changes everything because, not only could they decide to not pass on the data or to scramble identifying elements before passing it on, but they would also share responsibility - which means they would be answerable to questions about what is being collected, and could be criticised for nasty policies.
Adblock would continue to work. It'd just need regex's (which I think it already uses).
I'm not 100% anti-advertising, but the privacy issue is deeper than just being on a "Do not track" list.
If the ad is served from a host controlled by the advertiser, then they have my IP address, the date and time, the number of times I saw the ad, and (by the "referer" header) what page(s) I was viewing when I saw the ad.
For me, "acceptable" ads are those served by servers which I've opted into correspond with, either by typing into the address bar or by clicking a link.
From the point of view of technological progress, proposing the use of 20-year old technology is shameful, but it really is the only solution. (until software patents get abolished)
This was also suggested by Nokia during the html5 standard discussion of the video tag:
http://en.swpat.org/wiki/Use_software_and_functionality_from_20_years_ago
And remember, this problem is caused not by trolls but by the MPEG-LA signatories: Columbia University, Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute of Korea (ETRI), France Télécom, Fujitsu, LG Electronics, Matsushita (Panasonic), Mitsubishi, Microsoft, Motorola, Nokia, Philips, Robert Bosch GmbH, Samsung, Sharp, Sony, Toshiba, and Victor Company of Japan (JVC).
It has to be remembered that IBM is one of the biggest pro-software-patent lobby groups in the world.
In the US Bilski case, they submitted a brief saying that free software needed software patents!
http://en.swpat.org/wiki/Fake_representatives_of_free_software#IBM
I saw them personally in the EU lobbying from 2003-2005 where they pushed with all their might for software patents.
And then recently, when New Zealand announced it would legislate to clarify that software *isn't* patentable, who stepped in to kneel on the government? IBM (with MS).
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/10/06/23/0235248/new-zealand-u-turns-will-grant-software-patents
So, yeh, I'd be happy if all patent trolls disappeared tomorrow, but trolls aren't even the biggest problem, and the existence of the whole problem is in a large part due to IBM.
* http://en.swpat.org/wiki/More_than_trolls
* http://en.swpat.org/wiki/IBM
They've asked for a DMCA exception for:
So, for any device you buy, you can install GNU/Linux, or Rockbox, or OpenWRT, or Sugar, OpenMoko, etc.
Their argument is based on recognising the value of the jailbreak-exemption which was granted in 2009, and saying that SFLC's suggested exemtion is what's needed in 2012 and beyond to achieve that same sort of goal.
There's no dense legalese in the document. It's a readable set of arguments with numbers and examples to back them up.
SFLC's request would be a bigger win. Here's their submission:
https://www.softwarefreedom.org/resources/2011/SFLC-proposed-DMCA-exemption.pdf
And their press release gives an introduction:
http://softwarefreedom.org/news/2011/dec/02/proposed-dmca-exemption/
Regardless of what the issue at hand is, the ECJ's legal advisor has said that being able to monopolise software ideas is "to the detriment of technological progress and industrial development".
As an anti-software-patent campaigner, I see great news.
I downloaded the source for Kindle_src_3.3_611680021.tar.gz (randomly picked).
The contents of their tarball is the below list of files. Which of these sub-tarballs contains the Amazon reader and interface software? Or are they just releasing the bare minimum required by the GPL and keeping their stuff proprietary? Can Kindle owners blank their devices and use the published tarball to restore all functionality?
Put another way: is there a contribution here, or are they just doing what's necessary to avoid getting sued?
The US-ITC rejects almost all such requests, so this is no surprise and doesn't necessarily mean the case has collapsed.
Some patent holders surely use these procedures just to smear product developers and scare investors - in the hope of a easy cash settlement.
More about the ITC:
http://en.swpat.org/wiki/United_States_International_Trade_Commission
> To play the devil's advocate [...]
If that argument has any value, then it has an equal negative value because by telling the child they're born to do one of the two sports categories, you're also telling them they're not born to the other category.
But I don't think the argument has significant value. Factors such as living near a pool/mountain/pitch, and whether their friends are involved in a particular sport, and whether their school has good (motivating) coaches are much bigger factors, and you're much better off letting the child do what they choose rather than guiding them to certain sports and away from certain others.
Producing a top sportsperson is not the goal of raising a child.
They should be raised healthy, happy, and with good habits.
They have to be encouraged to do whatever form of sport/exercise they are willing/happy to do.
Mono has its uses - it could help people remove .Net dependencies from their software packages.
But for new software packages, choosing a Microsoft technology is a mistake. Microsoft calls free software an enemy - "cancer" to be "extinguished", so building on their technologies is folly, especially when there are lots of non-Microsoft languages and frameworks that we can use. The problems of software patents are only getting worse, so we need to prepare for the future by applying some caution today.
I hope this is indeed the real reason for taking Mono-dependent software out of Ubuntu.
http://en.swpat.org/wiki/Mono
I hope you realise that any such toilet exception would lead to the bulk of the G20 summit being conducted in the mens toilets. Leaving Germany, Brazil, Argentina and Australia to strike up a bizarre alliance in the women's toilet.
When a GPL'd project gets bought out, we can end up with one freerider: the purchaser.
With BSD/MIT/Apache licences, we get lumped with unlimited freeriders, no purchase necessary. That's why companies who aren't interested in freedom put so much work into advocating those licences.
Free software is about setting minimum levels of respect: the four freedoms.
Many projects go beyond this, by using copyleft, by assisting community participation, by being transparent, etc.
By abandoning this standard, Oracle shows itself as just another free software freerider, not to be trusted and not worthy of community support or good will.
We've all heard of the research showing that London taxi drivers have one part of their brain enlarged by their work.
More recently, research shows that this comes at the cost of reducing their memory for other things:
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/sciencetoday/2011/0609/1224298636027.html
Becoming a super-specialist in a very narrow field, such as a Scrabble master, might have the same effect.
It's a real pity that Ghostery isn't free software.
It has a look-but-don't-touch licence for the source code. Being able to look is better than nothing, but if no one can modify or fork it, then it's unlikely that anyone's reading the source code at all. I wouldn't trust my privacy to something with no community or third-party oversight.
Here's gnu.org's list of free, mozilla-compatible add-ons:
http://www.gnu.org/software/gnuzilla/addons.html
For privacy, there's only really Noscript and Requestpolicy.
From the mail linked to in the story: http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2011-07/msg01155.html
Some negative reviews of the project's concept:
* Richard Fontana: http://opensource.com/law/11/7/trouble-harmony-part-1
* Bradley Kuhn: http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2011/07/07/harmony-harmful.html
* David Neary: http://blogs.gnome.org/bolsh/2011/07/06/harmony-agreements-reach-1-0/
(I just noticed that their licence notice doesn't make any sense. I presume they meant to write "with*out* written permission")
I just went looking for free alternatives but NoScript is all I found!
* https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/noscript/
TrackerBlock, BetterPrivacy, and Ghostery all seem to be proprietary software. What a disappointment.
FSF maintain a list of free mozilla-compatible plugins:
http://www.gnu.org/software/gnuzilla/addons.html
I see one free plugin that I haven't tinkered with: https://www.requestpolicy.com/