It could be, But I have not yet seen where it says that the results will be open sourced.
While the participants are required to share it doesnt say whether they collectively sign an NDA and whether the various processes and the ultimate solutions are going to belong to Gates or to a wider community.
Gates could be good or bad for world health depending on whether he is encouraging openness for developing private assets, or whether he is encouraging openness in the interests of effective and accessible medicine for African people.
Existing AIDs treatments are protected by patents. Generic drug factories in India which could supply the drugs to Africa have been closed in the interests of protecting the patent on the medicine. 20million lives to protect income on a patent. South Africa is not a subscriber to the DMCA for this reason.
So Gates money behind research can either be a tool for making medicine available to all people, or it can be a block to other groups who would wish to do the same.
Depends whether the goal is the patent asset or the end of AIDs.
You are right, these nations need to remember that they have the right to contest this. However it is the path we got here by.*
As I understand it the response by the AU government was "What harm can it do?"
It is OK to suggest that they should stand up for what we want, but we have to be prepared to re-engage with the government and let them know when the team on the otherside of the net is asking for something which is untenable.
Spines, brains, mouths and ears have to work all the way down the chain for us to respond effectively.
It is comparatively easy for a small group of business interests with a common way to profit from a bad law to push it through using their extensive collective financial backing and legal entourage.
The problems for the nations on the opposing side of the football field is that all of us have to care enough to put pressure on a government which has become accustomed to considering these small corporate channels of input as their light on the path.
Currently it feels as though we are all standing outside the field with scarfes on, but the connection between our opinions and fielding an effective opposing team have problems
- we are not a single large commercial entity with a single perspective. - we have difficulty financing a legal team and policy documents to match the business lobby.(This perhaps was what govt was for originally?)
IMHO the LinuxAU Petition is a sound defensive response, but it will take some offensive power to change the situation. Currently the DMCA is being pushed worldwide. People are pushing back worldwide. Which is great!
We need to have an alternative digital access rights policy to bring to an international treaty table which does not have as a fundamental starting point that access to information is a crime, with the paying customer being a tenuous exception to this crime.
We need to start by talking to people who do not get it yet. We need to find channels of media who are prepared to discuss it. We need the local business/industry lobby groups to understand that this is bad for them too. We need to push it into local politics and keep at it until its on the treaty table next to the DMCA. We also need to have people at that treaty table who get it and are prepared to support it.
Its not a small task but it is very fundamental to a lot of our rights as people and businesses. It is also, I feel, a pivotal point for democracy as a model. The DMCA is plainly wrong. If people are unable to effect change through democratic process to block and reverse it then democracy is a farce and we are as Drahos and Braithwaite suggest living in an Information Feudalism.
* Read Information Feudalism by Drahos and Braithwaite. Its an enlightening tour.(Not the ebook if youre on linux) It explains how it impacts the computing sector as well as how it is similarly the path being used to stop Indian pharmaceutical companies from producing generic AIDs treatments at a price that can be afforded in South Africa. Millions of lives to protect a patent.
Try penal colony. The default state for any technology is to assume you are illegal, not a subscribed customer, and you must feed the parking meter to prove your innocence, permission to interact as a customer.
If you cannot afford the new license which asks for your firstborn in exchange for using the system for the next 24 hours and counting, or if the parking meter is broken, or if you want to make an alternative system but would like it to work with a propriatory one, but your new product does not yet have a significant commercial weight, then you are a criminal.
Default state is guilty/closed/inaccessible. Innocence is bought, on terms which may change with each new product and license. Each component in your computer and each component of software and each component of published content, any proprietory systems which businesses and government are using to run, are able to use black box TPMs which may not be interacted with and which can block you from developing or using or installing competing products.
works fine here so perhaps it was a temporary issue.
If you would like to sign a petition you can also head to your local Linux user group.
Ed Felton has a good blog on DMCA as it is being used currently in the US. He also has comments on the new incoming even nastier version being negotiated there. http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/?cat=5
Ive got a small blog with some of the implications for AU written for layfolk. http://lucychili.blogspot.com/ The older posts starting with DMCA are a set of examples of implications for different interest groups, consumers, industry government.
Yes and last year some of us wrote submissions to lobby for exemptions for fair use/dealing. The libraries and some software development groups and some consumers are on record with concerns. It has not been a very public process. I have recently searched the ABC website for DMCA and was able to come up with a 0 response to the search. It is probably not meant to be a public process. It is not how law is normally drafted. I would expect it is bypassing our legal community as well:
"The reality is that we do not spend a lot of time thinking about legal issues when we negotiate agreements in the GATT... [T]he concerns that we have are with the commercial results of what a negotiated agreement is, rather than with the legal miceties of it." (Emory Simon, then Director for Intellectual Property at the Office of the United States Trade Representative.) Drahos, Braithwaite, Information Feudalism. 2002
This is the kind of process we are talking about.
The impact will be to close down the technologies that many of us make our income on. To hobble the internet with legal roadblocks on creating interoperable systems. It is basically a very granular Berlin Wall around all of the components we use to exchange information, invent and around the information itself.
There needs to be some feedback loop to the treaty processes from the communities around the world.
I've been wondering if there is a way to initiate a referendum in each the impacted countries simultaneously, This would highlight the fact that the treaty process is not representative and is destructive worldwide. This might be a simplistic approach but there needs to be some way to reconnect the law makers with the people who have to live by them.
It impacts consumers, developers, any small independent manufacturers, libraries, researchers... It potentially even blocks governments from being able to investigate or customise any systems they use which they have purchased from a rights holder. eg. digital voting, power station safety monitoring, sensitive data collections such as census material. No one has any privacy or security of information because they are blackboxing the systems. Noone is able to improve or update or do systems integration without permission from a competitor. Surely theres enough wrong in that to reverberate back up the tree.
My mum knows, and she's now reading information feudalism. Get it onto talkback radio and I reckon it'll start to kick. I've been trying to get to JJJ but havent had any joy yet.
both the EU and the AU have been negotiated into these bad decisions because the lobby group which has hijacked the US trade negotiation system wants right of way. The individual nations did not choose this DMCA. they were advised that there would be no trade agreement and in fact there would be trade sanctions against them if they did not accept this. There is an excellent book by Drahos, Braithwaite called Information Feudalism which describes the path we all took to get here. This has not been an overnight happening it has taken some years. (Buy the paper copy not the ebook, I bought both and the ebook will not work on Linux and I'm still waiting for a fix after a week) ebooks are a typical example of DRM in action; ie how to buy something you can't have or use.
If the people in the nations of the world want to take back some freedoms it is my opinion that it will need to happen at a level where the International Treaty process can hear it.
ie. Petitioning our local governments is a first step. We need to make this an issue for all of these governments simultaneously. To let them know that they are removing freedoms for their communities and businesses at the request of a small group of businesses who had enough money to rort international agreements in their own interests.
That sounds like the kind of sensible decision that wont be possible under DMCA. It is exactly the shift from us owning a hardware/software/content product like a book to being a subscriber or tenant of these things that is a problem.
With TPM it becomes criminal to discover Sony has put a rootkit on your system, it becomes criminal to investigate Microsoft's spyware system which phones home in readiness for their WGA with kill switch for systems running older versions(currently postponed).
It becomes criminal to investigate digital voting systems, and in the current discussion in the US for the new improved DMCA the lobby group is actually fighting not to have an exemption in situations which threaten critical systems and cause risk to life. Ed Felten has a comprehensive blog on DMCA Here is his post on this topic: http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/?p=984
Re:It's not ideal, but at least seems an improveme
on
Aussies Brace for DMCA
·
· Score: 1
If you think of the proposed DMCA as putting a parking meter on all digital media(including software and hardware) You must be paid up to be legal. If you run out of license and are interacting with the content you are a criminal.
TPMs are a direct threat to developers and manufacturers. For software developers and digital component manufacturers it means their competitors can license permission to make products which interact with their product. Interoperability becomes a franchise. This would make it possible for a primary brand holder to buy the fealty or gaol/elliminate the independent peers in a market place.
Ask the generic printer cartridge manufacturers, and the open source game server developers for first hand accounts of how this impacts diversity in the computing marketplace. It will also impact on plant and equipment and industrial systems, but the most active lobbyists and groups taking DMCA up in court are from the computing and publishing sector at this point.
The differrence with DMCA is that you are buying the right to be a tenant or a subscriber. Your tenancy has no default rights attached. The terms of the tenancy are based on the license of that product. Because the license is backed up with TPM and criminal legal penalties there can be no fair use.
So potentially: You get to listen to the DVD if the DVD thinks you are a currently valid tenant/subscriber. If the DVD has any kind of glitch or is not working in the DVD player youre using because youre in AU you lose. If the product deems correctly or incorrectly that you cannot copy material for fair use purposes, eg study research creative work, you cant argue with the DVD it can assume that you may not. Working around it even for legal purposes can send you to a criminal court.
LinuxAU have a petition to sign to restrict the circumvention to nefarious acts directly tied to copyright infringement. Contact your local lug to sign one, download one from the LinuxAU site below. http://www.linux.org.au/law
Slashdot Mirror
For whom?
It could be, But I have not yet seen where it says that the results will be open sourced.
While the participants are required to share it doesnt say whether they collectively sign an NDA and whether the various processes and the ultimate solutions are going to belong to Gates or to a wider community.
Gates could be good or bad for world health depending on whether he is encouraging openness for developing private assets, or whether he is encouraging openness in the interests of effective and accessible medicine for African people.
Existing AIDs treatments are protected by patents. Generic drug factories in India which could supply the drugs to Africa have been closed in the interests of protecting the patent on the medicine. 20million lives to protect income on a patent. South Africa is not a subscriber to the DMCA for this reason.
So Gates money behind research can either be a tool for making medicine available to all people,
or it can be a block to other groups who would wish to do the same.
Depends whether the goal is the patent asset or the end of AIDs.
You are right, these nations need to remember that they have the right to contest this.
However it is the path we got here by.*
As I understand it the response by the AU government was "What harm can it do?"
It is OK to suggest that they should stand up for what we want, but we have to be prepared to re-engage with the government and let them know when
the team on the otherside of the net is asking for something which is untenable.
Spines, brains, mouths and ears have to work all the way down the chain for us to respond effectively.
It is comparatively easy for a small group of business interests with a common way to profit from a bad law to push it through using their extensive collective financial
backing and legal entourage.
The problems for the nations on the opposing side of the football field is that all of us have to care enough to put pressure on a government which has become accustomed to
considering these small corporate channels of input as their light on the path.
Currently it feels as though we are all standing outside the field with scarfes on, but the connection between our opinions and fielding an effective opposing team have
problems
- we are not a single large commercial entity with a single perspective.
- we have difficulty financing a legal team and policy documents to match the business lobby.(This perhaps was what govt was for originally?)
IMHO the LinuxAU Petition is a sound defensive response, but it will take some offensive power to change the situation.
Currently the DMCA is being pushed worldwide.
People are pushing back worldwide. Which is great!
We need to have an alternative digital access rights policy to bring to an international treaty table which does not have as a
fundamental starting point that access to information is a crime, with the paying customer being a tenuous exception to this crime.
We need to start by talking to people who do not get it yet.
We need to find channels of media who are prepared to discuss it.
We need the local business/industry lobby groups to understand that this is bad for them too.
We need to push it into local politics and keep at it until its on the treaty table next to the DMCA.
We also need to have people at that treaty table who get it and are prepared to support it.
Its not a small task but it is very fundamental to a lot of our rights as people and businesses.
It is also, I feel, a pivotal point for democracy as a model.
The DMCA is plainly wrong.
If people are unable to effect change through democratic process to block and reverse it then
democracy is a farce and we are as Drahos and Braithwaite suggest living in an Information Feudalism.
* Read Information Feudalism by Drahos and Braithwaite.
Its an enlightening tour.(Not the ebook if youre on linux)
It explains how it impacts the computing sector as well as how it is similarly the path being used to stop Indian pharmaceutical companies from producing generic AIDs treatments at a price that can be afforded in South Africa.
Millions of lives to protect a patent.
Try penal colony.
The default state for any technology is to assume you are illegal, not a subscribed customer,
and you must feed the parking meter to prove your innocence, permission to interact as a customer.
If you cannot afford the new license which asks for your firstborn in exchange for using the system for the next 24 hours and counting, or
if the parking meter is broken, or
if you want to make an alternative system but would like it to work with a propriatory one,
but your new product does not yet have a significant commercial weight, then you are a criminal.
Default state is guilty/closed/inaccessible.
Innocence is bought, on terms which may change with each new product and license.
Each component in your computer and each component of software and each component of published content,
any proprietory systems which businesses and government are using to run,
are able to use black box TPMs which may not be interacted with and which
can block you from developing or using or installing competing products.
works fine here so perhaps it was a temporary issue.
If you would like to sign a petition you can also head to your local Linux user group.
Ed Felton has a good blog on DMCA as it is being used currently in the US.
He also has comments on the new incoming even nastier version being negotiated there.
http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/?cat=5
Kim Weatherall has info about the impact on AU from a lawyers perspective.
http://weatherall.blogspot.com/
Ive got a small blog with some of the implications for AU written for layfolk.
http://lucychili.blogspot.com/
The older posts starting with DMCA are a set of examples of implications for different interest groups, consumers, industry government.
Yes and last year some of us wrote submissions to lobby for exemptions for fair use/dealing.
The libraries and some software development groups and some consumers are on record with concerns.
It has not been a very public process.
I have recently searched the ABC website for DMCA and was able to come up with a 0 response to the search.
It is probably not meant to be a public process.
It is not how law is normally drafted.
I would expect it is bypassing our legal community as well:
"The reality is that we do not spend a lot of time thinking about legal issues when we negotiate agreements in the GATT...
[T]he concerns that we have are with the commercial results of what a negotiated agreement is, rather than with the legal miceties of it."
(Emory Simon, then Director for Intellectual Property at the Office of the United States Trade Representative.) Drahos, Braithwaite, Information Feudalism. 2002
This is the kind of process we are talking about.
The impact will be to close down the technologies that many of us make our income on.
To hobble the internet with legal roadblocks on creating interoperable systems.
It is basically a very granular Berlin Wall around all of the components we use to exchange information, invent and around the information itself.
There needs to be some feedback loop to the treaty processes from the communities around the world.
I've been wondering if there is a way to initiate a referendum in each the impacted countries simultaneously,
This would highlight the fact that the treaty process is not representative and is destructive worldwide.
This might be a simplistic approach but there needs to be some way to reconnect the law makers with the people who have to live by them.
It impacts consumers, developers, any small independent manufacturers, libraries, researchers...
It potentially even blocks governments from being able to investigate or customise any systems they use which they have purchased from a rights holder.
eg. digital voting, power station safety monitoring, sensitive data collections such as census material.
No one has any privacy or security of information because they are blackboxing the systems.
Noone is able to improve or update or do systems integration without permission from a competitor.
Surely theres enough wrong in that to reverberate back up the tree.
My mum knows, and she's now reading information feudalism.
Get it onto talkback radio and I reckon it'll start to kick.
I've been trying to get to JJJ but havent had any joy yet.
Sign the petition and tell them.
http://linux.org.au/law
Layperson speak about the issue:
http://www.lucychili.blogspot.com/
both the EU and the AU have been negotiated into these bad decisions because
the lobby group which has hijacked the US trade negotiation system wants right of way.
The individual nations did not choose this DMCA. they were advised that there would be no trade agreement and in fact there would be trade sanctions against them if they did not accept this. There is an excellent book by Drahos, Braithwaite called Information Feudalism which describes the path we all took to get here.
This has not been an overnight happening it has taken some years.
(Buy the paper copy not the ebook, I bought both and the ebook will not work on Linux and I'm still waiting for a fix after a week)
ebooks are a typical example of DRM in action; ie how to buy something you can't have or use.
If the people in the nations of the world want to take back some freedoms it is my opinion
that it will need to happen at a level where the International Treaty process can hear it.
ie. Petitioning our local governments is a first step.
We need to make this an issue for all of these governments simultaneously.
To let them know that they are removing freedoms for their communities and businesses at the request of a small group of businesses who had enough money to rort international agreements in their own interests.
That sounds like the kind of sensible decision that wont be possible under DMCA.
It is exactly the shift from us owning a hardware/software/content product like a book
to being a subscriber or tenant of these things that is a problem.
With TPM it becomes criminal to discover Sony has put a rootkit on your system,
it becomes criminal to investigate Microsoft's spyware system which phones home
in readiness for their WGA with kill switch for systems running older versions(currently postponed).
It becomes criminal to investigate digital voting systems, and in the current
discussion in the US for the new improved DMCA the lobby group is actually fighting
not to have an exemption in situations which threaten critical systems and cause risk to life.
Ed Felten has a comprehensive blog on DMCA
Here is his post on this topic:
http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/?p=984
If you think of the proposed DMCA as putting a parking meter on all digital media(including software and hardware)
You must be paid up to be legal.
If you run out of license and are interacting with the content you are a criminal.
TPMs are a direct threat to developers and manufacturers.
For software developers and digital component manufacturers it means their competitors
can license permission to make products which interact with their product.
Interoperability becomes a franchise.
This would make it possible for a primary brand holder to buy the fealty or gaol/elliminate the independent peers in a market place.
Ask the generic printer cartridge manufacturers, and the open source game server developers for first hand accounts of how this impacts diversity in the computing marketplace. It will also impact on plant and equipment and industrial systems, but the most active lobbyists and groups taking DMCA up in court are from the computing and publishing sector at this point.
The differrence with DMCA is that you are buying the right to be a tenant or a subscriber.
Your tenancy has no default rights attached.
The terms of the tenancy are based on the license of that product.
Because the license is backed up with TPM and criminal legal penalties there can be no fair use.
So potentially:
You get to listen to the DVD if the DVD thinks you are a currently valid tenant/subscriber.
If the DVD has any kind of glitch or is not working in the DVD player youre using because youre in AU you lose.
If the product deems correctly or incorrectly that you cannot copy material for fair use purposes,
eg study research creative work, you cant argue with the DVD it can assume that you may not.
Working around it even for legal purposes can send you to a criminal court.
Hi folks
a ll_archive.html
LinuxAU have a petition to sign to restrict the circumvention to nefarious acts directly tied to copyright infringement.
Contact your local lug to sign one, download one from the LinuxAU site below.
http://www.linux.org.au/law
I've been pulling together an info stash about the impact on AU of DMCA for layfolk.
http://www.lucychili.blogspot.com/
Kim Weatherall is a good place to start if you want to see the proposed DMCA law from the perspective of a lawyer.
http://weatherall.blogspot.com/2005_08_01_weather
EFF is a perennial source for DMCA debacle court cases
http://www.eff.org/IP/DMCA/