… In Hungary? Yeah I know, Ole Tux is just an OS. That is what I thought too. Still do by the way. But in Hungary a political party — Jobbik — has sprung up.:

We are going to implement open standards in the public sector and will promote the spread of open source solutions among the general public and among businesses. Under these directives, government and public sector documents can be stored only, in open document formats, on systems running open standards applications.

We are going to develop open standard interfaces, in order to encourage municipalities, the tax department, the banking sector and public offices to use open source solutions.

We are going to supply government funded and developed applications for municipalities, nation wide, to eliminate parallel and wasteful developments.

When both proprietary and open source software will be available with the equal functionality to accomplish a particular task, we will make the use of open source solutions, mandatory.

We are going to implement open standards in the school system and will introduce open source computing as a subject in schools, under the discipline of computer sciences.

That ladies and gentlemen is the Jobbik party platform. Sound wild? Well I will just direct you to Sweden where the Pirate Party has a foothold in Parliment after raising petitions and funds on the Pirate Bay file sharing suit. They now have over a dozen affiliated Pirate parties in the world. So it would not be far fetched at all.

Linky.

LA Times has a piece of Comcast sniffing around the behind of NBC Universal. The question for Comcast is the property a pig in a poke –

Cable giant Comcast Corp. is kicking the tires of NBC Universal, according to people familiar with the situation.

Comcast, the nation’s largest cable operator with almost 25 million subscribers, has been looking to increase its content holdings for several years. In NBC Universal it would get its hands on not only a big broadcast network and movie studio, but also several powerful cable channels, including USA, Syfy, CNBC, MSNBC and Bravo.

NBC parent General Electric has often denied that it is interested in selling its entertainment holdings. Of course, if history is any guide, Comcast doesn’t necessarily wait for an invitation before making a play. Five years ago it made an unsuccessful run to buy Walt Disney Co. for $54 billion.

Even smart money can be dead wrong at times. This might be one of them. Consider that NBC proper, is a TV property that like its competitors has seen better days. These are the twilight years of on air content. Then there is MSNBC cable. Its ratings are so low that their total viewership on any given night does not even beat Greta Van Susteren a Fox property. SyFy and USA Network are probably the only two pieces with any lastings prospects. But would you plunk down $30Bn or so on that basis?

What a NBCUniversal deal does do for Comcast is seal up some cable content for themselves. Which considering that channel providers might bolt to Hulu or YouTube makes it a fair defensive play. The question of course, is it worth the money?

Good luck there Comcast. More here.

Microsoft has now filed a patent for a means of categorizing animal species. Yes you heard me. This is the kind of stuff that is giving IP a bad name. When there is nothing in the public square the ability to perform research of any sort will cease without first talking to a lawyer –

A Microsoft patent application has evolutionary biologists worried Redmond could claim standard techniques used by scientists to organize how animals are related through time.

The patent application, which came to light in the August edition of Science, claims invention of methods for mapping biological data to an evolutionary tree. It includes methods for counting evolutionary events as well as grouping evolutionary relatedness from biomolecules.

The patent application was filed July 23, 2007 and credited to Stuart Ozer.

“This patent is written in such a broad language that it appears to swallow up any activity that involves understanding biodiversity though phylogenetics,” said William Piel, a phylogeneticst at Yale University quoted in the article.

Linky.

In what I think the MPAA and RIAA industry insiders will regret, the cat kinda slipped out of the bag. The DRM mavens don’t think you should have forever use of your copyrighted works you paid for. –

“We reject the view,” he writes in a letter to the top legal advisor at the Copyright Office, “that copyright owners and their licensees are required to provide consumers with perpetual access to creative works. No other product or service providers are held to such lofty standards. No one expects computers or other electronics devices to work properly in perpetuity, and there is no reason that any particular mode of distributing copyrighted works should be required to do so.”

Now here is the sham of that argument. First of all I DO expect a motherboard on a computer to work for the lifecycle of the product. Which in most cases is not hard to see 10 years go by. (I have seen some, like a few Bell 3b2’s and PDP-8’s approaching 40yrs of life.) The problem for the MPAA/RIAA type is that they deal in expressions not a container. That is the essence of a copyright.

Why is that different? Well lets say you bought the cassette version of Neil Diamond’s ‘Stones’ album from back in the 70’s. Now lets say you did the same in 1995 because you wanted it in CD format and Wally World had in in the $2.99 bargain bin. The cassette and CD are different ‘containers’ but the expressions in form of music is the expression. So lets say your original version of the cassette wore out. So you copy the tracks off the CD to a new cassette. You’re covered right? Not in the eyes of the RIAA. They would say you infringed and should have bought a cassette version (good luck one has not been available for a decade.)

Here’s where the RIAA/MPAA argument falls apart. How would the RIAA sue you? They will make the argument in court you stole the expression that represents the content and denied the artist revenue. Yet they will for economic purposes maintain the container is the thing and is what they protect. Sorry you can’t have it both ways. Copyright is about the expression.

I would take one more step, vis a vis the hard goods comparison. Suits, you knew going in that this was the lay of the land legally in regards to content. If you don’t like those rules then find a new line of work more suited to the hard goods - patent mindset. Live with it.

Linky.

The connected world is advancing human knowledge at an amazing pace, and that pace is accelerating. From marketing data to volumes of boffin fodder from labs, we will create and gather more data this year than we had in all of the the prior years of recorded history.

The abundance of free or nearly free knowledge is shaking the foundations of  institutions that existed to distribute information. They no longer control access and what was once scarce is a commodity. We’ve seen major shifts in media, entertainment and knowledge work. Traditional higher learning is also losing it’s control of access to knowledge. While prices at traditional universities are spiraling out of control, learning on the cheap is exploding in the cloud.

…. that means is that for many people, college is out of reach financially. But what if social media tools would allow the cost of an education to drop nearly all the way down to zero? Of course, quality education will always have costs involved — professors and other experts need to be compensated for their time and efforts, for example, and certain disciplines require expensive, specialized equipment to train students (i.e., you can’t learn to be a surgeon without access to an operating theater). However, social media can drastically reduce much of the overhead involved with higher education — such as administrative costs and even the campus itself — and open source or reusable and adaptive learning materials can drive costs down even further. (Mashable)

Some background: The Amazon terms of use say that the company grants Kindle users “the non-exclusive right to keep a permanent copy” of the e-books they purchase. The terms do not let you resell the e-books and limit their use to the individual who bought them. The terms say that Amazon can revoke access to an e-book without notice if you violate them but nowhere do the terms of use say that Amazon can delete e-books after you buy them. In spite of this, Amazon did delete e-books for what is arguably a good reason — it did not have the right to sell the e-books in the first place.

The underlying issue here is that Amazon, among many others, see the rules for digital as different than those for other things. It would never have crossed Amazon’s collective mind to grab a physical book from you if the company had shipped you one that it did not have the right to sell. But, maybe because it could, Amazon just did what it has the ability to do without thinking to see if the ability to do something automatically meant that it was the right thing to do.

Amazon is not alone in confusing the ability to do something with the idea that it is the right thing to do. It would be inconceivable that the U.S. Post Office would be required to make and save a record of who sent and received every letter it handled. Yet, just because it can be done, a number of law enforcement officials have called for laws that require ISPs to do just that with e-mail.

That ladies and gentlemen will be the bug-a-boo that will prevent eBooks from becoming a force in the marketplace. So long as the ability to delete material is in the control of others then quite honestly we are smack dab in the middle of page 103 of Fahrenheit 451.

Now I will grant that the commentary above is right on the money. But I have yet to hear any talking head breath the most obvious question of all — “How many other titles in their catalog does Amazon not have the right to sell to a customer?” A couple? Couple Hundred? Or is it more? Oh and many of those that Amazon thinks they don’t have a right to sell are actually in the public domain?

The electronic world is slowly strangling itself in rules that eventually the customer will just say, ‘To Hell with it’. When the customer no longer has any rights to the things they hear or see they will stop being interested.

Linky.

The asshats at ASCAP are now making waves that ringtones are derivative works of commercial art and therefore due an payable. Why this is a scam after the jump –

Internet watchdog Electronic Frontier Foundation has hit out at a US music royalties collector, accusing it of making “outlandish copyright claims” about mobile phone ringtones.

The American Society of Composer, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) filed a lawsuit against telecoms giant AT&T, in which it told a federal court that ringtones fell under the public perfomance Copyright Act.

ASCAP collects royalties and licences on behalf of 350,000 members in the US.

In effect, the organisation is gunning for additional payments from mobile firms, and if they don’t cough up the royalties ASCAP could claim copyright infringement against mobile users, according to the EFF.

The lobby group responded by filing an amicus brief* for the case earlier this week in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York.

The brief, which was also joined by the Center for Democracy and Technology and Public Knowledge, urged the federal court to reject what the EFF described as “bogus copyright claims… that could raise costs for consumers, jeopardise consumer rights, and curtail new technological innovation”.

Here’s the clue this is a con job. The threat that ASCAP is throwing around is that they will go after the carriers customers. BUT, they won’t if the likes of AT&T, Verizon and Sprint pay up for them. This is the typical lawyer trick. Don’t go after the violator, go after the peripheral player in the affair that possess deep pockets. Always go after the deep pockets is the lawyers choice. That is the tip off this is a legal scam.

Linky.

We living in strange times. In our new Third Pipe world small and decentralized is the rule. Information moves freely and big is on life support demanding a tribute and a toll on its motion. Unfortunately big won’t go away without a fight. Big has an ally in government, and laws are being made to protect big even though, it has become antiquated and inefficient. It can even be argued that the forces of  big won the last round of elections for federal offices. For the last several months, we’ve seen government getting bigger at an unsustainable rate, spending unthinkable sums of money to extend the lives of equally big and unsustainable enterprises.  We’ve also seen big extending it’s reach into our lives hoping to control us, because it’s the only way that it can remain big in this new world. One of the biggest enemies of big is free. Big creates nothing. Big has gotten big and rich from distribution.  Now that distribution is largely free, big is in trouble.

There’s plenty of benefit to giving things away in a business. In fact, many businesses are already giving away or losing money on some products, just to have a chance to sell something else. There are also plenty of us who freely contribute what we produce into the commons,  supported by individuals that value our work. Chris Anderson, best know for editing Wired and popularizing the concept of the long tail recently released a new book called Free, the future of a radical price in which he contends that the value of most intellectual property is in a race to zero.

“Free” is essentially an extended elaboration of Stewart Brand’s famous declaration that “information wants to be free.” The digital age, Anderson argues, is exerting an inexorable downward pressure on the prices of all things “made of ideas.” Anderson does not consider this a passing trend. Rather, he seems to think of it as an iron law: “In the digital realm you can try to keep Free at bay with laws and locks, but eventually the force of economic gravity will win.” To musicians who believe that their music is being pirated, Anderson is blunt. They should stop complaining, and capitalize on the added exposure that piracy provides by making money through touring, merchandise sales, and “yes, the sale of some of [their] music to people who still want CDs or prefer to buy their music online.” To the Dallas Morning News, he would say the same thing. Newspapers need to accept that content is never again going to be worth what they want it to be worth, and reinvent their business. “Out of the bloodbath will come a new role for professional journalists,” (The New Yorker)

It has been announced that Pirate Bay, the audio/video/mp3/ogg/flac source site for things not paid for has itself been sold. Why a sucker? Well I will get to that after the jump –

The Pirate Bay has agreed to be sold for $7.7 million, a deal with a Swedish software maker that would ultimately turn the world’s most notorious BitTorrent tracker into a legitimate player.

The move by Global Gaming Factory X AB comes nearly three months after the four co-founders of The Pirate Bay were found guilty of facilitating copyright infringement, and face a year each in prison pending appeals in addition to a $3.6 million fine.

While the site is to discontinue pointing the way to free movies, music, games and software, Global Gaming Factory thinks it can turn The Pirate Bay into a money-making venture.

“We would like to introduce models which entail that content providers and copyright owners get paid for content that is downloaded via the site,” Hans Pandeya, Global Gaming’s chief executive, said in a statement.

Eh, Hans, you are the sucker.

This is not an issue about Pirate Bay going legit. I hope they do, I also hope they are successful at it. For if they are, they will be positioned to offer deep discounts on media, if the sources get a clue. If I could get a copy of ‘The Day the Earth Stood Still’ legit for $2.99 vs $19.95 off the storefront I would do so.

But that is not Pirate Bay’s draw. Bay’s draw was something for nothing. That and the ‘Tee Hee….’ mindset of ripping off The Man. I dare not call it counter-culture. Not quite that but almost. When the chic is off the rose then so goes the audience. That happened to Napster to a certain extent. The other fact is it is too easy to set up another site like it in Pakistan and have free competition vs paid service. Its the mindset in play here.

Possibly Pirate Bay will need to be renamed to Rum’s Cay and Media Emporium when the dust settles.

Linky.

In what has to be the biggest Hail Mary on record, the defendants in the Pirate Bay case will NOT be retried. As you may recall, a mistrial was requested after discovery that the judge in the case had dealings/relationships with entitles that the defendants had supposedly defrauded. But it is not all good either –

A Swedish appellate court ruled Thursday there would be no retrial in the Pirate Bay case, despite accusations the trial judge was biased against the four founders of the world’s most notorious BitTorrent tracker.

“We have reached the conclusion that we do not agree with the conflict of interest claim,” Sweden Court of Appeal Judge Anders Eka told Swedish media. In the appellate court’s written opinion, the three-judge panel said that backing “the principles” of copyright law “cannot be considered bias.”

In denying the appeal the original finding stands and the defendants must cough up the dough and face the jailer. Course in the end, they probably win again. With the right greasing of the palms Pirate Bay could be running in Khakistan in weeks.

Linky.