The Wellington Declaration

"Give to us clear vision that we may know where to stand and what to stand for—because unless we stand for something, we shall fall for anything. " —Peter Marshall.

This week marks the start in Wellington New Zealand of the next round of ACTA negotiations, nominally the US-led Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. The scope of the agreement, however, has extended well beyond trade in fake medicines and knock-off Gucci handbags into the technical realms of file-sharing, ISP liability, disconnection, and DRM. Such issues have been contentious where they've arisen in New Zealand, France, the UK, USA, and elsewhere, yet negotiators seem ignorant of consumer and technology concerns. To correct this, the open PublicACTA conference two days ago drafted and released the Wellington Declaration.

The Wellington Declaration states principles and positions that attendees felt the negotiators should take into account. Participants repeatedly said the matters at the heart of ACTA's original scope were important for the negotiators to tackle because of the public health and safety implications of fake medicines. The audience, however, did not support the trade agreement's incursion into general IP law and the effective rebalancing of copyright law that the leaked drafts show is on the table.

Significant changes to copyright law reflect complex issues with strong public opinion on both sides, and public consultation is essential to make satisfactory law. This was shown last year after New Zealand's successful opposition to the imposition of three-strikes disconnection law caused the Government to work more closely with those who would be affected, resulting in a significantly better bill to be put before Parliament next month. The ACTA participants are negotiating in secret and countries will sign the agreement before revealing the text, a process that is almost guaranteed to provide bad law.

The drafters of the Wellington Declaration were insistent that the Internet is not a vehicle for economic destruction to be contained and thwarted by the ACTA. Instead, they were aware of its ability to create wealth, connect people, share knowledge, and raise the social, economic, and cultural conditions of people around the world. They were clear that these benefits of the Internet are imperiled by the rush to introduce "secondary liability" (make ISPs, search engines, and web sites responsible for the things they carry or serve for others), "TPMs" (technical protection measures, another name for DRM), and "statutory damages" (damages calculations enshrined in law, rather than being left to the judge and the damage caused by the particular act), and disconnection (or other approaches, such as slowdowns).

As notable as the text of the Declaration is the manner in which it was created. Over a hundred people including leading law professors, IP lawyers, privacy experts, entrepreneurs, and technologists heard from two who have immersed themselves in the leaked ACTA drafts, Michael Geist and Kim Weatherall. Then we heard from some people active in New Zealand technology law, before identifying the issues the declaration would address. We broke into groups, developed draft text, and then wordsmithed as a group to produce the final text. Anyone was welcome to attend and participate, the proceedings were streamed and watched by hundreds internationally, and we operated by consensus so the final draft was agreed by all. Video from the event is archived online. We, the PublicACTA organisers and participants, hope we've begun something that will be continued in other countries in future rounds, and which results in a narrower, better trade agreement that focuses on public good.

The text of the Declaration will be delivered to the negotiators in less than twenty-four hours, but will of course remain online. You can sign the Wellington Declaration and lend your weight to this clear vision so ACTA negotiators know what to stand for.

Four short links: 9 April 2010

ACTA, Librarianship, HTML Magic, and Understanding Data

1. PublicACTA -- conference to critique the ACTA draft and offer better principles for the negotiators. It will be streamed online, and you'll be able to watch Michael Geist, Kim Weatherall, and other speakers as well as follow the issues and drafting process. Raw notes and drafts will be on the web site throughout the day. I'm MCing.
2. The Library is the Machine -- article about the relationship of libraries to catalogues, errors, authoritative information, and the lessons for this new world of data we're building. (via staplegun on Twitter)
3. Parchment -- all-Javascript z-code interpreter. Z-code is the basis of Infocom-style text adventures ("interactive fiction" to aficionados). Impressive for the decoding, interpretation, and speed. The web still surprises me with what it can do and how well it does it. If only it had an app store *cough*.
4. Fixing the Budget -- the Economist polled Americans on the budget deficit. Overwhelmingly they want to cut spending and not raise taxes. When asked where to cut spending, the only agreement was on topics responsible for a few percent of the overall budget. This is why Budget Hero is so important: we need more SimCity-like exploration tools that let you say "what if we did (my favourite policy)?" and see what it does to not just next year's deficit but those that our children will inherit.

Four short links: 8 April 2010

0Day BLINK, Code Review, Business Models, and Cognitive Visualization

1. BLINK Tag Security Advisory -- sounds April 1sty, but WebKit had an executable code vulnerability related to use of the BLINK tag. (via followr on Twitter)
2. Gerrit -- a web based code review system, facilitating online code reviews for projects using the Git version control system. (via mattb on Delicious)
3. Open Source Business Models (PDF) -- presentation by Matt Aslett of The 451 Group, giving a framework for understanding how license, community, development model, and business model interact. Was a talk at OSBC. (via Stephen Wall)
4. Graphical Perception: Learn the Fundamentals First (Flowing Data) -- a list of visual cues ordered by how well people perceive them, and examples of how they're used in visualizations. Visualization isn't just art, there's science behind it and just as great artists know the science behind their medium, great data artists understand the cognitive science behind their techniques.

Four short links: 7 April 2010

HTML5 Widgets, RDF and Unix, Movie Piracy, and Online Complaints

1. SproutCore -- open-source HTML5 application framework (i.e., lots of Javascript goodness) that'll work with any backend. To code for this, you put most of the logic in the front-end and leave the back-end much simpler.
2. RDF for Intrepid Unix Hackers -- an interesting series, showing how to use common Unix tools to manipulate RDF data from the commandline. (via Edd Dumbill)
3. How to Thrive Among Pirates (Kevin Kelly) -- a look at how indigenous movie-makers make money in countries like China, India, and Nigeria where piracy is rampant. In short, they make cheap movies, sell near the price of inferior-quality knockoffs, and take advantage of unique experiences that movie theaters offer (e.g., air-conditioning).
4. On Complaints (PublicStrategist) -- a very good analysis of complaints departments and expectations of people who complain. But there is also a vital question of what the organisation thinks the purpose of a complaints process is. If it is a safety valve, a means of finding and correcting the most egregious failures or a means of channelling immediate anger and dissatisfaction into a swamp of unresponsiveness, then it can’t provide any broader value. That’s where the Patient Opinion model starts to look really attractive. It is deliberately and carefully constructed to elicit feedback, not just complaints. More than half the stories it gets told are positive, even some of the most harrowing, and it therefore creates a picture which is as clear about what is valued as it is about what is seen as in need of improvement.

Four short links: 6 April 2010

Copytheft, Digg UI, HIV Detection, and Facebook Sueage

1. Thinking Further About Copyright (Confused of Calcutta) -- several nice illustrations of the "copying is not theft" distinction. Copying per se is not stealing. After Michael Jackson did his moonwalk, children the world over copied him. They were not stealing. Digital forms of music, film, book and newspapers are cheap to copy and to distribute, because of the internet. The internet is a commons, specifically designed for doing this. For copying and distributing. Throwing that away just to protect the “rightsholders” is questionable in the extreme. Digital assets are nonrival goods, shareable without affecting the rights of anyone else to enjoy the same thing.
2. DUI: Digg User Library -- Javascript UI library from the folks at Digg.
3. Building a Handheld HIV Detector -- gadget the size of an iPod, that detects the T-cells that HIV kills. Prototype cost $250 to make, orders of magnitude less than the typical medical instrument. This is just one of many approaches to the problem, including disposable test kits funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. (via @parc)
4. How I Got Sued by Facebook (Pete Warden) -- he'd previously reported security holes to Facebook's security team, and that apparently saved him from a full-on lawsuit. Their contention was robots.txt had no legal force and they could sue anyone for accessing their site even if they scrupulously obeyed the instructions it contained. The only legal way to access any web site with a crawler was to obtain prior written permission. Obviously this isn't the way the web has worked for the last 16 years since robots.txt was introduced, but my lawyer advised me that it had never been tested in court, and the legal costs alone of being a test case would bankrupt me.

Four short links: 5 April 2010

Intelligence, Community, Compression, and UI Hackery

1. Wrong about the iPad (Tim Bray) -- I am actively ignoring the iPad drivel, but this line caught my eye: Intelligence is a text-based application.
2. Fertile Medium -- online community consultancy, from the first and former Flickr community coordinator. One to watch: Heather and Derek really know their community. Again I say it: understanding of how open source and other collaborative communities can function is rare and valuable. (via waxy)
3. pigz -- parallel gzip implementation. Voom voom, so fast! (via kellan on Delicious
4. Prefab: What If We Could Modify Any Interface? -- screen-scraping for GUIs to bolt on new functionality to user interfaces. This is incredible. Watch the demo, it's impressive!

Four short links: 2 April 2010

REST Data, Copyright Hell, iPhone Web Apps, HTML5 Quake

1. OData -- REST protocol for accessing datasets, based on Atom, JSON, and some XML formats for metadata.
2. Thinking about Monkeys and Engineers and Copyright -- short read, but makes you realise how tortuous the current remix possibilities make copyright law.
3. How to Make an HTML5 iPhone App -- walks and talks like an iPhone app, but is made entirely of HTML. (via Hacker News)
4. Quake 2 for HTML5 -- In the port, we use WebGL, the Canvas API, HTML 5 <audio> elements, the local storage API, and WebSockets to demonstrate the possibilities of pure web applications in modern browsers such as Safari and Chrome. (via waxy)

Four short links: 1 April 2010

Copyright Economics, RDF, Linked Data Faith, and Douglas Adams

1. Extending Copyright Duration in Australia (PDF) -- economics of copyright extension. This proposal in the "let's dream" section at the end caught my eye: The potential trade-off between production and distribution of intellectual property can be addressed in a number of ways. Australia could offer a system of graduated copyright protection with differing durations and differing fees. If an individual truly believed that their intellectual property would be valuable seventy years after their deaths, they should pay for that privilege. This is a Coasian solution to the copyright monopoly problem — with property rights being allocated to the public domain. In essence, creators are renting a portion of the public domain. It need not constitute a barrier to invention and creative activity because, in any event, there are few copyright materials that are valuable after such a long period of time and further, if the individual’s beliefs are correct they could either raise the necessary funds by means of a loan or by selling the idea on the secondary market. If, however, they thought their intellectual property were only valuable for ten years then they would pay far less, and so on. (via wiselark on Twitter)
2. Heart Proposal (Apache) -- a planet-scale RDF data store and a distributed processing engine based on Hadoop & Hbase. (via Hacker News)
3. Collections Trust: 10 Principles for Linked Data -- they read to me more as articles of faith than as proven statements of fact. 4. Linked Data can help us achieve more efficient practice. 5. Linked Data can help us deliver on our commitment to Public Access. 6. Linked Data is the next phase in our adaptation to the Web. 7. Linked Data should become an embedded function of the software we use (via PeoplePoints)
4. Parrots, The Universe, and Everything -- 1981 University of California talk by Douglas Adams. (via BoingBoing)

Four short links: 31 March 2010

Messaging, Predicting, Visualising, and Patenting

1. ZeroMQ -- bold claim of "Fastest. Messaging. Ever." LGPL, C++ with bindings for many languages, past version 2 already. (via edd on Twitter)
2. Prediction Market News (David Pennock) -- HSX is going to be a real marketplace with real $. The real HSX will of course say goodbye to the virtual specialist and the opening weekend adjust, two facets of the game that make it fun to play, but that create significant amounts of (virtual) wealth out of thin air. The Cantor Gaming group is engaged in other interesting initiatives. They are taking over a sportsbook in Las Vegas and turning it into more of a derivatives exchange with live in-game betting, a step toward my dream of a geek-friendly casino. Interestingly, another company called Veriana Networks is close to launching a competing Hollywood derivatives market called the Trend Exchange.
3. A Pivot Visualization of my Wordpress Blog (Jon Udell) -- using pro-am data exploration tools from Microsoft (Pivot) to work with information from his blog. Contains the scripts he used to do it.
4. Select Committee Report on Patents Bill (PDF) -- New Zealand Government select committee recommends no software patents in NZ. We recommend amending clause 15 to include computer programs among inventions that may not be patented. We received many submissions concerning the patentability of computer programs. Under the Patents Act 1953 computer programs can be patented in New Zealand provided they produce a commercially useful effect [footnote: Under the Patents Act 1953 mathematical algorithms as such are not patentable. They may be patented under the Patents Act when used in a computer, so long as they produce a commercially useful effect.] Open source, or free, software has grown in popularity since the 1980s Protecting software by patenting it is inconsistent with the open source model, and its proponents oppose it. A number of submitters argued that there is no "inventive step" in software development, as "new" software invariably builds on existing software. They felt that computer software should be excluded from patent protection as software patents can stifle innovation and competition, and can be granted for trivial or existing techniques. In general we accept this position.

Four short links: 30 March 2010

ACTA, Google Books, and APIs vs Data

1. PublicACTA -- New Zealand is hosting the final round of ACTA negotiations, and InternetNZ and other concerned technology-aware citizens will also host a PublicACTA conference. The goal is to produce a statement from the citizens, one which can be given to the negotiators ahead of the final round. If you can't make it to NZ for April 10, the site has an interesting blog and the conference itself will be live streamed.
2. Submission on Copying in the Digital Environment -- ahead of the ACTA round, New Zealand negotiators invited submissions around certain questions. This fantastic response from an artist and author reminds me why the fight is so important. 2. The idea that all copying must be authorised (or else be illegal) makes no sense in the digital environment. The internet works through copying - that’s how the technology of it functions, and it’s also how its power to promote and market ideas and art is unleashed. For example, when my work “goes viral” - i.e. is copied from website to blog to aggregation site to tweet to email (and so on) - I benefit enormously from that exposure. This is not something I can engineer or control, and when it has happened it has always come as a pleasant surprise. I have benefited from these frenzies of “unauthorised” copying in a number of ways, from international commissions to increased sales. I have learned that such copying is in my interests; in fact, it is essential to my success in the digital environment. (via starrjulie on Twitter)
3. Jon Orwant of Google Books -- Jon's an O'Reilly alum, and engineering manager for Google Books. David Weinberger liveblogged a talk Jon gave to Harvard librarians. Google Books want to scan all books. Has done 12M out of the 120 works (which have 174 manifestations — different versions and editions, etc.). About 4B pages, 40+ libraries, 400 languages (“Three in Klingon”). Google Books is in the first stage: Scanning. Second: Scaling. Third: What do we do with all this? 20% are public domain.
4. We Have an API -- Nat Friedman asks for a "download all the data" link instead of an API that dribbles out data like a pensioner with a prostate problem (my words, not his). I loved Francis Irving's observation, buried in the comments, that A "download data" item is just an API call that can return all the data..

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