If a user is sick and tired of some of the flaws of, say, Internet Explorer and they want to turn to an Open Source solution, the easy goto browser for surfing is FireFox hands down. In fact, FireFox does have what very few open source solutions have – a household name that most know about. Chances are, someone who knows someone who knows someone at the very least either knows or uses the famed browser. What about alternatives to, say, AutoCAD or Adobe Illustrator? That might be a bit more difficult to find.

Wouldn’t it make sense to have a website devoted specifically to having a directory of well known proprietary software and list all the open source alternatives? Actually, there are a handful of sites that do that sort of thing.

Open Source as Alternative or OSALT.com is one of those websites. You can simply type in their search bar something like Adobe Illustrator, then browse a list that appears to have some of the latest Adobe products, click on the software you are looking for, scroll past the description and you can have a short list of open source projects that is similar to the software you are looking for. For this example, we were able to find InkScape which appears, based on the description, to be a nice vector editing software that is open source and a potential alternative to Adobe illustrator. The page contains a right hand bar with a link directly to the Inkscape home page. It seems to be quite a handy website for those who are hoping to switch to open source.

Another website that tries to fit the bill for an open source alternative directory is Downloadpedia’s Open Source Alternative to Commercial Software page. Fittingly, it’s in a Wiki format which allows users to contribute to the site. It probably needs some help given how huge the page in question is, but one can simply use their browser to quickly search through the page. In FireFox, one can click on Edit, then Find and type in on that website, say, “AutoCAD”. The page points to two pieces of software and links directly to their home pages. One of those is BRL-CAD.

One of the problems with open source software like this is that design schools tend to teach the proprietary software rather than the free versions. This can mean that users who want to get over the learning curve of either choice either have instructor help with proprietary software or face their problems more or less on their own with the open source solutions. When it comes to open source and facing the problems on ones own, users aren’t actually on their own. YouTube have hundreds of thousands of tutorials on different pieces of software and open source is no exception.

Simply go to YouTube and, going back to the first example of InkScape, type in YouTube’s search for Inkscape tutorial. This specific example reveals a number of tutorials on the software in question.

Open Source provides an excellent opportunity for students because basic terms, in design for example, never change. A stroke will always be a stroke, measurements will be in picas, pixels, inches, etc. and layers will be layers. If one were to think about signing up for a program, even if they were to be learning Adobe Illustrator for example, learning the open source alternative even if it is for general purposes will really help understand fundamental principles in a given design project. The interface will no doubt be different and there will still be that learning curve, but that curve will more than likely shrink when one knows about the general ideas of design through learning the open source software.

There’s always the classic arguments for businesses to switch to open source alternatives such as it cuts down significantly on overhead costs. How much does it cost to upgrade over 100 machines to the latest software and properly license it? Wouldn’t it be great if it was possible to remove that cost? It certainly wouldn’t be very possible for the BSA to be coming after a given business for using legally free software.

Of course, such changes would never happen overnight – if at all. Still, that doesn’t mean one shouldn’t be aware of alternatives in the first place and it’s great that there are resources out there that will point a user in the right direction should that user choose to give open source a try.

Have a tip? Want to contact the author? You can do so by sending a PM via the forums or via e-mail at drew@zeropaid.com.

There’s an interesting report over on Stuff which suggests that one of the political parties of New Zealand, namely the Green Party, is pushing for bold plans for New Zealand’s technological future. The policy as released by MP Metiria Turei says that, among other things, it would exclude software from the patent process and investigate the possibility of a free municipally owned wireless network.

The report suggests that this move follows up an earlier move to get government desktop computers moved over from Microsoft’s Windows to open sourced solution Linux. From the report:

Centre systems manager Jason Horncy says it is “very satisfied” with its decision in 2003 to install Linux on the 120 desktop PCs in its 25 regional offices and on most PCs in its head office. It previously used Microsoft Windows on its desktops but moved all its main systems, including servers, to open source software at the same time.

The fact that the latest policy calls for a greater expansion on the use of open source seems to highlight another positive news story for the open content community. Last week, the open content community in the United States effectively won, at this point, a key legal battle which makes open “artistic licenses” like GPL and Creative Commons subject to copyright law. The more open source is adopted, the better for the open source community.

This isn’t the first positive move out of New Zealand. When New Zealand reformed it’s copyright laws, some, at first, thought the country caved to US copyright industry pressure. However, a closer look revealed that while some aspects are distasteful, it also demonstrated generally acceptable flexibility when it comes to Digital Rights Management (DRM).

This certainly makes it easy to be excited over what could be in store for the people of New Zealand, but the idea of an open WiFi network (should the government try for city-wide WiFi) has been attempted a couple of times without success. In the United States (specifically Portland), a company called MetroFi attempted to set up a city-wide WiFi network. Unfortunately, the network failed to reach completion due to money related issues. Attempts to sell the network also failed and the city may end up spending $60,000 to remove. In Canada, in preparation for the 2010 Olympics, there were plans to set up a city-wide WiFi network, but the last news bit was back at the beginning of 2007 where Vancouver police said it would attract global crime. There hasn’t been any developments on the subject, that we are aware of, since. If New Zealand is successful, they may be the first to implement such an undertaking successfully, but previous attempts elsewhere suggest that it may not happen.

As for software patents, the history of software patents is complicated. There’s very good reason to exclude software from patents. The EFF’s Patent Busting project has some great examples of why software shouldn’t be included in the patent system. Some of these examples: patent on VoIP, patent for online gaming and the patent on encoding digital music.

While there are great examples that justify the idea of excluding software from the patent system, there is probably already a good deterrent to keep software out of the patent system already. Typically, a patent involves submitting information on how such a thing works. Since most commercial companies aren’t willing to give up the source code, software is usually copyrighted and not patented because copyright doesn’t require details on how it works to be submitted.

The Green party, judging by the report, is mainly interested in ending monopolies. Of course, it points to Microsoft as a great example of this. If this is what the Green party intends to do, it is easy to understand why they want to make such bold moves. ISPs have notoriously held on to a comfortable oligopoly in many countries. Patents are specifically designed to give certain people or companies a monopoly over an idea. Windows Operating Systems are overwhelmingly dominant in the Operating System industry.

While it may be difficult to actually follow through on these bold plans, there are no doubt plenty who wish them the best of luck regardless.

“We’ve just released a major update to Miro, version 1.2″ The announcement says, “This version adds lots of tweaks and bug fixes that make Miro smoother and slicker. It also lays the groundwork for some big improvements that are coming soon.”

The release notes (Google Cache for those who have as much trouble loading the page) contain the following improvements:

• Update to VLC 0.8.6e (which fixes a security flaw in vlc)
• Reorganization of frontend / backend (with cool implications for developers)
• Separate preferences to control manual and automatic simultaneous downloads.

There was also a number of bug fixes including:

• global preference to control autodownload settings
• A preference to set torrent upload ratios
• All revver searches return 0 results.
• DailyMotion? videos downloads give File Not Found errors
• Can’t Minimize to Task Bar via task bar on First run
• An extra directory level for downloaded torrents

Miro implements many things including the BitTorrent protocol which is known for efficiently distributing large files to users. Miro suggested that shows such as Democracy Now! could save thousands (in this case, $1000 a month) in bandwidth costs by implementing the BitTorrent technology.

There is high hopes for applications such as Miro given that the CBC has already announced it’s plans to distribute TV shows such as “Canada’s Next Great Prime Minister” through BitTorrent. The hope is that this first step by a major TV broadcaster would open the floodgates to many North American broadcasters to follow suit.

digg_url = ‘http://digg.com/tech_news/BitTorrent_Democratic_TV_App_Miro_Upgrades_to_Version_1_2′;

(Authors note: This portion of the interview took place on February 22nd.)

Part 1 of this interview available here.

Part 3 of this interview available here.

ZeroPaid: There is some doubt in the air whether or not Jim Prentice’s current copyright reform bill will actually see the light of day given that there is the potential for an election, not to mention that there is rumors that the bill was delayed again just after a coalition of businesses started to get a balanced copyright reform bill tabled. Late last year, there was an interesting comment made by Access Copyright which says, “after a great deal of pressur[e] from a protest group regarding the tabling of this bill (most notably within the blogosphere), the much awaited amendments to the Copyright Act may be put on hold indefinitely.” While, in the opinion of some, that may be a bit of a stretch, in light of all that has happened since the end of last year, would you say there may be an element of truth to what they said after all? Some say that the delays in copyright reform bill, even though there is some needed copyright reforms that everyone can agree on, may not be so bad given that the laws could have pushed Canada towards a more US style copyright law system. Would that be agreeable in your mind? Could there be something to fear should there be a majority government on the copyright end of things given that a succession of minority governments have already prevented what many are calling a “Canadian DMCA”? You allude to being non-partisan in one of your blog postings. People who observe the copyright debates may note that the Conservatives have appeared to be simply tabling everything foreign record labels are demanding. This follows the Liberal party’s infamous Bill C-60 which you personally helped organize petitions for. Meanwhile, there seems to be a lot of more pro-consumer stuff coming from the NDP – most notably Charlie Angus. It almost seems like the copyright debate is, in fact, a partisan issue in many ways. Is it a partisan issue when it all hits the fan or is there evidence to suggest otherwise? Given the track record of copyright reform bills, is it fair to say that it’s going to be really hard to avoid US style copyright laws since both the major parties in Canada have endorsed such laws at one point or another?

Russell McOrmond: There are many competing dynamics at play in my opinion.

I’ll start with the political parties. I don’t consider this a partisan issue as none of the parties are really any better than the other. What we have had is individual people, such as Charlie Angus, who have entered the house with a modern view of these issues.

As grateful as I am for the work of Charlie Angus, I don’t believe people should confuse this as the view of the NDP as a party given there are other elements in the same party who have very different views. Much of the pressure to adopt “stronger” copyright (copyright more in the favour of incumbent copyright holders) comes from the various creator and union associations. This means that the NDPs close tie with the labour movement also creates a strong tie with existing groups within Canada that believe in policy changes that would make the USA’s DMCA look quite progressive.

The pressure for that direction in the law is not only from the USA, but also from within Canada. If it was only foreign pressure it would be far easier to handle. Trying to suggest we are different than the USA is a favourite political pastime in Canadian politics. On the other hand, if we get involved we can have a much better influence on these domestic interests groups than we can on foreign groups.

While there are people like Charlie Angus who I trust to work towards modernizing Copyright, there are then people like Hedy Fry who I have all but given up on. I try not to comment on individual politicians until I have met them in person. Some of my worst encounters were with Sheila Copps and Sarmite Bulte, neither of which are currently in the House of Commons, and Hon. Hedy Fry (Vancouver Center). I consider it a coincidence that these people are all from the Liberal party of Canada, not a sign that we should give up on the Liberal party. I have also met other Liberals which I have found very helpful towards what I consider to be positive policy, with Hon. Reg Alcock being an example of someone currently not in the house.

‘Sam’ Sarmite Bulte, a Liberal Member of Parliament who, under the Liberal government, tabled the previous copyright reform bill. Image courtesy of Wikipedia.

One thing that I believe is that the more time passes, the more informed people become. My own understanding of these issues has greatly improved since I became involved in 2001.

There will be groups who have been involved in the Copyright debate for several decades, and who thought they owned the debate, that will be upset at this educational process. This includes members of the Creators Copyright Coalition (DAMIC in Quebec). Their choice to include collective societies like Access Copyright (a controversial administration body for a specific business model option) within their group, but not include anyone from the technical community, creative
commons, or other such perspectives shows just how narrow they are looking at the issue. That said, there are individual people within these groups who have a wide variety of views, and the historical fear of new technology and business methods isn’t something that is going to remain in these groups forever.

Access Copyright suggesting the bill is delayed, and blaming “bloggers”, is their way to encourage their membership to get more politically involved and push harder for the proposals that Access Copyright has been pushing. Neither the bill being delayed forever, nor the suggestion that bloggers influenced the policy, are likely true — that is just a political tool.

Tabling of the bill is still on the notice paper, meaning that the bill can be tabled without additional notice. People should not get complacent in believing that a bill is delayed and they don’t need to be actively involved right away.

While the Facebook group received a lot of media attention, it should be obvious from the public statements from the Business Coalition for Balanced Copyright that the larger business community has also been in touch with the government. It is far more likely that this is the influence than a few thousand Facebook users.

I think this area of policy comes down to the personal experience of individuals. We need to do everything we can to share what we are experiencing with others, and to become more involved. No matter what type of creativity you are involved with, there is an association that can use your help to better understand the benefits and other implications of modern technology.

We also need to become far more aware of individuals running for elected office. If we consider these issues to be important we have to look past the party labels to the individual experiences of the candidates.

I don’t know if we will see an election soon or in 2009 as otherwise planned. I don’t know if a Copyright bill will be tabled before the election, and if so whether it will have passed or fall off the order paper when the election is called. Even if a bill has been tabled and passed, this should not be considered the end of this conversation. A future government can undo any bad decisions made by current governments, so we need to keep the campaign going.

Do you know where your current MP stands on these issues? Do you know who the nominated candidates are that will be running in your riding in the future election, and where they stand? If not, why not?

(Authors note: The next series of questions were answered on February 27th)

ZP: How do you see the YouTube revolution? Has it boosted the so-called ‘remix culture’ or is it more of just simply watching an extension of TV? The EFF says that Adobe is contemplating putting DRM into their Flash player. Do you think this would have an impact on the YouTube crowd?

RM: I believe that YouTube is an innovation that was enabled by important transformative changes, but it is not itself that change. (The concept of a “transformative change” comes from Clayton M. Christensen’s book “Innovators Dilemma”).

There are two key transformative changes at work:

• the move from legacy “smart network, dumb terminals” used by the phone and broadcasting networks (television, radio), to the End-to-End design of “dumb network, smart terminals” of the real Internet.
• tools used to create, edit, distribute and access creative content being able to be owned and controlled by individual citizens who can then participate in culture.

On top of these two changes can be built a whole host of things such as Google, Archive.org, YouTube, Wikipedia, SourceForge, Creative Commons, blogs/podcasting/vlogs, FLOSS, Open Access, etc.

The network changes don’t get rid of old media (point-to-point voice, broadcast audio and video), but offer these mechanisms as tiny subsets of the broader possibilities with the new medium. Any new type of communications can be negotiated between two endpoints on the network because they are able to own and control their own technology. Whether those endpoints are broadcasters, new media companies, or individual citizens doesn’t matter to the network or the citizen owned and controlled technology.

This is why I focus much of my policy work on protecting these innovations, whether that be opposition to “DRM”, interface copyrights, and software patents, or my strong support for “Net Neutrality”.

As a company, Adobe is not a fan of owner control over software and software choice. While Microsoft and Apple get most of the negative publicity on issues around anti-competitive behaviour, proprietary software, software patents, and digital rights management, Adobe is one of the key opponents to new-media within the Business Software Alliance (BSA). The BSA is a key member of the IIPA, which is a primary source for the United States Trade Representative intellectual property reports pushing against citizen ownership/control of technology.

Adobe wants the same thing that Microsoft and Apple wants, which is to own and control the platform that people use to communicate. This is the definition of an anti-trust or competition policy issue, but unfortunately I have found that the quickest way to turn off the brains of politicians, policy makers and bureaucrats is to throw misinformation about technology into the mix.

This policy confusion demonstrates one of the many ways in which software and other intangibles are not at all like tangible property (See: Jefferson Debate: A Godwin’s law for copyright discussions?). If we were talking about the tied selling between two tangible products, or the removal of ownership control over something tangible, lawmakers would clearly make that illegal. Instead with this debate we have lawmakers giving legal protection for harmful activities which they would otherwise make illegal.

With the Adobe Flash issue it is important to not get distracted. The important question is who decides what rules the software on our computer is obeying (the owner of the software author), not only how much content will only interoperate with the specific brand of software. See: Even in the “DRM” debate, Content is not King. The file format is only important in that it encourages/imposes specific brands of locked down hardware/software on people.

I have watched YouTube videos using GNASH and the YouTube viewer on my Neuros OSD. Neither uses any software from Adobe. The more people use alternatives to Adobe software for Flash and PDF, the less control Adobe will be able to abuse.

ZP: How is the open source movement doing these days in your mind? There seems to be more businesses accepting the movement as opposed to the attitude of, as the famous line from Microsoft went a few years ago, ‘a
Cancer’. Has the movement gone towards a corporate setting more or is there a particular direction the movement is headed more than any other direction?

RM: I think we are nearing the end of “then they fight you” in the GandhiCon, but we haven’t yet won that fight.

There are very few people who would want to embarrass themselves by showing a lack of knowledge about FLOSS and suggest it is a cancer. It has proven itself to be a viable method of producing, distributing and resourcing software. Few claim that there is no money to be made or saved using these methods given how much economic success there has been.

There have been legal and economic textbooks such as Yochai Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom which explain how the underlying production methodology works.

Those who were successful using legacy methods are not being phased out without a fight. Rather than trying to claim publicly that FLOSS is “a Cancer”, they have now set their sights largely at policy makers. The push has been to confuse governments around things such as DRM and software patents. These are policies which have nothing to do with protecting innovation and creativity, and everything to do with protecting incumbent software manufacturing vendors from FLOSS competitors.

This is part 2 of this interview with Russell McOrmond. Part 1 is available here.

Part 3 of this interview is available here.

(Authors note: This portion of the interview took place on February 22nd)

ZeroPaid: Who are you and what do you do? What got you into the copyright debates as well as other things that you advocate for? How long have you been an advocate these general technology issues?

Russell McOrmond: My name is Russell McOrmond. I am paid mostly as a system administrator of FLOSS-based Internet servers, which often includes authoring and/or enhancing FLOSS software. I have done a bit of paid work as a policy person for federal government departments and in other sectors. As a volunteer I am the host of Digital-Copyright.ca, co-coordinator of GOSLINGcommunity.org , policy coordinator for CLUEcan.ca, and offer free web hosting to community groups through FLORA.org and elsewhere.

I became aware of/interested in computers in the early 1980’s, with Commodore PET computers on loan at my school for a few months in Grade 8.

I became aware of the Free Software movement in the early 1990’s, while at Carleton University. I was sceptical of the long-term viability of the proprietary software industry, and sceptical of the ability of independent entrepreneurs to make a living in that monopolistic industry.

I became involved in Digital Copyright in the summer of 2001 when someone sent me an email to let me know that Canada was doing a consultation on possibly bringing a DMCA into Canada. I already knew about the DMCA, and how bad an idea it is.

My background is in technology, but I spend more time talking to bureaucrats, lawyers and other policy people in recent years than talking about technology.

ZP: The big headliner recently has been the story of Michael Geist getting the EFF pioneer award. What are your thoughts on this and does this, in your mind, affect the issues he stands for in anyway? Any words for Michael Geist?

RM: Michael Geist is one of our best allies in Canada. He comes at this policy from a very different direction. He is a lawyer and law professor that didn’t really grow up with technology the way I did, even though we are the same age. He noticed a crucial policy debate where major stakeholders were not invited to the debate, nor were they fully aware that a debate was happening. Has been doing everything he can to ensure that these missing voices are heard and understood. He understands the benefits of new communications technology and media, and begins many of his presentations by talking about the wonderful benefits (economic and beyond) that giving individual citizens control over the media has and can continue to offer us.

I think Geist is well deserving of the award. My only worry is that far too much of a spotlight has been placed on any single person when we need to make very visible to politicians and other Canadians a strong and diverse Canadian movement for modernizing our laws to embrace rather than oppose new technologies.

ZP: There’s been a number of stories around the world about privacy. In Ireland, 80 government laptops, which are among a number of storage devices were ’stolen’ which raised privacy concerns as well as some interesting debate on the whole issue of data retention laws in Europe. This came a few months after the massive story of Britain losing nearly half the populations identities went missing. Then, there’s a huge issue in the US with the whole telecom immunity story. Latest word was that one of the parties is saying effectively that there will be no compromises for telecom immunity which is after it passed the senate. With all these privacy issues cropping up, it is sometimes easy to forget that Canada did have a debate not too long ago with the Lawful Access issue to which CIPPIC immediately shot down. Despite all these issues going on today, do you think that these issues could play a roll in future debates on things such as lawful access should they arise? What are your thoughts on some of the other countries asking about whether or not there should be some give from privacy in favor of security? On the flip side, sometimes transparency is a good thing for corporate and government entities. Do you have any thoughts on the California Court issuing an injunction on Wikileaks?

RM:I see a number of distinct issues discussed here.

What is the responsibility of companies when they hold personal information about us. This is one of the great things about Canada where we have privacy commissioners and privacy law at both the federal and provincial levels. What we have now is a start, and there are consultations going on right now to enhance these laws to handle things like mandatory disclosure of security breaches.

Then there is the question around what liability should exist when governments impose additional monitoring and data retention. This is coupled with some heated political debates about whether we should give up privacy in favour of security, or whether giving up privacy is itself a form of giving up security. I am one of those people that believes that protecting privacy is itself required to protect our security, and the idea that we should give up privacy for security is utter nonsense.

Rather than governments imposing more and more surveillance on us they should instead be doing everything in their power to empower us to better secure ourselves from unauthorized (by us citizens) surveillance by either governments or foreign attackers.

Corporate and government transparency is a different issue, and I don’t consider that related to privacy. It is public transparency and accountability for activities which have an impact on the public, not activities which are private in nature.

Then there are issues of pure politics. When it is a government that makes a mistake, is it not simply a form of corruption when they try to hide from the law anyone who helped them in this mistake. This is the essence of laws which grant immunity for third parties breaking the law?

There needs to be respect for the law in order to hold our society together, and when governments play political games with the law in order to avoid political embarrassment then this puts our entire society at risk. What the outgoing Bush administration in the USA is doing is extremely dangerous, and will only encourage more lawbreaking in that country.

Respect for the law is a key component of the Copyright debate. In order for the law to be respected it needs to be respectable. That means that how it regulates us must be understandable to those it regulates. There must also be a understanding and agreement within society as to the laws purpose.

I believe that the current direction of Copyright policy is dangerous as it erodes respectability, which may lead people to want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Copyright has some positive effects that are being overshadowed by the negative social and economic impacts of recent reforms and proposals.

ZP: There’s been some debate on whether or not ISPs should be playing the ‘copyright cop’ with some ISPs considering a ‘three strike rule’ for file-sharers. First it was France to consider it, then it was England, then Australia. The IIA which is an organization that represents Australian ISPs have already said that these kinds of filtering wouldn’t work not to mention that ISPs seem to have historically been reluctant to even think about caving to pressure from copyright stakeholders to police their networks. Now AT&T have said that they may have a change of heart which caused some debate on the matter You’ve said numerous times on your BLOG that file-sharing of copyrighted content like software actually deals greater harm to the open source movement in general. At the same time, plenty of open source projects are out on file-sharing networks. So, how would these ideas affect the movement should they really be implemented? Do you have any thoughts on the filtering at the ISP level, not to mention having a three strike rule?

RM: As with the last question, there are a lot of separate issues, each of which take some time to discuss.

At the highest level I believe we as an online or technically literate community need to get past our naive arrogance of believing that the genie of the Internet and new technology is out of the bottle, and that it is not possible to put it back in. Far too many people ignore the politics around technology law simply believing that filtering is not possible. The reality is that it is quite easy as the number of people who are both technologically literate enough and politically motivated to use technology to circumvent the law.

Many people who lack this knowledge and motivation are today doing activities, but that is because the Genie is still out. There are a host of organizations that want to put it back.

The roll of ISPs in this debate is confusing as there are companies that currently sell Internet services that actually want to offer something very different than Internet services. I recently wrote an article Copyright lobby to IT sector: It’s all your fault! In some cases it is that discussed this issue in more detail.

When I say “Internet” I mean a network configured under the End-to-End design principle where all the intelligence in the network are at the endpoints, and the network in between is deliberately dumb. This allows for innovation that only requires coordination between those endpoints, and does not need the permission or changes in configuration of the underlying dumb network.

The phone and cable television companies recognize that an end-to-end network would compete with their traditional phone and broadcasting services, and not be compatible with their legacy business models (per “call” costs, bundles of channels, etc), so they do not want to offer that service.

How a non-Neutral ISP could work. A photoshop by echobucket of Something Awful. Source: BoingBoing.net

Unfortunately in North America most people gain access to the Internet via the phone or cable companies, meaning they are connecting to the Internet in a way that may not actually operate like the Internet at all in the future. People wanting to understand the history and get a sense of the current state of our movement away from having Internet connectivity should read Digital Imprimatur: How big brother and big media can put the Internet genie back in the bottle.

I don’t think we should take the willingness of phone and cable companies to configure their networks more like phone and cable as a “change of heart”, but just one of those many ways in which the phone and cable companies act quite differently than independent companies who actually want to offer “Internet” services.

If we have a end-to-end network that is neutral to the political, economic or other policies of the pure dumb-network intermediaries, this does not mean that we have a free-for-all. As one example, copyright has never before tried to regulate what types of technologies can exist. It has only required permission from a copyright holder to carry out
specific activities which people might do with respect to expressions of ideas. While new technologies made new activities possible, copyright has historically been technologically neutral in that it has never tried to prohibit the existence or individual control over any type of technology.

If we were to continue to follow the way that copyright has worked over hundreds of years, we would have a situation where copyright did not impact the existence of multi-purpose technology and services, but would only regulate very specific activities with very specific content.

I believe that so-called P2P filesharing tools should be both legal and treated neutrally on the Network. That does not mean that I believe that people should be able to share anything that they want.

I believe that it should be the copyright holder, and nobody else, that should be able to decide what business model they want to use to try to fund their creativity. I consider it wrong when alleged “fans” try to second guess the creator and claim that unauthorized sharing is simply advertising for some other product or service. Whether that is true or
not is irrelevant to me: it should be the creator who gets to make that choice, and they should collect both the rewards of success as well as the costs of failure.

I don’t believe that anyone else, whether that be governments or alleged “fans”, should impose choices on the creators. I believe it is as wrong for alleged music fans to infringe copyright as it is for the government to try to regulate against private ownership and control of communications technology.

We have far too many examples of special interests trying to convince governments to impose or otherwise privilege specific business model choices on the economy. I went into some of the false statistics recently in Lies, Damned lies, and IIPA/BSA/etc statistics. I consider the lobbying by IIPA, BSA, RIAA, MPAA and similar organizations to be less moral than those who commercially infringe copyright, with both greatly harming the interests of creators and innovators.

I don’t believe P2P filesharing should be carved out of our laws to allow anyone to “share” anything, including things we neither own nor acquired permission to share. I want to ensure that it is those who have chosen to break copyright law that bear the costs of their personal decisions — not everyone else.

This means I support a very narrow definition of “making available” which ensures that there is evidence that files have to actually be distributed to someone (as a minimum an investigator) before any case can be launched alleging infringement. We need to stop these dragnets that the legacy recording industry and motion picture industry have been tossing out where there is minimal evidence of infringing activity. The threat of excessive statutory damages is then used to scare people into settling out of court. There should also be adequate penalties for false accusations to ensure that this issue isn’t taken as lightly as it currently is.

Some copyright holders also want someone other than them to bear the political and economic costs of lawsuits against alleged infringers. I believe that having to sue people and make potential future customers upset is simply a cost of their chosen business model. If they don’t think they have the moral support of the public for enforcement, then I really believe they need to be seeking business models that have the full support of their customer base. There is a full spectrum of methods of production, distribution and funding available for each type of creativity, and there is no reason to believe that if customers don’t support one model that they will not support another. Most people believe that creators should be paid for their work, and it is simply dishonest lobbying to be suggesting otherwise.

This brings us to the issue of ISP liability and whether ISPs, either real ones or phone and cable companies, should be policing copyright. Current copyright law is excessively complex, and I do not believe that anyone outside of a court should be trying to pass judgement about whether copyright has or has not been infringed. This is why I support the “Notice and Notice” regime proposed in Canada. ISPs are sometimes the only link between an alleged copyright holder and an alleged copyright infringer. Having the ISP act as a communications intermediary between the two seems obvious.

If, after the ISP customer has been notified that what they are doing is possibly infringing, they can’t then suggest that they didn’t know. The Copyright holder should then go to a court as a next step. That court could then order up discovery information (such as the identities of the customers, which are otherwise information protected by our privacy laws), or it could order that the material be removed, or even the customer disconnected until the issue is resolved.

I am strongly opposed to ISPs being given the roll of the courts, and incorrectly presumed to either be as competent on the law or as impartial as we expect of our courts. Courts have a level of legal competency, accountability and transparency which ISPs lack, so it should be trivially obvious that one cannot substitute for the other.

I don’t think the concept behind “three strikes and you are out” is all that novel, but I have yet to see any proposal that talks about actual strikes. Being a strike doesn’t mean three allegations from some alleged copyright holder, but being found guilty of some harmful amount of copyright infringement in a court. This would not be something new, and courts have ordered people accused of computer crimes to not be allowed to use a computer for a period of time.

The only concept that is really new to the discussion is the suggestion that untrained, unaccountable and special interests ISPs should be taking on a roll that must be reserved for our courts.

Canada is a country that has statutory damages for copyright, which means that there is no obligation to show any harm caused by the infringement. In Canada it is damages of “a sum of not less than $500 or more than $20,000″. This is “per infringement”, and cases in the USA (which Canadian courts would follow) this has been translated to “per
file” in the case of P2P. Given that statutory damages can easily bankrupt a family, we already have a “one strike and you are out” regime in Canada. If your family is bankrupt, not having Internet access is the least of your problems given you may not be able to afford a computer for a very long time.

Note: Contrary to common misconceptions of the BMG vs Doe case, unauthorized P2P filesharing of music is not legal in Canada. While those “receiving only” are likely to be considered to be under the private copying regime, those sharing could be liable for a minimum of $500 per file that is being shared. It is politics and the desire of the recording industry to confuse politicians into passing draconian laws that is different in Canada that has caused the industry not to sue in Canada as they have in the USA.

As a way to simplify the issue in some specific cases, I support compulsory licensing for things like recorded music, to legalize non-commercial citizen-to-citizen sharing of music, movies and television. This is the same way we legalized commercial radio and cable/satellite television, so it is not like this is a new idea. These must be narrow and adequately analyzed, as I wrote in Analyzing when copyright levies are a good idea, and when they are a very bad idea, as levies in some areas can be helpful, but they can decimate other creative sectors.

Part 2 of this interview is available here.

Part 3 of this interview is available here.

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IBM’s affection for the open-source community and Linux continues to grow. Recently they allowed the community access to numerous IBM software patents with goals of quality improvement.

Another move, this time a financial-based decision, indicated the support IBM has for the open-source movement, this time, specifically targeting Linux. According to VNUNet.com, IBM has pledged $100 million over a three-year period of time. The goal behind the investment is to expand Linux support across IBM’s Workplace software.

The investment will focus on products including WebSphere Portal, Lotus Notes/Domino and IBM Workplace. It will also be used for ISV support programmes, channel/partner initiatives, research and development, marketing and various technology and integration centres.

Read the complete Story @ Web Pro News