Disqus - Latest Comments for phbradley

Re: UK ruling makes internet browsing a copyright risk, rendering innocent acts of millions illegal

Philippe Bradley — Sun, 31 Jul 2011 10:37:54 -0000

(cross-posted from Hacker News and the IPKat blog):

The ruling not only causes absurdity/doesn't work, it's wrong in law to boot. I hope this goes to the UK Supreme Court. It's very dangerous: it effectively means that if I look at a picture on the floor I'm not breaking copyright (because I'm not making a copy), but if I view in on a public server I can be held to be in breach of copyright. Just because there are technological steps involved in delivering the picture to my eyes, copyright law suddenly applies, and hard. Copyright is not meant to limit the reading of works, merely their reproduction where such reproduction is marketable/commercially relevant. Browsing a webpage must be viewed as the sort of merely transient "copying" that is not a restricted act. There is no permanence in the act and the viewer doesn't take possession of a copy with which he can then compete in the marketplace which the rightsholder is supposed to have a state-granted monopoly over.

Wrong in law: The Ecommerce Directive (2001/29) says that, subject to certain conditions, copies made during transmission by a third party or in your ram, cache, etc, are not reproductions covered by copyright law. The leading case on this is called Infopaq, which summarises:
- the act is temporary;
- it is transient or incidental;
- it is an integral and essential part of a technological process;
- the sole purpose of that process is to enable lawful consumption of the work or a transmission in a network between third parties by an intermediary of a lawful use of a work or protected subject-matter; and
- the act has no independent economic significance.
The recital (explanatory notes) to this exemption is this: "The exclusive right of reproduction should be subject to an exception to allow certain acts of temporary reproduction, which are transient or incidental reproductions, forming an integral and essential part of a technological process and carried out for the sole purpose of enabling (...) lawful use of a work or other subject-matter to be made. To the extent that they meet these conditions, this exception should include acts which enable _browsing_ as well as acts of _caching_ to take place, including (...)"

The court in Meltwater says that the copies made by the users (which, it says, are unlicensed and thus infringing copies) are not exempt. Its reasoning hinges mostly on the fourth point. It uses circular logic despite accusing the defence of using the same: "A person making a copy of a webpage on his computer screen will not have a defence under s. 28A CDPA simply because he has been browsing. He must first show that it was lawful for him to have made the copy. The copy is not part of the technological process; it is generated by his own volition. The whole point of the receipt and copying of Meltwater News is to enable the End User to receive and read it. Making the copy is not an essential and integral part of a technological process but the end which the process is designed to achieve. Storage of the copy and the duration of that storage are matters within the End User's control. It begs the question for decision whether making the copy is to enable a lawful use of the work."

This judgement presupposes that a copy is being deliberately made by the user; therefore it 'begs the question' whether the steps leading to that are excepted or not (because this is not lawful consumption). This is of course very flawed: when viewing a .jpg or Meltwater news from a remote server, we are not creating a meaningful copy of it, any more than receiving a broadcast on your TV set. That only happens once you hit Ctrl+S. Because you're just viewing (consuming, not copying) what's placed in plain sight, any RAM/cache/whatnot is in fact incidental to lawful consumption. The court thinks that you cannot consume digital work without meaningfully copying it - because it exists once on the server and they think it can exist simultaneously on many, many different users' terminals. But that is no more 'copying' (in the copyright sense) than happens on TVs in broadcasting (since you ignore all incidental technologically necessary 'copies' that lead up to the display of the work), and is precisely the opposite of what the law (Art 5(1) Ecommerce Directive) says.

They consider Infopaq, but all too superficially. From Infopaq: "23. According to the Højesteret, it is not disputed in this case that consent from the rightholders is not required to engage in press monitoring activity" - loading the websites so they can be read (and summarised by hand, or whatever else you want to do that doesn't store a copy of the words). Infopaq objects to the OCR and printing. I don't know if/why this was not flagged up in Meltwater. Infopaq seems poorly considered in that case.

Absurd:

- If the mere display of a .JPG were a copy, each re-rendering of the page (scrolling, zooming, AJAX refresh, etc) would be a separate potential infringement, wouldn't it? In fact, each refresh (60 times a second) would be creating an infringing copy.
- everyone (even rightsholders) clearly think there is no infringement possible by mere browsing, otherwise if the traffic lights system goes ahead anyone clicking on a redlighted link is immediately an infringer (because they will be making infringing copies of unlicensed content). It would then be absurd for google to even list the site. In fact Google wouldn't even be able to re-spider it from the instant it is redlighted. Infringement detection agents couldn't safely visit it. Nobody could. That is clearly not what the PRS is suggesting with their traffic light scheme, unless I'm vastly mistaken (or that is in fact their cunning plan).
- if the publisher of a work doesn't want her copy of the work to be available to the public, she can simply stop making it available to the public. If nobody has actually made a copy which they can go on using or serving to the public themselves (which I don't deny would be a restricted act), the work stops being available to the public. If I circumvent the way she sets up her property to reflect her wishes, just to be able to cast eyes upon the work, she at the very least has the Computer Misuse Act to remedy the trespass onto her server. She does not require copyright infringement remedies for that.
Horses for courses thus combine to ensure total respect for the publisher without necessitating an expansion of copyright law that were it isn't required - viewing files on a server (nor, for reasons stated in my preceding emails, is it welcome there either). - the picture on floor vs. picture on webpage dichotomy mentioned in my first paragraph: if it's can lawfully be retrieved and displayed (by looking at the picture on the floor, or requesting it, quite legitimately, from a server) then copyright shouldn't apply, but in Meltwater, it applies to the latter.

Any reading of the law that extends the law to where it serves no purpose at all, cannot befit the purpose of the law being read (and it sure ain't necessary in a democratic society, ney'ver). Even if this were not the plain meaning of the law (which I showed above that it is), if for any reason a judge were to seek a purposive reading of the law (I have, for example, heard of Art 8 - right to private and family life - being applied in more surprising ways that protecting your right to browse the web without courts having the ability to find you in breach of the law for every page you visit - Branduse v Romania was about smelly prisons, ffs, not being able to forward your music, or deeplinks and headlines to your daughter - this allows the judge to use the Human Rights Act as authority for a strained, non-obvious interpretation of the law in order to respect european human rights law), I also think it be possible to read the text appropriately.

Re: Every email and website to be stored by government

Philippe Bradley — Wed, 20 Oct 2010 09:09:59 -0000

Journalists and whistleblowers should be worried that it was precisely this type of logging that allowed Sarkozy to abuse investigatory powers and track down a Le Monde journalist's sources recently (to David Senat) in order to crack down on leaks in the Bettencourt prosecution. Liliane Bettencourt is France's richest woman. She is one of the wealthiest persons in the world, and has a personal fortune equivalent to the entire UK justice budget (to put things into context)

Re: Default public licensing of copyrighted works

Philippe Bradley — Wed, 13 Oct 2010 10:27:25 -0000

I agree with most of what you're saying. To cast a slightly different light on the latter part:
There's an argument for saying that all I'm arguing for is the crystallisation into statute of something which happens anyway, all the time: if I write something (e.g. a blog post, a twitter post, a facebook status) but don't state what rights I'm reserving, I'm usually implicitly granting you a licence to redistribute.

Now, I don't know if common law recognises implicit licenses of copyright, but perhaps it does. If so I'm just proposing an explicit recognition and statutory definition of UK common law.

Not very revolutionary. But perhaps subversive?

Re: Default public licensing of copyrighted works

Philippe Bradley — Wed, 13 Oct 2010 09:19:17 -0000

These are the particular things I'm wondering:

Would it adequately solve some of the issues you have with copyright?
Would it provide the 'innocent reproducer' with a defence when non-commercially reproducing/modifying work they come across that isn't accompanied by a licence?
Would it boost the commons and legitimise not-for-profit sharing and reworking of more works (unless the creator express a wish to contrary?)
Would it have undesirable side-effects (such as DRM of some form? term extension? enforcement? economic effects?)
Could the idea usefully be made more sophisticated, e.g. making it such that explicit departures from the default public licence must be expressly renewed every (xx) years? That if un-renewed for (y) multiples of the (xx) period, the work falls into the public domain outright?
Would it strike a fair balance between stakeholders in the copyright debate?
Could it be implemented without a break with the UK's international copyright treaty/agreement obligations? With EU harmonisation?
Is there a particular type of copyrighted work which this could be applied to if a government wanted to experiment?

Re: Default public licensing of copyrighted works

Philippe Bradley — Wed, 13 Oct 2010 09:17:08 -0000

I do have issues with asking for registration though. I've not seen any feasibility studies done yet. Content production and dissemination is accelerating, fast. Self-deprecating/expiring DRM instead?

The effect of such a policy on DRM usage and development is one of the questions I have concerning this.

Re: Default public licensing of copyrighted works

Philippe Bradley — Wed, 13 Oct 2010 09:12:40 -0000

Ah, I get a few more web hits for "copyleft be default". Not a new idea
then, as I thought.
(I'm astounded that they came from you though!)

Not a solution that ever got traction I guess - but did it get rebuttals
(besides *your own*, which seem to be based on the premise that copyleft is
wrong because copyright is wrong)?

Re: Software:Law::Oil:Water

Philippe Bradley — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 10:45:01 -0000

It's fine to bemoan lawyer's salaries, I think most people are with you on that one. But why turn your disappointment so indiscriminately towards those going after GPL infringers? What exactly is it they're doing that's wrong? Are you advocating their inaction? I can see two ways of giving effect to that:
- rights holders should not enforce their rights when such rights are abnormally used/abused
- take away rights holders' ability to enforce the rights they elected not to relinquish when they picked a GDL license for their work in the first place,

A breached but unenforceable right is not a right at all. The whole GPL scheme falls apart if abused with impunity. The correct question to ask is perhaps - what level of enforcement will lead to respect of the GPL, avoiding the need for future litigation. Is a suit against 14 companies excessive, in which case winning GPL rightsholders massively overshoot their target, the and lawyers get more (paid!) work than they should have and industry as a whole gets hit...

don't forget this very same SFLC is pro bono, donation-funded, and goes after dodgy patents (and advocates their outright eradication) - its ideology (the spread of copyleft practices) logically leads (if successful) to a net long term reduction in lawsuits.

Re: Official: government now certified batshit insane

Philippe Bradley — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 14:04:03 -0000

Care to argue, instead of preach?

If you do, please take into account my membership of Creative Commons, and consider the middle ground...

Re: Official: government now certified batshit insane

Philippe Bradley — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 05:03:45 -0000

I disagree that copyright is fundamentally a bad thing in a modern society -
and so would most people. That's a debate to be held in another place, at
another time.

What I *do* resent is atrocious legal precedents being set in response to
minor problems that are going away of their own accord IN SPITE OF already
extravagant and archaic copyright frameworks (one shudders to think what
issues the many new era music services - last.fm, spotify, we7 etc have to
put up with) - especially when the limited measures already proposed
infringe human rights and cost rights owners more money (
http://www.guardian.co.uk/t...
than
they would return to them - "it would cost £420m annually to run a system to
defeat a problem the music industry complains costs it £200m per year."

2009/11/23 Disqus <>

Re: Hacking Education (continued)

Philippe Bradley — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 14:16:20 -0000

Hi Fred - long time since I last posted here. Plenty of food for thought in this post for my long bus journey to Sao Paolo tonight! It leaves soon so I can't go into my initial impressions with adequate depth, but the post as a whole does bring up vivid memories of a book I'm extremely fond of, by an author I very much recommend for a totally leftfield approach to various sociopolitical issues. Who knows, Ivan Ilich may even have come up at the conference. Here's a pointedly relevant extract:

*
Many students, especially those who are poor, intuitively know what the schools do for them. They school them to confuse process and substance. Once these become blurred, a new logic is assumed: the more treatment there is, the better are the results; or, escalation leads to success. The pupil is thereby "schooled" to confuse teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence, and fluency with the ability to say something new. His imagination is "schooled" to accept service in place of value. Medical treatment is mistaken for health care, social work for the improvement of community life, police protection for safety, military poise for national security, the rat race for productive work. Health, learning, dignity, independence, and creative endeavour are defined as little more than the performance of the institutions which claim to serve these ends, and their improvement is made to depend on allocating more resources to the management of hospitals, schools, and other agencies in question.
Ivan Illich Deschooling Society (1973: 9)
*

Re: Change I'd Like To See

Philippe Bradley — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 18:29:43 -0000

if there's one thing to hope (I'm a brit, I'm not the one doing the hoping! asides from no more master-and-dog escapades in the middle east...) it's that this 'change' campaign gives him the extra political capital to do it.

the flipside, of course, is that this extra leeway is just a much looser leash for a dangerous dog to wreak havoc! I guess how you see it depends on how much faith you have in the man and the team he will build around him

Re: Change I'd Like To See

Philippe Bradley — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 18:12:17 -0000

I think the tacitness of western citizens to financially-driven special interest lobbying is truly obscene. We put governments in place for a number of reasons, but two main ones are, in my mind:
1) to complement free market mechanisms where they fail or don't belong
2) to be a reasonably impartial arbiter in the relations between fellow members of a society - elected, so as to reflect (as well as possible) the prevailing mores and opinions of the majority as to those arbitrations

so for it to be possible to curry favour with the government by making a bigger donation than another component of society is obscene on both counts! it's corruption, pure and simple, and here we are discussing the best way to handle it, rather than how to eradicate it! any proposals? free TV airtime, like in the UK, might be one. public funding would be another.

might the US public be better off if the money saved from Iraq funded, amongst other things, political (rather than military!) campaigns, rather than universal healthcare?

Re: Change I'd Like To See

Philippe Bradley — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 16:03:40 -0000

total enforced anonymity has to entail restricting donations to various levels - or else information can be encoded in the bid itself (hey John - we were the ones that gave you $1,234,567,890 for your campaign!

Re: The Human Piece Of The Venture Equation

Philippe Bradley — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 21:39:51 -0000

You've effectively been doing this job for as long, if not longer, than many of my age cohort have been alive - and here we come, asking for your backers' money. There's a fascinating differential there and it'd be good to hear more about it in later posts; I don't feel Jessica Livingston covered it that well in Founders At Work - the founders back then weren't typically this young

Re: With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility - Continuations

Philippe Bradley — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 06:00:01 -0000

their reputation for not manually altering their search results - and thus returning only unbiased, objectively-determined 'quality' results, is worth infinitely more to them than Knol ever will be. It would be brand suicide.

qdub, i think you're more on the mark with your comment made 2 levels up - they have an inherent knowledge of SEO, and they'll never get blacklisted, they'll be fully aware of what path their spiders take through the site, what it sees, what it likes, what it dislikes, etc. Expect Danny Sullivan and co to pay very close attention to Knol's design features and to extrapolate good SEO practices from it. This may not be all bad for clever content publishers...

as for the CPMs (and the ROI corollary - as I said, it'd be interesting to see how much google has staked on Knol - doubt it's much)... it would seem unlikely that, with the insider's perspective we just agreed they have, they would be putting low CPM content up; after all, doubtless they have a sandbox environment that they can run a knol page in and see what CPMs it would likely fetch, and what it would displace in the rankings, no? Besides, is there any reason to presuppose that these will be low-CPM pages? The emphasis is on authoritatively put together, highly-useful, zero sales-pitch quasi-encyclopedic content, with high-interest visitors... sounds like for a given topic it ought to tend to a naturally high (relative) SERP, and for high CPMs too (again relative to others in the niche), over time. I can't quite see it displacing higher-returns business, especially further down the line.

It may kick the crutch from out of a single-keyword reliant publisher but is there anything inefficient about that? This ecosystem can heal itself extremely well - it's one of the most diverse ecosystems of human activity, and low low low barriers to entry mean something else, better adapted, will just flow into the virtual space left by it.

spam and content scraping is an interesting question: will anyone risk google's fury by copying their content or trying to insert your own links into it?

Re: With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility - Continuations

Philippe Bradley — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 21:50:17 -0000

But is it really a threat to the Internet ecosystem? If the Internet has ever proved anything, it's that its ecosystem *doesn't* rely on professional content producers. So will the ecosystem be worse off if Google forces professional content producers to shut up shop?

Google is merely yet another nail in the coffin for professional online producers - the main driving force, bigger even than Google, is the amateur-empowering basic nature of the Web. And that nature may burn Google's fingers if it tries its hand at professional content with meaningful stakes (I'd like to see figures on investment into Knol but I doubt it's a big bet) - there's no reason why Google should be immune in this arena when nobody else has been so far.

Re: Manifesto for Microphilanthropy

Philippe Bradley — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 13:58:36 -0000

Pure commoditisation - which ultimately, is what needs micropayment - is almost the exact opposite of microphilanthropy! It leads to donation requests getting so micro as to make the donation they ask for so small that potential donors can't be bothered to do it - it's too much effort to get your wallet out, type in the card details, etc (hence the need for micropayment systems to get over this).

Microphilanthropy is not (in my eyes) the act of commoditising charity into tiny, massmarketed, micropayment experiences (i.e. micro-donations by millions of people) - it's about fostering a Long Tail in our new hyperconnected world. The micro relates more to the size of the niche - specific families, specific stories - than to the size of the donation. Micro-donation is an alternative model for charity perhaps more suited to the existing, highly institutionalised model of philanthropy (but could be very important/useful to it, so also requires discussion)

There's no reason why average donations can't stay relatively upscale in microphilanthropy - it is based around the creation/display of hyper-personal, highly niche charitable actions, thus it finds unusually devoted people (because it's highly personal, it should be of high value to people, hence the large donations), and it finds enough of them to put together a group just large enough to make the world move in that tiny niche. Before the internet, it was too hard to find those people, so charities had to stick to mass-appeal issues, staying very general. Since everyone is different, millions of niches get worked on, all in parallel. Microphilanthropy is a hyper-parallelised model of charity - its a similar boost that you get from a dual-core processor (parallel computing) versus single-core.

Re: Paradoxical lifestyles

Philippe Bradley — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 13:29:59 -0000

if you really care about the methodology, which upon a quick scan seems sound, here's the direct download link: http://www.iew.unizh.ch/wp/...

Ultimately the utility of these findings, and of the field itself, is in providing us with an awareness of inherent decision making biases, such that we can rationally address/redress the biases and make better decisions. Scientifically elucidated, codified and distilled wisdom. The above finding is an example of empirically-derived wisdom - but I agree with you about the dangers of correlation and causation - its like any science in that only when you go deeper (more micro) can you get really useful knowledge, and thus technology, out of it. Just like Mendel's "discovery" of inheritance in biology, it took more precise "wisdom" - e.g. DNA (i.e. molecular genetics) before it became a truly useful tool in the lab.

There's clear and present danger of abuse as it gets more advanced (more 'micro') - it could dramatically enhance propaganda, giving it precise and powerful rules/techniques for how to frame issues/prime audiences to be more receptive/accepting of a statement/policy. As behavioural science attains the advanced level (and thus increased utility) of other sciences such as physics, chemistry or medicine, with their highly informative precision tools giving their users ever clearer pictures of cause & effect in the systems they observe, we get uncomfortably close to informing - and thus empowering - brainwashing.

Behavioural science will lead to behavioural technology (in the true sense of the word - I don't mean gadgets, I mean largely immaterial 'tools' - like framing [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wik... ]), with potential for good and bad use, like any other technology. It'll be interesting to spot the development of that technology; most other technology you can put in your hands, or at least put under a microscope, and examine. We may not yet realise just how important humanities will be in the 21st century. And this is coming from a biochemist!

Re: A lesson learnt

Philippe Bradley — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 14:55:05 -0000

Two primary decision vectors when deciding whether to hit the 'publish' button:
a) Does it add value (i.e. does it avoid repetition of other material already generally available, and will anybody coming across it find it interesting or valueable?)
b) Is it 'safe' - i.e. free (within reasonable bounds of probability) of negative repercussions for the writer or anyone associated with the text. In this case there's a chance of negative repercussions on myself, being a public, self-redacted slur on my own character, that may put others off wanting to work with me etc. But I'm aware of the threat, weighed it up and decided that its utility/potential value to myself as a personal 'scarecrow', and to readers in a similar situation - and the probability of getting some great comments that I would find useful - outweighs that risk.

Certainly other 'dirty laundry' situations I have seen others airing on the web would easily fail at least one (or even both) checkpoints.

Re: A lesson learnt

Philippe Bradley — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 14:25:11 -0000

The specific companies are not relevant to the post - asides from the 'long term' one dragging its feet, they are largely faultless in the affair, so are totally irrelevant to the scenario (though the startup, by being open about its feelings in the matter, really helped in my understanding of what just happened - kudos). I wrote this mostly as a permanent reminder to myself of a lesson learnt the hard way, and partly in the remote hope that someone will avoid it entirely after reading this. This comment thread, full of wisdom, is an unexpected bonus.

I think your point about transparency being the simplest strategy is spot on. I'm reminded of the late John Peel's quote: "I don't know what people mean by âintegrityâ. Iâve always found it easier to tell the truth because that way you donât have to remember what youâve said. So, for purely practical reasons, it is the best thing." - I think the same goes for transparency. If you're not a bastard, by and large there should be no reason to not be clear about your actions and intentions. Oddly for me, that's usually a principle I stick to with ease - why I haven't applied it to this jobseeking process I haven't a clue.

But yes, it is easier said than done to tell a startup - that has and will be making sacrifices to extend you an offer to join the team - that you're soliciting other offers (though in this case, not necessarily mutually exclusive ones - but as a way of unlocking working for the startup, not as a replacement - though I'm not sure what I'd do if they conflicted; in the text I said I'd err towards the long view; maybe, maybe not). That's what I struggled with here, and failed to take the right course of action in response to the challenge.

[As regards the related posts, they're automatically generated, I have no idea what's coming up (I write this remotely) - apologies!]

Re: Blacklight Power claims nearly-free energy from water — is this for real?

Philippe Bradley — Sat, 31 May 2008 19:26:03 -0000

I'll take those odds!

Re: WTF-of-the-day: Friday 30th May ’08

Philippe Bradley — Sat, 31 May 2008 19:23:04 -0000

I suppose I could rephrase - rather than say something along the lines of 'his maths is bad' to 'his maths isn't good enough for quantum physics and was riddled with errors', would that be more appropriate? I thought that was close enough.

The optimist in me desperately hopes that despite the valid cause for scepticism here, the guy is right (and so are his backers), and the physics world needs to update its theory; this technology could be absolutely fantastic for humanity. Sadly though I think for the time being my cynicism has the edge on my general view of Mills' claims.

Re: Your food has… software?!

Philippe Bradley — Thu, 29 May 2008 13:49:04 -0000

There's certainly a lot of room/potential for innovation in the micro-/p2p agriculture sphere, however it really doesn't fit into our current society and infrastructure, so I suspect if it does happen, we'll see it coming from South America or Asia (maybe the African continent) - whichever is the most innovative/least reliant on developed countries for urban/social planning direction

Re: Energy

Philippe Bradley — Thu, 29 May 2008 02:32:03 -0000

Ah, the problem of externalities. Turns out economics does have the answer, but politics is lagging. Putting taxes on tires or road users comes across as "yet another stealth tax"... when really all it's doing is forcing people to compensate society for the bad effects of their behaviour. Sadly politicians don't have the willpower to make that happen.

Re: Last.fm taking major step towards becoming great big clever iTunes in the sky

Philippe Bradley — Wed, 28 May 2008 17:07:41 -0000

I can well appreciate that your comment that I may be getting ahead of myself - I often do.
But content is already very impressive and growing steadily, so apart from the files it doesn't have (yet?), it *is* a 'jukebox in the sky', to all intents and purposes. How it caters to the niche versus the mainstream in its ever growing catalogue remains to be seen. Here's hoping both are equally well served

now, as for only being able to play them 3 times, I largely suspect that's because they haven't yet totally figured out the revenue side of things. 3 plays is a taster. In this post I linked to an earlier post I made: http://www.overthecountercu...
Check the screenshot. It promises "unlimited access", does it not? But they need to make sure they know how much that's gonna cost them in order to know how much to charge for the service; part of that is knowing what the auxiliary (non-subscription) revenue is to a streaming service - how many shoppers do they send to Amazon to download/buy the single or album, how many ads get clicked on, etc, how many times do people listen to each song and is that from (costly) major labels, or are people streaming underground stuff that maybe costs last.fm less (in terms of streaming royalties)... etc.