Censorship on the internet

We all know about this, or at least most of the netizens, the censorship of the internet is big on the agenda of european governements. Be it the french idea of whitelists for free wifi acces[fr] by Christine Albanel or the germans various attempts at filtering internet traffic[de] pushed by Von der Leyen…

Those attemps have been well discussed, on other blogs[de] as well as by scientist. It’s very well known (by the politics as well[de]) that it won’t help the acknowledged goal of fighting child pornography. Not only are these not effective, but they have a high social cost, directly threatening freedom of speech and privacy rights as “collateral damage”.

If they didn’t know how to make us aware of that, they just managed to do it today:

There are various countries who are testing out such filtering software, one of them being Denmark. Obviously for the list of address to be effective, it has to be hidden. Something that doesn’t add to the transparency of the project. Such a listed leaked earlier in Sweden, with less that 1% of the sites having illegal content[en]. I can’t find the link again, but here is an amusing example of what is being filtered[en].

But the story that made me write this blog post is a different entirely. What Germany is now trying to censor is the actual reporting about those problems. I got the story from the law blog,[de] via twitter. I think the study of leaked filtering lists are very important, since they all tend to show how poor the selection is, making the argument for politics even more difficult. Well now one person linking to the list on wikileaks[de] has been searched by the german authorities and his material seized[de].

EDIT: i understood the story badly, it’s not for linking the list, it’s for linking a blog that links the list! Completement UBUÈSQUE!!

I can only cite the original blog post:

Bitte sehr: Gegen Sie zu http://wikileaks.org/wiki/Denmark:_3863_sites_on_censorship_list,_Feb_2008 , und klicken Sie mal 30 bis 40 Links aus der Liste an. Sie müssen ja nichts kaufen.

Wie bitte, Sie trauen sich nicht? Sie haben Angst, sich strafbar zu machen? Haben sie denn das Grundgesetz nicht gelesen? Artikel 5 “Jeder hat das Recht, seine Meinung in Wort, Schrift und Bild frei zu äußern und zu verbreiten und sich aus allgemein zugänglichen Quellen ungehindert zu unterrichten.

In this sense: La liberté d’expression ne s’use que si on ne s’en sert pas

Today once again, i am an angry citizen. I’m wondering when the politics who gouvern me will cease to fail me…

truth, classical media and “new media”

comic courtesy of xkcd.com[en], thank you for the comic, for publishing in CC[en], and for existing in general (you make my day 3 times a week).

Yesterday i stumbled on a post on friendfeed[de] (thanks to franz for pointing it out), linking to an article of the Südeutsche Zeitung[de] warning people about risk of false information when getting news through so called “new” or “social media (friendfeed, twitter, blogs and the like). The funny part being that they made a mistake themselves (that they now have corrected).

There is a classical stance by the newspaper, that try to say that only their information can be trusted, everybody else failing to have that “journalist ethic” badly needed to give acurate information. This seems to fail more and more, or maybe, it is just pointed out more and more, and in a clearer way. Another example being a Times online article[en] published recently that was completely wrong. As far as i know it was debunked by Michael Arrington on Techcrunch[en].

What’s the lesson to be learned? Well every source of information can at times (some more often than others) give false information, you have to stay critical before everything you read.

I learned my hard lesson in a similar way recently, i was reading a really good article about the mistreatment of a french journalist by the police on Maitre Eolas’s blog[fr] as he announced, he described by the very detailed how the journalist was treated and then commented on how it was or not the procedure, of what was legal and what was common etc. Very good read, you learned a lot on how everyday justice works in france (it’s not beautiful to say the least). Only a few days later a read the related article in lemonde.fr[fr], and it’s only then that i realised what was hidden behind the whole story: one more try of the gouvernement to scare journalist, to warn them to behave “well” (you know France is a democracy…). What’s the moral, i failed to see the big picture while reading Maitre Eolas’s blog, is he at fault? not at all, he even warned in the begining what he wanted to do. Actually the Le Monde article is much more partial and oppiniated then the blog, but sometimes that’s what ones need in order to get the big picture.

The good thing about blog’s and the likes is that you tend to be much more carefull when you read, i think it may be a blessing for the press, but eventually there claim to give but the truth and all the truth is bound to fail. Sometimes i wish that they simply assume being partial and stop publishing 3 lines article retelling an dpa, afp or reuters news. I don’t want to know what happened, i want to understand what happened.

Copyright and the state

Originally uploaded by stephen_downes

Ok here i go with the second post on copyright…

I want to talk about copyrighted material created by stated funded or state owned institutions.
The first occurrence of that happened to me last April, i wanted to visit the computer science class on databases. Now i was pretty busy, so i couldn’t really attend to the lecture more than once or twice… “Not a problem!” i thought, usually people leave extensive material on the internet, especially in cs classes. well that was kind of true, but to access it you needed to be a student of the university (i wasn’t at that time) and go through a fairly complicated registration process using the “Matrikelnummer” and other official data… That was the end of my effort to learn more about databases, at least in Münster.

Why am I saying this, well in a sense this effort to “hide” knowledge, to block access from the public, is basically what every university do when they publish copyrighted material. Why are expensive state funded research published on elsevier? It is so expensive that we couldn’t afford to have it at our institute… (it’s not that relevant for us either, explaining why we prefer not spending the money on them). That might be ok for private university, but for state funded research, the product belongs to the citizen and should be made accessible. I fail to see why university, whose purpose is to preserve, spread and create knowledge should make the teaching content it creates inaccessible to the people they serve (they are civil servants after all). The refreshing and novel approach of (private university Stanford) that gives their classes out for free on itunes and youtube, they aren’t the only one. For more university sharing content for free over the internet see open culture. On the subject of scientific publication i’d like to point to this great article by ars technica, who depicts the current struggle and surprises of the american congress while they where trying to open up acces to state funded medical research.

But that’s not the end, another hilarious story (via crunchgear) was about a student getting sued in germany for creating an iPhone app that was able to provided train schedules for public transport in Berlin, because there is a freaking copyright on the train schedule ! How dumb is that? Who does the train schedule belong to? I would probably in my lack of legal n´knowledge say to no one, or if anyone then the citizen of Berlin… Here you see the devastating effect of copyright on creativity…

I’d like to point out the last 2 posts i want to make on the subject (yeah it’s also for me to not forgett…):

• “The copyright war” – on the disproportionity of the “two” adversary be it in courts or in lobying work.
• Copyright in Europe, a menace for democracy? this is what motivated me in the first place to talk about copyright, i’d like to question if what we see at work in the law making process on the subject of copyright point out potential risk for democratie at european level.

Intellectual property

it’s 4:46 in the morning and i can’t sleep… So i decided i could as well write a post i was postponing since at least mid October…

Originally uploaded by PugnoM

The ones of you with which i regularly discuss politics – sometimes i feel there aren’t enough of those – knows that it’s a theme that interest me for a long time. Usually when i talk about it everybody suppose i want to talk about p2p, music and related problem. Actually i believe more and more that this is only a tiny little problem in a much bigger picture.

Traditionally intellectual property only applies to so called non-rival goods that is, goods that can be used/enjoyed by multiple people simultaneously. Intellectual property is then divided in different sections that don’t have much in common:

• copyright, which affects intellectual work such as books, movies, music, pictures, art in general, but also software;
• patent, which covers machine, goods ( composition of matter, article of manufacture), production processes;
• trademark: logos, names;
• industrial design and
• trade secret.

Originally uploaded by Majiscup – Drink for Design

I want to talk mostly about the two first. While not entirely similar there is an important difference that is easily noticeable: in the U.S. and Europe, the duration of a patent is typically of 10 to 20 years. As for copyright, in th U.S. it’s 70 years after the death of the author or if the work was a work for hire 120 year after creation or 95 years after publication, whichever is shorter, according to wikipedia. In Europe it is uniformely 70 years after death of the author, also according to wikipedia. Related to all of this is the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works which sets the minimal duration of copyright to be 50 years after the death of the author. Nobody can fail to see the humongus gap between the duration of copyright and patents…

I have no strong opinion with respect to patent, but for one thing: looking at this article from Techcrunch, where a company’s business model is to get money for not suing other companies for patent infrigement, seems totally wrong. And yes it looks llike it’s not only legal but also profitable… There seem to be a huge business around paterns that neither promote creativity nor is usefull to the general public in any way shape or form. It would be interesting to find ways to cut this business down as it costs real companies a lot, a price that is in the end taken care of by the customers.

As i am trying to shorten my posts, i will talk about copyright in a second voley of this (maybe longer) serie.

Ideas for a political blog

Parlement Europeen (Strasbourg)

Originally uploaded by PizzaDeBarr

I’m more and more concerned about the evolution of our democracy. It’s not like I believe there will be something awful that will happen anytime soon. It’s just that I am wondering how I, or any other citizen here, could use new media and possibilities to somehow make it better, one small step at a time.

thanks to 96dpi i stumbled upon this site and i was wondering if one could not push the idea further:

Create a blog (possibly with multiple authors).

For every measure that is taken either in your national parliament, or in the European parliament, that you feel you have a strong opinion on, write the delegate that is representing you an open letter that you post on that blog. In that open letter, explain the problem, if he took a stance on the problem (that is the one you also have) remind him of it. Ask him to vote in your sense for that motion/law/decision or to motivate why he will not. Ask him if you can publish that motivation, if he agrees publish it.

Then make a blog post about how the decision passed, and if the information is available, how your delegates did vote.

At the next election where he is presenting himself again, draw a balance of how much he respected his election promises. Ask him and any other candidate to take a clear stance on the matters.

The idea is to make elected persons more accountable for the decision they are taking. Do you think it would help? If yes anybody who would like to join me on such a project?

民以国为大 a rant…

The East is Red

Originally uploaded by Life in Asia (aka Life in Nanning)

Seeing that i was blogging chinese citations, my father asked me to blog the sentence of the title. Knowing that he had to find it somewhere on the internet (i doubt he is able to type chinese characters). After googling it, i became upset…

Instead of talking about the sentence, i rather talk about why i’m upset…

Briefly put, the sentence says: the people are more important than (pass before?) the people. 沒意思？ I love english! Better would be: individuals are less important then the country. Obviously a blasphemy we righteous europeans/americans/westerners? would tremble upon hearing… And thus once again a cheepo critic on china was launched, and it was easy to agree…

Especially during the olympic times it became some (not yet olympic) sport to be aware of all gruesome chinese mischiefs. Now don’t get me wrong, I am aware that there are things that are just wrong in China. It’s just that in order to be believable one has to argue about facts, not just wave some random prefabricated slogan under my nose like a red cloth.

Like so often, one faction has become so idiotically sure it has the right (the truth, the morals whatever) with them that they don’t care anymore about arguing, since their position alone, let them win any argument by default. And me as a sceptic, and a moderate (on this issue) can only shrug and be put off by their arrogance, as much as i would like to agree with them.

So what, the individual may not have that much of an importance in china, is it truly better here? Is the patriot act the paradigm of a civilization that really put the individuals at it’s center? Germany and France aren’t better, there are enough example there too, starting by wiretapping, where individual rights have been flouted.

The only good thing about all this is that it made me think again about what i really think is important in a state. More on that in the next post.