News
net.wars: Orphans in a storm
At last week's ORGCon I moderated a panel on orphan works. Specifically, about the recent so-called "Instagram Act", more correctly the Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Act. The panel provided some clarification of this rather contentious bit of new law, courtesy of participants Nick Munn from the UK's Intellectual Property Office (PDF); Emily Goodhand, who is both the copyright and compliance officer at the University of Reading and the vice-chair of the Libraries and Archives Copyright Alliance; the independent barrister and Open Rights Group advisory council member Francis Davey; and photographer and security consultant Daniel Cuthbert.[more...]
net.wars: PRISM break
The modern usability movement as it applies to computer software and hardware design began in 1988 when Donald Norman published The Design of Everyday Things. Norman, as he's patiently retold many times since, was inspired to write that book by six frustrating months in England, where he was constantly maddened because nothing, not even light switches, worked logically. His most recent book, Living with Complexity, looked at the design of complex systems, trying to pinpoint how to make the services we navigate every day less frustrating.[more...]
net.wars: Flow, sweet data, flow
It's very difficult to gauge the progress of the EU's attempt to reform the data protection directive, whose text is due to be agreed by the end of this year. Basically, it comes down to the difficulty of understanding what is going on in EU government at any given time. There seems to be more than 4,000 amendments (not exaggerating), an endless succession of committee votes, and little way to understand their order of precedence. Couple that general confusion over the EU's legislative process with the fact that a Mad Man trying his hardest could not have come with a term that sounded less engaging, and you have a subject that fights to get mainstream press attention.[more...]
net.wars: Forcing functions
At last Saturday's OpenTech, perennial grain-of-sand-in-the-Internet-oyster Bill Thompson, in a session on open data, asked an interesting question. In a nod to NTK's old slogan, "They stole our revolution – now we're stealing it back", he asked: how can we ensure that open data supports values of democracy, openness, transparency, and social justice? The Internet pioneers did their best to embed these things into their designs, and the open architecture, software, and licensing they pioneered can be taken without paying by any oppressive government or large company that cares to, Is this what we want for open data, too?[more...]
net.wars: Equality bytes
This week BT announced it would give free access for its residential broadband subscribers to its two sports channels (BT Sport 1 and BT Sport 2) plus US-based ESPN. Is this the moment the UK starts fighting, like the US, over network neutrality?[more...]
net.wars: The brewing war on some shapes
It's about time we had a new new-technology panic, and here it is. This week the US State Department invoked the International Traffic in Arms Regulations to demand the removal of design files for "The Liberator" gun from Defense Distributed's "island of misfit objects", Defcad.[more...]
