Watching you: Surveillance and the EU.

Open Europe has published a new report taking stock of how the EU is impacting our civil liberties....  Everyone should read it: "How the EU is watching you: the rise of Europe's surveillance state"

Quoting the Open Europe blog: "There are lots of juicy proposals in the pipeline including: a target to train a third of all police officers across the EU in a “common culture” of policing; the mass collection and sharing of personal data including DNA records into an EU-wide database; controversial surveillance techniques including ‘cyber patrols’; the creation of a fledgling ‘EU Home Office’ with powers to decide on cooperation on police, border, immigration and criminal justice issues; an EU “master plan” on information exchange; the transfer of criminal proceedings among EU member states; a three-fold increase in the number of controversial EU arrest warrants; access to other member states’ national tax databases; and EU laws on citizens’ right to internet access."


The road to hell is paved with good intentions...

Also on: HAX & The Telegraph


Piratpartiet & The Pirate Party -  Putting privacy first.

Talking privacy in person - How worried should we be?

If you're in the UK you can take the opportunity to catch these seminars on privacy....

First, Cory Doctorow is talking about privacy at the Battle of Ideas in London on Saturday - trying to answer the question "How worried should we be?"

That's 'Rethinking Privacy in an age of Disclosure and Sharing'
on Saturday 31 October, 1.30pm until 3.00pm, Upper Gulbenkian Gallery

Then, a little further down the line, the Open Rights Group is organising a talk by cryptographer, technologist and author Bruce Schneier on the title of:  'The Future of Privacy: Rethinking Security Trade-offs' 
on Friday 4 December 2009 at  18:30.  St Albans Centre, 18 Brooke St, London
 
That looks like two interesting topics....  Can't someone get those onto Youtube???

Piratpartiet & The Pirate Party -  Putting privacy first.

Bad habits, bad government - Fudging the figures

You may remember the fuss about government statistics on piracy being based on adjusted, interpolated figures sourced from industry lobbyists.

Heresy Corner has a super piece on 'Abusing the evidence' (about amongst other things, sex trafficking) that shows that the use of selective statistics to support UK government policy making is endemic.  As the Heresiarch puts it..
"The government has loudly proclaimed its commitment to "evidence-based policy-making" while instead pursuing policy-based evidence making."

Statistics is only evidence if it is honestly presented - and scientifically valid.  Fudging the figures will just lead to bad policy - and bad government.

Do I mean will - or has?

An Open Letter to the Music Industry

Rick Falkvinge, leader of the Swedish Pirate Party, Piratpartiet, has issued an open letter to the music industry - following a speech he made at a music industry event in Manchester. While reports of the event are interesting for the reaction the speech generated, Rick's letter is a 'must read' for anyone interested in digital rights and the future of copyright.  Right on the button....

Piratpartiet & The Pirate Party -  Working for copyright reform.

UK Government out of touch on copyright

The UK is one of the main movers behind the Council of Minister's refusal to accept  'innocent until proven guiilty' as a guiding principle for cutting internet access to suspected copyright infringers...  However, at home things are far from quiet in opposition to the government's plans. 

Tom Watson's early day motion on illicit file sharing continues to gain MP's support, while the Open Rights Group has published the results of a survey that shows that supporting cutting people off from the internet for filesharing is a clear vote loser.  Sixty eight percent thought that internet users should be disconnected only once evidence had been considered by a court - a pretty resounding chorus in defence of our rights to 'innocent until proven guilty'.

If you are one of those sixty eight percent then write to your MP and tell them so...  and also write to your MEP (right away!) and tell them to put pressure on the Council of Minister's to accept Amendment 138 as proposed by the EU parliament - it's the first and best way to ensure just due process is protected in law.

Meanwhile the government get a knocking too in the recently published report by the UK All Party Parliamentary group on Copyright.  It has lots of interesting reading, with details of the evidence from a wide range of parties on both sides of the debate.  On illicit file sharing the group concludes

"We conclude that much of the problem with illegal sharing of copyrighted material has been caused by the rightsholders, and the music industry in particular, being far too slow in getting their act together and making popular legal alternatives available.

We do not believe that disconnecting end users is in the slightest bit consistent with policies that attempt to promote eGovernment, and we recommend that this approach to dealing with illegal file-sharing should not be further considered.

We think that it is inappropriate to make policy choices in the UK when policy options are still to be agreed by the EU Commission and EU Parliament in their  negotiations over the “Telecoms Package”. We recommend that the Government terminate their current policy-making process, and restart it with a new consultation once the EU has made its decisions."

Which is pretty blunt, given that this is a cross parliamentary group.

Piratpartiet & The Pirate Party -  Working for copyright reform.

A royal view on copyright...

I was reading the paper at the weekend and came across an interesting article by Pelle Snickars, head of research at Kungliga Biblioteket  - the Swedish Royal Library.  The article discusses the Google books project and the ramifications of the internet on the availability and distribution of our common culture - in particular it draws attention to the majority of the books being scanned which are not in the public domain - but not commercially available either.  Orphaned works that are effectively lost to our collective online heritage.  It is a state of affairs that he ascribes to over-extensive copyright.. 

"A series of independent studies have shown that cultural products such as books, music or films have a commercial value on the market during a five-to ten-year period. With some extremely few exceptions – and Google Book Search is about the General rather than the particulate – then demand drops dramatically. Even if  the "long tail" in the long term will perhaps extend the commercial potential for various cultural products, it is a consumption pattern that will continue for a further period. For example, when American copyright demanded that copyright owners extended their rights after 28 years, it was less than 15% that bothered to. The incentive to extend rights to a commodity that no longer generates profit was fairly negligible.

That almost nine out of ten copyright owners did not find it worthwhile to renew their rights ought to be a cause for reflection, but developments have rather gone the other way. As several network activists and progressive law professors have said, the extension of the terms of protection over the past decades have been unusually narrow-minded given how the Internet developed during the same period. Future historians will in all probability be asked how the lawmakers were thinking that could  lock in the whole cultural production of the 20th century at the same time as the Web was developing as a global distribution channel available to all citizens."
(translated by Bing.. with a bit of help from me..)
 
Laws should be about getting the best deal for society - but clearly today copyright fails to deliver.   It's no coincidence that Piratpartiet are advocating greatly reduced copyright duration to bring back the balance between creators and society.  If you don't believe me, go to the library and look it up...

Piratpartiet & The Pirate Party -  Working for copyright reform.

MPs challenge the UK government on file sharing

A parliamentary early day motion on illicit filesharing is challenging the governments position on how to tackle filesharing.  It highlights that alleged offenders can easily conceal their (IP) identity, that not-for-profit downloads don't necessarily cause financial loss, and that cutting people off the net is unjust for others using the same connection.  Pretty obvious stuff - but the government clearly don't get it.  Great anyway to see the mainstream parties waking up to address the issues. 

So far eighteen MPs from five partys have signed  up....   More please!
(so much for two party politics!)

Update: now 26 MPs

Tips: Pirate Party blog " MPs start to get it"

Piratpartiet & The Pirate Party -  Working for copyright reform.