Digital Rights Network

These are some highly impressionistic notes taken at a workshop on a cross-gov data mashing lab which took place today at the Royal Society in London organized under the aegis of the Department of Transports[^1]. The purpose of the lab would be to develop tools and demonstration projects which would illustrate the possibilities of data [...]

As advertised in a previous post my paper entitled The Value of the Public Domain was published today by the IPPR as a part of a set commissioned for their project on IP and the Public Sphere. You can download the paper from the IPPR website in pdf form via this link: http://www.ippr.org/ecomm/files/value_of_public_domain.pdf It is is available [...]

On the 14th the IPPR Digital Society and Media team will be publishing a collection of papers as part of their project on intellectual property (IP) and the public sphere. I contributed one of these papers entitled The Value of the Public Domain and will be speaking at the publication event on the 14th of [...]

The KForge/KnowledgeForge project is one the OKF’s core activities and the KForge software is being used to run both http://www.knowledgeforge.net/ and the administrative backend for the main OKF site: http://admin.okfn.org/. The 0.11 release of KForge introduces a bunch of new features and bugfixes. Full details in this post on the KForge project site.

Brussels, London, Berlin, Warsaw, Ljubljana, 4th July 2006 — In an open letter to the EU Commission, six small business associations have called on Commissioners Verheugen and Reding to modify their plans for a task force, designed “to define the future EU policy in ICT”. The proposed task force mainly consists of large IT firms, such as IBM, Cisco, and [...]

The Open Knowledge Foundation have been working on a Public Domain Works Database in association with with Free Culture UK (as part of FC-UK’s larger Public Domain Burn project). There is now a front-end site up (as of last weekend!) at: http://www.publicdomainworks.net/ Summary: “The Public Domain Works DB is an [WWW] open registry of artistic works that [...]

It took 12 years to produce (1988-2000) and cost 4.5 million dollars (according to its editor Richard Talbert). It has a whole page dedicated to listing donors and supporters of the project. It recruited seventy-three compilers, with ten regional editors with ninety-five reviewers and twenty-two cartographers. It is 148 pp. long and with companion gazetteer [...]

Two weeks ago I was at the Telecommunications and Media Forum run by the International Institute of Communications in Brussels. The bulk of the panels were concerned with telecommunications issues but I was speaking in their IP session entitled: Striking a Balance in Copyright and Digital Rights: How Can Rights be Protected without Restricting Consumer [...]

One of the good things about going to the IIC forum (see next post for details) was the opportunity to hear the debate on the other, more ‘telcoish’ panels which were extremely interesting — especially those that dealt with spectrum (albeit because it’s an area I don’t know that much about). Listening to the debate as [...]

In a ruling earlier this year, just published, the European Patent Office reversed a decision to throw out Microsoft’s patent application on “expanded clipboard formats”. The ruling explicitly states that no software is excluded from patentability by virtue of being a computer program. If the courts uphold the EPO’s logic, then all that is required [...]

The All Party Parliamentary Internet Group (APIG) releases its report into Digital Rights Management. The inquiry received over 90 written submissions from consumers, Think Tanks, libraries, print media publishers, the film and music industries and lawyers. An oral evidence session was organised at the House of Commons in February when a cross selection of the [...]

Starnberg, Germany (June 06, 2006) — Florian Mueller, the founder of the NoSoftwarePatents.com campaign, has published his book, “No Lobbyists As Such - The War over Software Patents in the European Union”, on the Internet. Over 377 pages, Mueller tells the story of the legislative process that ended in July last year with a landslide [...]

There are already very impressive examples of open knowledge in the form of projects such as wikipedia, publicwhip, the world-wide molecular matrix etc. However it would be nice to have something a little simpler, some sort of ‘hello world’ type open knowledge project, which would illustrate what we mean by open knowledge and why it is useful. Such a [...]

Late in the afternoon at the Free Culture UK meetup back in April there was a discussion of the analogy between code and content in relation to open production models. This came up as an aside to the main discussion but it raised some very interesting points directly related to my ongoing consideration of the [...]

Introduction Open knowledge means porting much more of the open source stack than just the idea of open licensing. It is about porting many of the processes and tools that attach to the open development process — the process enabled by the use of an open approach to knowledge production and distribution. The Four Principles Open knowledge allows [...]

A meeting on the UKPO consultation on Inventive Step and its relation to software and business process patents in the UK and EU organized by FFII-UK. It is free to attend but as we need to know numbers please let us know if you plan to come by emailing coordinator@ffii.org.uk When: Monday May 22nd 2006, 1730 - [...]

As the EU Commission seeks to build a European Digital Library, PJ, of the award winning Groklaw website, sets her sights on the world leading British Library and in particular on its increasingly controversial attitude to DRM, fair-dealing and copyright in the digital age. “If [the EU] duplicate what they have done at the [...]

Following my recent post about the problems of restrictions on commercial usage as found in Creative Commons ‘nc’ licenses there was a spirited debate on the mailing list. Tom Chance made the important point that for many in existing artistic communities the ‘NC’ restriction represents some kind of ‘ideal social contract’. Below I include the [...]

In a statement today the EU Commission announced it has adopted a proposal for a directive to combat intellectual property offences. Specifically the directive is intended to be “[…] applied to all types of intellectual property right infringements. In the directive, all intentional infringements of an intellectual property right on a commercial scale, including attempting, aiding and abetting such [...]