taint.org: Justin Mason’s Weblog

Linux: Doc Searls will be speaking at LinuxWorld Expo 2004 in Dublin. Apparently, he’ll be discussing DIY-IT — the ‘real’ Linux story (’how the demand side supplies itself’). That presentation is great — strongly recommended.

(If you’re in a hurry, just skip to the funny part.)

Patents: op-ed article in the Sydney Morning Herald about patents and US-Australia ‘free trade’ talks.

… The cost of fighting a patent litigation battle in the US has dropped considerably. “Claims are now actually decided by a judge and only about 3 per cent of cases go to trial,” he says. “Therefore, costs have been limited dramatically. In most cases, costs are less than $US2 million.” (jm: my emphasis)

The question remains as to how many small Australian technology companies can afford to put up that sort of money if they believe their patent has been infringed or, worse still, if they have been accused of infringing a patent. (jm: exactly! the playing field is tilted dramatically.)

…

Local software developer Jeremy Howard believes that the US-Australia free trade agreement legislation has the potential to stifle local development. Howard has created two software systems with global potential, a portable email product called Fastmail (jm: hooray Fastmail!) and an insurance-industry package called Profit Optimising System. He believes two particular provisions of the FTA could be devastating to local software development. One is the requirement for Australia to have legislation similar to the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and the other is the stringent enforcement of software patents.

“The (DMCA) legislation removes the ability to use reverse engineering to make products compatible with existing products,” Howard says. “There are two negative effects of this. It reduces competition: effectively no one who writes software can be compatible with existing proprietary software. It’s also bad for security and privacy: people won’t be allowed to analyse protocols to see whether they’re secure because that’s considered reverse engineering. Thus, we see that this legislation will protect vendors from bad publicity as well as competition.”

Howard considers DMCA as a serious threat to the local software industry, but he believes a potentially even greater threat from the FTA will be a requirement for Australia to stringently enforce software patents.

“Many US software companies have huge portfolios of patents,” he says. “It costs millions to fight a (disputed) patent suit, so small companies will be forced to pay licence fees to patent holders or be shut down. This means that it will clearly not be practical for small software businesses to try to become established on the world stage. We’ll be spending more time worrying about patents instead of innovating.”

A very, very clueful article. Here’s hoping EU-based journalists are taking notes! The data about software patents being of much greater benefit to US companies than local exporters is a big deal, so I’ll write about that in the next posting.

Tags: development, dmca, doc, fastmail, legislation, linux, patent, potential, software, trade, us-australia

e-Voting: Wired has an absolutely mind-numbing list of issues with the security of Diebold voting machine procedures, including passwords printed in manuals which the staff can take home, that same password being reused for multiple systems including the on-site machines at polling stations, tamper-resistance measures being omitted, poll supervisors hired without background checks, bicycle locks being used to secure voting machines, one shared key used to ’secure’ the memory cards, etc.

‘The election process is mainly based on trust,’ Ginnold said. ‘We trust that poll workers are not going to be tampering with them.’

It’s simply insane to replace a known-good voting system (even if it’s just First-Past-the-Post instead of Proportional Representation, but that’s another issue) with a quick hack like this, IMO.

Please vote anyway, if you’re a CA citizen. And not for the fondling meathead, naturally.

DMCA: EFF: Unintended Consequences: Five Years under the DMCA. An incredible list of cases where the DMCA was used unfairly to restrict competition, research, or fair use, some of which I didn’t even know about. For example, I didn’t realise that the International Information Hiding Workshop Conference will no longer hold conferences on US soil after Professor Ed Felten was threatened over their SDMI paper.

Politics: Michael Moore on how to talk to your conservative brother-in-law. MM may play to the gallery now and again, but sometimes, he’s a genius:

Paying workers more money makes you money!

Dear brother-in-law, when you don’t pay people enough for them to take care of life’s essentials, it ends up costing you and everybody else a lot of money. When you pay your employees more money, what do you think they do with it? Invest it in stocks? Hoard it in offshore accounts? No! They spend it! And what do they spend it on? The stuff you make and sell! If you pay people squat, or lay them off, they can’t buy your stuff. They become a drain on the economy; some turn to crime, and when they turn to crime, it’s your Mercedes they want, not some junker Oldsmobile in their poor neighbour’s driveway.

Science: IgNobel prize winners 2003, including a prize for the nation of Liechtenstein for renting out the entire country for ‘corporate conventions, weddings, bar mitzvahs, and other gatherings’.

Tags: brother-in-law, diebold, dmca, e-voting, list, money, poll, security, stuff, voting, wired

(of the phone variety). I’ve been driven mad by telemarketers; one of the more irritating local innovations (thankfully ’sales cold calls’ are pretty hard to operate with European privacy laws, so it wasn’t a problem back home).

Well, Congress over here recently passed a ‘do not call’ list, so you could ring up the maintainers and ask for your number to be added, and hey presto, no more phone spam. Well, CalPundit writes:

The federal law doesn’t cover banks, airlines or phone companies or calls made within a state.

Wow. That’s like saying ‘the law doesn’t cover calls made on a day ending in ‘y’.’ In my experience, those companies make 95% of the calls. Great.

Think I’ll stick with the tried-and-trusted ‘ring through to answerphone during the afternoon and early evening’ filter…

DMCA: IP: Using treaties to lock in DMCA enforcement:

On May 6, President Bush and Prime Minister Goh of Singapore signed the U.S.-Singapore Free Trade Agreement (the ‘FTA’). President Bush has termed the FTA ‘the first of its kind’ - apparently meaning that it is the first free trade agreement between the United States and an Asian nation.

But the FTA is also the first of its kind in another sense, as well. It is the first international trade agreement to demand that the signatories implement anti-circumvention provisions similar to those of the hotly controversial Digital Millennium Copyright Act (’DMCA’).

It’s Naomi Klein meets Slashdot ;) Hopefully it’ll be blocked though, since it has serious domestic results too:

This step will have international, as well as domestic consequences: If Congress approves the FTA, it will not able to alter the DMCA without violating its obligations to Singapore.

Of course, according to some correspondents, Ireland’s copyright regime (reformed in 2000) quietly inserted its own DMCA provisions. Of course, nobody noticed, except for the legal lobbyists who were hoping this would happen. Doh. Is nowhere safe for freedom-to-tinker these days?

Tags: agreement, congress, copyright, course, dmca, fta, kind, law, phone, trade

If you’re wondering what happens to non-US-resident programmers when they run afoul of the US’s ludicrous copyright laws (namely the DMCA), take a look at Danny O’Brien’s blog entry from the Elcomsoft trial, covering Dmitry Sklyarov’s evidence.

Tags: afoul, blog, copyright, dmca, elcomsoft, entry, look, non, trial, us-resident