If you write a music/MP3 blog, a law/copyright blog, or you are a podcaster and would like to come to the ORG press briefing on copyright term extension for sound recordings, 2pm on Monday 13th November, please contact Michael with your URL and preferred email address and we’ll send you a proper invitation with all the details. We have very few places, so please contact us as soon as possible.

The Court of Appeal has ruled on two cases involving software patents today. It rejected one and unfortunately granted the other. It was hoped that the ruling would confirm that software development which relates only to new business logic does not have to worry about patent threats. As more and more companies in the United States get tied up in business method patent litigation, this decision should be a worry for UK companies. The full ruling is here, for those of you that are really keen. If you want some more details or are a member of the press I recommend you check out the FFII’s comments on the Court of Appeal Judgement in Macrossan and Aerotel.

These two cases are of vital interest to anyone concerned with the ongoing debate over the patentability of software and business methods in the UK and Europe. Both of the cases at issue concern patents in the area of software and business methods and so the appeal presented a historic opportunity for the UK courts to reaffirm the clear exclusion of these areas from the scope of patentability as well as to send an important signal to legislators and patent officials at the European level. It has not done so.

Aerotel’s patent that was granted today claims the making of telephone calls using prepayments. The essential idea is to have a telephone exchange which keeps a record of clients’ credit. Clients can then dial into the exchange, and have their calls completed for as long as they have credit to pay for them.

Why are these cases so important? High Court decisions do not establish binding precedents on other High Court cases, but decisions by the Court of Appeal do bind lower courts. Today’s decision is the first time the Court of Appeal have ruled on software and business method patentability since 1997, and gives a definitive statement of the UK law in this area.

Both patents do not contain anything novel except new administrative or business logic, with solely administrative and business consequences. At stake was not only the Court of Appeal’s decision, but how it decides it. We will be looking closely at these rulings and posting again to provide you more information.

Macrossan’s patent application was rejected by the UK Patent Office. In the High Court, Macrossan appealed against this rejection, but the appeal was dismissed by Judge Mann, finding that although not specifically a business method, it was a method of performing a mental act by a computer. It has been described by one software contractor as an absolutely conventional “fill-in-the-blanks website that picks the right docs based on guided answers, then fills them in appropriately and disgorges them wherever required”. The only new idea was to apply this to the documents needed to incorporate a company. Quite rightly this patent was rejected today on appeal.

Just popped in to the 5th UK Network Operators Forum to hear ORG advisory Council member Richard Clayton talk on content filtering. Here are my notes:

Overview
- content blocking system taxonomy
- overblocking and other problems
- avoiding the blocking altogether
- attacking the blocking system
- Cleanfeed and the ‘oracle attack’
- the IWF web site list
- the political landscape

Taxonomy
Three ways of blocking content
- DNS poisoning; you arrange for your DNS server to provide the wrong results, so when you look up, say, lolita.com you are sent to the wrong site and will not find the content you’re looking for. Low cost, highly scalable. Can blog an indefinite no. of domains
- Blackhole routing; dropping the packets to the bad site. Also low cost, but limited, so will not scale.
- Proxy filtering; arrange that all web traffic goes through a web proxy. High cost, but very accurate and allows you to pick out exactly what you want to block.

Problems with DNS poisoning
People think it’s easy, but if you have sub-domains which you don’t wish to block, or if you want to allow email but not web traffic, then it’s not good enough. West German ISPs, where local government requires to block access to Nazi sites, and most ISPs managed make a mess of it, and managed to block some parts of the site but not the bits they were supposed to block, and all managed to mess up the email. Every ISP made at least one mistake.

Blackhole routing
Dropping packets will affect every web site hosted at the IP address. So you can’t block a single site at one IP address. So useless for sites like Geocities. Useless for huge numbers of other sites. You do not have one IP address per web site. Ben Edelman did a study on ‘overblocking’, and 87.3% of the sites shared an IP address with at least one other. Some web servers have over 50 sites on them. So ends up blocking innocent sites as well.

Proxy filtering
No overblocking, but it is expensive. Has costs in kit, and customer satisfaction, because proxies are slower and customers don’t like that, and can mess up ability to tell people apart. Not good news for users, but they are the best way of doing precise blocking.

Avoidance for clients
Some people don’t like being blocked and there are tricks for getting round it
- use a different DNS server, very easy
- use IP addresses instead of the domain name
- use a relay, which often encrypts and anonymises; lots of these services out there, marketed to people who want to browse from their office desk but work just as well from home to get around blocks from ISP
- people encode requests, (e.g. ‘request%73′ = requests) to avoid recognition; just look at spam for this. far more complex than it seems to just block domains
- send malformed HTTP requests, e.g. multiple HOST protocol elements

Avoidance for servers
- move your site to another IP address, which is easy
- change the port number, which is a bit trickier because we don’t have good systems for looking up port numbers
- provide the same content on many different URLs, you can send out your spam and arrange that lolita.com is constant but then put a random string (which also allows you to check which of your spam emails works best) as some blockers don’t realise that what comes after the / is irrelevant and end up blocking the whole URL not the domain name.
- accept unusually formatted requests

BT CleanFeed
- CleanFeed is their internal name, but externally it’s not called that, but ‘anti-child-abuse initiative’. Two stage system from 2004, but similar designs used by other ISPs.
- first stage is IP address based, so it checks to see if there might be child pornography and if it is then traffic is redirected to a proxy which then matches URLs,
- this is what’s publicly known, not covered by NDA

Users send their traffic to boundary to BT’s network. BT’s system decides which traffic is good, and sends it on its way. If it is going somewhere bad, it will go to their proxy and then decide if it’s going to a bad site, or somewhere innocent. If it’s supposed to be going somewhere bad, then it returns a 404, i.e. no accusations of wrongdoing.

Fragile.
- evading either stage evades the system, all previous attacks continue to be relevant
- plus can attack the system in new ways, e.g. if include IP addresses for innocent sites, like Google or ITunes Music Store, in DNS results for bad sites then that will flood the second stage with legitimate traffic
- if they give it local IP address then results in routing loops

The oracle attack
- can detect the first stage and so can tell which IP address is being blocked. If you sent lots of tcp/80 traffic you can see what comes back and tell whether your traffic is being redirected. Then you can find out which domain names are being hosted and these IP addresses.

The Internet Watch Foundation (IWF)
- set up in 1996 to deal with child porn on Usenet
- operates consumer hot-line for reports
- mainly concerned with web sites now
- has a database of sites not yet removed
- but sites move around very fast, and database needs to be regularly reviewed

Politics
- in Whitehall they thought it was impossible to censor or block the net until BT deployed CleanFeed, despite blocking systems in Norway, Saudi Arabia and Chine, for e.g.
- ISPA claim 80% of consumers covered by systems that block illegal child images
- Minster now wants all broadband to block by end 2007
- which is apparently voluntary but ‘if it appear that we are not going to meet our target through co-operation, we will review the situation’

Whitehall comprehension?
- “recently it has become technically feasible for ISPs to block home users access to web sites irrespective of where in the world they are hosted”
- they don’t understand the cost of the system, how fragile they are, how easy they are to evade, or how they can be attacked or made less secure or less stable. Also don’t understand that you can use the system to reverse engineer a list of sites to look at.

After the events in August, Fratini (EU) wants the internet to be a ‘hostile environment’ for terrorists: “very important to explore further possibility of blocking web site that incite to commit terrorist action”
- also blog drugs, gambling, holocaust denial.
- don’t overlook civil cases: defamation, copyright material, MI6 agent list, industrial secrets, lists of company directors, etc.

People will want web sites blocked. But people used to think ‘it’s not possible’ but now they are saying it is, and the more people think it’s possible the more they want it.

More on this in Richard’s PhD thesis, Chapter 7, which is available on his site.

Biggest problem country is actually the USA - they are not good at removing pedophile material from the internet.

How big is the IWF database? 888 items? Can infer what the IWF publish, because they have said 38% of sites are still active after 2 months, so they are checking it.

Problem with doing research into the blocking of child porn because, of course, looking at the sites is illegal, so you can’t check the content. Only a small percentage of sites reported to the IWF check actually have child porn. IWF and BT refused to allow Richard to have his site added to their blacklist so that he could check to see how well the system works.

Note: This was the last session on Friday, and again these notes are pretty much verbatim.

How could we operate if there wasn’t copyright? What’s the bare minimum we might exist with?

Ideas for topics for discussion in this session

- What is the business model for artists when you don’t have copyright? How would artists make money? Who are the risk bearers?
- When you have conflicting rights, how should those be resolved? How do artists feel they should be resolved?
- Restricted acts, broadness of the concept of reproduction and the limits on what is restricted.
- Look at alternative remuneration methods. Paradigms that could be extended.
- Can copyright protect art from becoming a business activity?
- Rights are defined by power, so the only strategy is continuous disobedience.
- Different aspects of copyright. Freedoms.
- Motivation and incentives. What motivates arts activities, as opposed to economic activities. Actual motivations don’t seem to fit with assumed motivations.
- Not immediately inevitable that you must do away with copyright to understand ways to remunerate artists; parallel systems and how they are relevant, e.g. academic industry and patronage of the institution. Re-discuss authorship as itself a business model.
- Does anyone thing that it matters if copyright law fails to give protection to artists.
- Something more idealistic, what other protections could form a basis for an economy.
- What is at steak in the tension between the artistic and the business.

Want some future thinking. Look at integrity to start with.

As humans it’s natural to see what one has and prevent others taking it, but you always think that’s wrong when others prevent you from doing things. Integrity is a right that in theory gives me control over how others utilise my work, but that prevents me doing things with other people’s work. So having more control means having less freedom.

Huge difference in France with the right of respect that’s existed for a long time. But rather than looking at what the right to integrity is, look at what’s produced along the way. In the UK it’s not a right that’s had a very big effect, there are very few cases and in those nothing very objective has come out of them and in France sometimes we do see a conflict of rights, for example, the one place prevents theatre productions because of the right of respect, and it’s a way of using this right to control contemporary culture. Other cases where the right of integrity has done good, look beyond the individuals in the case or the people who might be dead, we find that the right of integrity has done something good for art, for instance that quality has been protected in some cases. If an author has been dissatisfied with the way that his book has been published he could use his right of integrity to make a quality publication to our benefit. Works of art have been protected for future generations through this right.

How does this affect the reproduction of art? In performing arts, if the heirs don’t want a certain company to perform a play, that effect is clear. How does it affect the way work is reproduced in France.
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The European Union’s plan to regulate the net as if it were TV - Television Without Frontiers - picked up a lot of attention in blogs this week, after the Times covered it.

The basic idea is flawed - TV involves handing a monopoly over spectrum to organisations, so regulating how they use it makes some sense, but there is no spectrum scarcity online, as all you need is a webserver. So the EU limits on local content, advertising intervals and content labelling don’t fit at all.

I spoke about this on the Technorati videoblog last week, and the BBC’s Pods and Blogs show last night. You can hear me about 30 minutes into this show recording.

Note: Again, these notes are verbatim and so things get a bit chaotic with so many people wanting to make different points, and revisiting issues brought up earlier in the conversation.

We can no longer compete as northern companies on labour costs and materials, so IP is seen as a centre of innovation. Across the board in policy circles there’s a focus on creativity which runs against some of the main narratives we’ve had on art in the last 30 years which questions the ideas of authorship, creativity, etc. This runs against the report of a report out of the DCMS where they looked at IP competition and did an analysis of VAPP (Value-Added Per Person), assumption that there’s economic value per person, that some people are very important to the economy. But they found no excess value, as creative people may not be any more productive than any other industry.

Rhetoric exists, ‘creative industries’, ‘creative economy’, but do we want to think in those terms?

Also, a focus on trying to inculcate creativity and respect for copyright in school children. Attempt to get Key Stage 1 school children to use the (c) symbol in their essays and to get them to respect copyright, in an attempt to reduce file sharing.

If we think about creativity and copyright it’s important to differentiate it from originality and innovation. Different ranges of meaning, particularly when we talk about art or business. For many people with a vested interest the argument goes that ’strong copyright is good for the economy’, so is creativity based on enhancing GDP? What’s good for the economy? Does that mean ‘what’s good for the corporate sector’? Are we trying to juxtapose the moral and individual arguments against the utilitarian, macro-economic or corporate? Are we using art as the straw man argument where artists represent labour and are opposed to anything in business. If so, that’s a very inadequate way of approaching questions of copyright and art.

Copyright was originated by and on behalf of individuals who wanted to defend their rights, particularly in literature. But if it was invented for the individual, the argument from activists against copyright is that it’s used now against the individual.
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Last week I went to a series of sessions run by Birkbeck, the AHRC New Directions in Copyright Network, and the Public Programmes Department of the Tate Modern, entitled Roundtable Discussions on the Future of Copyright and the Regulation of Creative Practice. Here are my notes.

The aim for these sessions is to have a deep discussion of copyright and to try to find new ways to think of creation and copyright. There’s a variety of people here, from artists, NGOs, think tanks, to academics, and it’s a very cross-disciplinary group so that we can hopefully find some interesting overlaps and contrasts. There are nearly 20 of us here, so my notes may not make a distinction between speakers, for which my apologies, as everyone is encouraged to speak at every session. There’s one roundtable today, and two tomorrow.

Roundtable 1: Creativity, how artists practice, and social creativity.

Jaime was one of the co-organisers of an event for the Arts Council on ways of working, strategies within what artists do and the mismatch of that and what artists do. But a policy intervention by the Arts Council said they should create tool kits to help artists. So the event ended up with surgeries so artists to talk to lawyers, so instead of having a discussion about law and copyright and artistic practice, it turned into a big case study. Problem was that they saw regulation as the foreground and everything else slot into that, so don’t want to look at artists as whether they are legal.

Another time he tested Creative Commons licences against artists. Got 10 artists to talk about their work, and it became clear that the way they practised their art was far more complex than anyone had imagined, and the law has difficulty with this. Also, there’s a different in motivation. Economists and lawyers think that artists create art because of the incentives (money), but in fact again it’s more complex than that.

IP is being forced into the forefront of economic thinking because of the idea of the ‘knowledge economy’, the way that developed countries compete on IP rather than access to labour and materials. Have a notion that something that was cultural has been overlain by copyright as a notion, defined by economic, export trade priorities. When you look at he relationship between creativity and innovation there are crucial differences.

Adam Singer once said he didn’t think he was in the business of protecting copyright or the business models of collecting societies but in the business of protecting his customer’s interests. Increasing sense see businesses seeing instability in copyright as a good thing so that they can override user rights using technology. No longer simple division between pro- and anti- camps.
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The Open Rights Group has grown astonishingly quickly over the last year, thanks to the hard work of the Board, the Advisory Council, our volunteers and part-time staff. Indeed, things have grown so fast that it’s now time to recruit a full-time Executive Director who will be able to get organised some of the things that I’ve not had time to do, such as find us a new office!

I am unfortunately not able to take on this full-time role, but I am confident that we will be able to recruit someone who can pick up the torch and keep ORG moving. I will be staying with ORG as a Board member, however, so that I can help the new Executive Director to settle in and continue to help steer the organisation in the right direction. Over the last year, ORG has been a real labour of love for me, and I am very much looking forward to expanding the team and bringing on board some new blood.

Applications are open to everyone. If you are interested, then please apply, and please do forward this ad to anyone you think might be suitable. We will be advertising in the press and in volunteer sector publications, but we’d like to spread the net far and wide so that we can get the best applicants.

Job title: Executive Director
Organisation: The Open Rights Group
Location: London/Online (must have home office)
Salary: Neg
Type: Full-time
Start date: ASAP
Closing Date for Applications: 13 November 2006.

The Open Rights Group is a new and fast-growing NGO focused on raising awareness of issues such as privacy, identity, data protection, access to knowledge and copyright reform. We aim to improve both understanding and policy in digital rights matters that affect both businesses and the public. We are funded by small grants and donations from supporters. Our activities include organising campaigns, lobbying government, and helping journalists find experts and alternative voices for stories.

ORG now needs a full time Executive Director (ED) to build our supporter numbers and expand our activities. The ED reports to the ORG Board, and has the support of an Advisory Council of digital rights experts.

The ED will be a passionate, professional and decisive self-starter who can prioritise a substantial work load, manage staff, lead volunteers and talk eloquently to the media. She/he will be responsible for:

* Maintaining a sustainable organisation in terms of numbers of members and staff, participation, income, public profile and reputation.
* Preparing and executing ORG’s strategy based on a balance of media work and policy influence.
* Increasing the public’s understanding of, and engagement with, a range of digital rights issues.

Desired skills and experiences include:

* Management experience, preferably for a NGO/not-for-profit or start-up.
* Expertise, or the willingness to acquire expertise across the full range of digital rights issues.
* Media, public communications and campaigning work.
* Knowledge of law or public affairs strongly valued.
* Experience of internet-based communications and management tools (including Wordpress, MediaWiki and Socialtext) highly beneficial.

We have a more detailed job spec if you require more information. Please send your CV in PDF format only to Michael Holloway by 13 November 2006.

William Dutton, Director of the Oxford Internet Institute, Social dynamics of the internet

This conference is focused on the future, and we wanted it to be evidence based, so thought to identify some patterns and themes in internet use, which are shaping the future of this emerging cyber-infrastructure.

Who uses the internet? How to people use it? What level of trust do people place in the internet, and why? What at the key implications?

Oxford Internet Surveys (OxIS)

done in 2003 and 2005, going out again in 2007
cross-sectional surveys, i.e. new section of people each time. vs panels
England, Scotland, Wales
Face to face, interviews
Response rate: 66% in 03 and 72% in 05.
Part of World Internet Projects, data put in pot with 22 other nations.

Who uses the internet? Who does not?
Internet has become central in 2001, people thought the net was ‘new’. Even in 01 people thought it was a fad. But 60% of britains are online. Was a new tech, but now has become an invisible infrastructure to many homes. It’s being taken for granted now. New stage of development where it’s central, and a cyber-infrastructure.

UK is doing well, but not as well as many Scandinavian countries, but digital divide is an important issue, particularly in countries like China where only 7% are online.

Important to realise that diffusion of the internet has plateau’d at 60%, and this has happened in other countries. Bumps up against limit, such as number of PCs in the home. Getting to the next level of diffusion is important. Broadband has diffused rapidly, so 70% of households with the internet are broadband, and soon that will be 100%. So this plateau is more significant because broadband allows increasing integration into every day life, but those without internet get no benefit of that.

Education is related to having the internet. Note - ‘internet use’ means anywhere, home, country or school, but the prime place to use it is at home. Education, income related to use of internet.

Access via mobile devices also linked to income.

Thus reinforces existing social divides. Richer people have more access.

Not just about digital divide, but also digital choice.

People who gamble on line: younger men with full time jobs, i.e. risk-taking demographics. In a way, early internet use is a risk-taking activity, so in a way it’s a choice. Higher income, job, educated are more likely to take the risk of going online.

Even in households with broadband, some people choose not to use the internet when it’s there. Non-users don’t use because they’re not interested. Building infrastructure is one thing, but building interest is another.

Cannot explain age patterns via socio-economic divides. So all kids use the internet, but only 30% of retirees use the internet. Younger people think the internet is more interesting and important than older people. This is a worldwide pattern. Age is more important than gender divides.

Factors:
- cohort, what tech was there when you were growing up
- life stage
- ageing, e.g. eyesight, memory, stiffer fingers
- design, computer industry not targeting older people

Kids use computers in three or more locations: home, friends house, school, cafe, etc. Older people use it in one location.

People who have ‘always on’ broadband capability, older people tend to actually turn it off, younger people leave it on all time. Again, a generational issue.

Multitasking, as you get older it’s harder to multitask, but almost all computer use is multitasking.

How do people use the internet?
Gambling was the lowest use of the internet, but checking email and product information online was the biggest. But lots of heterogeneity.

Factors
Entertainment, captures most of the greatest degree of variance
Information
Banking
Learning, looking up words or facts
Communication, email, IM etc. one of the most common things we do, but doesn’t discriminate among people
Planning, e.g. travel plans.

Communication - 92% use email.
Entertainment - more divided, e.g. 50% download music, but the rest don’t.

Those with higher income use the net more functionality to access information; the more expertise you have the more you use it for information. Oldest and youngest don’t use it for getting information.

Idea of a knowledge society or information society is wrong - just because kids use the net doesn’t mean they are accessing information.

Use of information to get health info is mainly people of a working age.

Younger people use the internet for entertainment, but not for info. Slight uptick in oldest age group.

Gender divides, males u se the internet more for entertainment than female, who use it more for information.

Internet does not realise its potential for UGC. Very low proportion, 18% or less, use the net for blogging, pictures, discussion/meassage board, but this was 2005. Maybe more now. 5% keep a blog. Most people use the internet passively, not actively.

Do people trust the internet? Is trust declining?
Two issues of trust.
- Net confidence: reliability f information on the net, confidence in people running the net, people you can communicate with on the net.
- Net risks: perceived risks ot privacy, security of information, accurately judging quality of products.

Non-users say they don’t know if the net is reliable. But users have an opinion. Non-users are most sceptical, but users and past users are more positive about the reliability.

Internet is an experience technology. People have to experience it to understand it. More experienced users have different attitudes.

Not the case that people who have trust in the internet do not necessarily trust all over tech. Broadband users people trust internet about as much as TV, but more than newspapers.

More experienced and more educated people are, more people trust the net.

Bad experiences. Many people have had bad experiences, and the more bad experiences you have the less you trust the internet. So more experience = trust; back experience = loss of trust, so a bit of an arms race there to see which will win.

People think the internet is more reliable in 2005 than in 2003. And have more confidence in the people they meet, and in ISPs.

People trust people they meet online a bit less than other people from your country, but it’s gone up since 03. People perceive it to be more powerful now, and people who’ve not used the internet now are less likely to be sceptical and more likely to say they don’t know.

Different patterns of use. More experienced people use the net differently to beginners with less than 1 year’s experience.

So what?
Lots of opinions as to what all this means. Utopian vs dystopian, substitution, dual effects, reinforcement, reconfiguring access.

Internet has a transformative impact that’s not deterministic in the long run. Internet reconfigures access, e.g. where would you go first if looking for information on, an MP… people first go to the internet. Taxes, second place, planning a journey, first place, for books, visit a website is second, local schools, internet is major source of information

Changing how we go about getting information. More dramatic if you pull out age groups. Younger people, 56% would go to the internet, 8% would not.

Also changes what you read, what information you get. Asked what newspapers you read online that you don’t read offline? 20% of users find info online they don’t find in print.

20% met people or made friends online and this is a pre-social networking phenomenon. People meet these people offline too. Also make friends online that they never meet.

As people get more skills, they meet more people online. People who use the net more meet more people. So as it becomes a more central infrastructure we’ll see more people meting more people online.

And this refiguring will change the way that people learn - more people having more access to more learning. Politics - how will politicians react to bloggers? Across every sector, it’s changing not just the way we do things but also the outcome.

Major challenges:
- addressing socio-economic digital divides
- countering digital choice
- focus on patterns of consumption and production as well as adoption
- creating and maintaining a learned level of trust in an experience technology
- strategically reconfiguring access to you and the world