John Pugh MP has tabled an Early Day Motion number 179 in the House of Commons entitled Software in Education. Please write to your MP requesting that they add their name to this motion.

That this House congratulates the Open University and other schools, colleges and universities for utilising free and open source software to deliver cost-effective educational benefit not just for their own institutions but also the wider community; and expresses concern that Becta and the Department for Education and Skills, through the use of outdated purchasing frameworks, are effectively denying schools the option of benefiting from both free and open source and the value and experience small and medium ICT companies could bring to the schools market.

Software in schools - John Pugh - Early Day Motion 179

The Open Schools Alliance have detailed information and advice on what to put in your letter.

UPDATE, 1 Dec 06: The EDM has now been signed by 39 MPs from all the main parties, which is above average for any Early Day Motion. The aim for the next two weeks is to get nearer the 100 signatures mark (of the 380 EDMs tabled by MPs since the Queen’s Speech, only 6 have over 100 signatures). If you haven’t written to your MP, please do so!

Back when I was in Brussels for EuroOSCON, the open source conference, Tom Steinberg asked me to think of a petition that I would like to see on a new petition site that mySociety was building for 10 Downing Street. I had a bit of a think, and came up with this one:

We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to create a new exception to copyright law that gives individuals the right to create a private copy of copyrighted materials for their own personal use, including back-ups, archiving and shifting format.

It was a bit of a rush job, but I think it summed up what I wanted to say, and very much fit in with the thinking I was doing at the time about Release The Music.

The petition site launched on 14 November, and to start with my petition was the most popular, then it slipped into second place, and now it’s fourth on the site with 1030 signatories (compared to the hunting petition which has 5437). You have until 26 December 2006 to sign up, so please do pop along and add your name to the list.

The chaps over at mySociety deserve applause for their hard work - it seems like the first 48 hours after the site went live were a lot of hard work as they ironed out wrinkles in the system. The site has been far more popular than I think anyone anticipated, with nearly 500 petitions suggested within the first few days, although I’ll be interested to see how usage levels off when press interest dies down.

However, I can see that this will be a tool that ORG will be using regularly as we step up our campaigning.

And talking of petitions, if you haven’t already signed the petition against term extension on sound recordings, please do. We have 230 names already, but we’d like at least a few thousand more!

Great piece in The Guardian about how Adam Laurie and No2ID’s Phil Booth cracked the new hi-tech passport RIFD chips. If you weren’t worried about these new passports before, you should be:

Within minutes of applying the three passports to the reader, the information from all of them has been copied and the holders’ images appear on the screen of Laurie’s laptop. The passports belong to Booth, and to Laurie’s son, Max, and my partner, who have all given their permission.

Booth is staggered. He has undercut Laurie by finding an RFID reader for £174, which also works. “This is simply not supposed to happen,” Booth says. “This could provide a bonanza for counterfeiters because drawing the information from the chip, complete with the digital signature it contains, could result in a passport being passed off as the real article. You could make a perfect clone of the passport.”

Thanks to everyone who made it along on Monday night. For those who could not attend, and also for reference purposes, you can now download the audio recording - in either MP3 or Ogg Vorbis format - from the link below. Its split into 2 sections, 1 covers the lecture from Jonathan Zittrain, and the other covers the panel discussion.

http://media.ito.com/suw/rtm/

We hope to make an audio-visual record available within a week or so.

Well, I think that the Release The Music event last night went superbly, getting our campaign off to a flying start. Jonathan Zittrain’s keynote was great, giving a clear and concise overview of what copyright is and how we got to where we are with the current copyright term of 50 years on sound recordings. It was good to see Jonathan neatly illustrate the difference between property rights and copyright. The debate was just as impassioned as I had hoped it would be, with some eloquent questions from the floor and a lively response from the speakers.

I’m very much looking forward to getting the audio/video up online so that those who could not attend will be able to find out what happened. In the meantime, there’s a blog post from Fernando Barrio with his take on the evening, and an article from PC Pro from our journalist briefing yesterday.

I’d like to thank:

• All our speakers - Professor Jonathan Zittrain, John Howkins, Dave Rowntree, Caroline Wilson, Richard Mollet and Martin Talbot - for taking time out to participate in our event.
• John Buckman of Magnatune for providing a venue for our journalists’ briefing yesterday.
• Derek Wyatt MP and his office for helping us organise the MPs briefing on Thursday.
• The Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust for funding the Release The Music campaign with a grant of £5,000.
• And Michael Holloway, Becky Hogge, Lubna Azhaar, Mike Little, Lemon and all the ORG volunteers for helping with both the event and the site.

What next?
Last night’s event was the culmination of over a month’s work, but it’s really just the beginning of our campaign. On the Release The Music site we have a number of things that you can do to support our efforts, including sign our petition (according to Martin Talbot, Music Week got 2000 names and AIM got 4000 names in favour of extension which they presented to the Gowers Review, so we have a way to go to match those), blog about our campaign and the issues involved, or write to your MP.

Whatever you do, don’t do nothing. The music industry has a lot of resources, but we have you, and your voice is important.

releasethemusic

Our Release The Music campaign is starting to get underway. Last Thursday, myself, ORG Chair Louise Ferguson, journalist Becky Hogge and lawyer Lubna Azhaar gathered at Portcullis House to give an briefing to MPs, peers and their staff. Due to Parliament being prorogued (temporarily suspended) prior to the Queen’s Speech, attendance wasn’t quite as good as we would have liked, but nevertheless we had a very useful session.

Today we have our lunchtime briefing for journalists, and our public event at Conway Hall at 6pm tonight. I’ve closed registration, but if you want to come, please just show up as we’ve a few spare spaces.

Although all our work over the last month or two has been focused on today, really, this event is only the start. We’ll continue to expand the website, adding more information and content up there. And we’re already in talks about another couple of events that we might be able to pull together with some very interesting partners.

I’m very excited about tonight, but I’m even more excited that soon I’ll be able to start thinking about the next step in our campaign.

Meantime, if you agree that the term of copyright protection given to sound recordings should remain at 50 years, please sign our petition.

releasethemusic

Trustguide reports on our views, beliefs and needs regarding trust, security and privacy in relation to new technologies. We like it very much - It should be required reading for politicians! Over the last 15 months HP and BT, in conjunction with the DTI, hosted workshops across the UK on a broad range of topics (detailed below). The document is full of participant-responses and is a treasure trove of quotes for journalists.

Topics under consideration:

• Trust versus risk
• E-Commerce: Risk and Responsibility
• Factors that impact on risk taking
• Mitigated risk
• ID cards: An aid to security?
• Use of Biometric data
• Privacy and health information
• E-Government and Public Sector IT
• Awareness and education
• Use of public access terminals

Read the rest of this entry >

We have finally confirmed our line-up for the Release The Music event on Monday 13 November at the Conway Hall in Holborn, with the addition of Richard Mollet from the British Phonographic Industry.

6.00pm - Registration
6.30 - 7.30pm - Professor Jonathan Zittrain, Oxford University
7.30 - 8.30pm - Should the term of copright protection on sound recordings be extended?
Moderator: John Howkins, Adelphi Charter
For: Richard Mollet, Director of Public Affairs, BPI; Martin Talbot, Editor, Music Week
Against: Dave Rowntree, Blur; Caroline Wilson, Southampton Law School
8.30 - 10.00pm - A pre-1955 DJ set
10.00pm - Close

There are still tickets left, so sign up now if you would like to come.

releasethemusic

I’m delighted to announce that Dave Rowntree from Blur will be taking part in our debate about the extension of the term of copyright protection for sound recordings. He’ll join Caroline Wilson from the University of Southampton, School of Law arguing against extension, and will be facing Martin Talbot, Editor of Music Week and an as yet unnamed music industry representative who will be arguing in favour. John Howkins from the Adelphi Charter will moderate.

Our keynote speaker will be Professor Jonathan Zittrain, Chair in Internet Governance and Regulation at Oxford University. We’ll make sure that there will be plenty of opportunities for questions from the floor after both the keynote and during the panel discussion.

We’re also arranging for the event to be recorded, and hope to be able to post both audio and video afterwards. We can’t live stream it, unfortunately, because the venue doesn’t have internet access.

If you want to come, please sign up online for your free tickets. Details are:

Date
Nov 13, 2006

Time
6:00 pm - 10:00 pm

Location
Conway Hall
25 Red Lion Square
London, WC1

We hope to see you there!

Guest post by Jason Kitcat

Summary: This post summarises the newly announced UK e-voting pilots for 2007 and provides action you can take to help stop the pilots.

On October 17th the Department for Constitutional Affairs and the Electoral Commission officially announced a prospectus for electoral pilots in May 2007. Pilots can include:

* Internet voting
* Telephone voting
* Polling place electronic voting machines
* Electronic counting
* Administrative innovations such as early voting

Explicitly excluded are text message voting, digital TV voting and all-postal voting.

Local authorities have been given until 17th November to apply to run a pilot in their area, although it’s clear that at least some authorities were already preparing their applications before the announcement.

This announcement comes at a time when e-voting has been increasingly recognised around the world as a threat to democratic elections. For example:

* The Netherlands has withdrawn e-voting machines by one manufacturer due to vulnerabilities including emitting radio signals which reveal how votes are being cast. The other brand used has been the subject of a widely reported analysis finding multiple major vulnerabilities. more info

* The Canadian province of Quebec has withdrawn all electronic voting machines from elections. This was after a damning report by the province’s chief electoral office into a controversial and problematic election in 2005. more info

* The Republic of Ireland has a moratorium on the use of their e-voting machines after an independent commission found significant problems. more info

* A Japanese municipal authority have shelved e-voting after the result of a 2003 council election was voided. more info

The United States was the first country to make widespread use of voting machines, starting with the lever machines in 1892. Since the 1970s, when electronic machines began to be used, there have been many detailed reports on the fraud, errors and usability problems experienced culminating in the infamous 2000 Presidential election.

Whether allegations can be proved or not, the doubt that electronic voting systems sow in the minds of voters make any outcome open to debate, which ends up undermining our democracy. Because the results are electronic it’s impossible to know what really happened, whether votes were really stored as the voters intended of if they were changed later on.

E-voting makes fraud on an unimaginable scale possible as never before. Electoral fraud is a problem we need to deal with in this country, as recent convictions have shown.

E-voting, unlike e-commerce, is a difficult technical problem where you need to ensure that voters are who they say they are, that they haven’t already voted and can do so secretly. Remote e-voting, from home or work, threatens our secret vote opening electors to vote-buying, peer pressure and threats. E-voting is also incredibly expensive, for a Sheffield pilot the cost was at least £55 per vote cast!

More information about e-voting:

* Communications of the ACM: Special Issue on E-Voting
* Jason Kitcat’s e-voting pages
* Rebecca Mercuri’s e-voting pages
* Louise Ferguson’s e-voting pages
* Voting Machines Pro Con (US site but a useful, balanced, overview)

What can we do about it?

There is easy immediate action we can take to stop pilots happening. A pilot will only be approved if a local council applies to take part. So until the application deadline of 17th November we need to ask councillors to get assurances that your council won’t be applying to run an e-voting pilot.

Brighton & Hove and Camden Councils have already ruled out pilots thanks to people contacting their councillors

The areas most likely to apply are those who have already run an e-voting or e-counting pilot so if you live in one of the following areas it’s vital that you take action:

* Basingstoke & Deane Borough Council
* Bolton Metropolitan Council
* Broxbourne Borough Council
* Chester City Council
* Chester-le-Street District Council
* Chorley Borough Council
* Crewe & Nantwich Borough Council
* Derwentside District Council
* Epping Forest District Council
* Ipswich Borough Council
* Kerrier District Council
* Liverpool City Council
* London Borough of Newham
* Rugby Borough Council
* Rushmoor Borough Council
* St Albans City & District
* Sheffield City Council
* Shrewsbury & Atcham Borough Council
* South Tyneside Metropolitan Borough Council
* South Oxfordshire District Council
* South Somerset District Council
* South Tyneside Council
* Stratford on Avon District Conucil
* Stroud District Council
* Swindon Borough Council
* Vale Royal Borough Council
* Wear Valley District Council
* City of Westminster

Contact your councillor via WriteToThem politely asking them to ensure your council doesn’t waste local tax payers’ money on electronic voting pilots. Remember to do it before 17th November!

Please email me the responses you get.

We will be organising an e-voting event in the New Year and will let you know more about that soon.