Tag Archives: technology

Petition: Hollyweb, W3C und Lobbyisten für “Digital Rights Management” im HTML5-Standard

Posted on 2013/04/04 | Leave a comment

[Ursprünglich auf netzpolitik.org]

hollyweb

Der fast fertige HTML5-Standard für Webseiten soll technische Möglichkeiten zur Inhalte-Kontrolle erhalten. Mit dem gefährlichen “Digital Rights Management” (DRM) ist aber schon die Musikindustrie gescheitert. Netzpolitische Organisationen rufen dazu auf, eine Petition dagegen zu unterzeichnen – macht mit!

Das HTML-Protokoll ist für das Internet zentral wie die Luft zum Atmen. Es beschreibt, wie Inhalte im Webbrowser dargestellt werden. Kein Wunder, dass die Neutralität, Unabhängigkeit und Offenheit dieses Protokolls nahezu allen Usern ausgesprochen wichtig sind. Genau diese Grundsätze sind jetzt in Gefahr, weil die Medienindustrie ihre Lobbyisten auf das World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) angesetzt hat, um eine standardisierte Schnittstelle für DRM-Mechanismen direkt in das HTML-Protokoll zu integrieren.

Bisher gibt es keine solche Schnittstelle im Protokoll, was zu Auswüchsen wie dem Flash-Plugin geführt hatte. Unter dem Vorwand, einen Ersatz für Flash zu schaffen, sollen nun Schnittstellen für proprietäre Erweiterungen in HTML in den Standard integriert werden. Damit entstehen mindestens zwei schwerwiegende Einschränkungen für User: Sie können nicht mehr jederzeit alle Inhalte empfangen, und die Implementierung der proprietären Erweiterungen ist nicht mehr vollständig in freien Webbrowsern wie Firefox möglich. Gerade diese Freiheiten sind Hollywood ein Dorn im Auge, so dass es mit Sicherheit keine Vorteile für Anwender gibt, mit denen sich diese Erweiterungen begründen lassen. Es soll die Einführung und Verbreitung von DRM-Technologie erleichtert werden, weil auf diese Weise jeder standardkonforme Browser als DRM-Schnittstelle dienen kann. Mehr nicht.

Die gründlichste Erklärung zu diesem komplexen Thema hat bis jetzt die Electronic Frontier Foundation geliefert. Ihr Artikel ruft zur Mitzeichnung einer Petition gegen die geplante “Encrypted Media Extension” auf:

Tell the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and its member organizations not to embrace a proposal that undermines the very purpose of the HTML standard upon which the Web is built – freedom.

Mitte März wandte sich Autor und Netzaktivist Cory Doctorow in einem Guardian-Blogeintrag mit dem Titel “What I wish Tim Berners-Lee understood about DRM” direkt an den HTML-Pionier Tim Berners-Lee. Darin äußert Doctorow seine Besorgnis darüber, dass im Rahmen des W3C über eine Erweiterung des HTML5-Standards um eine standardisierte Schnittstelle für Kopierschutztechnologien (Digital Rights/Restrictions Management, DRM) diskutiert wird:

Adding DRM to the HTML standard will have far-reaching effects that are incompatible with the W3C’s most important policies, and with Berners-Lee’s deeply held principles.

Das W3C hat bis jetzt großartige Arbeit beim Erstellen und Verwalten Offener Standards geleistet. Dieses fundamentale Prinzip ist unabdingbar für die Rolle, die das Internet inzwischen als öffentlicher und politischer Raum gewonnen hat. Man opfert kein Prinzip den Verwertungsinteressen der Industrie. Wir fordern unsere Leser auf, sich zu informieren und die Petition zu unterstützen.


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Defensive Publications at Embedded World 2013

Posted on 2013/02/26 | 2 Comments

Embedded World has started today in Nürnberg, Germany. I am here with Open Invention Network to spread the idea of defensive publications and OIN’s non-aggression community of companies in the Open Source sphere. Highly innovative companies present here, and many of them face the same dilemma — if the innovators decide not to patent their inventions, they run the risk that another party applies for a patent of the same invention later. The decision not to patent could be for ethical reasons because they understand that software patents are harmful, or for business or many other reasons. The problem stays the same, there is a threat that patents are awarded even though similar solutions already existed.

There are many software patents out there that experts consider obvious, not inventive or trivial. All of those three are reasons that the patent should have been rejected. Especially important for complex but non-inventive ones, the patent examiner did not discover relevant prior art when scrutinising the patent application. The state of the art was not documented and accessible in a way that supported a good decision. Defensive publications are one answer to this problem. They offer a cheap and fast way to document inventions. Also, defensive publications are available for areas that legally should not be patentable, like software as such.

Through linuxdefenders.org, companies and research institutions, but also individual developers can submit defensive publications relevant to Linux and Open Source in general. Linux Defenders is backed by Open Invention Network on it’s mission to prevent bad software patents. We want to support developers and inventors to document their ideas as explicit prior art. Our goal is to ensure freedom to operate for the innovators in Open Source. If you are interested, worried about your invention or have any questions, you can find Armijn Hemel and me in hall 5, booth 341. Or ping me on Twitter @mirkoboehm.

Mirko Boehm
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Here is to a book that did not exist a week ago – “How to understand an oil contract”

Posted on 2012/11/06 | 1 Comment

This week, the Open Oil project performed a marvelous stunt – the Oil Contracts Booksprint. Johnny West, Zara Rahman and their supporters gathered oil contract experts from across the globe at Schloss Neuhausen to achieve something that has never done before – create a book that explains how to understand an oil contract. Not only did such a book not exist, they also published it under a Creative Commons license. And because that is not enough of a challenge, they did it all in one week.

Oil ContractsOil contracts determine the share of the oil revenue that the country who owns the oil, the international oil companies and others receive. From the book: “It is petroleum contracts that express how [the] money is split and who makes what profits, just as it is the contracts that determine who manages operations and how issues such as the environment, local economic development, and community rights are dealt with. The share price of ExxonMobil, the question of who carries responsibility for Deepwater Horizon, whether Uganda will be able to stop importing petrol, and how much it costs to heat and light homes in millions of homes ­­ these are issues which depend directly on clauses in the contracts signed between the governments of the world and the oil companies. For most of the 150 years of oil production, these contracts have remained hidden, nested in a broader secrecy that surrounded all aspects of the industry. Governments claimed national security prerogatives, companies said commercial sensitivity precluded making them available.”

open oil booksprint

Photo of the desk at the open oil booksprint.

People who have attended an Open Source developer sprint may notice that the desk in the picture pretty much looks like at one of them. A book sprint applies techniques and tools developed in the Open Source world to authoring. Gather the relevant people, get them to a remote location with little distraction, and then allow them to focus on producing something they are passionate about. As in software, the results are impressive. Collaborative editing tools are used to coordinate between authors, editors and illustrators, similar to version control. It is also noteworthy that of the different expert that attended the sprint, all attended on a pro-bono basis or as part of their day job.

The “How to understand an oil contract” book is a good read even for people who are only casually interested in the politics of oil. How the book was produced serves as a great example of the Open Source way adopted by other, less technology related sectors. And if the book contributes to making oil contracts better understood and more comparable, the world has just become a better place.

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Today’s lecture: “Markets, Firms and Peer Production”

Posted on 2012/11/05 | 3 Comments

Today’s session is one of my favorites of the Open Source and Intellectual Property in the Digital Society course I am  teaching at TU Berlin. From the summary:

“Markets, Firms and Peer Production:Markets and privately or publicly owned firms are the traditional mechanisms for the coordination of production in an economy. The coordination of production is largely influenced by transaction cost that determine what subset of the production process is coordinated within firms and which through market exchanges. Where transaction cost in markets decrease with volume for example through economies of scale, firms typically experience “diminishing returns on management” resulting in transaction cost increasing with volume. The equilibrium established by these two cutting curves is disturbed by the increasing economic importance of peer production. Peer production, the process most prominently applied to create Open Source software, extends the concepts of markets and firms by an alternative model of coordination that does not rely on price setting. To be peer-produced, goods need to present a set of attributes, like the possibility for small contributions to the overall outcome and decentralised coordination. Where the resulting transaction cost of peer production is lower than that of markets or firms, goods will tend to be produced collaboratively.

We will analyse how peer production differs from and extends markets and firms, and how it applies to software and other information goods. Self-identification as the mechanism for matching human skill to tasks is contrasted to how firms solve the same problem utilising their comparatively static supply of expertise. Finally, peer production processes will be characterised by the created content, the sorting for relevance as a quality assurance mechanism, and digital distribution.”

If you are interested in the subject and you happen to be studying in Berlin, it will be a pleasure to see you here in the coming semester. There are 30 seats only, allocated on a first-come first-served basis.

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