The media frenzy over the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act (SOPA and PIPA respectively) appears to be finally dying down after last week’s Internet blackout, mostly due to the shocking news regarding the shutting down of Megaupload. While I publicly expressed some misgivings about the focus of the current debate, it is undeniable that with regards to SOPA and PIPA, there is indeed room for concern outside of the U.S about the two pieces of legislation (not to mention concern inside that country), as it is very possible that SOPA and PIPA could have serious extraterritorial consequences. This has been a point that has been constantly repeated in the last few days, but the danger is much graver than anyone thinks. See, the existing network architecture of the Internet relies heavily on the United States, and any legislation that affects the core would have cascading consequences elsewhere. Allow me to elaborate.
In network theory, there is a concept called centrality which measures the importance of a node in any given network. This is calculated by the number of links a node has to neighbouring nodes, the shortest number of paths to other nodes in the network, and the average shortest path. A node is said to be central in a network if it is linked to a large number of other nodes, if it can be connected to other nodes quickly (the six degrees of separation phenomenon), and if the average distance to other nodes is short. When plotting charts describing networks, central nodes can be sometimes easily identified like in this chart, where blue indicates more central nodes:
Node and hub centrality is an important indication that there is a power law at work in a network, as high concentration of centrality in some nodes may give rise to a scale-free network, where some nodes are more important than others. The Internet is a scale-free network (here is where I plug my book if you want to read more about the subject, wink, wink), so centrality comes into play in two ways. There is the physical network, the wires, routers and hubs that make up its physical architecture, and then there is also a logical level of centrality. I would class the DNS system and Internet governance to be important aspects of the logical Internet. It should be no surprise to anyone to learn that any way you look at the Internet, the U.S. is extremely central. Take for example this picture of the global submarine cable network (from this excellent website):
This is just one aspect of the large dominance that the U.S. has in the Internet’s infrastructure. Things get even more interesting when you look at the logical architecture, where the U.S. has managed to remain considerably ahead of other countries. While anyone can become an Internet server by just installing web server software into any computer connected to the Web, you need a registrar if you want a domain name that resolves in the system (such as technollama.co.uk). Most top level domains are registered in the United States (.com, .org, .net, .biz), and statistics show that the U.S. is the country with the most domain names registered under its jurisdiction, with 78,453,258 as of last week.
Country-wise Domains Distribution: Domain Names by Country of Purchase
Rank
Country
Domains
1
United States
78,453,258
2
Germany
6,481,160
3
United Kingdom
4,617,854
4
China
4,502,381
5
Canada
3,869,783
6
France
3,271,896
7
Japan
2,483,667
8
Australia
2,405,261
9
Spain
1,589,942
10
Netherlands,The
1,372,323
The closest second country is Germany with over six million. In fact, not even combining the rest of the countries can you reach the total of domains registered in the U.S. A similar picture emerges with regards to hosting, that is, where content is actually placed in a server. For example, while this blog’s domain name was registered by a UK provider, it is hosted by a U.S. company (and I assume that the content is actually held there). 9 out of the top 10 hosting companies are American, and of these, the largest host in the world is GoDaddy (WildWestDomains in the chart). The end result is a skewed map of the world, where whatever happens in the United States affects the Internet disproportionately. Take what happened to Megaupload, while the company was registered in Hong Kong, and most of its operations ran from New Zealand, its .com domain was registered to an American company named DotRegistrar, based in Washington state. Similarly, the site had also hired some of its hosting services in the States, where at some point it had leased more than 1,000 servers to companies like Carpathia Hosting and Cogent Communications. This state of affairs opened up Megaupload to enforcement by American authorities, which is precisely what took place.
One does not need to know anything about networks to know that DNS registration and hosting are the Achilles heel of both pirating and legitimate sites. However, centrality has an important lesson to teach us with regards to the dangers of SOPA and PIPA in other ways. Imagine that most digital lockers, torrent trackers and other sites operating in the shadier side of the Web were to move shop and get out of the U.S. as fast as you can say “Conspiracy to Commit Racketeering“, but that the North American country retains its centrality in the Web’s architecture. This is precisely where SOPA wants to step in, as it would create several dispositions that would try to get to websites that are currently outside of the U.S. jurisdiction, namely, are registered and hosted elsewhere in the world. The most controversial norm in SOPA (of which there is talk of being removed), was contained in s102, which stated that:
“A service provider shall take technically feasible and reasonable measures designed to prevent access by its subscribers located within the United States to the foreign infringing site (or portion thereof) that is subject to the order, including measures designed to prevent the domain name of the foreign infringing site (or portion thereof) from resolving to that domain name’s Internet Protocol address. Such actions shall be taken as expeditiously as possible, but in any case within 5 days after being served with a copy of the order, or within such time as the court may order.”
This would have established a filtering responsibility for ISPs and other intermediaries against alleged copyright infringers. The problem with such a feature when introduced in such a central country is that it could perfectly trickle downstream to other physical and logical clients elsewhere, which would mean that SOPA would be used to filter content to all of us. There are already lots of national filtering systems enacted in countries around the world, but none of these is as central to the workings of the Net as the Land of the Free™. Seen from an architectural perspective, countries like China are large Intranets, which is why it was so easy for Egyptian authorities to shut down all Web access during that country’s revolution. The U.S has an entirely different role to the network, so anything that is filtered there could end up being filtered in places that have never heard of SOPA, be it justified or not. I cannot imagine that this is a bug and not a feature, some in the copyright industries seem determined to export this draconian model.
The optimist in me wants to believe that we have seen the last of SOPA and PIPA. Unfortunately, Megaupload proved that things are about to get bumpier. “Squad leaders, we’ve picked up a new group of signals. Enemy fighters coming your way.”
“The Louvre Museum has 8.5 million visitors per year. This blog was viewed about 80,000 times in 2011. If it were an exhibit at the Louvre Museum, it would take about 3 days for that many people to see it.
In 2011, there were 48 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 121 posts.
May you live in interesting times, the Chinese say. Oh my, aren’t we blessed? The file-sharing site Megaupload has been the subject of an international law enforcement operation by U.S. authorities, who have arrested six men charged with running an international criminal operation engaged in copyright infringement. A fact that has been less reported is that the FBI also managed to shut down the site through technical means by ordering their registrar to seize the names, so as of today the address www.megaupload.com and related domains do not resolve in the system. Who needs SOPA?
I am looking for superlatives to use in the case of Megaupload and I keep coming short. The site was huge, it accounted for 4% of Internet traffic and received an estimated 50 million visitors per day. It is said that it used up more bandwidth than Dropbox, the very popular and acceptable digital locker. Megaupload operated a free service, but what really seems to have played a big part in its demise is the fact that it was a mega business (be prepared for excessive use of the word Mega in these paragraphs), with income estimated at $150 million USD in subscription fees and $25 million USD from advertising. I will truly never understand people who pay subscription fees to services such as Megaupload, but do not pay for content, but I digress.
I do have to admit that with figures like these, it is very difficult to feel sympathy for Megaupload, or to think of its owners as some sort of anti-establishment heroes. In most occasions I have a large cache of sympathy and understanding towards other points of view, but in this occasion it has been shut tightly by reading that the owners of Megaupload collectively owned 14 Mercedes-Benz “with license plates such as “POLICE,” “MAFIA,” “V,” “STONED,” “CEO,” “HACKER,” GOOD,” “EVIL,” and—perhaps presciently—”GUILTY.”", according to Ars Tecnica. Reading through the indictment, the picture that emerges is of a bunch of hackers that knew fully well that the site’s main business was infringement, evidenced by several internal emails and the existence of a reward program for mega-uploaders.
So, what will be the result of the mega bust of Megaupload? In the short-term we will witness some angry Anonymous activity against U.S. interests, which is already taking place, but as xkcd once commented, attacks on websites are akin to the removal of a public poster (already World War Web is trending on Twitter). Funnily enough, I also think that the action against Megaupload may end up killing SOPA and PIPA for good. Why do you need new legislation when your domain name seizure strategy is proving effective?
In the medium-term, if the information in the indictment is accurate, and if extradition is granted, it seems possible that those arrested will be found guilty of criminal infringement charges and will receive mega sentences (OK, enough already). It is also possible that there will be lawsuits from legitimate users of Megaupload.
In the long-term, I do not think that much will change. Megaupload was a one-off, a vastly centralised and popular system whose actions will mean that proving direct copyright infringement and even secondary infringement following the Grokster incitement doctrine will be easy to achieve. While it was big, MU did not command the market dominance of a Napster in its heyday, but like that service, it suffered from its decision to provide a very direct involvement with what its customers were doing. What we can really expect is that we will see more domain name seizures.
The piracy wars will now be fought in the domain name system.
As Wikipedia goes silent today in protest against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA), and as other Internet giants unite their voices against the proposed legislations, we could really say that Web activism is starting to become a force to be reckoned with. Undoubtedly the rise of social media has made it more difficult for controversial treaties and laws to be passed without the knowledge of significant number of people.
Internet activism is becoming more powerful and sophisticated. Just last month, hosting firm GoDaddy had to drop its support for SOPA when it became clear that they faced mass migration from influential clients because of this single decision. A web petition forced the White House to make a negative statement against SOPA, and voices all over the world have been clamouring against this misguided solution for piracy. For the moment opposition to SOPA has managed to at least put the law on hold. Similarly, strong and vocal opposition in the UK to the Digital Economy Act almost managed to defeat the law. This is all very good, and I strongly believe that we are better for it. Imagine if social media had been prevalent at the time of some other controversial pieces of legislation such as the DMCA.
However, as much as I welcome the rise and rise of Web activism, I cannot help but to be just a little bit worried by what I believe is a very narrow focus, both thematic and geographic. Undoubtedly, this has to do with the continuing global dominance by the United States when it comes to the Internet, so we are in danger of becoming focused on things that matter to a portion of the U.S. population, in detriment of almost anything else. Web activism then has become mostly concerned with anything that might affect white U.S. middle class web users, so we end up getting worked up about SOPA, PIPA, ACTA and net neutrality. I am not trying to say that no other problem gets through the Net’s collective psyche, but it seems clear that the netocracy mostly is concerned with the copywars.
The reason for this is something that I have talked about before in these pages. There is a growing global anglophone wired techno-elite that shares a common language of technology, are fluent in memes, and hang out in Reddit, BoingBoing, TechCrunch and similar blogs and forums. This global class has technical sophistication that usually puts them at odds with those who do not share the technical environment. They tweet, blog and facebook (decreasingly, as FB is no longer cool), and are capable of using mass media in ways that we could only dream of in the past. This class is not only global, but it tends to replicate at a local level anything that is posted in BoingBoing, so each country has its own elite of top tweeps and bloggers concerned with anything that Cory and Xeni think is relevant. This to me explains the growing concern for net neutrality in countries where connectivity is still the most prevalent concern, or the current interest given to SOPA. While it is true that SOPA as written could have nasty extraterritorial effects, the level of concern and sometimes outright fear-mongering that is being shared online is quite simply out of proportion to the actual threat. SOPA will outlaw streaming! SOPA will create a global firewall! SOPA will come into your house, sleep in your bed and eat your porridge!
Web activism is proving its power. While the Internet’s role in the Arab Spring is still disputed, there is little doubt that at least social media was used successfully to pass information around. We just need to give emphasis to the things that really matter, and be a bit more sceptic about sources.
Having said this, I am heartened by some other signs of change. The #occupy movement is almost a direct result of the 15-M movement in Spain (and to a lesser extent due to Tahrir Square), and the Indignados were able to export their brand of public space occupation and social media use. Let’s hope that Web activism continues to grow outside of the narrow concern of certain popular blogs.
Now, how do I fact-check this entry without Wikipedia?
ETA: Almost to prove my point, I just read on Twitter that the English managing editor of BoingBong got interviewed by Al Jazeera about SOPA. No comment.
Since 2004 I have been the technical editor of SCRIPTed, the open access journal of Law and Technology published by the SCRIPT Centre in Edinburgh. This involvement has survived all other Edinburgh-related commitments, and has become one of the most rewarding aspects of my academic life. Every four months I sit down and do nothing but edit the articles and put them online. The end result is that I get a four-monthly jolt of joy when each issue goes live that gives me a small idea of what it must be to be a father.
Talk of paternity is not rare when it comes to open access, in great part it is a labour of love. For 8 years SCRIPTed has been made possible by a rare combination of vision, talent and funding. In 2003 Professors Lilian Edwards and Graeme Laurie had the idea of producing an online journal as part of the remit of the SCRIPT Centre, following the North American publishing model of employing students as editors. This was a visionary decision that allowed SCRIPTed to gain longevity, as a large part of the work was performed by volunteers. This is a noble tradition that is common in legal establishments in the United States, and has been performed by the likes of President Obama and Justice Elena Kagan.
While the journal has had immense support from the funding side and is relatively cheap to produce, I have always felt that innovative projects such as these seemed to be ignored by mainstream academia. As on online-only publication, we had to contend with an idea that an online journal is simply not the same as a printed journal. Similarly, while I dedicated countless hours to the journal, I always felt that there seemed to be little official recognition to the work, as it did not fall easily into any normal bead counting categories. Still, the work was very rewarding in its own right, and the back catalogue of excellent articles is a testament to all of the hard work of a large legion of editors that have put a lot of effort into the journal.
All things need to evolve, and that is why we have now moved SCRIPTed outside of the University of Edinburgh servers, and created one of the first WordPress-based journals (as far as I know). While there are lots of open source journal interfaces out there, I felt that WordPress has evolved enough to allow a full migration. We will be moving our back catalogue to the new site during the next few months.
Sustainability is still an important question in open access journal, and hopefully we will continue to be able to support SCRIPTed for many years to come.
So if you do not know what to do today, why not go to SCRIPTed and browse our archive?
If you follow Yours Truly in any sort of social media available you will know by now that my book entitled Networks, Complexity and Internet Regulation: Scale-Free Law has been published by Edward Elgar. The book has its own page on this blog, and is now available for purchase at e-commerce retailers, or directly from the publisher. There is an e-book version, but alas, not on Kindle as the publishers have assured me that Amazon offers rather bad terms. The book is offered under a Creative Commons licence, although the copyright page in my copy does not seem to reflect this fully and the publishers have added a generic “All Rights Reserved” copyright notice although I drafted a different one. I guess CC is still not that well-known.
For those who are thinking of getting the book, I apologise in advance for the price, it is beyond my control. To whet your appetite, here is a file with all of the images used in the book in colour (where available) and the highest resolution I could find. Here is also the book´s brochure. Enjoy.
UPDATE
I have been contacted by the editors, who acknowledge that there has been an error in the printed copyright page, this is because my book is their first Creative Commons book. At some point in the printing procedure someone probably slapped the generic All Rights Reserved notice instead of my suggested text. Edward Elgar will in future change their procedure so that this doest happen again. Similarly, they have kindly agreed to give rreaders of this blog a 20% discount on the book from their site. Yes, you read correctly, twenty percent! The code to redeem the discount is “Guadamuz20″.
Thanks to Edward Elgar for this amazing response, they have really treated me superbly.
Law Meets Biology: Are Our Databases Eligible For Legal Protection?
| HTML | PDF | Michele Oliva and Marcelo Corrales, pp.226-228 The authors look at the interaction the European Database Directive, existing ECJ jurisprudence, and biological databases.
Reviewed Articles
Forgetting Footprints, Shunning Shadows. A Critical Analysis Of The “Right To Be Forgotten” In Big Data Practice Bert-Jaap Koops, pp.229-256
| HTML | PDF |
The so-called “right to be forgotten” has been put firmly on the agenda, both of academia and of policy. Although the idea is intuitive and appealing, the legal form and practical implications of a right to be forgotten have hardly been analysed so far. This contribution aims to critically assess what a right to be forgotten could or should entail in practice. It outlines the current socio-technical context as one of Big Data, in which massive data collections are created and mined for many purposes. Big Data involves not only individuals’ digital footprints (data they themselves leave behind) but, perhaps more importantly, also individuals’ data shadows (information about them generated by others). And contrary to physical footprints and shadows, their digital counterparts are not ephemeral but persistent. This presents particular challenges for the right to be forgotten, which are discussed in the form of three key questions. Against whom can the right be invoked? When and why can the right be invoked? And how can the right be effected? Advocates of a right to be forgotten must clarify which conceptualisation of such a right they favour – a comprehensive, user-control-based right to have data deleted in due time, or a narrower, context-specific right to a “clean slate” – and how they think the considerable obstacles presented in this paper can be overcome, if people are really to be enabled to have their digital footprints forgotten and to shun their data shadows.
Music and Dance: Beyond Copyright Text? Charlotte Waelde and Philip Schlesinger, pp.257-291 | HTML | PDF | Are experiential, experimental forms of music and dance beyond protection by copyright? If they are, how might these art forms best be protected by cultural policy and cultural economics? These were the key questions that we set out to investigate with the support of a Beyond Text grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council and with the help of our network members where together we formed an interdisciplinary team comprised of experts in copyright law, cultural policy, cultural economics, dance and musical composition. Through a series of interviews with musicians, singers, songwriters, composers, dancers, choreographers and others involved in the music industry and dance community we came to the conclusion that these types of works are both before copyright and beyond copyright. They are before copyright because what matters to the majority of those involved is the process of creation – which itself is constantly evolving – rather than the product – the protected work once fixed. They are beyond copyright because key aspects of the performance involve contributions which are not recognised by copyright, and because there is much about the performance which simply cannot be captured in the mechanical sense. As a result, policy intervention, which focuses on the product rather than the process, becomes problematic. This article suggests a series of practical recommendations made by our interviewees for ways in which the art forms may be supported into the future.
We are grateful to all of our interviewees, some of whom feature in our documentary Performers on the Edge, published in Audiovisual Thinking: the journal of academic videos, and who have remained in touch and contributed extra evidence to this project which can be found on our project website, and who joined us at our dissemination event in September 2011 in Glasgow.
Analysis
Challenges for Free Access to Law in a Multi-Jurisdictional Developing Country: Building the Legal Information Institute of India Graham Greenleaf, VC Vivekanandan, Philip Chung, Ranbir Singh and Andrew Mowbray, pp.292-316
| HTML | PDF |
This article analyses the complexities involved in providing free public online access to the “public legal information” of the Indian legal system. It starts with some of the causes of the complexity of Indian legal information then describes the considerable progress that has previously been made in the provision of free access to some types of legal information, but why the result is still below international standards. The article then explains a project to remedy some of these deficiencies, the Legal Information Institute of India (LII of India), being carried out by eight Indian law schools and an international partner. It has developed in its first year of public operation, the LII of India, a system with over 750,000 searchable documents and 151 databases. The considerable remaining challenges for creation of a world-standard and sustainable system are then outlined, and steps proposed to address them. The extent to which this collaborative project might be a model for development of free access to legal information in other countries is considered.
By “public legal information” we mean that information which, as a matter of public policy, ought to be available for free public access in a society which values democracy and the rule of law. This has been argued elsewhere to include legislation, case law, treaties a country has entered into, reports proposing reform of the law, and such legal scholarship as authors have chosen or are required to make freely available to the public. For the purpose of this article, this definition is assumed.
India’s New Data Protection Legislation: Do The Government’s Clarifications Suffice? Raghunath Ananthapur, pp.317-322
| HTML | PDF |
After giving an introduction to data protection legislation in India, the author analyses the latest round of regulations to arise out of that country. This is important because India has started gaining prominence in the outsourcing business from European Union countries.
Reports
Regenerative Medicine Goverence: The EU Experience and Argentine Possibilities Shawn H E Harmon, pp.323-328
| HTML | PDF |
Can We Trust the Media? Yolande Stolte, pp.329-332
| HTML | PDF |
Book Reviews
Enhanced Dispute Resolution Through The Use Of Information Technology By Arno R Lodder and John Zeleznikow Reviewed by Vagelis Papakonstantinou, pp.333-335
| HTML | PDF |
Patents
By Joseph Scott Miller (ed) Reviewed by Erika Ellyne, pp.336-339
| HTML | PDF |
I am currently reading REAMDE, Neal Stephenson’s latest novel, and although I am still going through the initial pages (I am savouring it as I do most of Stephenson’s work), and it already has me thinking about new trends in literature.
Cyberpunk is a well-defined post-modern sub-genre within science fiction, with a distinctive narrative style, anti-hero characters and specific technological background. The technology in cyberpunk literature is a mix of cyborg implants and early cyberspace depictions. Interestingly, many of the seminal works pre-date the development of the World Wide Web, but they tend to describe virtual spaces as part of the Internet. William Gibson´s Neuromancer, Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, Pat Cadigan’s Synners, and Bruce Sterling’s Islands in the Net are some of the defining works. The genre has had its off-shoots, most notably steampunk, which is beautifully encapsulated in the wonderful yet under-appreciated The Difference Engine by Gibson and Sterling.
In the last couple of years I have read some works that do not fall easily into the cyberpunk genre, but have a lot in common with some of its aesthetic values, so I am thinking that we are seeing a new type of cyberpunk, let’s call it Virtualpunk, a type of Cyberpunk 2.0. These works are Halting State by Charles Stross, For The Win by Cory Doctorow, and now REAMDE. The common theme is that all of these works heavily feature virtual worlds, and seem to be informed directly or indirectly on the MMORPG phenomenon best showcased by World of Warcraft. In these three works, vast worldwide games are integral part of the plot, which I believe is the first definition of Virtualpunk. The second is that they are all works with sophisticated understanding of economics and finance, in the case of For The Win, Doctorow actually has written one of the most believable depictions of a financial crash due to crazy derivatives markets that I have yet to read in fiction and non-fiction (including, dare I say, Too Big To Fail). The third characteristic is that all of these works have been written with the real Internet in mind, and therefore this space does not resemble the idealized versions in Snow Crash or Neuromancer. To me this adds a level of realism that some of the earlier cyberpunk lacked.
The final characteristic of the new genre, and what prompts me to write these lines in this blog, is that these three works share a high level of legal and regulatory sophistication. In all three novels the protagonists have to deal with cybercrime, filtering, censorship, e-commerce and jurisdictional issues that would not be alien in many Internet regulation classes. In Halting State we are presented with the way in which a police force is asked to deal with a heist of virtual goods worth millions of Euro. In For The Win, we are presented with life behind the Great Firewall of China, institutionalised gold farming, and how game companies try to handle it. In REAMDE we have viruses and cyber-extorsion (so far, please do not spoil the book for me), all dealt with the aplomb and knowledge of someone who is familiar with how virtual spaces operate. Is Neal Stephenson a WoW player I wonder?
Anyway, I highly recommend these books, they lead me to think that there is a new literary trend that has wider repecussions than the geek sci-fi circles.
Anyone interested in the above works might also want to pick up an augmented reality variant to the trend, works such as Spook Country by William Gibson and Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge.
ETA: I am leaving Larry Niven’s augmented reality LARP novels outside. They are rather cyberpunkish in a way.
This is a response to Johnathan Zittrain’s article entitled, surprisingly, The Personal Computer is Dead. I say surprisingly because the title is a bit deceiving, and the content has little to do with the death of the PC as such, 98% of the piece is spent talking about Apple’s closed development environment. In fact, I happen to agree with most of the content of the article, what I completely disagree with is the title and the first paragraph. Zittrain declares the death of the personal computer to illustrate the problem that he sees with Apple’s walled garden approach, as he envisions a future where we cannot have free access to software because most of us will be using Apple computers, and will be getting our computer programs from controlled environments like the App Store. He says in the opening paragraph:
“The PC is dead. Rising numbers of mobile, lightweight, cloud-centric devices don’t merely represent a change in form factor. Rather, we’re seeing an unprecedented shift of power from end users and software developers on the one hand, to operating system vendors on the other—and even those who keep their PCs are being swept along. This is a little for the better, and much for the worse.”
Just like a coroner at a busy mortuary, he simply signs the death certificate with the merest glance at the body in front of him. No figures, no statistics, we’re simply told that the PC market is dying, and I must assume that the replacement will be a world where everyone will be using iPads, smartphones and netbooks. This is the premise that I want to argue against.
In a very controversial article published last year, Wired declared the death of the Web for similar reasons to those presented by Zittrain, namely, the rise of mobile computing. According to that piece, everyone in the future will access the Internet through apps, and the humble website would simply disappear. There were several replies to this, but my favourites were this article in Scientific American, and this deconstruction of their now infamous chart at Boing Boing. A common criticism of the article is that it was too parochial, that it noticed some trends amongst the technocratic elites of Silicon Valley, and assumed that we would all be doing the same thing. I believe that the same may have happened to Zittrain, perhaps he surveys the contents of his classroom, and sees only tablets and smartphones. Where did all the laptops go? This seems a very American-centric view of the world, and a college-age view at that. In the rest of the world not everyone can afford an iPad.
There is no doubt that we are seeing an unprecedented diversification in the computer hardware market, but this does not spell the end of the PC. In fact, PC sales have continued to grow year on year for the past two decades, and while Gartner recently slashed its growth forecast, the PC market grew by more than 3% in 2011.
PC annual sales growth actual (1998-2010) from The Guardian.
The fact is that the PC is still doing fine for a very simple reason: people need to work. Have you tried getting any actual work done on your iPad? Even with a keyboard it is not the friendliest of working environments. Apps are good for specific tasks, such as playing games, reading news, checking social networks, chatting, listening to music, watching videos, and all sort of things that apps are good for. But if I need to write a document, design a website, or go through some spreadsheets, I do it at my Windows PC. The workstation is still a considerable marketplace, and I reckon that it will be with us for at least another decade.
What I envision will happen is that the growth of the PC market will stop, and we will experience a gradual decrease, probably with movement towards cloud-based devices and sturdier work-friendly tablets, but the PC will still live strongly until a workstation replacement really comes of age. If I think of my technology usage, I now own a Kindle, an iPad, an iPod, an Android smartphone, a PS3, a laptop and a PC. They all have overlapping capabilities, for example, I can listen to music and read ebooks in all of them. But I use them for different purposes, most of my work is done on a Windows PC (and some online gaming). I also use this as a media server to send video files to several devices, like the games console and the iPad. The laptop is for travel and work at the office, while the iPad is mostly for gaming and watching videos. I cannot envisage getting rid of either the laptop or the PC, and I suspect I’m not alone in this.
As mentioned already, I completely agree with Zittrain’s main argument. Apple’s closed development policies are bad for innovation. This is why I’m placing a lot of hope in Android.
Long-time readers may remember the interesting case of SAS Institute v World Programming (my analysis here), an important software interoperability decision in the UK that got referred to the European Court of Justice. The case sets SAS, one of the biggest business software giants, against a UK software company that created a clone of SAS products based on some components from the SAS portfolio, but most importantly, by using manuals and other training materials. SAS sued for copyright infringement claiming that WP had directly copied SAS manual materials, and had also infringed copyright by creating its own version of the manuals.
In the first instance decision, Arnold J found that WP had copied substantial parts of the SAS manuals, including keywords and other vital components. However, Arnold J did not rule on the interoperability question, namely that World Programming had to decompile large parts of SAS object code in order to create its own clones of the software. These questions then were referred to the ECJ:
Does copyright in computer programs protect programming languages from being copied?
Does copyright in computer programs protect interfaces from being copied where this can be achieved without decompiling the object code?
Does copyright in computer programs protect the functions of the programs from being copied?
Arnold J required interpretation of several articles in both the Software Programs Directive and the Copyright Directive.
A few days ago Yves Bot, the Advocate General of the ECJ, produced an opinion in the case which seems to favour World Programming and interoperability. For those unfamiliar with ECJ procedure, the Advocate General’s opinion is not a decision, it simply gives an overview of the case for the justices, and the Court may ignore it altogether, but generally influence the final result. The Advocate General broke down the referred questions into several main issues. To me the most important question is precisely whether the functional element of a computer program protected by copyright. The AG put it this way:
“First, by questions 1 to 3, the referring court asks, in essence, whether Article 1(2) of Directive 91/250 is to be interpreted as meaning that the functionalities of a computer program and the programming language are regarded as the expression of that program and thus qualify for the copyright protection provided for by that directive.”
Mr. Bot goes through the basics of software copyright. He reminds us that copyright does not protect ideas, but the expression of an idea, and while copyright does not only protect literal elements of software, he clearly states that “the functionalities of a computer program cannot, as such, form the object of copyright protection”. Furthermore, the Advocate General analyses whether a computer programming language can be subject of copyright protection. He states that:
“69. As we have seen, a computer program is first compiled in the form of a source code. That code is written in a programming language which will act as a translator between the user and the computer. It enables the user to write instructions in a language that he himself understands. The referring court explains that SAS language consists of statements, expressions, options, formats and functions expressed in tokens, that is to say, strings of characters used in accordance with certain conventions. One of the main types of token in SAS language is names, for example, LOGISTIC and UNIVARIATE. The referring court adds that SAS language has its own syntax and keywords.[...]
71. It seems to me, therefore, that programming language is a functional element which allows instructions to be given to the computer. As we have seen with SAS language, programming language is made up of words and characters known to everyone and lacking any originality. In my opinion, programming language must be regarded as comparable to the language used by the author of a novel. It is therefore the means which permits expression to be given, not the expression itself.
72. Accordingly, I do not think that it can, as such, be regarded as the expression of a computer program and thus be eligible for copyright protection under Directive 91/250.”
It is always a pleasure to read good legal opinions, of which this is one great example. So, computer languages are functional in nature, and therefore they cannot be protected under copyright. Mr Bot then goes on to analyse the extent of interoperability in software. The issue was “whether, under Article 6 of Directive 91/250, WPL was entitled to perform an act of decompilation in order to achieve interoperability between the SAS System and its WPL System.” He believes that World Programming was indeed able to decompile to achieve interoperability. He states in his conclusion:
“Article 5(3) of Directive 91/250, read in conjunction with Articles 4(a) and (b) and 5(1) thereof, is to be interpreted as meaning that the expression ‘any of the acts of loading, displaying, running, transmitting or storing the computer program [which the person having the right] is entitled to do’ relates to the acts for which that person has obtained authorisation from the rightholder and to the acts of loading and running necessary in order to use the computer program in accordance with its intended purpose. Acts of observing, studying or testing the functioning of a computer program which are performed in accordance with that provision must not have the effect of enabling the person having a right to use a copy of the program to access information which is protected by copyright, such as the source code or the object code.”
Hopefully this opinion will be carried by the court when they decide the case. On a more shallow note, I love the name Bot, I would have lots of fun with that name messing up Turing tests. “Are you a bot? Yes, as a matter of fact I happen to be a Bot”.
TechnoLlama covers several Cyberlaw topics, with emphasis on open licensing, digital rights, software protection, virtual worlds, and llamas. While the blog tackles these issues in a light-hearted and nonchalant manner, some serious points filter through from time to time.
The end result is a skewed map of the world, where whatever happens in the United States affects the Internet disproportionately. Take what happened to Megaupload, while the company was registered in Hong Kong, and most of its operations ran from New Zealand, its .com domain was registered to an American company named DotRegistrar, based in Washington state. Similarly, the site had also hired some of its hosting services in the States, where at some point it had leased more than 1,000 servers to companies like Carpathia Hosting and Cogent Communications. This state of affairs opened up Megaupload to enforcement by American authorities, which is precisely what took place.
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