inamerrata

So, the Labor senators also made some recommendations about temporary copies:

Recommendation 15

Labor Senators recommend that the Commonwealth Government implement Recommendations 15 and 16 of the Digital Agenda Review report prepared by Phillips Fox to ensure that temporary reproductions and caching are explicitly protected under Australian law.

I briefly mentioned recommendation 15 of the DAR report when it came out, but not in much depth, and the issue’s worth reviewing.

Recommendation Fifteen

That sections 43A and 111A of the [Copyright] Act be amended to align the exception with the similar exception in the Information Society Directive, by deleting the words ‘of making or receiving a communication’ in subsection (1) and substituting ‘part of the technical process’ with ‘as a necessary and incidental part to any technical process’.

A consequential amendment to the heading to the section will be needed also.

That the sections be further amended by inserting a new subsection to include a definition of ‘temporary reproduction’ for the purposes of the section, as meaning any transient, non-persistent reproduction that is incidental to the primary purpose or act for which the work is made available and which has no independent economic significance.

Recommendation Sixteen

That the educational statutory licence provisions be amended to allow an educational insitution to make active caches of copyright material for the purpose of a course of instruction by the educational institution, in return for a payment of equitable remuneration to the copyright owner.

Here’s what we’ve actually got in the FTA implementation bill (starting on page 155):

188 After section 43A
Insert:

43B Reproduction of works as part of a technical process of use

(1) Subject to subsection (2), the copyright in a work is not infringed by the making of a reproduction of the work if the reproduction is incidentally made as part of a technical process of using a copy of the work.

(2) Subsection (1) does not apply to the making of a reproduction of a work if the reproduction is made from an infringing copy of the work.

189 After section 111A
Insert:

111B Reproduction of subject-matter as part of a technical process of use

(1) Subject to subsection (2), the copyright in a subject-matter is not infringed by the making of a reproduction of the subject-matter if the reproduction is incidentally made as part of a technical process of using a copy of the subject-matter.

(2) Subsection (1) does not apply to the making of a reproduction of a work if the reproduction is made from an infringing copy of the work.

So it seems like that recommendation has already been taken care of. And it seems to answer Kim’s concerns from April:

This suggests (although, as I say, it’s not entirely clear) that we can’t have a general exception for temporary copies.

On the other hand, material form gets extended to cover any copy of the work, even one you can’t make further reproductions from. Thus you’re forced to rely on the incidental exception outlined above if you want to do anything with a work at all. That’s actually a pretty major change, though I happen to think a good one — an exception that allows you to argue that a use is incidental is much more flexible and powerful than requiring you to argue that further reproduction can’t be made — which is merely a technical issue that can usually be overcome.

Another concern is those (2) clauses: if you cache a pirated work, or even just play a pirated work on a computer, you’re infringing copyright. We’ll have to see whether this is any more concerning that the existing problem of infringing copyright by taping shows from TV.

One question that arises is how the term incidental will actually be interpreted. It’s not defined, and there are a couple of alternative meanings that would result in different outcomes:

incidental
     adj 1: [...] minor or casual or subordinate
            in significance or nature or occurring as a chance
            concomitant or consequence; [...]
     2: following as a consequence; [...]
     3: not of prime or central importance; "nonessential to the
        integral meanings of poetry" [syn: {nonessential}]

Meaning (2) is useful — the task is playing your CD on your iPod; the technical details of how you do that are minor and subordinate in significance, and thus incidental. Meaning (3) is entirely useless on the other hand: if you’re only allowing unnecessary copies to be made, what’s the point? If I want to play a CD on my iPod, the copies are necessary, so therefore I can’t make them. Meaning (1) is difficult to make use of: is the copying minor because people playing the song don’t really want to care about the technical details, or is it major because without the technical details it wouldn’t be possible?

Going with meaning (2), this seems like it could be said to allow compilation tapes (“I’d like to play these twenty songs on my hour long trip, but they’re all on different CDs and I can’t be fumbling in the car, so I’ll make incidental copies of them on a new CD”), and time-shifting (“I’m trying to watch this show, but the only way I can is if I make an incidental copy on this tape, then replay it later when I’m actually home in front of the TV”).

So it basically seems that if you interpret “incidental” as meaning “more about letting you use or access the work than giving you two copies of the work that you can use independently” — which seems quite reasonable to me — this seems like a fairly limited, but quite useful, form of fair use in and of itself.

(It isn’t fair use though, because fair use probably lets you give your compilation CD to a friend even though that’s technically “piracy”. Not to mention “fair use” means that you’ve got a defense if you forward an email to someone whom the author of that email didn’t want you to forward it to. Err, except I just did mention that. My bad.)

I’m not a lawyer, this isn’t legal advice. Heck, this isn’t even the law yet.

So the FTA Senate Committee’s final report is out now, and there are some more explicit recommendations from the Labor members. Here’s the cliff’s notes.

Fair use is in:

Recommendation 8

Labor Senators recommend that the Senate Select Committee on Intellectual Property [the establishment of which is Recommendation 6 — aj] investigate options for possible amendments to the Copyright Act 1968 to expand the fair dealing exceptions to more closely reflect the ‘fair use’ doctrine that exists in the United States and to address the anomalies of ‘time shifting’ and ‘space shifting’ in Australia.

Recommendation 11

Labor Senators recommend that the Senate Select Committee on Intellectual Property investigate amendments to the Copyright Act 1968 to provide that a contract that purports to exclude or modify exceptions to copyright infringement such as fair dealing is not enforceable.

Open source DVD players and PDF readers are also covered:

Recommendation 14

Labor Senators recommend that the Commonwealth Government ensure that specific exceptions will be available in the implementation of Australia’s obligations in relation to Technological Protection Measures (TPMs) to provide for the manufacture of interoperable software products.

(Access to protected works and not rushing the legislation for this is covered in recommendations 12 and 13)

Also interesting is recommendation 10, which suggests looking into doing something like the Public Domain Enhancement Act — which requires a token $1 payment for protection 50 years after publication (as opposed to death of the author), and every ten years after that. Such a law’s almost certainly in violation of our obligations under the Berne convention, of course.

Recommendation 7 is a motherhood statement for universities, recommendation 9 is about reviewing originality, and recommendations 16-18 cover take down notifications

That just leaves recommendation 15, which I’ll get to in a second.

PoliPundit raves about Dubya’s acceptance speech for the Republican nomination in 2000. An interesting line from Cheney’s remarks:

You will never see him pointing the finger of blame for failure…you will only see him sharing the credit for success.

Ignoring the over-reaching generalisation, that comment is interesting in regard to how Bush has handled a number of pretty controversial appointments. George Tenet is the main one that comes to mind: if you’re thinking in terms of “ministerial responsibility” for departmental failures, you’d probably expect the CIA director to have been booted over the massive intelligence failure that was Sept 11. White Glenn certainly did. But if Bush is firmly against “pointing the finger of blame”, demanding resignations like that isn’t going to happen; and indeed it didn’t: Tenet remained as CIA director for almost two more years, ’til resigning in June. While there’s speculation that “personal reasons” is just a face saving cover for being pushed, ttbomk it’s still nothing more than speculation.

Presumably it would be pretty easy to have fired Tenet, made him a scape goat for Sept 11, and brought in some new blood to try to fix the CIA’s problems. That would certainly have had some benefits; who knows, it could have shaken things up enough that someone would’ve gotten an accurate idea of what was going in Iraq. Putting the blame for S11 on Tenet, appointed during Clinton’s term, might’ve been a politically astute way of making it look like the Democrats’ fault, too. On the other hand, it’d probably have made Tenet’s life pretty unpleasant, might’ve gulled the country into thinking that the intelligence failures would be amenable to a quick fix, and might’ve been disruptive enough to the CIA so as to make it even less effective. There’s also the issue of whether putting too much focus on blame encourages more CYA activity than is desirable.

It’s probably reasonable to relate this to Bush’s handling of Colin Powell and the State Department.

It’s an interesting question whether avoiding casting blame even when it’s warranted is actually a good idea or not.

(For reference, a better generalisation than the one Cheney presents is probably “You will never see him pointing the finger of blame for failure at people he works with”. The converse implication is worth considering: just because you don’t see him pointing the finger of blame at a colleague, doesn’t necessarily mean he doesn’t think that guy isn’t a complete screwup and isn’t doing something about it.)

Huh, David’s mad perl skills are pulling all the hot lawyer chicks. Awesome! (His anewed attractiveness presumably has nothing to do with his acquisition of a mobile phone over the weekend)

Though if he’s going all Napster over it and hoping to start off a “dot-id-au boom”, here’s hoping he thought to get a patent for it while he still could — it’s been public for over a year now…

I’ve been thinking of getting an iPod for quite a while, but hadn’t quite managed to get over the “$500 for a fancy-shmancy walkman?? pfft!” mental hurdle. However things came to a head recently — I’ve joined the local gym to try to get a bit fitter for skiing in a couple of weeks (Mmmm. Skiing. Sorry, can’t help it), and having some nice music to distract myself from the sweat and pain seems useful. Last time I went I ended up having to make up a song to keep my rhythym up while running on the treadmill. Its lyrics were “one, two, three, four” repeated for ten minutes straight, in time to my steps (or fifteen minutes or twenty hours or something, whatever). Obviously something had to be done.

With two iPod obsessed friends, and with the “I read it on the Internet, so of course I trust it implicitly” recommendation from some snowboarder chick who might be Japanese, I even got as far as giving my credit card details to Apple to order a pretty new 20GB clickwheel iPod. At that point I started looking up some Linux based mp3 encoders since my collections of oggs wasn’t going to be much use, and stumbled upon notlame (which installs a program called lame, which is a program for encoding mp3s, whose name stands for “lame ain’t an mp3 encoder”. wtf?), which has a FAQ for portable mp3 players. It makes the following recommendation:

Q: What is better: an iPod or a flash-based mp3 player ?

A: It completely depends on what you want to do with it: if you want something to listen to in the train, car, or at work, then the iPod or an iPod-clone is for you. On the other hand, if you want to go running, skiing, snowboarding, mountain biking (or other extreme sports …), it is better to get a player with no moving parts – much less likely to get broken (due to falling, running into trees, cold weather, etc).

And running and skiing are kinda what I want to do with this gizmo. Naturally this led me to reconsider what I was getting (with thanks to Apple’s wonderful and up-front policy of “no questions asked” cancellations within a few days of ordering). As it turns out, flash based mp3 players have reasonable battery life, and reasonable storage — you can’t store all your songs, but you can store, say, half-a-day’s playlist. And you can also run it off a AAA battery instead of having to recharge, and you can listen to FM radio on them. And they’re cheaper and smaller than the iPod mini, and they’re available without a four week wait.

As you might’ve figured by the this post’s title, I ended up getting an EFX Newgen5, which is apparently the same as the Hyundai Newgen5, which are both apparently rebranded Teravalue Newgen5. Well, as long as you don’t expect them to have gone to the actual trouble of rebranding the device. Whatever. Teravalue is Korean apparently. Neither Teravalue nor EFX seem to have downloadable drivers, which is a nuisance since they’re needed for it to work as a USB mass storage device in win98. Bleh. (Please ignore the hyperlink behind the curtain)

Apart from that, I’m pretty happy with it so far. I ended up with the 512MB model; mp3direct.com.au rang and said they were out of stock of the 256MB model I ordered, and suggested I get the bigger model (“smaller model? oh, yes, I suppose we have some of those too…”). It came with a necklace attachment (hook it into the ring on the back, loop it round your neck, and it’s light enough not to be a bother), it came with a little case with a belt clip, and it came with an armband that you can also clip the case to. I’m not convinced the armband’ll work terribly well, it seems both a little loose and possibly uncomfortable, but hey, we’ll see. And if not, it’ll hang around my neck well enough and won’t try depantsing me in public if I put it in my shorts’ pocket. So it should work for its intended purpose pretty well. (The 128MB model doesn’t come with the case and armband apparently, otherwise the three models only differ in memory size and colour afaict)

What else? It’s got a hold button, so you don’t accidently turn it on or off by bumping buttons. It’s got a funny proprietary USB connector on the device itself, so you have to use the supplied cable to connect it to a computer rather than just plugging it in. The headphones work, but jut out crazy-like — as though they’re a homage to Thor’s hammer or something. It records from an inbuilt microphone, from a line-in, or from the radio, which is cool, but probably useless. It can do shuffle play, I’m relieved to find; and you can even do playlists by putting mp3s in separate directories, by the looks, which seems to be better than a bunch of players manage. Ordering seems to be done by messing around with the FAT, though. Tacky, but apparently kinda standard for these things. As such, there’s a tool for it: ReOrganize, originally Windows freeware, with a Linux port these days. That link via the review of some noname mp3 player on Dan’s Data. And hey, you didn’t even have to sign up to get that link like you would’ve at Expert’s Exchange.

Oh, and its big feature is you can stick in an SD card, for either more mp3 storage, or just because you don’t have any other reader handy. The player’s only USB1, though, but when you’re not talking gigabytes, that’s not that big a deal. This didn’t work for me first go — it apparently makes both the internal flash and the card available over USB at once, and as such needs CONFIG_SCSI_MULTI_LUN enabled in the kernel; though the kernel config help seems to suggest is normally not worth doing for clueless newbies. D’oh.

There’re some lightweight reviews from Kelly Mills at the Australian and the Gadgets Weblog.

There’s a bunch of other mp3 players around too of course. The other one I was leaning towards was the “Pocki MP3” which comes in a couple of versions, with similar features, and a substantially lower price tag. I ended up not liking the shape (in particular worrying that it’d be a nuisance to take jogging or to the gym since it didn’t seem to do the necklace or armband thing) and not feeling terribly confident that it wouldn’t be flakey — the Newgen5 specifically mentions Linux support, and has had firmware updates, whereas the reviews on ebuyer.com seemed to indicate it’s occassionally flakey. And at least with the Newgen5 there’s an Australian company I can harangue. Probably futilely, but at least it’ll be futility in English!

And to finish, why not pretend I’m on Livejournal just this once?

Current music: Collider – Les Horribles Cernettes

Current mood: Indolent

(Oh, and to be complete: People are mean and make life suck! Except when they aren’t and it doesn’t!)

(Yeah, ‘sif I can finish a post in the time it takes for just one song to play: also listening to Emma’s Song – Sinead O’Connor, Innocent Eyes – Delta Goodrem, Love is Never Equal – Jill Sobule, and apparently the closest thing to testosterone in my playlist at the moment is Pass It Around by The Donnas… Hrm. Something must be done about this situation, too)

Motion

That the Committee recommend that the Senate agree to the Australia-US Free Trade Agreement Implementation Bill.

For: Senators Cook, Conroy, O’Brien, Brandis, Ferris, Boswell

Against: Senators Ridgeway, Harris

Summary of Senate inquiry into the FTA

Told you so.

me, right here, right now

Actually, I probably haven’t told you so, gentle reader (and the link above is to a subscribers only archive at that, so arguably I still haven’t), since I restricted my Cassandra-esque whining to the various folks still actively campaigning against the FTA. That’s a pretty bright collection of people, all of whom I respect pretty highly, so I don’t really like disagreeing with them, least of all when they’ve got more facts at hand than I do, and it’s on a subject I’m at least as clueless about as any of them.

But hey. Unlike the various negative takes on the FTA you’ll get from the sad sacks above, I think we (meaning either open source d00ds or Australians) have actually come out pretty well. This is probably a character flaw more than anything: if it comes to a choice between being an optimist and a realist, I’ll choose optimism, thanks. But before we get to that, let’s get the compulsory negativity out of the way to start with.

First, Australia didn’t have the upper hand in the bargaining. The US government (in general and the Bush administration in particular) are generally supportive of free trade, and want to give .au a kickback for the support in foreign policy, but that’s only enough leverage for us to get minor benefits; meanwhile the US economy’s huge and attractive, and the US alliance and free trade (and associated economic liberalisation) are pretty high priorities for the Howard government. It happens, and there’s probably nothing that could’ve been done about it, but hey, why can’t Australia be the world hyperpower for a change?

Second, the negotiators weren’t properly informed about IP issues, probably amongst others (negotiating a better deal on visa issues for business people comes to mind). The IP issues are difficult to be informed about as the CIE report probably demonstrates, but even basic measures like waiting for the Digital Agenda review to be finished and basing the FTA bargaining position on its conclusions weren’t taken. That’s not just ignoring proper democratic processes, it’s throwing away a bargaining chip. Heck, if the negotiations need to be wound up, get the guys doing the report to hurry up or issue an interim report, or something. IP is important; it mightn’t be the be-all and end-all of everything, but it needs more consideration than it was given by the negotiators. That’s been remedied by both committees reviewing the legislation, but that’s too late for useful, substantive changes to the agreement.

Anyway, that said, it’s not too late in general — after all, will we not fight ’til from our bones our flesh be hacked? Implementing the FTA doesn’t take us that far from our existing copyright regime — modchipping is already illegal (pending possible High Court review), open source DVD players are already presumably in violation of anti-circumvention measures if you import or distribute them (untested in courts), and there are all sorts of other inaninities like it being a copyright violation to forward email, or use your VCR to tape a TV program or your iPod to listen to mp3s of CDs you’ve bought (again none of these have been tested in court, ttbomk). Australia’s stance on patents doesn’t change much at all, we introduce a couple of new criminal provisions for copyright violations, we close a couple of loopholes related to circumvention devices, and we suffer potential pushback from the US if we change these things. All that’s pretty much a wash, afaics, we were in a bad state before, we’re in a slightly different bad state now, but we’re not going to be crushed by glaciers the moment this legislation passes.

So, with that out of the way, what’s the good news? First is that people are paying attention. That didn’t happen twelve months ago during the, now somewhat obsoleted, review of the Digital Agenda Act; it is happening now. That’s a major triumph: last year, the only people who were on top of copyright stuff in Australia were the corporate guys with their $20,000 per month Canberra lobbiests and plots to get an extra thirty million dollars per year out of the pockets of people buying blank CDs. If you aren’t playing the game — or don’t even know the rules — you’ve got no chance of winning; we weren’t then, we are now.

The most obvious way in which we’re winning is in the serious consideration of “fair use” rights. Last time this came up was in 1998, by the Copyright Law Review Committee, which at the time recommended we broaden (or augment) our fair dealing provisions along the lines of the US fair use provisions. That recommendation went nowhere. Now we’ve got support for fair use from the government, via the JSCT committee; and support for fair use from the opposition, via the Senate committee:

3.117 […] The Committee is of the view that the application of a broad, open-ended ‘fair use’ doctrine, similar to that in the United States, may resolve this long-standing legal anomaly in Australian copyright law and assist in legitimising several commonplace actions undertaken regularly by Australians perhaps unaware that they are infringing copyright.

(Copynorms is the word you’re looking for, guys)

Bipartisan support? Check. Topical issue? Check. Upcoming election? Check. If you’ve made it this far through the post, you’re obviously seriously interested in these issues, so write to your local member and indicate your interest in IP issues and that you hope that if re-elected he or she will be looking out for you. Or write to some of the challengers, or your senators, or all of them. There ain’t no time like the present. Well, unless you like the sound of being an “iPod outlaw”, of course.

Because hey, it’s not like the pigopolists aren’t acting, what with their lame ads, dodgy reports and unreasonable posturing:

3.113 The Australian Record Industry Association (ARIA) expressed strong opposition to the introduction of a US-style ‘fair use’ exemption and argued that, amongst other things, it would constitute ‘an unjustified abrogation of the rights of copyright owners’ and would ‘significantly increase enforcement difficulties’.

Doing open source circumvention devices (eg, playing region coded DVDs, whether coded for Australia or elsewhere, and viewing/printing “protected” PDFs) is a trickier issue. We’ve got lots of support for fair use: if the Liberals back off on their recommendations, Labor can take them to task for it, and vice-versa; but for anti-circumvention, we’ve got a lot of problems all of which have to be successfully tackled.

Problem number one is convincing DFAT to do anything about it. They don’t want to, and the recommendations from the committees about the issue aren’t really very strong: JSCT only talks about region coding, and afaics the Senate committee doesn’t make any specific recommendations at all. It’s not even clear that they can do anything about it; the FTA itself is ambiguous at best, so we’ve got to rely on the repeated assurances made before the two FTA committees. Keeping our representatives involved, and pressuring the department is a very necessary first step.

But that probably only gets us a process in place. The US has a process for seeking exemptions, and it alone doesn’t really do them that much got. So once we’ve got the process up and running, we have to actually use it, and probably iron out the inevitable bugs in any complicated first release system; and that’ll likely require actual work, rather than just writing letters and complaining. We’ll likely need some supportable estimates of the effect of not being able to play DVDs or read PDFs on Linux, ideally dollar figures, but anything numeric really.

Then, once we’ve gone through that process, we still need to make sure that the US doesn’t decide that Linux is evil, and try to make Australia stop being sensible. That means making sure we Linux hax0rs in Australia don’t look like pirates (or the semi-respectable political front for pirates), and, ideally that there continues to be some momentum behind things like the DMCRA in the US, so that both the US and Australia (and all the countries that end up with templatised FTA’s with the US) march in lock-step into the world of sensible copyright where candy and rainbows abound.

But hey, we can actually win on all that: the issue’s been raised before the relevant committees, and folks from all parties are giving the concerns some serious attention. That’s more than fair use managed when it was recommended by the CLRC — and it’s probably more than what we could’ve expected from the Digital Agenda review’s recommendations if the FTA hadn’t come along and made the appropriate folks sit down and pay attention to this issue.

Also interesting is some of the measures we’re getting on temporary reproductions. Gone are the weird provisions about “material form” and “in the course of a communication”, and no we can just make “incidental reproductions” pretty much whenever we feel like. Yay for not having to worry about getting copyright owners permissions everytime you want to use a cache, a proxy, swap, or a ram disk!

There are other issues, of course: takedown notices, criminal liability for copyright infringement, and the ever-worrying question of what to do about software patents. Someday we’re going to have to get rid of them entirely presumably, but geez, talk about daunting.

(Hey, if I’m not going to be writing release updates anymore, there’s got to be something long and tedious I can write about…)

One of my friends (whose heart’s still in San Francisco, and whose politics follow directly from that) recently asked if I actually hang with anyone who shares my conservative (right-wing? free-market? Austrian school?) political views. To some point I do, but aside from a backlink from the Gnu Hunter, pretty much all the folks I have anything to do with have a decidedly liberal bent. Which is fair enough, since, heck, I don’t score all that far right on most political tests anyway.

While googling for something unrelated, I stumbled upon an interesting page about consensus. One of the criticisms it raises goes like this:

Consensus decision-making can also lead to some pathological group dynamics. For example, people may be discouraged from expressing dissenting views out of concern that this would break consensus. This can lead to a situation known as groupthink in which each person in the group believes a strategy to be flawed, but no one is willing to express this idea because they are under the mistaken impression that everyone else in the group supports the strategy.

There’s a longer exposition on the same site about groupthink too, of course.

Reagan’s death happened while I was down in Canberra visiting friends and watching ski movies, so I missed the blogosphere’s reaction ’til I got back. There was lots of interesting tributes from various right-wing fanboy type blogs I read, and there was this gem from a guy I’ve known for years now, and whose blog I host on my server:

Ronald Reagan, noted liar and imperialist, that scourge of the Left and champion of military Keynesianism, kicks the bucket.

It’s not good to speak ill of the dead, but dying a drooling vegetable was better than he deserved. Too bad about the thousands dead and millions in poverty thanks to events he helped set in motion.

Joh Bjelke-Petersen, you’re next.

I’d like to have said “friend” instead of “guy” above, but since I happen to admire Ronald Reagan and, at least in some ways, think he set an example worth emulating, the above seems really close to a death threat. Or if not a threat per se, “I’d like to see your role models die disgustingly, painfully, but most of all soon” at least has to make you question either your choice in role models or your choice in acquaintances.

Well, fair enough, Ben’s a forthright kinda guy and often says things before thinking them through. Ranting‘s not a crime, and certainly not when you do it on your own damn blog. Another post I cam across when I got back from Canberra was this one, from Daniel Stone, via Planet Debian:

goddamnit, shut up

Doesn’t he ever shut up? Play School ‘foolish’: PM.

The ABC was foolish to introduce the issue of lesbian parents into the children’s program Play School, Prime Minister John Howard said today. […] ”This is an example of the ABC running an agenda in a children’s program. If people want to debate that issue, do it on a program like Lateline, but not on Play School. […] You’re talking about a very, very small number and to intrude that into a children’s program is just being politically correct and I think is an example of the ABC running an agenda.”

Good god. When I was a kid, my favourite presenter was — I forget her name, maybe Monique? — black. Not Asian or Aboriginal, but of African descent (via England, I believe). Now, Mr. Howard, what percentage of Australians are of African descent? The reality is that there are lesbian mothers out there, and there’s nothing wrong with it. Deal. The kids are coping just fine; I’m sure there won’t be an orgy in the MLC (all-girls school) prep room just because there was a story about a girl with two mums. Even if it did influence more girls to become lesbian or bisexual in the long term, so what? Should the ABC have never shown Monique because it might have made people stop planting burning crosses? Jesus.

I’ve been raised on being told that free speech is great, and that diversity of opinions is wonderful, and that tolerance for people who think or live differently from you is to be not merely encouraged, but expected and required. It comes as a bit of a shock to find that friends of mine don’t even think the Prime Minister of the country should be allowed to speak his mind if he holds views similar to mine.

(For what it’s worth, I think there are two differences between Trisha‘s performance on Play School and the “my two mums” incidence: one is that race issues really weren’t all that controversial in the 90’s in Australia — for better or worse, raising kids without a mother and a father still is; and the other is that race issues are reasonable ones for young children to be dealing with, sexuality issues really aren’t. Sure, sometimes life forces you to deal with things that’re difficult, but PlaySchool shouldn’t. YMMV, sure, whatever — but discussing these things is how you deal with them, not by saying “goddammit, shut up” to whoever disagrees)

Another post from Daniel a week later ends like so:

I was going to implore the Liberals to reconsider this, if they had a conscience, But then I realised the gutless bastards never had one.

So, as well as being a gutless bastard, I apparently don’t have a conscience either. The added gem there is that “gutless bastards”, “had” and “one” are links to other friends, pointing out, eg, that I’m clueless, unheedful, disgusting and undemocratic as well.

Ugh.

Peer pressure sucked enough in high school, it can damn well stay there, thanks all the same.

So, like I said, I need a new section for political rants, and this is it; it’s for polemics about politics and economics, hence poli-mics. Well, my mum thinks I’m funny anyway.

Let’s start how we’d like to finish, with some good ol’ Latham lovin’.

I’m inclined to think that I’ve worn out the “newly conservative” explanation for blogging under the “neo-con” tag, but I haven’t come upon a replacement yet, and I can’t resist commenting on this. The Senate Select Committee on the Free Trade Agreement has an interesting membership. It’s designed, depending on your level of cynicism, either to more accurately represent the membership in the senate, or to give the Labor MPs an excuse for doing what they want, independent of what the JSCT committee says (which is whatever the government says, as it has a simple majority from the coalition parties).

There are thus two Liberal senators, a National senator (ie, three government senators), three Labor senators, a Democrat senator, and… a One Nation senator.

The senate consists of 35 government senators (3 from the National party), 29 Labor senators, 7 Democrats, 2 independenants, 2 Greens, and three senators of miscellaneous parties, including One Nation. So if we were really looking to represent the senate, we’d be expecting at least as many Liberal senators as Labor senators; as many Green senators as One Nation senators, and as many Democrat senators as One Nation and National Party senators combined.

To get a view on what Len Harris, the One Nation Senator (from good ol’ Queensland!), thinks, you might like to review his press release from 10th February, entitled Is it free trade or legal rape and pillage?. Or maybe you can get a sense of the contents just from the title.

Since One Nation was never going to support the FTA, the Senate Committee would at best be equally split without Labor’s support for the FTA; given the Democrats have decided to oppose too, the Senate Committee will be concluding whatever Labor wants it to, either six to two in favour of the FTA, or five to three against. It’s a bit weird to see Labor acting as a balance of power instead of one of the minor parties; but it’ll be interesting to see if they end up getting any significant concessions for their eventual approval (presuming it’s forthcoming). OTOH, I do keep wondering if they’re just hoping they can delay having to commit to a stance on the FTA ’til after the election.

Anyway, my real point for posting was to note that it’s interesting that our One Nation iconoclast seems right at home with the various self-proclaimed progressives including the Greens, the Democrats, and the Labor left. Takes me back to this comment:

The strangest comment on Pauline Hanson’s insane three-year jail term came from ex-Democrats leader Natasha Stott-Despoja: “I was never a fan of Pauline Hanson’s politics but that should have nothing to do with a judgment in a case like this.” Never a fan? Natasha’s policies on trade and economics — protectionism! tariffs! don’t let foreigners steal Australian jobs! — are practically identical to Pauline’s. Like most Democrats, Stott-Despoja is a PhD: Pauline Hanson with a degree.

Ah, so entertaining.

From the conclusions to the JSCT FTA report:

18.6 The evidence received by the Committee can be divided into three groups: There were those who supported the Agreement and proposed that Australia ratify the AUSFTA; There were those who opposed the Agreement and proposed that Australia not ratify and then there was a third group who highlighted potential problems with particular Chapters without expressing an opinion on whether Australia should ratify.

18.7 Having determined that ratification is in Australia’s national interest, the approach the Committee has taken to address the concerns of this third group has been to make a number of recommendations which it believes are consistent with the spirit and text of the Agreement.

In other news, the two page “Dissenting Report” (which seconds all the recommendations of the main report except actual ratification, which it considers to still be premature) was only signed by the Labor party committee members; Senator Bartlett doesn’t seem to have taken the opportunity to explain or even note the Australian Democrats’ opposition. Odd.

On the upside: bipartisan political support for fair use and opposition to region coding!

At least the Joint Standing Committee on Treaties managed to spell my name right, unlike some. From their report on the Au/US FTA:

16.39 The arguments presented to the Committee centred around the balance between users and owners in the Copyright Act 1968, and the change in balance under the obligations in the AUSFTA. One submission noted

The primary balance provided by the United States to its citizens against strong IP rights is a broad exemption for ‘fair use’ of works…It has the benefit of coping far more flexibly with new technologies…⁴²

So Australians will hopefully soon get the right to legally tape shows for later viewing and to make mp3s of CDs they’ve bought. Who says bad treaties can’t be useful?

They also make a recommendation that at least partially defangs the anti-circumvention provisions; though it’s not entirely clear to what extent. As always, Kim Weatherall has more. There’s also an interim report from the Senate committee — which is really two reports one on why the FTA sucks, and another from the government senators rebutting that, and the initial round of implementing legislation (which has lots of IP stuff, but not the really interesting IP stuff).

The JSCT report notes that as far as IP is concerned, the agreement was drafted the way it has been “to ensure consistency with the US template approach to its free trade agreements.” So heads up to anyone who wants to avoid the DMCA and has a government that might consider negotiating with the US over better trade deals; you’re going to be going through the exact same stuff pretty soon. (Open source trade negotiations: don’t start from scratch, instead take our successes and build on them, and take our failures and fix them)

Thanks to Greg Black for prompting me to check up on what’s been happening on all this.

I haven’t been blogging much lately; and for some reason I feel obliged to note that for a change that this is neither a forthright demonstration of languid apathy, nor even an expected consequence of a surfeit of other things to do. Oh well, what we can’t manage in frequency or regularity, will presumably be made up for in quantity sooner or later.

This post is in honour of the Infinite Cat Project. Its lineage is me reading a post by Martin, who read a post by Seth, who read a post by Matthew Skala.

Matthew’s post basically attempts to provide a way of thinking about copyright violations, and more particularly about why computer scientists often don’t think much of copyright. He basically postulates that there’s an invisible “colour” associated with bits, and that where computer scientists get into trouble is trying to ignore that colour.

I don’t really think that view’s helpful: colours that you can’t actually see don’t make things easier to reason about; and while sometimes you have to come up with terms to describe things because there’s no more meaningful way to look at things, this isn’t one of those cases.

The main mistake is thinking that copyright is something about restricting what bits can exist; it’s not — it’s about restricting what you can do with bits. Fundamentally it’s about stopping you from making copies of bits, but sometimes it’s also about stopping you from looking at them in certain ways too. The only “colours” (which we might as well just call “attributes”) that a set of bits have as far as copyright is generally concerned is an “owner” (whoever bought them, or got given them), and a “copyright holder” (whoever created them originally, or whoever received the copyright title from that person).

Those attributes aren’t determined by the bits at all — if you sell your computer, then the owner of the software on it is changed without any of the bits that make up that software changing at all. And similarly, copies of the same set of bits, laid out in the same order with the same meaning, can be owned by a whole range of different people simultaneously — and the fact that I might own a copy of something doesn’t mean that I can steal, change, or even use your copy, even if I could do all of those things with my copy. The “copyright holder” attribute is similar — it can be changed just by signing some papers, none of the actual bits have to be flipped at all.

Another thing computer scientists will try to do is to treat Colour as a function (in the strict mathematical sense of “function”) of the bits — maybe an uncomputable function (in the strict mathematical sense of “uncomputable”), maybe intractable, but a function nevertheless. We either do that because we mistakenly believe that Colour really is a function, or because we’re a little more sophisticated, we know that it’s not a function, but we think that we can fake it closely enough with a function to get the lawyers off our backs. Either way, the idea is that we should be able to look at bits and somehow determine, from the bits themselves, what Colour they ought to be.

Functions, in the mathematical sense, are pretty general things — they’re just a way of saying that given a particular question (like “Am I allowed to do this?”), and an appropriate amount of information and context, there’s a single, definite, answer. In mathematics, this is usually written like q(I) = A, that is given the necessary information about the situation, I, the answer to the question, q, is always A. If the question is “What is the sum of these two numbers”, then the information you need takes the form of “The two numbers are __ and __”. If you don’t have that information (or something essentially equivalent), you don’t have a function — if you’re only told one of the numbers, then you can’t give a single answer, eg, since the sum of “1” and “some other number” can still be anything. If you’ve got more than that information (“the numbers are 3 and 4, and James Gleick writes cool books”), you do have a function, but you’re being redundant, which is frowned upon.

So what does that mean? Fundamentally, it means that “colour”, that is the copyright status, isn’t a function of the bits themselves — it’s a function of how the bits were obtained, and of the legal agreements signed by the copyright holder. But that’s not the end of the story — there’s a reason why computer scientists try to make copyright status a function of bits, and that reason isn’t because they’re stupid, and it isn’t because they’re trying to come up with an excuse to ignore copyright (well, that’s not the reason in all cases anyway).

The ultimate reason is that we want to be able to enforce copyright in software rather than in courts — both because software’s a lot cheaper and more efficient, and because potentially it’s a lot more effective. The RIAA gets a lot of flack about suing kids for copyright violations, and they’d love it if they could just stop the kids from violating copyright in the first place so they didn’t have to worry about enforcing their rights in the traditional way. But fundamentally, software, whether it’s trying to enforce copyright or do anything else, only gets to look at the bits, and can only come up with one answer, so a function is exactly what’s needed.

But, as we’ve established, that’s simply not possible to do accurately, and doing it inaccurately screws up the copyright balance by definition — either the copyright holders get screwed, the users get screwed, or both.

It’s not irrecoverable though — there’s no reason why you can’t just provide the software with all the information it actually needs: working out who the current copyright holder is could be made as easy as querying the Library of Congress’s website, or some similar body, governmental or private as appropriate. As long as you have the information your function actually needs, determining the copyright status of some bits is straightforward.

What’s not straightforward is going to the next step and actually preventing copyright infringement. The above lets you inform the user that they can or can’t copy (or otherwise use) whatever they’re looking at, but it doesn’t actually prevent them from doing it, which is a whole other matter.

The computer science applications of Colour seem to be mostly specific to security. Suppose your computer is infected with a worm or virus. You want to disinfect it. What do you do? You boot it up from original write-protected install media. Sure, you have a copy of the operating system on the drive already, but you can’t use that copy – it’s the wrong Colour. Then you go through a process of replacing files, maybe examining files, swapping disks around and carefully write-protecting them; throughout, you’re maintaining information on the Colour of each part of the system and each disk until you’ve isolated the questionable files and everything else is known to be the “not infected with virus” Colour.

This is a different sort of “colour” — whether you can trust software, which is to say, whether it does what you expect it to, or how much unexpected damage it’s likely to do, is purely a function of the bits (well, and your expectations). The problem is it’s not one you can usually (or efficiently) work out from the bits — who wants to pore over a print out of 1’s and 0’s that goes on for thousands of pages, anyway? It’s similar only in the outcome: when we want to work out the correct answer, we don’t look at the bits, we look at other information. But that’s not as strong a case as we can make for copyright: in establishing trust, we could look at the bits, but it’s easier to look elsewhere. For establishing copyright software we have to look elsewhere.

Compare this with another sort of activity courts look at. Murder’s a crime which should be punished. But we don’t punish possession of a bloody knife — after all, that could just indicate you cut yourself peeling a potato and haven’t yet rinsed it. It’s not the results of a murder that indicate punishment’s warranted: not the bloody knife, not the body, not even the confession — it’s the act of murder itself that requires punishment, and the rest are just evidence that indicates the act did (or didn’t) actually happen.

The same’s the case for copyright violations: it’s the act that’s the problem, not the end product; but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t look at the end product as (possible) evidence of an infringing act being committed.

UPDATE 2004/06/24:

Oh, I suppose I may as well note it before someone else does. Advantage: Inchoate.

I made my first post to this blog a year ago yesterday. I think it’s pretty appropriate to have commemorated such a momentous anniversary by not blogging at all yesterday.

Pick the prominant third-way thinker who said this:

America rejects the ethic of sink or swim. America rejects social Darwinism, because strength is not the same as worth. Our greatest failures as a nation have come when we lost sight of our compassionate ideals — in slavery, in segregation, and in every wrong that has denied the value and dignity of life. Our greatest strength as a nation is that we bravely face our flaws and do our best to make things right. Our greatest successes as a nation have come when we broadened the circle of protection and inclusion. And this work is not finished. We will press on until every person shares in the promise of our country.