Let's not forget that the reason developing countries can't cheaply manufacture their own AIDS medication is that the TRIPS agreement, which Gates was a major back of, requires them to respect the patents of the richest countries.
In the EU, it has to be approved by the Council of Ministers and the European Parliament.
I'm not sure if there's any diagram that would make things clearer. Diagrams present formalities that mask the political reality of the decision making process.
Remember when software patents were put on the agenda of the fisheries committee? Procedures include flexibility...
Blocking ACTA isn't about spotting something on a map, it's about talking to our representatives and saying "We don't want this". (Council of Ministers is made up of the relevant ministers from the national governments, and the European Parliament is made up of our MEPs).
Almost all applications for an ITC import ban are rejected:
http://en.swpat.org/wiki/United_States_International_Trade_Commission
But that's not the point. For a number of weeks or months, there's a cloud hanging over the target company and investors don't know if a device will ever be on sale in the USA. It's serious FUD, for free.
An actual import ban would just be monopolist icing on the FUD cake.
read the linked article.
He says that using services to access big stores of data (as search engines do) is a legitimate reason to use these APIs.
It's worth a read. Go on.
It's an API. Tacking "Open" onto doesn't change the fact that it's just an interface to a black box.
As Stallman's been saying for the last few years, having software freedom is about having control over your computing, and that requires that your computing is done on *your* computer:
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-serve.html
This is a topic for tonight's monthly meeting of Irish Free Software Organisation:
http://mail.fsfeurope.org/pipermail/fsfe-ie/2011-December/003005.html
Other mail starting the discussion:
http://mail.fsfeurope.org/pipermail/fsfe-ie/2011-December/003006.html
> If we block all advertising that isn't self hosted, we'll get
> server-side systems that automatically copy adds from advertisers
> servers and then share tracking info back to the advertiser.
But the site I choose to visit would be a layer between my data and the harvester.
That changes everything because, not only could they decide to not pass on the data or to scramble identifying elements before passing it on, but they would also share responsibility - which means they would be answerable to questions about what is being collected, and could be criticised for nasty policies.
Adblock would continue to work. It'd just need regex's (which I think it already uses).
I'm not 100% anti-advertising, but the privacy issue is deeper than just being on a "Do not track" list.
If the ad is served from a host controlled by the advertiser, then they have my IP address, the date and time, the number of times I saw the ad, and (by the "referer" header) what page(s) I was viewing when I saw the ad.
For me, "acceptable" ads are those served by servers which I've opted into correspond with, either by typing into the address bar or by clicking a link.
From the point of view of technological progress, proposing the use of 20-year old technology is shameful, but it really is the only solution. (until software patents get abolished)
This was also suggested by Nokia during the html5 standard discussion of the video tag:
http://en.swpat.org/wiki/Use_software_and_functionality_from_20_years_ago
And remember, this problem is caused not by trolls but by the MPEG-LA signatories: Columbia University, Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute of Korea (ETRI), France Télécom, Fujitsu, LG Electronics, Matsushita (Panasonic), Mitsubishi, Microsoft, Motorola, Nokia, Philips, Robert Bosch GmbH, Samsung, Sharp, Sony, Toshiba, and Victor Company of Japan (JVC).
It has to be remembered that IBM is one of the biggest pro-software-patent lobby groups in the world.
In the US Bilski case, they submitted a brief saying that free software needed software patents!
http://en.swpat.org/wiki/Fake_representatives_of_free_software#IBM
I saw them personally in the EU lobbying from 2003-2005 where they pushed with all their might for software patents.
And then recently, when New Zealand announced it would legislate to clarify that software *isn't* patentable, who stepped in to kneel on the government? IBM (with MS).
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/10/06/23/0235248/new-zealand-u-turns-will-grant-software-patents
So, yeh, I'd be happy if all patent trolls disappeared tomorrow, but trolls aren't even the biggest problem, and the existence of the whole problem is in a large part due to IBM.
* http://en.swpat.org/wiki/More_than_trolls
* http://en.swpat.org/wiki/IBM
They've asked for a DMCA exception for:
Computer programs that enable the installation and execution of lawfully obtained software on a personal computing device, where circumvention is performed by or at the request of the device's owner.
So, for any device you buy, you can install GNU/Linux, or Rockbox, or OpenWRT, or Sugar, OpenMoko, etc.
Their argument is based on recognising the value of the jailbreak-exemption which was granted in 2009, and saying that SFLC's suggested exemtion is what's needed in 2012 and beyond to achieve that same sort of goal.
There's no dense legalese in the document. It's a readable set of arguments with numbers and examples to back them up.
SFLC's request would be a bigger win. Here's their submission:
https://www.softwarefreedom.org/resources/2011/SFLC-proposed-DMCA-exemption.pdf
And their press release gives an introduction:
http://softwarefreedom.org/news/2011/dec/02/proposed-dmca-exemption/
Regardless of what the issue at hand is, the ECJ's legal advisor has said that being able to monopolise software ideas is "to the detriment of technological progress and industrial development".
As an anti-software-patent campaigner, I see great news.
I downloaded the source for Kindle_src_3.3_611680021.tar.gz (randomly picked).
The contents of their tarball is the below list of files. Which of these sub-tarballs contains the Amazon reader and interface software? Or are they just releasing the bare minimum required by the GPL and keeping their stuff proprietary? Can Kindle owners blank their devices and use the published tarball to restore all functionality?
Put another way: is there a contribution here, or are they just doing what's necessary to avoid getting sued?
The US-ITC rejects almost all such requests, so this is no surprise and doesn't necessarily mean the case has collapsed.
Some patent holders surely use these procedures just to smear product developers and scare investors - in the hope of a easy cash settlement.
More about the ITC:
http://en.swpat.org/wiki/United_States_International_Trade_Commission
Intel CPUs are not defective, they just act that way. -- Henry Spencer
