Tag Archives: WIPO

Content Management Systems, course management systems, eLearning, freedom, innovation, Moodle, Open Source Movement, software development

Legal Sense: CMS Edition

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This one is even more exciting than the SecondLife statement.

After the announcement that the USPTO was reexamining its patents in a case against open source course management software, Blackboard incorporated is announcing that it is specifically not going to use its patents to sue open source and other non-commercial providers of course management software.

From a message sent to users of Blackboard’s products and relayed by the Moodle community.

I am writing to share some exciting news about a patent pledge Blackboard is making today to the open source and home-grown course management community.  We are announcing a legally-binding, irrevocable, world-wide pledge not to assert any of our issued or pending patents related to course management systems or transaction systems against the use, development or support of any open source or home-grown course management systems.

This is a major victory. Not only for developers of Moodle, Sakai, ATutor, Elgg, and Bodington course- and content-management solutions, but for anyone involved in the open and free-as-in-speech approach to education, research, technology, and law.

Even more so than in Microsoft’s case, Blackboard is making the most logical decision it could make. Makes perfect business sense: they’re generating goodwill, encouraging the world’s leading eLearning communities, and putting themselves in a Google-like “do no evil” position in the general public’s opinion. Also makes perfect legal sense as they’re acknowledging that the law is really there to protect them against misappropriation of their ideas by commercial competitors and not to crush innovation.

A small step for a corporation … a giant step for freedomkind.

cluefulness, friendship, humour, respect, Spoofs

Legal Sense

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Not only does it titillate my humour-friendly fibers but the encouraging letter allegedly sent by SecondLife.com to the creator of the Get a First Life parody displays what is, to me (IANAL), perfect legal sense.

Frivolous lawsuits and cease-and-desist letters are detrimental to the overall legal system involved in content creation (especially in the U.S. but also in other regions where the lobby groups such as WIPO are prominent). By showing that they apparently don’t intend to threaten a parody site, SecondLife’s lawyers show more than humour and common sense. They show an appreciation for the positive side of legality.

More power to us!

Apple, Blogger (Blogspot), cellphones, DRM, Facebook, Google, iPod, Moodle, predictions, smartphones, Web 2.0, WordPress, YouTube

Web 2.1 or Internet 7.0?

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Speaking of Web technologies getting together to create tomorrow’s Web. It’s all about puzzles.

It’s really not that hard to visualize the completed picture of a Web 2.1 puzzle merging most of the advantages from the main Web 2.0 players: Facebook meets YouTube, Wikipedia meets WordPress, PodShow meets Digg, Flickr meets SecondLife… Smaller players like Moodle and GarageBand are likely to have a huge impact in the long run, but the first steps have more to do with the biggest pieces of the puzzle.

In fact, if I were to take a bet on the near future of the user-driven Web, I’d say Google is the one institution with most of the important pieces of the puzzle. Google owns YouTube, JotSpot, MeasureMap, Writely, SketchUp, Blogger, etc. They have also developed important services and features like Gmail and Google Maps. In many ways, their management seems clueful enough. Their “do no evil” stance has helped them maintain much of the goodwill toward them on the part of geeks. They understand the value of the Web. And they have a fair amount of money on hand.

Because of all of this, Google is, IMHO, the most likely group to solve the puzzle of redesigning the Web. To pull it off, though, they might need to get their act together in terms of organizing their different services and features.

On the other hand, there’s an off-Web puzzle that might be more important. Internet 7.0 needs not be Web 3.0 and the Web may become less important in terms of digital life. Though I don’t own a cell phone myself, a lot of people are surely betting on cell phones for the future of digital life. AFAIK, there are more cell phone users than Internet users in the world and cell phones generate quite a bit of revenue to a lot of people. The connection between cell phones and the Net goes beyond moblogging, VoIP, IM, and music downloads. It’s not hard to envision a setup combining the advantages of a smartphone (à la Tréo or Blackberry) with those of a media device like the Apple iPod, Creative Zen, or Microsoft Zune. Sure, there’s the matter of the form factor difference between smartphones and portable media players. But the device could easily have two parts. The important thing here is not to have a single device doing everything but having a way to integrate all of these features together, without the use of a laptop or desktop computer.

There are other pieces to that second puzzle: MVNOs, voice navigation, flash memory, portable games, Linux, P2P, mesh networks, media outlets, DRM-freedom, etc. And it’s difficult to tell who has the most of those pieces. Sony would be a good bet but they have messed up on too many occasions recently to be trusted with such a thing as a digital life vision. Apple fans like myself would hope that the computer company has a good chance at shaking things up with its rumored phone, but it’s hard to tell if they are willing to listen to consumers instead of WIPO member corporations.

It’s also difficult to predict which scenario is likely to happen first, if both scenarios will merge, if we will instead see a Web 2.0 burst, etc.

Puzzling.

adaptation, art, creativity, freedom, innovation, intellectual property, music, opinions, public domain, ramblings, rants

World Intellectual Property Exploitation Organization Ultimately Threatened (WIPEOUT)

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I do hope they realize it. The infamous, and famously exploitative, lobby group for “intellectual property” is ultimately going to lose.

Signs of their ultimate demise abound in the actions of both the RIAA and the MPAA (as well as equivalent lobby groups in other North America and Europe). These people just don’t get it.

Been laughing out loud at some comments about the recent debate over the alleged benefits of extending British copyright for performing artists over the fifty years that anyone in their right mind would think is fair. Even some musicians are revealing the lack of breadth in their argument: they just want to be able to live off the money from their recordings from the late 1950s and early 1960s. That would stimulate innovation how, exactly? The fact that it took these people that long to realize that copyrights are meant to be temporary is preciously funny. “Oh, wait! I thought I was supposed to keep my monopoly over these recordings forever.”

Also funny is the stance of Apple Corps. and the remaining Beatles over what should be done with their music. Their first recordings will come out of copyright in the UK (and several other places) in a few years. Instead of taking advantage of the situation by making sure that the last people who by their music get added value, they prevent online music stores from selling their tracks and release a set of anachronistic remixes. Weird.

Been thinking for a while about a type of “two cultures” theory. What Larry Lessig calls “Free Culture” on one side and “Commerical Culture” on the other. The meaning of “culture” used in those cases can be relatively close to anthropological concepts, though it’s also about “creative culture,” including arts and entertainments. In the U.S. of A., Lessig’s primary target, “free culture” seems to be under attack. Elsewhere, it florishes. In any way we think about it, “free culture” is more beneficial for the greater group than a “closed culture,” whether it’s based on commercial value, on jealousy, or both. If we think competitively, there is little doubt in my head that “free culture” will eventually win and that U.S. “commercial culture” (or “permission culture,” as Lessig calls it) will collapse, bringing down a large part of U.S. society.

That is, unless some people finally wake up.

advocacy, content, Digital Life, hegemony, intellectual property, open-source, product and process, productivity, software development

Microsoft Disinforms on Open-Source and Free-Software

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Can Windows and Linux Learn to Play Nice?:

A commercial company has to build intellectual property, while the GPL, by its very nature, does not allow intellectual property to be built, making the two approaches fundamentally incompatible, Muglia said.

Interesting take on “intellectual property.’ Would benefit from a bit more of an explanation. Is “IP” the very foundation of any commercial company?
What's more awkward, though, is that Microsoft veep Bob Muglia talks about the GPL in the context of open-source. As he surely knows, this is exactly where the terms “open-source” and “free software” are not interchangeable. While the two are quite similar, “free software” refers to a movement in favour of free (as in speech) or “libre” development in direct opposition to the notion of “intellectual property.” “Open-source,” on the other hand, refers to a development process through which source code for software is shared by multiple developers in an open fashion, whether or not that code is meant to be protected as “intellectual property.” In fact, many open-source projects are not only interoperable with commercial software but do in fact have commercial licenses through which they protect their IP. Whichever model we prefer, free or open, they're models of very different things. The two models are quite compatible in practice. They are both used in resistance to Microsoft's hegemony. But confounding them serves little purpose in the discussion. It might not be a strategy on Muglia's part to confuse the two issues. Interestingly enough, the “free software” vs. “open source” issue wasn't even the main thrust of the Slashdot thread on the subject, at least in the beginning.

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