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Deutsch: Danke SOPA, danke ACTA
The digital rights world can be grateful that the intellectual property lobby employs too many lobbyists and too few strategists. Lobbyists are salespeople, the sell potential clients or employers amazing things, international agreements, Directives, the ability to stop time and enjoy old business models with no need for innovation or creativity, they sell smoke and mirrors. It was this approach that led to the proposal of SOPA in the United States and ACTA in Europe and beyond. It is this short-sightedness that has helped inspire the massive digital rights movement that brought untold thousands of citizens onto the streets of Europe on the cold February day that will be seen, we hope, as the day that helped preserve our digital heritage.
From the European content industry, ACTA was all cost and no potential benefit. However, as always, it was dragged along by multinational, mainly US lobbies that promise the world but could never deliver. The component parts of ACTA were coming, the content industry just needed to stay silent and wait. The European Commission was about to launch a criminal sanctions Directive. The EU was planning to review the profoundly broken IPR Enforcement Directive (IPRED), which many rightsholders were targeting as a means of further strengthening European repressive policies in the internet environment. There was no sign of the Commission strengthening data protection legislation to prevent abuse of personal data by intermediaries carrying out arbitrary policing of their networks. The Commission had a whole queue of privatised enforcement measures in the style of ACTA's Article 27.3 either already in place or planned. All that the European copyright industry needed was to avoid public attention for these plans. And then came ACTA.
Thanks to SOPA, European citizens better understood the dangers of ACTA. Thanks to the anti-ACTA campaign, it would be politically crazy for the Commission to launch the criminal sanctions Directive. Thanks to ACTA, there is broad understanding in the European Parliament of just how bad IPRED really is and any review now, if the Commission has the courage to re-open it, is more likely to improve the Directive rather than increase its repressive measures. Home Affairs Commissioner Cecilia Malmström reportedly demanded an improvement of the ePrivacy Directive to avoid data retention by Member States.
One by one, the Commission's “self-regulation” projects have failed, with the Commission now relying on terrorism and child protection as a means of pushing privatised enforcement. Even here they are in trouble, as the Commission-funded CleanIT project is becoming more effective as a case study in incompetence than as a tool for fighting terrorism.
And it is not only in specific policy proposals that ACTA has had an effect. The Commission President, Manuel Barroso was reportedly furious (and justifiably so), not just that ACTA has made the Commission look so out of touch, undemocratic and hamfisted, but that Commissioner De Gucht's services were so drunk on their own importance that they were not able to warn of the impending storm. Digital rights, as a political issue, has moved from the periphery to the centre of the concerns of European policy makers.
Like all overnight successes, it has taken years of work. From the software patents campaign, to data retention, to Amendment 138, activists with vision, energy and commitment have spent years hoping when there was no sane reason to hope, fighting where the prospect of winning seemed absurd and working when the work seemed pointless.
ACTA is not the end. ACTA is the beginning.
Thank you ACTA. Thank you activists. And thank you pro-ACTA lobbyists, without you, none of this would have been possible.
CleanIT
http://www.cleanitproject.eu
Malmström interview: "We were very patient with Germany" (only in
German, 3.07.2012)
http://www.faz.net/aktuell/politik/europaeische-union/euinnenkommissar...
EDRi-member Digitale Gesellschaft: How-To build an Anti-ACTA-Campaign
https://digitalegesellschaft.de/2012/06/how-to-build-an-anti-acta-camp...
(Contribution by Joe McNamee - EDRi)
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Deutsch: EuGH verurteilt Microsoft zu 860 Millionen Euro Strafe
The European Court of Justice (ECJ) has rejected Microsoft’s appeal against the European Commission’s decision of 2008 to fine the company for not having shared interoperability information to its competitors, in a long case first brought by the European Commission's competition watchdog in 1998.
A record fine of 899 million Euro was given by the European Commission in 2008, which decided that, by the end of 2007, Microsoft had not fulfilled its obligations under the "Reasonable And Non Discriminatory (RAND)" conditions which had been imposed to the company. "The General Court essentially upholds the commission’s decision imposing a periodic penalty payment on Microsoft for failing to allow its competitors access to interoperability information on reasonable terms," was the court statement.
Microsoft had refused to reveal their changes in the public protocols under the excuse of patents. The company claimed that, as the information contained in the release was covered by patents and therefore innovative, the company was in its right to charge its competitors for access to this information. The court ruled that Microsoft’s argument was wrong as there was no need for a license.
Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) and the Samba Team, which has also intervened in the case, denied that the information provided by Microsoft was innovative. "Microsoft in practice continued to refuse Free Software developers all access to the interoperability information, which was not something that the letter recognised it could legitimately do," was the court’s decision.
"We have successfully asserted the rights of Free Software developers like the Samba Team to access interoperability information, but Microsoft refused our legitimate demands until the very end. Today's decision establishes that we were right once again. Receiving the interoperability information was our right, not a concession by Microsoft”, said Carlo Piana, General Counsel for FSFE.
The court however reduced the fine from 899 million Euro to 860 million Euro because, in 2005, the European Commission accepted in a letter that Microsoft could restrict the distribution of open source products until the Court's judgement in September 2007. As FSFE notices, large companies such as Microsoft, Apple or Google are still trying to keep the market under control, by abusing patents in order to limit the sales of products and therefore, preserve their market shares.
Joaquin Almunia, the EC's competition commissioner, said in February 2012 that the Commission would “continue to keep a close eye on the behaviour of all market players in the sector, particularly the increasingly strategic use of patents."
Press Release – General Court of the European Union no.89/12 (27.06.2012)
http://curia.europa.eu/jcms/jcms/P_88952/
Record fine against Microsoft upheld by European Court of Justice
(27.06.2012)
http://fsfe.org/news/2012/news-20120627-01.en.html
Microsoft loses appeal against EU antitrust smackdown – Court upholds
fine, but knocks it down to €860m (27.06.2012)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/06/27/microsoft_loses_antitrust_appe...
Microsoft loses EU antitrust fine appeal (27.06.2012)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/jun/27/microsoft-loses-eu-an...
EDRi-gram: Microsoft appeals the EC fine but faces even more complaints
(21.05.2008)
http://www.edri.org/edrigram/number6.10/microsoft-ec-fine
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Deutsch: Do Not Track: Standpunkt der Europäischen Kommission
The European Commission also got engaged in the discussions on the Do Not Track (DNT) at the Worldwide Web Consortium (W3C) by sending a letter asking W3C to require browser makers to give DNT options to users when they first install or run a browser, and allow them to change the default.
DNT is a standard mechanism that would signal whether a user wants online advertisers and websites to track his/her online activities. "The standard should foresee that at the install or first use of the browser the owner should be informed of the importance of their DNT choice, told of the default setting and prompted or allowed to change that setting," says in the letter Robert Madelin, head of the European Commission Information Society and Media Directorate-General.
Microsoft announced on 31 May 2012 that Internet Explorer 10 (IE10) would have DNT on, by default. However, W3C’s position is opposite to that of Microsoft. In a draft of the standard published after Microsoft's announcement, W3C stated that users should be able to express their preference, and that a browser producer could not do that for them - an idea backed-up by Firefox.
The Commission does not seem to be bothered by the DNT on-by-default. "It is not the Commission's understanding that user agents' factory or default setting necessarily determine or distort owner choice," said Madelin. Privacy advocates also tend to agree with DNT by default which, in their opinion, should not be imposed by the editor on the user, but rather let at the user’s choice. The EC is mainly interested in the education of the users considering that the issue of DNT by default or not is not the main issue but that of providing clear information on DNT.
Last week, DNT was also on the public debate in USA, where the US Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation held a hearing entitled “The Need for Privacy Protections: Is Self-Regulation Adequate?”.
Everybody seems to agree on one thing – DNT is necessary and has to be implemented as soon as possible.
Tracking Preference Expression (DNT) - W3C Working Draft (13.03.2012)
http://www.w3.org/TR/tracking-dnt/
Letter of European Commission Information Society and Media Directorate-
General to the Worldwide Web Consortium Tracking Protection Working
Group (21.06.2012)
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-tracking/2012Jun/att-0604/L...
Do Not Track: the European Commission rather in line with Microsoft
(only in French, 25.06.2012)
http://www.zdnet.fr/actualites/do-not-track-la-commission-europeenne-p...
Europe officials want all browsers to prompt users to set their privacy
choice (25.06.2012)
http://www.computerworlduk.com/news/applications/3366125/eu-regulators...
Do Not Track: the adjustment by default is not at stake for Brussels
(only in French, 26.06.2012)
http://www.numerama.com/magazine/22998-do-not-track-le-reglage-par-def...
Report from the US meeting at the Senate Committee on Commerce,
Science and Transportation (29.06.2012)
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-tracking/2012Jun/0692.html
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Deutsch: Britisches Schnüffelgesetz könnte Standpunkt der EU-Kommission wider...
The plans of the UK government of increasing the police online surveillance powers under the draft Communications Data Bill (CDB), also known as the “Snoopers’ Chart”, might come into contradiction with the European Commission’s position on citizens’ rights.
If approved, CDB will place innocent citizens under continuous surveillance having all their communications and online activity monitored, all of the time. The government would store information about who’s messaging whom, who’s a friend to whom on the Internet or what people are searching for on search engines. Police and HM Revenue and Customs officers would have the power to access this information without a judicial warrant.
According to the information appeared in mass-media, the Home Office had a meeting with the largest electronic communications providers in UK that included discussions on the hardware which companies will have to use to monitor traffic flowing through their systems.
Things get more complicated with the design of the system to identify and store traffic data from the webmail services. Thus, the ISPs might have "to route the data via a government-approved 'black box' which will decrypt the message, separate the content from the 'header data', and pass the latter back to the ISP for storage."
When asked about the UK Communications Data Act on the occasion of the Digital Enlightenment Forum in Luxembourg on 25 June, the European Commission vice-president Viviane Reding, who in January 2012 proposed the overhaul of the data protection law in the 27 EU member-states, made reference to the Treaty of Lisbon that had to be observed by all the states. She also pointed out there had to be a balance between the rights and the obligations of the state: “one is to preserve the rights of the individual and the other one is to preserve the rights of the society. This is a balancing act; you cannot make them clash.”
Reding added that the proposed Data Protection Directive, now under discussion in the European Parliament, had some flexibility for the sake of national security against terrorists and organised crime. "But there is no way that in those policies the rights of individuals are eliminated," she however added.
The significant impact of the CDB on human rights was underlined also by Dr. Paul Bernal in a submission sent to the Joint Committee on Human Rights (JCHR). He concluded that even the "premise of the Communications Data Bill is fundamentally flawed. By the very design, innocent people’s data will be gathered (and hence become vulnerable) and their activities will be monitored. Universal data gathering or monitoring is almost certain to be disproportionate at best, highly counterproductive at worst."
Brussels could 'clash' with London over UK snooper's charter - 'Maybe
not everyone understands the Treaty of Lisbon' (26.06.2012)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/06/19/viviane_reding_on_uk_communica...
How will the Communications Data Bill affect you? (21.06.2012)
https://www.privacyinternational.org/blog/how-will-the-communications-...
'Black boxes' to monitor all internet and phone data (29.06.2012)
http://www.channel4.com/news/black-boxes-to-monitor-all-internet-and-p...
The snoopers charter (26.06.2012)
http://paulbernal.wordpress.com/2012/06/26/the-snoopers-charter/
EDRi-gram: Concerns over the proposed Communication Bill in UK (23.05.2012)
http://www.edri.org/edrigram/number10.10/draft-communications-bill-uk
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Deutsch: Frankreich: Probleme mit dem E-Voting
During the French 2012 parliamentary elections, the citizens that were not in the country had the possibility to vote online. However, the transparency of the procedure was far from the desired one.
While, according to the law, the delegates of the candidates can check the electronic vote operations, the Pirate Party delegates could not verify the source code of a virtual urn monitored by a private company. With the exception of a candidate from the Left Front, the other parties have not even asked to check the electronic voting process meant for 700 000 voters.
At the end of the election exercise and the closure of the virtual urn, the delegates of the Pirate Party have found significant security faults. The generation of the electronic keys allowing the opening of the urn was done by means of unwarranted information tools. In some cases, the keys which were supposed to be unique could be duplicated by any person with access to the computer on which the keys were generated. Therefore, the Pirate Party delegates have asked to have access to the source code of the e-voting software but they were refused.“We have witnessed a ceremony staged to give the impression of security and to put the officials at rest, while there is a total opacity of the key points”, said Philippe Blanc, one of the delegates.
The French Pirate Party has also submitted a complaint to the Constitutional Court asking the annulment of the electronic vote made by the abroad French citizens due to the problems encountered in the e-voting process, its transparency, lack of security and its possible biased results.
On 21 June 2012, Numerama revealed an internal document issued by Atos Worldline and Scytl, the two companies chosen by the government to create the software solution and host the electronic voting, detailing the security measures for the election scrutiny. The document was showing that certain measures required by the Minister of Foreign Affairs and ANSSI (l'Agence Nationale de Sécurité des Systèmes d'Information) had not been foreseen by Atos.
Atos has required right away Numerama to delete the article, threatening with a lawsuit, but with this action the document just got more publicity then expected, with its copies already available on various servers on the Internet.
The Party Pirate lacking the right to check the scrutiny for 700 000
voters (only in French, 21.05.2012)
http://www.numerama.com/magazine/22666-le-parti-pirate-prive-du-droit-...
The Pirate Party demands the annulment of the Internet vote (only in
French, 28.06.2012)
http://legislatives.partipirate.org/2012/2012/06/28/le-parti-pirate-de...
ATOS requires Numerama to suppress its document on electronic voting
(only in French, 22.06.2012)
http://www.numerama.com/magazine/22972-atos-met-en-demeure-numerama-de...
Atos or the unavoidable Streisand effect of the censure (only in French,
25.06.2012)
http://www.numerama.com/magazine/22975-atos-ou-l-inevitable-effet-stre...
Document from Atos trying to be blocked (only in French)
http://www.scribd.com/doc/97947909/Atos
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Deutsch: Britische Regierung plant automatisierte Netzfilter für Erwachsenenan...
The UK officials intend to force Internet users to filter out pornography websites starting with the setting out of their accounts.
"I want to fully explore every option that might help make children safer - including whether internet filters should be switched on as the default, so that adult content is blocked unless you decide otherwise," Prime Minister David Cameron said.
In April 2012, an independent Parliamentary inquiry into online child safety included a recommendation that "ISPs should be tasked with rolling out single account network filters for domestic broadband customers that can provide one-click filtering for all devices connected to a home internet connection within 12 months". The inquiry was dismissed by broadband industry lobby group ISPA.
Automatic filtering is one of the solutions proposed in the public discussion paper (Parental Internet Control) recently issued by the Department of Education and available for comments by 10 September 2012. The document suggests three broad options in order to choose the best approach to keeping children safe online.
“We want this questionnaire to give business, and children's and parents' organisations, the opportunity to make clear to government what their views and concerns are and how they see their responsibilities. We want to seek views on how parents and children can become better educated about how to minimise risks when online, but also to hear about the potential for technical solutions, and what can be done to address problems such as cyber-bullying”, says the paper.
One of the options is called "active choice", where new customers are asked whether they want open access to all content with a version called "active choice-plus” that would automatically block adult content, but would give users the possibility to change this in order to have access to sites promoting pornography, violence and other adult-only themes.
The four main internet service providers - BT, TalkTalk, Virgin Media and Sky - already give a choice to their customers whether to apply filters, but the government considers this technology is not entirely efficient.
The consultation document is not however very precise, which most probably will lead to interpretations and inconsistencies. If the government proposed regulation is introduced, ISPs might be forced to automatically block adult sites without any choice for the customer.
"This can of worms pushes censorship technologies and could damage access to perfectly legitimate and innocent websites,” said Jim Killock, Executive Director of the EDRi-member Open Rights Group.
We must not set up network censorship (28.06.2012)
http://www.openrightsgroup.org/press/releases/we-must-not-set-up-netwo...
e-consultation tool: Parental Internet Controls
http://www.education.gov.uk/consultations/index.cfm?action=consultatio...
Parental Internet controls - public consultation
https://www.education.gov.uk/aboutdfe/departmentalinformation/consulta...
Automatic bar on net porn considered (28.06.2012)
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-18616909
Ministers consult public on 'opt in for smut' plans- Just tick here,
sir, in the 'I am a pervert' box (28.06.2012)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/06/28/public_consultation_internet_s...
EDRi-gram: ENDitorial: Online child protection should not come
hand-in-hand with censorship (23.05.2012)
http://www.edri.org/edrigram/number10.10/online-child-protection-not-c...
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Deutsch: ENDitorial: Microsofts Vision einer Kommunikationsregulierung durch pr...
Microsoft is in charge of the “notice and takedown” workstream of the European Commission-funded and inspired “CEO coalition”. It is therefore interesting to take a look at what the world will look like if Microsoft and similar companies are allowed to decide what we are allowed to do on the Internet and what we are not allowed to do. An article published on Norwegian news site Dinside gives a valuable insight.
Morten Tobiassen used Microsoft Skydrive to store back-up copies of his family photos. As a proud father, he posed for pictures with his newly-born baby daughter and saved copies on Skydrive, only accessible to his close family.
This, however, was totally unacceptable for Microsoft. The fact that the photos are unquestionably legal is entirely irrelevant.
What if a paedophile was to gain access to the private photo collection and then manipulate the image of the three-hour old child into a photo that would be interesting for other paedophiles? According to the article, Microsoft has “heard of” photos being manipulated. As a result, the only option is to ban users from using Skydrive to save their own entirely legal and inoffensive photos.
As a result of the (in Microsoft's view) unacceptable risks that Mr Tobiassen was running by sharing the baby photos with his close family, he received an automatic e-mail from Microsoft. It gave him just 48 hours to remove the "offending" images and failure to do so would result in the deletion of all of his Microsoft Live profile content . Mr Tobiassen also used Microsoft's service to store a large amount of work files and presentations – one can imagine that it would have been somewhat difficult to explain to his boss why the files were deleted due to misuse of Skydrive for storing perfectly legal and inoffensive photographs of a child.
Microsoft subsequently claimed that, contrary to what they had said in their e-mail, they would not have irrevocably deleted the content. They said “delete” but didn't mean “delete”.
Of course, according to the terms of service, the company is completely within its rights to do this, or anything else that it wishes to, according to the 7 200-word terms and conditions document that users agree to when they first start using Microsoft Live. This permits cancellation or suspension of access “at any time without notice and for any reason”. If incidents like this one are reasonably predictable from the end-user's perspective, which means that they will read the 7 200 words before signing up, then they know what they are agreeing to.
So, instead of a society where democratically elected governments enact laws which are predictable and testable in court, we increasingly have terms of service which allow penalties to be meted out “at any time without notice and for any reason.” Our rights to privacy and freedom of expression are thus increasingly put into the hands of arbitrary decisions of private intermediaries.
At the same time as facilitating Microsoft's work on “notice and takedown”, the European Commission is also negotiating accession to the European Convention on Human Rights. Article 10 protects the right to receive and impart information and states that restrictions must be “prescribed by law” and “necessary in a democratic society”.
Dinside article (only in Norwegian)
http://www.dinside.no/825641/morten-fikk-48-timer-paa-aa-fjerne-bildet
Microsoft's Windows Live terms of service
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows-live/microsoft-service-agre...
EDRi-gram: CEO Coalition to make the Internet a safer place for kids
http://www.edri.org/edrigram/number10.5/ceo-coalition-freedom-of-speec...
Microsoft & CEO Coalition
http://www.microsoft.eu/digital-policy/posts/making-the-internet-a-saf...
European Commission' activities on self-regulation
http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/activities/sip/self_reg/index_...
(Contribution by Joe McNamee - EDRi)
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Deutsch: Mitmachen!
Current EU consultations of importance to digital rights
Deadlines - from 6 July to 10 September 2012
http://edri.org/open_consultations
@ukhomeoffice: Stop the extradition of Richard O'Dwyer to the USA - #SaveRichard
http://www.change.org/petitions/ukhomeoffice-stop-the-extradition-of-r...
This article is also available in:
Deutsch: Lesestoff
ECJ Decision: An author of software cannot oppose the resale of his
‘used’ licences allowing the use of his programs downloaded from the
internet (03.07.2012)
http://curia.europa.eu/jcms/jcms/P_89099/
2012 UNESCO Paris Declaration on Open Educational Resources (20-22.06.2012)
http://is.gd/O9jTYs
What does Internet Governance have to do with open data? (29.06.2012)
http://govinthelab.com/what-does-internet-governance-have-to-do-with-o...
WIPO Lauded For New Beijing Treaty On Audiovisual Performances (29.06.2012)
http://www.ip-watch.org/2012/06/29/wipo-lauded-for-new-beijing-treaty-...
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Deutsch: Agenda
9-10 July 2012, Barcelona, Spain
8th International Conference on Internet Law & Politics: Challenges and
Opportunities of Online Entertainment
http://edcp.uoc.edu/symposia/idp2012/cfp/?lang=en
11-13 July 2012, Vigo, Spain
The 12th Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium
(PETS 2012)
http://petsymposium.org/2012/
25-26 August 2012, Bonn, Germany
Free and Open Source software conference (FrOSCon)
http://www.froscon.de/en/program/call-for-papers/
6-7 September 2012, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
CONSENT policy conference:
Perceptions, Privacy and Permissions: the role of consent in on-line
services
http://conference.ubbcluj.ro/consent/
8-9 September 2012, Vienna, Austria
Daten, Netz & Politik 2012
Call for Contributions Deadline: 22 July 2012
https://dnp12.unwatched.org/
12-14 September 2012, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium
Building Institutions for Sustainable Scientific, Cultural and Genetic
Resources Commons.
http://biogov.uclouvain.be/iasc/index.php
14-17 September 2012, Brussels, Belgium
Freedom not Fear 2012
http://www.freedomnotfear.org/
http://www.freedom-not-fear.eu
7-10 October 2012, Amsterdam, Netherlands
2012 Amsterdam Privacy Conference
http://www.ivir.nl/news/CallforPapersAPC2012.pdf
25-28 October 2012, Barcelona, Spain
Free Culture Forum 2012
http://fcforum.net/
6-9 November 2012, Baku, Azerbaijan
Seventh Annual IGF Meeting: "Internet Governance for Sustainable Human,
Economic and Social Development"
http://www.intgovforum.org/cms/
9-11 November 2012, Fulda, Germany
Digitalisierte Gesellschaft - Wege und Irrwege
FIfF Annual Conference in cooperation with Fuldaer Informatik Kollquium
http://www.fiff.de/2012