~stef/blog/

Tavaly ősszel volt egy bizottsági konzultáció: "Consultation on scientific information in the digital age", erre beadtunk az FCForum és az EDRi kooperációjában egy véleményt (pdf). Januárban kijött az eredmény, és elég egybehangzó a vélemény. Ide kapcsolódik, hogy az Elseviert - a tudományos lapkiadók piacvezetőjét - elkezdték az akadémikusok bojkottálni, elegük van a kizsákmányolásból nekik is.

Végezetül pár kivonat az eredeti véleményből:

Our world has progressed from the economics of scarcity to an economy of abundance - at least when it comes to knowledge, information and data. This radical and ongoing shift is affecting all spheres of life, from the entertainment industry to public sector information. Scientific research is sadly an area where the fruits of this change have not begun to be harvested, despite the fact that the internet, which is the most important agent of change in this respect, was born in the research community. It is a precondition for meeting the EU's agenda to be a global leader in innovation to harness and nurture the generative nature of internet-enabled collaboration.

The role of Europe

We feel that policy formulation at the European level on access and preservation issues is essential to make progress on these issues and therefore agree strongly. This is for two reasons: first, scientific research was borderless even before the advent of the information age. Second, the legal frameworks surrounding issues of access and preservation have been to a large extent subject to legislative efforts at the European level. Although no effective harmonisation has come from the Copyright Duration Directive (93/98/EEC), Copyright Directive (2001/29/EC), the Database Directive (96/9/EC) and IPRED (2004/48/EC) , they do affect access and preservation issues to a large extent.

Moreover, we feel that the the following problems need to be addressed, primarily in order to be able to pursue Europe's ambitions in science, technology and sustainable economic development:

A majority of raw research data is not accessible to the scientific community as a result of database rights and/or other limitations. Or at least not accessible without strings attached. Examples of this are the results of clinical trials of new drugs. There have been several cases where early access to this data would have prevented harmful substances being prescribed (e.g. the Paxil and the Vioxx scandals)¹.

The current model of the scientific publishing industry is fundamentally broken. Authors submitting articles to scientific journals are unpaid or even have to pay for publication ("author-pays" model). The editorial boards and the peer reviewers of scientific journals are effectively unpaid. The cost of printing journals and of their dissemination has dropped in the past decades. The price of scientific journals nonetheless keeps on escalating². The profit margins of the scientific publishers are exceeding 35% now, while the general periodical publishing industry operates at a margin of less than 5%. According to financial analysts, no value is added by the scientific publishers that remotely justifies these excessive margins³.

We suggest than a comprehensive reform should include at least the following actions:

* Database protection should be abolished. Irrespective of any rights that preexisted the aforementioned Directive, there should be an harmonised EU rule that factual data is not eligible for copyright protection.

* Both the duration and the extent of copyright protection should be revised downwards. Any policymaking should take into account that reuse of information is essential for scientific progress.

* The EU should harmonise the transfer of copyrights from the original author to others. Such a transfer would have to be temporary and subject to compulsory registration.

* By extension, further expansion of IPR-enforcement powers through unfortunate directives such as IPRED should be curbed. In this vein ACTA should not be ratified by the EU since it can only worsen the situation in this regard. The chilling effects of excessive damages, provisional measures and injunctions in this field cannot be underestimated.

We also agree that co-ordinating existing initiatives in EU Member States would be an appropriate role for Europe.

Furthermore, we agree that Europe should be involved in supporting the development of a European network of repositories (online archives). In addition to this, we feel that online archives should use open standards as meant by the EIF 1.0 definition to the furthest extent possible, in order to foster genuine access to knowledge. Whenever possible, scientific information should be public, the same way legislation and jurisprudence are.

Finally on this point, we strongly agree that Europe should encourage universities, libraries, funding bodies, etc., to implement specific actions. A specific action should be that (European) funding of scientific research should be made contingent on a) unencumbered disclosure of both raw (provided that there are no privacy issues with raw data) and processed data and b) publication through open access scientific journals. Release early and release often, to borrow a mantra from the highly successful open source software development community, should be the credo of European research.

...we would like to stress that the current process of public funding of research by the EU is deeply flawed, but the problems are not unsolvable The biggest problem is that the areas of research that receive public funding are currently selected on the basis of framework programmes of half a decade ago. To quote a commentator in Forbes Magazine: ".. the system of awarding funds is insular, long winded and in no sense responsive to markets – these are five and six year plans, laying out innovation priorities from, say 2007 – 2013. Which areas of research should receive money is decided by the people who will bid for it and projects are assessed by people who are also applying. The impetus for change is dampened by the weight and self-serving nature of the system."⁴

An alternative avenue that is worth exploring is the use of competitions to solve specific scientific challenges. This model has been deployed successfully by DARPA and private actors like the X-prize challenges or the InnoCentive marketplace⁵.

Furthermore, user-driven innovation should be fostered. Examples of this phenomenon are so-called fablabs which put prototyping equipment in the hands of artists and designers. Even more grass-roots are hackerspaces, which despite their tremendous difficulties with housing and materials, have already shown to act as incubators for SMEs⁶.

1. Jasonoff, Transparency in Public Science, Purposes, Limits, in: Law and Contemporary Problems, vol. 69, iss. 21, Summer 2006, pp. 21-45.

2. see also Glenn S. McGuigan, Robert D. Russell, The Business of Academic Publishing: A Strategic Analysis of the Academic Journal Publishing Industry and its Impact on the Future of Scholarly Publishing, in: Electronic Journal of Academic and Special Librarianship, v.9 no.3 (Winter 2008)

3. http://southernlibrarianship.icaap.org/content/v09n03/mcguigan_g01.html

4. http://www.forbes.com/sites/haydnshaughnessy/2011/07/11/europes-disintegration-its-not-about-the-piigs-or-the-euro/

5. http://www.innocentive.com/

6. An example of this is innovation award winning soup.io

At the camp we had a very inspiring radio show [ogg]. One interesting topic that came up was copyright abolitionism. As a free software developer it's hard for me to accept the loss of protection by the GPL from closing down free software. I can agree however, that we must change our discourse from copyright to alternative ways of incentivising value creation. If we can replace copyright with alternative systems that empowers creators and amplifies creation while somehow also preserving the 4 basic rights of free software, I'm all OK with that. (I admit the mixing of free software ideas with more general value-creation, needs some more refinement, but you get the idea.)

I experiment with omnom to use it also as a platform to announce updates to itself, check out the omnom-announcement tag or point your rss reader at the atom feed.

The latest message in a nutshell: for anyone who uses the userscript for bookmarking should update.

Good news everyone! Omnom - my feeble attempt at creating a proper^Wlibre delicious replacement - now has gotten "widget" functionality. I took the original delicious widget and shamelessly adopted it. You can see the result in the right bar under "/dev/read".

If you are one of the lucky omnom users, you can use the code below, just change the 2 links pointing to my collection to your own.

<h3><a href='http://links.ctrlc.hu/u/stf'>/dev/read</a></h3><div id="omnom-box" style="margin:0;padding:0;border:none;"> </div>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://links.ctrlc.hu/u/stf/?format=json&j"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
   var ul = document.createElement('ul');
   for (var i=0, post; post = omnom_posts[i]; i++) {
      var li = document.createElement('li');
      var a = document.createElement('a');
      a.setAttribute('href', post.url);
      a.appendChild(document.createTextNode(post.title));
      li.appendChild(a);
      ul.appendChild(li);
   }
   ul.setAttribute('id', 'omnom-list');
   document.getElementById('omnom-box').appendChild(ul);
</script>

Parltrack is a free tool and the associated free database to track the law-making in the European Parliament. It

• aggregates and publishes dispersed information,
• provides email and RSS based notifications,
• links most documents with Pippi Longstrings for analysis and commenting.

Combined information

Parltrack collects the data daily and combines the information on MEPs, progress on dossiers from OEIL, committee agendas, and vote results from the plenary minutes. Using this data it is easy to see for example at a glance:

• which MEP has taken responsibility for which dossiers,
• which committee is responsible or gives opinion on which dossiers,
• forecasts for next steps on dossiers in the EP and committees - including tabling deadlines for amendments,
• online detailed committee agendas,
• online calendar with EP and committee dates,
• who are the influential MEPs related to a dossier. There's much more possibilities in this data than the web-interface and your humble developers can ever present to you. Though we are willing to work for hire to dig deeper into this information-goldmine. ;)

Notifications

Anyone can subscribe to receive email notifications on changes on dossiers. On every dossier page, there's a link "Track this Dossier", by providing your email here you create a new notification group. If you don't specify a name of the notification group, one will be randomly generated for you. If you specify an existing notification group name, the current dossier will be added to that. After you created a notification group, you can share the link to this so other people can join in.

The Texts

Most of the documents created in the law-making process (initial, supplementary and final texts, opinions) are linked whenever available from OEIL. Most of these documents are also available on Eur-Lex (the official EU website publishing the texts) and thus are also automatically available in Pippi Longstrings from the Documents tab for dossiers. Using Pippi Longstrings you can analyse the texts and comment on them. Commenting happens by selecting the text you want to comment on. The results of pippi-analysis are also displayed as comments, from a user named Pippi Longstrings.

The Data

All data in Parltrack is available freely in various forms for anyone to use. Most of the pages have a "Download as JSON" link, all new and changed dossiers are listed in an RSS feed, changes in dossiers are also available as email notifications. Furthermore a complete DB dump as JSON is also available. All this is under the ODBLv1.0 license. Running your own instance of Parltrack is encouraged, the code is free under the AGPLv3+.

Searching

Currently search is possible for text in MEPs names, dossiers titles and IDs of final acts like "directive 2006/24/EC".

Credit

Parltrack is inspired by ehjs Tratten, was conceived during the 2010 FCForum Tools for policy reformers workshop and is influenced by a bunch of good people, thanks!

If you'd like to support similar tools in the future, don't hesitate to show your support:

Thanks, It's much appreciated.

i figured code is a mightier sword than mere words. please forgive me for focusing on forging instead of mumbling:

• burnstation2: a tool to educate people that file-sharing can be legal, a fork of pyjama. We needed some software to access Jamendo, pyjama was perfect, together with a touchscreen we have a nice burnstation. (kudos to the original pyjama author(s)!)
• playful swarm simulation - a game for evolutionary pythonistas. Also a product of h.a.c.k. several of us modeled and visualized simple swarm behavior, it's a lot of fun to tweak the config to get the most stable setup. (thx, dnet+asciimooo)
• ksh-scraper: liberating the data of the Hungarian Statistical Office. Our contribution to the Open Government Data Hackday December 2010, using a simple greasemonkey script (install) all statistical data on the Hungarian Statistical Office are also available as CSV downloads (shouts to asciimoo).
• memopol2: i'm contributing to this important project, which gets especially interesting when combined with weurstchen and pippi. (greetz lqdn!)
• django-mongo-annotator: annotator rocks, but didn't support django/mongo out of the box. not anymore!

And some other important projects, which i will address in separate posts:

• omnom (formerly known as tagger, tagr): capitalizing on the faked demise of del.icio.us, an attempt to get it right and free, including snapshoting of bookmarked pages. (live demo) (thx smari)
• weurstchen: the EU legislative machinery is always churning out new law, weurstchen monitors this. (live demo) (thx smari)
• deaddrop: responsible leaking for reckless copycats. anonymous delivery services for everyone else.
• pippi longstrings is alive, automatically importing eur-lex, etherpad and co-ment documents, and allows commenting using annotator. (live demo)

if you like this, please consider flattring me.

I hope these projects make up for not posting here. If not, here: have some shiny distracting movies generated by the swarm simulation: (HD:mp4,SD:ogv) of swarms (greens=algae, white=fish, red=shark):

Download Video: Closed Format: "MP4" Open Format: "Ogg"

Download Video: Closed Format: "MP4" Open Format: "Ogg"

Download Video: Closed Format: "MP4" Open Format: "Ogg"

Download Video: Closed Format: "MP4" Open Format: "Ogg"

Disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer, if any of the issues below are misinterpreted, I am more than happy to remove them from the list.

The Hungarian media law is basically an huge law mixing the implementation of the European Audio Visual Media service directive, with the creation of a powerful media authority, regulating traditional media like Radio and Television, while unprecendentedly extending these also to Internet and printed media, furthermore it covers rules for public broadcasting and tenders for linear providers.

This analysis focuses on Internet related issues, other important topics are discussed widely. A list on issues that are unclear or cause of concern:

Scope

A main concern of the Hungarian media law is the extension of scope regarding the Internet. The definitions in Article 203 like "media service provider", "broadcasting" and "on-demand service" are overly broad or indefinite. The interpretation of "with commercial interest" is unclear and thus the scope of the law could also include wide portions of the Internet. Article 220 also extends the "Act LXXIV of 2007 on the Rules of Broadcasting and Digital Switchover" to cover now "media services" instead of "programme providers".

Jurisdiction

Article 1 and 176 assume jurisdiction over media services outside Hungary, whether this violates the "country of origin" principle should be clarified. But it could affect various online media providers in other countries.

Intermediaries

Article 2 (4) extends the law to cover also intermediary service providers. According to Article 189 (6) intermediary service Providers (access/mere conduit) can be fined if not cooperating in blocking content (Article 188 (1) and (3)). This creates a new kind of administrative liability, which can be in violation of the e-commerce directive.

Further worrying is the inclusion of search type intermediary services in the definition in Article 203 (30) d) could also include indexing sites and search engines.

Online media

Depending on the interpretation of on-demand and online media various Internet sources will be regulated. Article 46 (2) mandates all media products to be registered. Any publisher with an office in Hungary seems to qualify according to Art. 41 (2). Article 187 imposes fines on online media services, as well suspending in case of on-demand media. Article 41 (4) e-f,i requires registration of on-demand services and online media products. Further it is unclear how online video sharing sites and radios are among others affected by Article 73 (3) mandating a certain quota of Hungarian content.

Privacy, source protection

Investigative powers in Article 155 (2-3) and Article 175 (1) of the authority can among others violate journalistic source protection, business secrets and other privacy rights. Article 175 (4) allows the Authority to investigate on-site log files.

Self-regulating bodies

The Authority can cooperate with self-regulating bodies related to media policy in matters not covered in this law (Art 190 (2)). This might enable British Digital Economy Act style voluntary filtering.

Summary

Freedom of speech can be tightly controlled by this law, furthermore this framework seems open for extension. This bears the possibility that other aspects of content will be filtered, fined and blocked if the need arises, say at the adoption of ACTA, causing further serious threats to fundamental freedoms.

The above issues should be investigated and answered or if necessary addressed to protect fundamental freedoms, the diversity and the generativity of the Internet.

I hope I'm wrong. ;)

Reflections on the FCForum2010

This years Free Culture Forum goal was to come up with some economic models to support the free culture outlined in last years charter. Let me dump my random thoughts regarding this event on you:

Prop(rietary) culture

Before I delve into some specific models I have to state that Free Culture is only to a small degree about music, movies and books. In fact these three manifestations of culture are simply those ones that are based in the entertainment industry or as we called it in one of our working groups the prop(rietary) culture. Free culture is a lot of other things, it might be blogging, 3d printing, fanflicks, theater and a host of other things that produce or are based on the commons.

The corporations making up the entertainment industry are very good at communication, by owning or being the media most of us consume everyday - they are much louder than their real economic importance is. So we tend to give them more attention than they really deserve. By comparison the complete entertainment industry is only a tiny fraction of the food or automobile industry.

Prop Culture is whining about declining profits, yet as many studies show (citation needed) the amount of money going to music/movies has increased as has the production of those. Those whining in prop culture are the companies behind the thugs of the content maffia, these are not really producing culture but only ephemeral entertainment products. These products for example like Justin Bieber, Brittney Spears or the umpteenth Robin Hood movie adaptation are designed, produced and marketed products to consumers. Most of these products have a limited lifetime and then they're obsolete.

The myth of the 'rock star' is a lie (let's call it that from now: the 'rock-star-lie'), there is only a very limited number of natural stars - without being a product of the industry, becoming one is as improbable as winning the lottery - still exactly this myth is being sold to thousands of aspiring artists. A huge number of such products never recovers the product development costs and the competition of offerings on the Internet do reduces the chances to land a hit.

So instead of trying to do the job of well-compensated businessmen to find out how to make more money for their corporations, we should focus our efforts to find new economic models to foster diversity and concentrate on the middle and end of the long-tail of cultural production. After all giving more money to already successful artists will not motivate them to create more. Also why would anyone pump more capital into a dying industry?

Models

Let's have a look at some of the more exciting models that were or were not discussed at the forum. One of the most striking realizations for me was the fact, that most of free culture is currently produced by wealth that has been pre-accumulated out-side Free Culture, we need to find ways how to bootstrap this system, so that it can become self-sustainable. The incentives of the industry to create share-holder value through artificial scarcity is in direct opposition to our goal to foster cultural production.

Flatrates

Lot's of people are very excited about the Brazilian Internet flatrate, me not so much. After-all we do have the same for storage devices and even that has been just recently ruled unlawful in some cases (pdf). The beneficiaries of such a tax would be the dying industry, while in fact more than 60% of all shared files are porn. Shouldn't we support that industry then, what about fostering diversity and supporting artists directly? So the problem is, how to allocate the accumulated capital, why should this be done by a central authority, in the age of the Internet consumers themselves could decide what to support and what not. Decentralizing this decision would make sense, i think making Flattr or a similar service mandatory might solve this problem, but only if there is fierce competition between such services and citizens can choose which service to use.

Secondary currencies: the Culturo

Turning the flatrate into a voluntary system might make a lot more sense. People get a certain amount of their wages not in euros, but in 'culturos', which they can spend on any free culture product - directly rewarding the producer. Instead of some disengaged institution "redistributing" wealth to the head of the long-tail, people could directly decide what they want to support and possibly support more cultural producers on the middle of the long-tail. From a decentralization fundamentalist view, this is way more attractive.

The fashion business

Johanna Blakely made a very convincing argument, that the fashion industry is thriving with innovation exactly because the lack of protection. Big fashion houses are producing new collections every half year. While these do not last very long, there is also a high degree of reuse, we can see the same motives and designs coming back every once in a while. Let's not forget this model, it will come handy in combination with the next one:

Free Software business models

As far as free software development goes, if development is renumerated at all, then usually only the invested time spent is compensated as a normal hourly wage. This is great, insofar as it motivates the developer to create more. If free software would copy the 'rock star lie' for compensation, the results would be much more bleak. So combining this model and the fashion business model could solve as a general solution to reward sustainable production of free cultural goods. The fashion industry model is very much similar already to free software, as it enables copying after the creation of the product once, this is quite peculiar as it transcends the virtual space and is applied to physical goods.

We have seen some exciting models, interesting theories have been discussed, now we need to come up with some general guidelines how to make free culture not only sustainable from wealth generated outside.

I felt the need to write a post on net-neutrality in Hungarian, then I figured the result could be submitted to the EU Net-neutrality consultation. This is a first draft, i still don't have anything in Hungarian though...

Summary

1. Net-neutrality is a business-term for a technological concept
2. Regulate ISPs to adhere to the end-to-end principle.
3. Break up vertical monopolies.
4. Enforce 'mere conduit' provision of the E-commerce directive.
5. Empower non-commercial, libre and public ISPs, assign 33% of the Digital Dividend for this purpose.

End-to-End principle

Net-neutrality is business terminology for a fundamentally technical concept, the so called End-to-end principle.

The Internet is based on multiple layers of various protocols. The user interacts with the top layer, which passes the data down to the next layer. At the bottom of stack there is some physical medium, like a cable or a radio wave (essentially the ISP). On the receiving side a similar stack of protocols handles the data from bottom to top until it reaches the user on the other end. The layers have no knowledge of the data being passed from above and do not alter it in any way. Each layer is directly addressing the matching layer on the other end. Processing happens at the communicating parties ends, not in-transit, hence the name.

This End-to-end principle decentralizes the intelligence in the network. Telecom companies coming from a classical telephony background are used to having the intelligence of the network under their control, at the "center". On the Internet however, the intelligence is at the edges - at the clients - while the network is mostly dumb. ISPs are just one of the lower layers in this stack. Thus, any kind of content sent through an ISP should be processed regardless of the source, destination or data making it up. That is the end-to-end principle and this is also what is now being relabeled as network neutrality.

It is imperative to oblige infrastructure providers to adhere to the end-to-end principle and handle all data without prejudice.

Competition

The root cause of this discussion is a two-fold competition and fundamental rights issue.

First the offering of both infrastructure and content by the same business entity raises anti-trust concerns, this creates incentives to discriminate against 3rd party content. Extreme examples of discrimination even completely ban VoIP (Internet telephony) offerings or access to legal and alternative audio and video content. This behaviour is also a violation of the end-to-end principle, where the content sent should be handled by the lower layered network infrastructure without prejudice.

The network neutrality consultation must find long term solutions to the underlying root cause. The separation of content from infrastructure providers (e.g. like triple-play where Internet, TV and telephony is bundled) clearly calls for market separation.

Fundamental Rights

The second reason for the net-neutrality debate goes further than limiting access, it endangers fundamental rights. The copyright industry cannot cope with the changing business environment and tries to push ISPs to filtering and automatic blocking of access for wide portions of the population. In some member states this has been ruled unconstitutional on a national level. Essential parts of everyday life (from traffic information, banking to interaction with public services) depend on the access to a free Internet. The right to Internet access is already a fundamental right in Finland.

It is important to enforce the 'mere conduit' provision of the E-commerce directive, where network operators have no legal liability for traffic conveyed by them. This is a vital provision for the end-to-end principle, otherwise human rights need to be sacrificed, privacy invasive filtering and free-speech impeding blocking would become collateral damage while violating the end-to-end principle once more. Introduction of 3rd party liability for ISPs - which would induce ISPs to voluntarily adopt filtering and blocking measures - is a contradiction to the E-commerce directive and must be prohibited. The interests of a vocal, but otherwise small industry cannot overrule fundamental human rights.

Digital Dividend

In order to ensure a balanced neutral infrastructure, it must be possible to provide non-commercial libre public internet access. Community networks must be able to provide last-mile services. The Digital Dividend provides ample possibilities to assign at least a third of the analog television spectrum for non-commercial libre public ISPs, initiatives like the Openspectrum initiative must be empowered to create prospering public non-commercial ISPs that increase competition and investment in infrastructure.

Conclusion

While commercial and public interests collide, it is important to note that the short-term business interests are in no relation to the long-term societal benefits that this debate is trying to reverse.

feel free to comment via email.

thx: to pettter, lillmacho and Twelve from Telecomix.

Here's a new project, some of you might have already heard about it: Pippi Longstrings. Just like Bonobo (currently also off-line) this is part of le(n)x a set of tools to empower citizens in the legislative process. We're awaiting replacement of unstable hardware, but hope to have the problems sorted out soon and can start operations on http://pippi.euwiki.org. Until then there are some cached results from various stages of the development (the newest ACTA is a good example), so please excuse the varying quality of the docs in that cache.

Background

The original idea came from our team-member Erik Josefsson. Unfortunately he is not a lawyer, so he came up with the idea to make legislative texts (laws) more comprehensible for non-politicians, by looking for text-blocks that are copied from one document to another. These text-fragments act as memes that carry the most important legislation into new laws and other legal documents. By classifying these fragments and 'translating' them into short summaries, it is possible to ease the burden of reading such documents. Reverse-engineering the EU is something akin to having only the legal code of a Creative Commons license, but not the deed (a simple one line explanation - see an example for a deed) nor the icons, using Pippi we try to reduce the code into deeds and possibly also icons for easier understanding for citizens, activists, advisors and politicians themselves.

Just to give you an example of the above, the deed of the previous paragraph could say: "we look for copy/pasted texts (the longer the more interesting - hence the name: Pippi Longstrings) and try to translate this into short, comprehensible summaries".

Tracing sources

Among other this can also be used to track the sources of such fragments. Previously there have been interesting pippies discovered by manual inspection:

• the FSFE found out, that parts of the European Interoperability Framework have been "authored" by the Business Software Alliance.
• parts of the EU Telecom Package have been written by Telecom Italia (Amendment 542)
• and parts of EU laws (like the IPRED directive) have been included in Trade Agreements with Canada, Korea, scores of Caribian countries and possibly also India (more on this later).

There is a benefit for policy advocates as the above examples show. For non-legislative purposes Pippi Longstrings can also be used for tracking and translating memes in contracts, terms of service agreements and EULAs, similarity to the EFF's great Tosback service.

National implementations

Another important use-case for Pippi Lonstrings in regard to EU laws is the analysis of adoption of these laws into member states law. All EU laws are automatically translated and published in all 23 languages of the member states. So when a member state adopts a law, we can check whether they adopted the verbatim translation or changed bits and pieces while adopting it into national law. In the later case it is definitely interesting to analyze the reasons for the deviation from the original EU translation.

Current status

Pippi Longstrings is currently running as a closed beta. If you're interested in analyzing a certain document against the current European corpus of regulations and directives please suggest mail them to longstrings on ctrlc.hu.

We have about 40 documents that are on our list waiting to be processed. These are related to Internet, privacy, copyright topics and trade agreements, but we are looking for more docs to analyze.

Currently the processing of a doc takes a couple of hours against the whole EU corpus of law, the list of docs to be processed is being prioritized by us, until we succeed in adding a feature for user initiated processing and/or get donation for lots of powerful hardware. As an alternative, you can get the code which is completely free according to the Affero GNU Public License and operate a Pippi service yourself.

Document formats

Pippi Longstrings is part of a set of tools to reduce entry-barriers to participation in the European legislative process. Even though the European legislative process is obliged to be transparent, some - some of the most important - issues are shrouded in secrecy and so we need to rely on low quality PDF leaks for analyzing and reacting to them. These leaks are usually scanned PDFs which do not lend themselves for automated analysis. There is a grave need for solutions that are able to transform these PDFs into high-quality machine-processable documents (semantically correct HTML or ODF preferably). Currently we rely on crowd-sourced transcriptions mostly done by the Telecomix crew and La Quadrature du Net, but the EU-India trade agreement leak has not been transcribed yet by anyone - while it is surely a very interesting document. If anyone can help us to get these transcriptions more effectively, please share your tools, resources or whatever. It would be nice to have transcriptions done by recaptcha for example, google are you reading this?

If we have such a transcription or the original document is not a PDF, then we are able to produce some nifty diffs between different versions of these texts (think ACTA) so that we can track the negotiations without being admitted to them. The generation of these diffs is not as easy as you might know from software development though. Producing such diffs has involved a lot of manual labor to align the paragraphs properly for the most comprehensible results. The preprocessing prior to a diff for a typical ACTA leak or release takes between 5-10 days for a single person.

Plans

Our nearest-term goals are the introduction of commenting on (translating/summarizing) pippies, possibly also integrating marked up texts into the fantastic co-ment.org service. Also we are going to start a dedicated blog for pippies (longstrings.soup.io), where we are going to give summaries on the results of pippifications. If you request us to process a doc, you should also be ready to write a blog-post on the results in return.

As such we also intend to integrate Pippi with Eriks other very nice tool Tratten, which does track issues from the beginning of the legislative pipeline.

If you want to support the ongoing work consider signing up and donating via . We're also participating on Mozilla's Drumbeat project project, go and vote for us.

Big plans, lot's of things to do, let's not waste time. Please submit interesting docs to longstrings on ctrlc.hu.

Thanks go to a lot of supporters: amelia for setting us up, jaywalk for hosting us, asciimoo for his coding, erik for the idea and general support, jz for useful criticism, and the telecomix guys.

• Etimology :)
• You can have all kinds of dynamic content on your page, e.g. lightbox handles filegalleries, and disqus could also handle comments. For the sake of my readers I try do not leak visitors info to 3rd parties (I failed earlier, but changed policies since then). So no comments on my blog. But the server storage is read only, no funky dbs or code running.
• It's perfect if you rent some minimalistic vm's or ftp accounts to host your site, a big cms needs much more resources - money. Utterson is a good example on what is possible without a CMS and database storage.
• You write your posts in your favourite editor - not in some textarea or js editor. The formatting is done using textile or markdown or whatever wiki compiler your editor has built-in.
• The whole thing is generated using a self-generating makefile. which keeps the code very small. And here's the generator in ksh (proudly without perl, php, python, etc)! ;) the makefile recognizes if one of it's dependenies changed and regenerates itself accordingly.
• I sure don't worry about automated worms looking for utterson installations. :)

thx: juraj

Utterson is the static blogengine powering this blog. It is based on a bunch of shell-scripts and a self-generating makefile, only basic unix tools have been used (m4, gnu make, ksh93, rsync, ssh, etc). It comes with emacs integration and support for mailing in blogposts automatically via procmail. The engine has been serving this blog for the last 6 months without problems. Only a couple of small changes where necessary since the introduction of utterson, these have been commited to the github repo and are available as a v1.0 download. For more information head over to the README.

ACTA notes

Sok minden történik az ACTA egyezmény körül, nemrég előadást tartottam a metalabban a témával kapcsolatban, alább az angol nyelvű jegyzetem.

background - history

• EU is 21% of the worlds GDP (PPP) while the US is only 20%
• WTO/TRIPs, World Trade Organization, established January 1st 1995, replaced GATT, Trade Related aspect of Intellectual Property rights agreement
• [the following 3 bulletts curtesy of W] Big Pharma is in trouble, Ever expanding marketing and R&D costs, approval costs, duration of approval procedures
• Big Content is in trouble, Disintermediation, Overabundance of material
• Original UN institutions as WIPO, BRIC countries are fed up with maximalists, NGOs have gotten a seat at the table
• Spring 2008, the European Union, the United States, Japan, Canada, South Korea, Australia as well as a few other countries start to secretly negotiate a trade agreement aimed at enforcing copyright and tackling counterfeited goods (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement).
• some leaks appear, complete leak in march 2010, after negotiations in new zealand the eu publishes the first public draft.
• The parliament: Resolution 10th March, voted overwhelmingly 633/13/16 - record of votes (search for "(ACTA) - RESOLUTION") "Parliament considers that the proposed agreement should not make it possible for any "three-strike" procedures to be imposed, in order to protect fundamental rights."

main issues

• Acta benefits a few companies to the detriment of billions of humans.
• policy laundering avoiding any hint of democracy Schlyter (swedish green mep): industrial lobby 90% of the participants in stakeholder meetings, among others: pfizer, daimler, ms, timewarner, google, yahoo, bsa, mpaa, pharma, br american tobacco, br telecom.
• criminal sanctions (ipred) - the commissions negotiator devigne on going beyond the acquis vs the council
  • inclusion of non-commercial activities
  • border measures, search of personal items like phones, mp3 players, notebooks.
• freedom of speech, one MEP talked about suppressing access to radical political sites.
• privacy (monitoring, seizure, deep packet inspection) - Peter Hastinx, EDPS on acta: "Intellectual property must be protected, but it should not be placed above individuals' right to privacy and protection."
• 3rd party liability - Alexander Alvaro from Germany said that "third party liability for internet servers is like making the post office responsible for what is written on the letters it sends".
• censorship (censilia/censursula, blocking)
• access to medicines - Medicines sans frontieres: "We are in danger of ending up with the worst of both worlds, pushing IP rules, which are very effective at stopping access to life-saving drugs but are very bad at stopping or preventing fake drugs."
• other markets, that are dominated by a few big: spare car parts after-market, perhaps even thingiverse
• The opposition to ACTA has support from edri, tacd, ffii, kei, reporters sans frontieres, EuroISPA (business association of eu ISPs)

what can be done

• Written declaration 12/2010 was initially signed by MEPs Roithová (EPP) / Castex and Lambrinidis (S&D) / Alvaro (ALDE). list of signatories.
• never allow similar un-democratic legislative process, since we have arrived in the lisbon treaty the EP has co-decision powers, these are democratically elected, while the commision not. We need to help the MEPs to discover and protect their new powers. Demand to start from scratch, not accepting a draft that has been 2 years in secret preparation.
• get india/brazil/china/russia to comment and act on acta (india commented last tuesday, in an EP public hearing)
• convince MEPs sign written declaration 12, generally educating them about acta, showing that people care.
• community work: transcribing, cleaning, analyzing, translating, documents, leaks.
  • telecomix (pads+irc+twitter+wikis+small tools)
  • lqdn (wiki+co-ment+pads+twitter)
  • euwiki.org, pippi longstrings (not public yet), itsyourparliament.eu, custom tools!
  • develop tools that circumvent any kind of control, become a ciphernaut today!
  • support: LQDN, telecomix, eff, ffii, edri, your MEPs, wikileaks!
• make more videos like: cleanternet

assorted links

• La Quadrature du Net - ACTA dossier
• telecomix/werebuild.eu
• acta on co-ment.com
• wikification of the actaleak in march
• diff between leak and publication after NZ negotiations
• chapter-by-chapter clean-up of the leak and publication
• automated chapter-by-chapter diff of leak and publication
• pippi longstrings analysis of the NZ publication
• Michael Geist on acta
• EFF on acta
• Ante Wessels from ffii on acta in vienna
• The European Greens/EFA on acta

In Barcelona I showed off my timecloud widget. Then someone /* thx: a ;) */ asked if it is possible to add tagclouds to the European database of laws, eur-lex. This was the birth of bonobo.

Bonobo is a greasmonkey script which automatically retrieves the tagclouds for all legislative text available in HTML. All you need is the Greasemonkey Firefox plugin and bonobo. According to wikipedia this script might also work on other browsers than Firefox.

If you have both greasemonkey and bonobo installed, start browsing here for example.

Bonobo gets the tagcloud information from a back-end server, which retrieves, caches and converts the legislative texts to tagclouds. Like Bonobo this back-end server is also part of a set of tools trying to cut through the fog of legislation. If you're interested in the code (AGPLv3) visit the project on github.

Please bear in mind, that this back-end server is running in a quite unstable environment. It might happen, that you're not served your tagclouds. If anyone can donate some spare hosting for this service, that would be awesome. It would really feel at home on a Debian server. ;)

I have some other ideas queued already for further developments, check this project github page regularly.

a Versenyügyi biztos a netgeneráció  kapcsán 2 millió munkahelyet jósol: [update]: és gyorsan még egy videó a hölgytől, ezúttal a könyvek digitalizálásáról, a szerzői jogról és az az orphan works problémakörről (via EUXTV) akinek van rá 46 perce, itt megnézheti a teljes beszédet.