20 July 2013

How Big Agribusiness Is Heading Off The Threat From Seed Generics -- And Failing To Keep The Patent Bargain

Recently we wrote about how pharmaceutical companies use "evergreening" to extend their control over drugs as the patents expire. But this is also an issue for the world of agribusiness: a number of key patents, particularly for traits of genetically-engineered (GE) organisms, will be entering the public domain soon, and leading companies like Bayer, BASF, Dow, DuPont, Monsanto and Syngenta are naturally coming up with their own "evergreening" methods. 

On Techdirt.

05 July 2013

Birth of a Meme: the Tweetlog

As some of you may know, alongside this blog here - a slightly empty place at the moment, for which apologies - I run something called rather grandly "Moody's Microblog Daily Digest".  This is simply a collection of most of my tweets for each day - discarding the ephemeral ones that are replies etc.

It's mainly so that I have a readily-accessible store of them that is independent of Twitter, and that I can search through easily since Twitter's search is pretty feeble (hint, hint...).

Now I see that Björn Brembs has started doing the same on his blog.  He's dubbed it a "tweetlog", which seems a pretty good description.  What do people think?  Is this the birth of meme?

15 June 2013

Glyn Moody's PGP Key

In the light of, er, recent events, I've decided to up my crypto game - I now encourage people to use PGP when emailing me. Here's my public key (also available on public key servers such as http://kerckhoffs.surfnet.nl/):
 
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Version: GnuPG v1.4.12 (GNU/Linux)

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AwIGFQgCCQoLBBYCAwECHgECF4AACgkQrmu000rVU2GGmgf+KDWRTSZ90kzJwdfp
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=wFDl
-----END PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----
I don't use any other PGP keys you may come across. If that changes, I'll post about it. Other updates on how I'm trying to make things more interesting for certain people (</waves at NSA>) will follow in due course.

02 June 2013

Watch Out for the Coming TAFTA/TTIP "Science-Based" Negotiating Trick [Updated]

As anyone who has been following me recently will know, one of the most important geopolitical developments is the decision to negotiate a Transatlantic Free Trade Agreement (TAFTA), also known as the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), which makes clear its kinship with the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP) currently being drawn up.

Equally, you will know that my chief concern with TAFTA/TTIP is not so much any section on intellectual monopolies - although those might well turn out to be ACTA 2.0 - but the clauses dealing with unmemorably-named "Investor State Dispute Resolution".

I've explained what these are and why they are so dangerous on Techdirt (twice, actually.)  In a sentence, this system allow a company to sue a country, directly, for alleged loss of future profits caused by tiresome things like environmental legislation or health and safety laws.

These kind of disputes are also moving into the area of intellectual monopolies - for example, Canada is being sued by Eli Lilly for refusing to grant a patent on one of its drugs.  Worryingly, the European Commission mandate to its negotiators for TAFTA/TTIP explicitly allows precisely this kind of action.

However, here I want to concentrate on another aspect of TAFTA/TTIP: how the term "science-based" will be used in an attempt to ram through a range of spectacularly unscientific approaches that are currently allowed in the US, but not in Europe.

Here's what an article on the subject says:

To export agricultural goods, the U.S. also exports food safety standards, or at least gets other countries to accept our way of growing raw materials and processing them into food as justified by standards “based on science.” The U.S. Department of Agriculture and the U.S. Trade Representative will soon see if the member governments of the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) negotiations, launched by the Obama administration, will accept the way U.S. chicken processors butcher the bird. A National Chicken Council press release welcomed the launch of the TTIP negotiations: “When TTIP negotiations are successfully concluded, U.S. poultry producers look forward to marketing $500 million of products to the EU on an annual basis.”
 The article is principally about the following incident:

The death of a U.S. federal poultry inspector, reported on April 25 in the Washington Post, shone a bright light on the high speed processed, chlorine rinsed chicken that the U.S. wants to export not just to the EU, but globally. The inspector, 37 year old José Navarro, worked for five years in the midst of a chemical spray that the USDA allows processors to use to decontaminate the feces on chickens that results from ever faster processing line speeds. Navarro’s lungs bled out. The U.S. Occupational Health and Safety Commission (OSHA) has not determined the cause of Navarro’s bleeding to death. An OSHA spokesperson said the agency was so understaffed, it would take 131 years to inspect every facility under its authority for worker safety violations.
That hardly inspires confidence in the substance being sprayed on the chickens.  So a legitimate question is: how do we know that it's safe?
Both the USDA and the National Chicken Council (NCC) defended the use of the poultry rinse, pointing out that the Food and Drug Administration had accepted the poultry industry’s claim that the rinse was Generally Recognized As Safe (GRAS). GRAS is only a food safety designation, not a worker safety rule. Stan Painter, the president of the federal meat and poultry inspectors union, said his poultry inspectors reported weekly about coughing, sneezing, tight throats and itchy eyes that clear up only on the weekends when they are not working. However, “based on science” standards only protect traded goods, not the workers who produce them.
Here's some more information on that "Generally Recognised As Safe" idea from the US Food and Drug Administration site:

For a food additive, privately held data and information about the use of a substance are sent by the sponsor to FDA, which evaluates those data and information to determine whether they establish that the substance is safe under the conditions of its intended use (21 CFR 171.1). Thus, for a food additive, FDA determines the safety of the ingredient; whereas a determination that an ingredient is GRAS can be made by qualified experts outside of government.
Here's how much scrutiny the FDA gives:

Within 30 days of receiving a notice FDA will inform the notifier in writing of the date on which the notice was received. FDA then evaluates whether the submitted notice provides a sufficient basis for a GRAS determination and whether information in the notice, or otherwise available to FDA, raises issues that lead the agency to question whether use of the substance is GRAS.

So, basically, chlorine rinse for chickens, that may well have caused an operator's lungs to bleed until he died, has been approved because the manufacturer says it's checked, and everything's OK.  This is the "science-based" approach that US negotiators will invoke when negotiating with the EU in an attempt to force chlorine-soaked chickens on European consumers.

Nor will it stop there.  Another hugely contentious area is, of course, genetically-modified food.  Here, too, self-certification is essentially all the US has to justify approval:

Under U.S. regulations, biotech companies are not required to submit studies to demonstrate the safety of their products. The companies voluntarily submit only summaries of data vetted by company risk managers and without the methodological explanations of the studies that permit the peer review that is characteristic of scientific method.

What US companies really mean by "science-based" in this context is illustrated by the following:

Monsanto is threatening the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) with legal action after the European Union’s central science agency published data relating to a Monsanto genetically modified (GM) maize form.

This was data submitted to establish that the GM maize was not harmful - in other words, basic scientific data required for approval.  And yet Monsanto was threatening the EFSA for daring to reveal those basic facts.

That shows what US companies mean by "science-based": that they get to make claims about their products that others are not allowed to check.  But the essence of "science-based" is that others can and *must* be able to check the results claimed.  The use of the impressive-sounding "science-based" argument turns out to be a sham - simply a way of browbeating legitimate concerns about health and safety.

If companies truly believed in "science-based" approaches, they would freely release all their safety data, and would encourage independent third-parties to check their validity.  But that won't ever happen, because the invocation of "science-based" is pure bluster.

So watch out for the use of "science-based" arguments during the coming TAFTA/TTIP: I predict it's a phrase we'll being hearing a lot of, soon.  And when you hear it, remember that it's just a shabby negotiating trick that sullies the good name of science.

Update: As I predicted, "science-based" approaches are at the heart of TTIP.  And here is how the European Commission is using the underhand trick I outlined above:

Monsanto and the pesticide industry breathed a collective sigh of relief on 12 November 2015. The findings of an investigation into the toxicity of glyphosate by the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) and EU Member States were in stark contradiction to the March 2015 conclusion by the International Agency for Research against Cancer (IARC), a body of the World Health Organization (WHO), that this agricultural herbicide was probably causing cancer to humans. If validated, this conclusion could cause a partial ban of glyphosate in the EU.

This article takes a closer look at the arguments from both parties, and reveals two strikingly different processes that led to these conflicting assessments. In short, the WHO process was transparent, stuck to conventional scientific methodology and looked at glyphosate-containing herbicides (as glyphosate is never used alone in the real world), whereas EFSA's route was based on a 'peer review' by anonymous EFSA and national public officials relying on undisclosed industry-sponsored studies that looked at glyphosate alone. The European Commission, which will have the last say on whether or not glyphosate will be re-authorized in the EU, and under which conditions, must now decide what to make of this interesting piece of 'science'.

It's not hard to guess which kind of "science" they will choose...

17 May 2013

Why are Facebook, IBM, Microsoft and Oracle Backing the Fight *Against* the Blind?


One of the more disgraceful examples of the inherent selfishness of the copyright world is that it has consistently blocked a global treaty that would make it easier for the blind and visually impaired to read books in formats like Braille. The thinking seems to be that it's more important to preserve copyright "inviolate" than to alleviate the suffering of hundreds of millions of people around the world.

You can read the disgusting details of how publishers have fought against the "proposed international instrument on limitations and exceptions for persons with print disabilities" for *30* years in an column I wrote back in 2011.

Amazingly, things have got even worse since then, with most of the fault lying at the feet of the US and EU, which are more concerned about placating their publishing industries than helping the poor and disabled around the world. And just when you think it can't get any worse, it does:

In a May 14, 2013 letter signed by Markus Beyrer, a Brussels based corporate lobby group known as Business Europe has sent a letter to Commissioners Michel Barnier and Karel De Gucht opposing the WIPO treaty on copyright exceptions for persons who are blind or have other disabilities. .... Business Europe describes itself as "the main horizontal business organization at the EU level." It represents 41 national business organizations in 35 European countries, claiming to promote "growth and competitiveness in Europe." Below is a list of the 55 member companies on its Corporate Advisory and Support Group, which describes its main constituency.

What readers of this blog may find most of interest are the names of the companies from the computer industry that are supporting this move to deny the blind even the smallest solace. Here are the main ones:

Facebook
IBM
Microsoft
Oracle

These are companies that often like to present themselves as decent and caring organizations whose pursuit of profit is balanced by a deep respect for fundamental human values. But their support here for the Business Europe lobbying group and its attempt to make it even harder for the blind to gain belatedly basic human rights like being able to read books – something that most of us are able to take for granted - is simply unacceptable.

I therefore call on Facebook, IBM, Microsoft and Oracle to dissociate themselves from the Business Europe group and its attempt to keep blind people in their darkness. If those companies refuse, we will know that their claims to any kind of humanity are shams, and should treat them with the contempt that they deserve.

13 May 2013

How Publishers Have Fought Against the Treaty for the Blind

One of the most disgraceful manifestations of the callousness of copyright maximalists is their 30-year refusal to countenance any meaningful kind of exception for blind users to convert texts into readable forms. Here's the background:

Even in 2013, blind people and others living with a print disability such as those with dyslexia still have very limited access to books. Only some 7% of published books are ever made accessible (in formats such as Braille, audio and large print) in the richest countries, and less than 1% in poorer ones. This is a “book famine”.

And here's what Fred Schroeder, First Vice President of the World Blind Union, said about the current state of the negotiations to change that:

The purpose of this treaty is to ensure access to books for blind people and help end the “book famine” we face. WBU is alarmed that some of the negotiators have focused their efforts almost exclusively on crafting language around copyright protections that have nothing to do with the ability of authorized entities to produce books for the blind and visually impaired. The shift away from a treaty for the blind to a treaty focussed on rights holder protections has taken up precious negotiating time which should be directed at ensuring a treaty that makes it possible for materials to be shared internationally.

I was naturally interested to find out what the UK's publishers had been doing on this front, so I put in a FOI request to the UK government:

I would be grateful if you could please supply me with the following information. 
Emails, letters and any other written communications from the last six months, between the Publishers Association or representatives of UK publishers, and the Intellectual Property Office, on the subject of the WIPO treaty for the blind (formally, the "Treaty to facilitate Access to Published Works by Visually Impaired Persons and Persons with Print Disabilities".)

You can find the full reply here; this is what KEI's Jamie Love wrote about the emails that were made available to me:

Overall, the emails deal extensively with publisher opposition to fair use (fair use is mentioned 40 times), and promotion of commercial availability and requests that the treaty include restrictive three-step test language (even while asserting that other treaties and agreements already mandate the three step test for all copyright exceptions). The emails also demonstrate the close cooperation and communication between the IPO and the publishers in the negotiations.

Although it's frustrating not to be able to see more, the emails provide a handy reminder just how much the UK government is willing to work with publishers to place obstacles in the way of the blind gaining access to even a fraction of the materials that sighted people are fortunate enough to access.

You would have thought that any caring human being would gladly support moves to alleviate the massive suffering this book famine causes to hundreds of millions of visually impaired people across the world, but apparently there are some who are immune to these feelings, because they regard preserving copyright's oppressive intellectual monopoly as far more important than helping the poor, the sick and the disadvantaged.

I find that desperately sad - and further proof of the harm that copyright inflicts on society as a whole, and particularly on the most vulnerable. 

03 May 2013

Please Help Save Open Source Seeds Now

Seeds have much in common with code.  Indeed, I wrote an entire book about how genomics parallels the world of software.  In particular, they suffer from the same problem: patents.  Patents give control over key technologies, which makes the corresponding commons even more valuable for the freedom it offers.

And alongside open source code, there are open source seeds.  These are those that have been developed over thousands of years by nameless farmers, and are owned by no one.  Anyone can sell them, or use them to develop new seeds.  They form part of humanity's greatest heritage.  And yet an ill-advised European regulation threats to consign open source seeds to the dustbin of history.

I've written a detailed explanation of what the issues are over on Techdirt.  Here I'd like to concentrate on what we can do about it.  Basically, we need to contact the European Commissioners before Monday, asking them not to take this step.  Here are their email addresses:

Viviane.Reding@ec.europa.eu, joaquin.almunia@ec.europa.eu, Siim.Kallas@ec.europa.eu, Neelie.Kroes@ec.europa.eu, Antonio.Tajani@ec.europa.eu, Maros.sefcovic@ec.europa.eu, Olli.Rehn@ec.europa.eu, Janez.Potocnik@ec.europa.eu, Andris.Piebalgs@ec.europa.eu, Michel.Barnier@ec.europa.eu, Androulla.Vassiliou@ec.europa.eu, Algirdas.semeta@ec.europa.eu, karel.de-gucht@ec.europa.eu, Maire.Geoghegan-Quinn@ec.europa.eu, Janusz.Lewandowski@ec.europa.eu, Maria.Damanaki@ec.europa.eu, Kristalina.Georgieva@ec.europa.eu, Johannes.Hahn@ec.europa.eu, Connie.Hedegaard@ec.europa.eu, stefan.Fule@ec.europa.eu, Laszlo.Andor@ec.europa.eu, Cecilia.Malmstrom@ec.europa.eu, Dacian.Ciolos@ec.europa.eu, Tonio.Borg@ec.europa.eu

I'm sorry for the extremely short notice, but I found out about this just a few weeks ago, and have been trying to get my head around what is really going on.  Basically, this would give control of Europe's food supply to the multinational giants like Monsanto, and ensure that our food is increasingly "owned" through the presence of patents.  That's insane for the reasons that I note below.

Here's what I've sent off:


I am writing to you to urge you to object to the regulation of the licensing and sale of seeds, which I believe you will consider next week. 
Although I appreciate that the impulse behind this was laudable enough – to ensure that plant material that is available in the EU is safe, and that problems can be tracked back to their source – the way it is being implemented seems fraught with problems. 
First, there is the huge bureaucratic burden that is being imposed upon seed suppliers. These will fall especially hard on small and medium-sized enterprises, a group that I know you are keen to promote.

Perhaps even worse, it will mean that thousands of ancient varieties that are unencumbered and in the public domain will never be registered or certified, and thus will fall out of use. That is a terrible loss of thousands of years of European culture – civilisation was built on seeds, which made cities and all that they bring possible.
 
That will result in a loss of diversity at a time when European agriculture is facing unprecedented challenges thanks to climate change. The seed licensing proposals make it likely that fewer, less varied seeds will be used; this will make food supply in Europe far less resilient, and more vulnerable to diseases. It will also make European farmers dependent on a small group of large seed suppliers who will be able to exercise oligopoly power with all that this implies for pricing and control. 
Finally, these changes will result in tens of millions of ordinary citizens across Europe – the ones who delight in the simple pleasures of gardening – finding themselves limited in the seeds that they can buy and sow. At the very least this is likely to lead to an increasing disillusionment with the European project, something that we all would wish to avoid at a time when many are expressing their doubts on this score. 
In summary, I ask you to reject the regulation in its current form, and to insist that it be modified to allow Europe ancient seed heritage to be preserved and enjoyed by future generations, and to ensure that European agriculture remains strong and independent.   

 Please help if you can: this is important.

24 April 2013

Please Write to MEPs *Now* about TAFTA/TTIP


There's an important vote in INTA today (25 April) on the transatlantic trade agreement (TAFTA/TTIP), and there are some crucial issues that you might like to convey to your MEP, especially if they are on the INTA committee. La Quadrature du Net has put together a splendid page explaining which amendments to the proposed draft resolution need to be adopted, and which rejected. There's also a list of MEPs on the INTA committee, so you can check if there's yours.

Here's what I've sent to my MEP:

My fear is that attempts may be made to turn this treaty into ACTA by the backdoor, and I'm sure that none of us really wants to go through all that again. I'd therefore like to urge you and your colleagues on INTA to reject Amendment 115, and to adopt Amendment 121.

I'd also like to mention the problems with investor-state disputes. As you doubtless know, Eli Lilly is suing the Canadian government for $100 million because the Canadian courts decided that Eli Lilly's patent application did not meet the stated requirements (I wrote an article about it here: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130208/03441521918/canada-denies-patent-drug-so-us-pharma-company-demands-100-million-as-compensation-expropriation.shtml).

Eli Lilly wishes to use the investor-state dispute mechanism to overturn a legal, valid decision by the courts, following established Canadian law, simply because the company is not happy with it. As you can see, this threatens the sovereignty of any nation that agrees to such mechanisms, which were brought in for countries that had poor legal systems.

That is not the case for the EU and US, so the investor-state dispute mechanism is unnecessary, but represents a grave threat to not just every country in the EU, but the European Parliament itself, which could see its laws overruled by secret arbitration courts. I would thus urge you to accept Amendment 164 and exclude investor-state dispute mechanisms from the mandate.
Finally, I would like to ask that Amendment 174 be accepted. This requires the US to agree to transparency – something that was sadly lacking in ACTA, and which caused huge problems there. To those who say that it is not possible to reveal secret documents without compromising the negotiations, there is a simple answer: make public only those documents that are tabled for discussion. At that point, they are no longer secret, and therefore no advantage can be lost by releasing them. Documents that have not yet been tabled can be kept secret. Transparency would allow European citizens to follow and be engaged by the negotiations, rather than kept in the dark and alienated from them.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and on Google+

16 April 2013

Letter to UK Supermarkets on Use of non-GM Feed

As you may have read, by an amazing coincidence, most of the UK's leading supermarkets have simultaneously announced that they will no longer use non-GM feed (I'm sure there was no conferring whatsoever...).  The stated reason is that, much as they'd like to, they just can't find non-GM feed anymore.  Ain't that a pity?

Oddly, though, ABRANGE, the Brazilian Association for Producers of Non-GMO Soy, has just released a statement saying there's no shortage, just a queue of ships waiting to load goods at Brazilian docks.

So, I thought I'd send an email to the supermarkets concerned, asking for their comments on the good news that they don't need to adopt GM feed.  There's a list of addresses if you feel like doing the same. Here's what I've sent:

Last week you announced that you will no longer require that the farm animals in your supply chains are fed a non-GM diet. You said the reason for this was simply that non-GM feed is no longer available. And yet this week, ABRANGE, the Brazilian Association for Producers of Non-GMO Soy, released a statement (available at http://www.gmwatch.org/latest-listing/52-2013/14771-brazilian-non-gm-soy-producers-baffled-by-uk-retailers-decision) which included the following: 
"The current situation, which United Kingdom retailers have been lead to believe is do to reduced quantities and availability of Non-GMO soy actually has nothing to do with the soy being GMO or Non-GMO; it is the result of a slow down in Brazilian exports, which is due to increased pressure on Brazilian export facilities caused by increased demand for all types of exports from Brazil. There is a shortage of berths for mooring ships in virtually every Brazilian port. In some cases, ships must queue for 30-40 days just to dock and load. This is not due to lack of Non-GMO product in the harbour warehouses nor due to the logistics required to deliver product to the port, but to lack of available berths for mooring ships caused by spiralling export demand. 
This situation is temporary, as exporters are actively seeking solutions to circumvent the export slow down. 
Although one large supplier of non-GMO soy has withdrawn from the market, others continue to supply, and assure that they are still quite capable of consistently delivering material to UK customers." 
This suggests that you have been seriously misled by your suppliers, and that non-GM feed is indeed available. I would therefore be interested to hear your comment on this situation.

I would also hope that you will now re-consider your decision in the light of the fact the majority of UK shoppers do not wish to buy products made with GM feed, and that the problem you identified – the lack of non-GM feed - is in fact not an issue.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and on Google+.

14 April 2013

Here's Another Inventor Who Willingly Gave Away His Greatest Idea In Order To Establish It As A Global Standard


Beyond the fact that you are using it to read these words, the Web has undeniably had a major impact on a large part of the world's population. It's certainly one of the greatest inventions of recent times, and as Techdirt has noted before, one of the reasons it has taken off in such an amazing way, and led to so many further innovations, is because Sir Tim Berners-Lee decided not to patent it.

EU Proposal for (Nearly) Open Data [Update]


Update: Maël Brunet has pointed out that the press release I linked to below is from 2011; what was actually announced yesterday was that the EU Council's 'Coreper' committee (EU Committee of Member States' Permanent Representatives) has now endorsed the measures announced there. So, nothing has changed from what I wrote below, but another hurdle has been cleared in making the open data initiative happen. All that remains is for the European Parliament to agree, and the rules will come into force. Unfortunately, it seems unlikely that any amendments will be included at this stage, so it looks like we only get "almost" open data....

French Politician Wants To Limit How Cheaply Companies Can Sell Goods Online Compared to Physical Shop Prices


A couple of weeks ago, Techdirt wrote about a store that was trying to charge customers $5 for "just looking", because it felt that many people were merely inspecting goods there before then buying them online. Guillaume Champeau points us to a French politician who is also worried about the same problem, and hasproposed modifying the law governing commerce to deal with it (original in French). Here's the politician's explanation in the preamble of why it is needed:

How Multilateral Free Trade Agreements Are Bypassing Democratic Decision-Making Around The World


One of the most worrying aspects of ACTA -- which began life as a "simple" treaty about combatting counterfeit goods -- was how it morphed into a new approach to global policy making. This had two key aspects. First, the treaty would be negotiated in secret, with minimal input from the public, but plenty from lobbyists, who were given access to key documents and to negotiators. Secondly, the results of those secret negotiations were designed to constrain the participating governments in important ways that nullified ordinary democratic decision-making. If at all, representative bodies were presented with a take-it-or-leave it choice; changing individual details was not an option.

OpenDaylight and the Future of Enterprise Software


Earlier this week, the Linux Foundation made an announcement about the oddly-named OpenDaylight project:

I Re-send My IPRED Letter to the European Commission


Last week I wrote a letter to the European Commission about theextraordinary failure of the IPRED consultation process. I certainly didn't expect a reply immediately, but I did hope that its arrival might have been acknowledged by now. It hasn't, so I've now emailed the following:

French Intelligence Agency Forces Wikipedia Volunteer to Delete Article; Re-Instated, It Becomes Most-Read Page On French Wikipedia


Last week, we wrote about an organization that was unhappy that a Wikipedia article no longer existed. Now we have the opposite problem: an organization unhappy because a Wikipedia article does exist. And not just any organization, but the "Direction Centrale du Renseignement Intéieur" (Central Directorate of Interior Intelligence, DCRI), a French intelligence agency, which suddenly decided that an article about a military base contained classified information, and wanted it deleted. As the English-language Wikipedia article on the subject explains:

Google Under Attack in the EU: Microsoft to the Rescue?


As I wrote last week, all the main browsers are jockeying for position in the world of mobile, which is generally recognised as the key future platform. One player that is struggling here is Microsoft: its mobile phone strategy has signally failed to take off, leaving it a minor player alongside the duopoly of Apple and Google. Its tie-up with Nokia is part of its attempt to make its products relevant here, but another important aspect of its counter-attack is through the legal system.

Icelandic Politicians Ignore Crowdsourced Constitution; Pirate Party Rejoices


Techdirt has been following the fascinating saga of Iceland's crowdsourced constitution for nearly two years. Back in October 2012, we noted that Icelandic citizens gave it a pretty big thumbs up. Reflecting that, it really looked like Iceland's parliament might pass the associated bill, and go down in the history books for this bold re-invention of itself.

Mozilla and the Open Source Browser Bonanza


Even if you don't remember the birth of Mozilla 15 years ago, you are certainly benefitting from its consequences. For, back then, the company that invented the Web as a mass medium, Netscape, was in its death throes, and looked likely to take Web browser choice with it.

Amazon Refuses To Publish First Cornish-Language Ebook


As we've noted before, Amazon is beginning to wield considerable power over the entire publishing chain. The past teaches us that as successful companies gain near-monopoly powers, their arbitrary decisions become more problematic. Here's an unusual example of that, pointed out to us by @IndigenousTweet via @MLBrook:

Letter to European Commission on IPRED


Following my post yesterday about the extraordinary failure of the IPRED consultation process, I enclose below my letter sent to the European Commission on the subject, calling for an extension to the consultation, and for alternative ways of making submissions:

Wikipedia Editor Threatened With Lawsuit For Participating In Discussion Leading To Deletion Of Entry


After weathering earlier attacks on its reliability, Wikipedia is now an essential feature of our online and cultural landscapes. Indeed, it's hard now to imagine a world where you can't quickly check up some fact or other by going online to Wikipedia and typing in a few keywords. But that centrality brings with it its own problems, as a post from Benjamin Mako Hill about legal threats he received thanks to his work as a Wikipedia editor makes clear.

Indian Supreme Court Rejects Trivial 'Evergreening' Of Pharma Patents


Back in October last year, in the context of India showing itself increasingly sceptical about pharma patents that drive up drug prices beyond the reach of its citizens, we wrote about an important court battle over Novartis's drug Gleevec, sold as Glivec in India. The definitive judgement from India's Supreme Court was announced today, reported here by The Guardian:

The Great IPRED Consultation Fiasco


Last week I made a couple of urgent pleas to readers to complete the major EU IPRED consultation, which was being conducted on the Web. Since I needed to be able to refer to my own answers, I saved these as a draft online so that I could go back to them, polish them, and then submit them.

NATO 'Cyberwar' Manual Says Hacktivists Must Wear A Uniform


Last year, Techdirt wrote about an interesting article suggesting that we should welcome "cyberwar" since it would be so much less painful than the ordinary kind. Of course, that begs the question what we actually mean by "cyberwar", since some forms are probably less humane than others. As we have pointed out, the use of the totally embarrassing "cyber" prefix is really just an excuse for more government controls and for security companies to get fat contracts implementing them.