Code is not Property: Official!

Wired reports that, three days ago,  the US 2nd Circuit Court of Appeal has declared that code is not property and cannot therefore be stolen; there is no intent to deprive the owner of the object’s use. They also ruled that the perpetrator, there is no doubt that the code was removed from Goldman Sachs network, could not be prosecuted under the US Economic Espionage Act since the code in question was not used in commerce. I don’t actually know what the code did, but we can be sure that it was used in commerce, or it was a regulatory compliance program. If it didn’t have one of these two purposes, Goldman Sachs wouldn’t be doing it, and wouldn’t have wanted to keep it secret.

Does this mean that only traded software can be the object of the espionage act? If so I am not sure this is where we want to be.

Part of Goldman Sachs’ problem is that they wanted to keep the code secret and there are many reasons to want to do so. However patent and copyright protection require the intellectual property owner to publish their ideas, or the expression of their ideas. Another part of the problem is that people wanted to see Aleynikov go to prison and breach of employee confidentiality wasn’t sufficient to get him there.

As techdirt.com reports in their article,

Still, the overall ruling here is good, though it could have been more complete.

I wonder if there will be further appeals, but it’s an important stake in the ground. Copyright infringement is not theft.

This was also covered at engadget.com. …

The internet is a UK success

I was going to polish my notes from the #Pictor meeting last week, which has published its own precis of events, but the Wall Street Journal and the BBC are both carrying a story sourced from Boston Consulting that the UK’s internet industry is now over 8% of GDP, and grew at over 10% during the period of the study. This is  while the UK GDP grew by 0.7% over the last year and there remain fears of a return to recession.

James Firth, at his blog, “Slightly Right of Centre”, tries to evaluate the contribution of the Internet industry vs. the “creative” industry and makes the point that the Digital Economy Act was passed to help and support a very important wealth creator in our economy. It’s a shame, well, more truthfully a point of design,  that it almost certainly discriminates against an even more important one. The figure bandied about by BIS at the time the time the act was passed was that creative industries were about 7% of GDP; the internet has overtaken it.

No matter how one does the sums, maybe its time to back a winner! …

Neither the UK, nor the EU should sign ACTA

Red Sin Censura, published an Internet in Danger page the other day, which pointed me at Le Monde’s “What’s wrong with ACTA”. This has been worrying me, since much of the opposition has been based solely on secrecy, although this bleeds into democratic oversight. Since the treaty has been negotiated primarily between democracies and their politicians and public servants, to me secrecy alone is not sufficient to win broad support to opposition to the proposed treaty; there’s a lot of people that trust their politicians. …

The chilling effect of global copyright enforcement

And on to the EU’s attempt to implement strong copyright enforcement. I’ll return to the UK in the next week or so, but the European Commission signed the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) a couple of days ago. This proposed trade treaty has been negotiated in secret amongst a group of governments from the developed world. The US agenda was to strengthen international enforcement of intellectual property laws, and the original European agenda was similar, but orientated more around the protection of a number of geographic brands, such as champagne or cheddar. The Open Rights Group talks, on their blog, about the secrecy and how we have came to this point. …

Social media is innovating software and systems architecture

Twitter bought Blacktype in July 2011 and as part of that acquisition got hold of Storm. This is a press release detailing the publication of Storm’s code on Github.

They position Storm as a parallel messaging, disk less system.

M Davey asks if this has much use in Capital Markets here.

I wonder if ‘Time Series Order’ might not be a serious inhibitor to its adoption, but Chief Engineer, Nathan Marz on his blog seems to think it could be part of the answer to a large number of problems. …

Yankee Law, freedom and the internet!

The White House, in a reply to a petition on its e-petitions site calling for them to oppose the current legislative attempts to censor the internet in the name of anti-piracy says, among other things,

“Any effort to combat online piracy must guard against the risk of online censorship of lawful activity and must not inhibit innovation by our dynamic businesses large and small. Across the globe, the openness of the Internet is increasingly central to innovation in business, government, and society and it must be protected. To minimize this risk, new legislation must be narrowly targeted only at sites beyond the reach of current U.S. law, cover activity clearly prohibited under existing U.S. laws, and be effectively tailored, with strong due process and focused on criminal activity…..”

It adds,

“We must avoid creating new cybersecurity risks or disrupting the underlying architecture of the Internet. Proposed laws must not tamper with the technical architecture of the Internet through manipulation of the Domain Name System (DNS), a foundation of Internet security. Our analysis of the DNS filtering provisions in some proposed legislation suggests that they pose a real risk to cybersecurity and yet leave contraband goods and services accessible online. We must avoid legislation that drives users to dangerous, unreliable DNS servers and puts next-generation security policies, such as the deployment of DNSSEC, at risk.”

It’s a shame they didn’t come to this conclusion earlier and continued to permit the US Trade Representative and the US’s Embassies the world over to lobby and bully for Hollywood’s laws and to seek extradition clearly non-criminal behaviour.

I demand that the US Government withdraw their extradition request for Richard O’Dwyer; its not in-line with the policy above. O’Dwyer is not a criminal; links are legal in the UK. (So actually, it is my view that foreign nationals should not lobby the US Government, just as I do not expect foreign nationals, or tax non-domiciles to finance politics in the UK . I have,however, signed one anti-SOPA petition; it was clearly labelled as a global initiative, so I would ask my US friends and comrades to take up O’Dwyer’s case. )

It is a disgrace that the White House can grandstand for its own fundamental rights and laws and its own business innovation while funding an oppressive lobbying regime and the legal pursuit of hobbyists.

It is a disgrace that British politicians and Judges, spinelessly permit this abuse to occur.

It is a disgrace that American legislators are prepared to attack the freedom of speech for the rest of the world in order to protect the super-profits of billionaires. …