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Today on Radio New Zealand National I talk about the deranged world of software patents, where someone can claim that an idea they had five years ago suddenly means that entire industry owes them a fortune. I’ll be on after the 11am news.

Read on for my speaking notes, or after the broadcast you’ll be able to download the audio as ogg or mp3. (more…)

“Without us, the Internet would be empty.”

That ludicrous statement is Ant Healey of APRA talking to the Dominion Post. Apparently he expects us to believe that the content industries as he calls them are the sole contributors of information on the Internet. Cue the Tui Billboard!

Let’s just pause for a moment and celebrate a few of the things that people get over the Internet. Wikipedia. Twitter. Email. Hubble Space Pictures. Skype. Travel Bookings. Banking. News. Maps. I could go on, and I’m sure you could too.

By saying something as stupid as this APRA is showing that it really doesn’t live on the same planet as the rest of us. It thinks we are all just consumers of its members’ copyrighted materials and the only difference between us is whether we pay it or not. This is just plain wrong. Really, it looks as though APRA is contemptuous of what you and I do on the Internet.

The question is, once we have all finished laughing, what do we do about this attitude? Answer – laugh some more. The best thing is to just keep pointing out how silly it is. Derision is the best response. Just laugh at them!

A bit over a century ago, when a different new infrastructure was being introduced, the business people who felt threatened by it got a law passed against it. That law didn’t last. Neither will any backlash against the entire Internet. The Net’s just too useful to too many people for it to be killed to suit one group. And resorting to ridiculous assertions like APRA’s one here shows that.

I’ve always been interested in this. We have already paid our government to collect data – why should it lock the data away from us, or charge us for access? Just because you have the power to do something, doesn’t make it right, after all. And, to be fair, the New Zealand government has been publishing a lot of data for a long time.
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Software patents are not currently available in New Zealand, although several companies have tried to get “by the back door”, i.e. by tying the software idea they want to patent to some piece of hardware.

A software patent is a state-enforced monopoly on a idea. They exist in the US and some other countries, but not in many places including New Zealand. We don’t need or want them here. If you want some reasons, here are five good ones:

1) There is no benefit. Patents are intended to incentivise innovation by allowing an inventor a monopoly they can exploit for money. There is no shortage of innovation, however, in countries and communities that do not use software patents. The whole of Linux would be a good example.

2) There is serious harm in software patents, because they prevent others from using ideas. The whole of our technology, and in fact our whole culture as the human species, is built upon us using ideas others have had and developing them further.

3) Software patents lead to unintended bad consequences. Software patents have proved hugely detrimental in the US where they are often used for anti-competitive purposes. Just the threat of being sued over a software patent is often enough to stop a new product in its tracks, without that patent ever reaching court and being tested.

4) There is a large deadweight cost in legal fees and court costs which simply does not exist without software patents.

5) They can’t be awarded fairly. Patent offices overseas have proved incapable of determining what a valid software patent is and have consequently awarded patents on all kinds of obvious things. Sometimes these get overturned some years later after pressure from the community, but often they hang around and frustrate new software.

We don’t need or want software patents in New Zealand.

The NBR is saying that the government has scrapped the appalling S92A of the Copyright Act – the Guilt upon Accusation law. That’s fantastic news! Well done to everyone who has campaigned for this, and particularly well done to John Key and his government for realising just how wrong this was and having the guts to stop it.

Now to work out what should go in its place. Politicians need to talk to people apart from a few organizations that represent some of the rights-holders. There’s a lot more views to consider when trying to figure out the right way to approach copyright in the Internet age.

I’ve been invited to a meeting tomorrow about this by Clare Curran MP of the Labour party. I’m more than happy to talk to any of the other parties as well.

Let’s get it right this time!

Today on Radio New Zealand National I’ll talk about a whole list of things – not sure if I’ll get time for them all. I’m going to mention the rumours that IBM will buy Sun, talk about why you can’t use your mobile on the London Underground, how you can tell if your computer is infected, and about where the value lies in software, which is based on a blog post I made a few days ago. I’ll put some of my speaker notes and the links for the program behind the “more…” below.

Listen live at 11:05 or download the audio as ogg or mp3. (more…)

I’ve been involved in the campaign against Section 92A of the Copyright Act since before the election. On at least two occasions I’ve heard from journalists that someone they wouldn’t name was trying to plant stories linking anti-S92A activists with, of all things, child pornography. We gritted our teeth and ignored it.

Last weekend this all broke wide open. Video rental shops in the larger chains tried to get their customers to sign a petition demanding that S92A be retained. In one of the United Video shops around Hamilton, at least, video shop staff were telling customers that this petition was all about stopping child pornography. They were told to say that, they said, by their manager. (more…)

Campbell Smith of the Recording Industry Association of New Zealand, a body that represents some copyright holders in New Zealand, has written a column in the Herald saying that requiring people’s Internet providers to cut them off if they are accused of copyright infringement is a reasonable way to protect artists’ rights.
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The government has just announced that it will delay S92a until at least the 27th of March, and will suspend it in any case until the Internet people and the copyright holders can agree. That’s fantastic, and victory for common sense.

Well done, everyone who has worked to get rid of this dreadful law! Special mentions go to Bronwyn and Matthew from the CFF and Nat Torkington from Foo. But most of all thanks to you – if you blacked out your avatar, or blogged about it, or wrote to an MP – good on you. You made a difference.

Woo-hoo!

Over on Geekzone, Juha Saarinen is running a great piece on why the last government ignored submissions and Bill of Rights considerations to ram this unjust law through. Apparently, it’s a requirement of a free trade deal with the US.

Let’s just pause and examine this. If the US want to change our law, how come they make it stronger than own? Answer: to build up public pressure for further tightening at home. And, why don’t our politicians come clean about this as the real reason for introducing the harshest law in the world? Answer: because they want to be able to blow their own trumpets for introducing an FTA without people realising they gave away our rights for it.

Even John Key thinks the law is draconian, not well-drafted, and pretty ropey. (His words, listen to the MP3 and skip forward to 8 min 20s.) He tries to blame Judith Tizard for the law. But he’s not rushing to fix it. UPDATE: The implementation has been delayed until 29th March. Well done for listening, John.

Australia got an FTA with the US. It was signed by politicians because they had to – they had already puffed it hard in the press and it would have been politically embarrassing not to. But it was signed against the advice of trade officials who realised that the FTA Australia was able to negotiate gave away more than it received in return, as it has since proved. Anyone think we could do better?

Before someone says how essential trade is – yes, of course it is. But a Free Trade Agreement is an oxymoron – either you have free trade or you don’t. And if you don’t, then an agreement might better be called a restricted trade agreement, because that is its effect. Perhaps it’s slightly less restricted than what went before.

If politicians deem it justified to legislate away New Zealanders’ rights to a handful of multinationals in exchange for improved trade, let’s have that debate. Don’t be shy, let’s get the costs and benefits out on the table. Then we can all discuss them. We may not all agree, but a least we all get to see what the balance is.

Or, if Juha and I are wrong that this is all about trade – let the government deny it publicly. Then, explain why we have to have this law when more New Zealand artists are members of the Creative Freedom Foundation than APRA.

Finally, Dylan Horrocks has drawn a fantastic cartoon – spread it far and wide!