Incidentally, it’s really good to see a major political party actually trying to develop policy in the open on the Internet. I’d love to see them both doing it. Where are you, National?

I wrote a comment on the Red Alert blog trying to explain what I think statements like “Broadband is a Human Right” mean. Here’s an expanded and tidied up version.

Human rights are in some sense a legal fiction since there is nothing in physics or evolution which guarantees them. Rather, they are a way of agreeing a minimum set of standards to dealing with each. So arguments like “show me where Einstein, the Bible or the US Constitution says this” simply don’t address the issue.

However, human rights have shown themselves to be a good way of thinking about how we relate to each other. The UN Declaration of Human Rights (commonly thought to have been drafted by Eleanor Roosevelt) was put together in the late 40s while the world was still reflecting on the treatment of the Jews and other minority groups in Nazi Germany. (Subsequently Stalin and Mao also treated whole classes of people like this, but their nations did not sign up to the notion of human rights.) Setting human rights as a basic standard of treatment of individuals provides a benchmark by which people can measure their governments.

There is an argument that says agreeing to human rights such as freedom from unjust imprisonment is qualitatively different to saying that access to a good or service like food or broadband is also a human right. We can agree that killing people is wrong, but to some it’s a further step to say that you should feed someone who would otherwise starve.

My perspective on this is that human rights are part of the way which we mutually agree to treat each other. I don’t think it would be acceptable for people to starve or freeze to death for lack of food or shelter and I’m happy to give up a proportion of my resources to ensure that. The actual job of distributing those resources is outsourced to the state. So, to me, extending the language of human rights to the basic necessities of life is entirely appropriate.

The question we are now facing is whether access to broadband can be seen as a human right. You can certainly argue that people should have the right to participate in society and the the economy, and I can cheerfully assert that broadband will soon be essential for those things if it isn’t already. So, the question is whether participation in society and the economy is a human right.

It seems to me that these things are real human rights. We are social creatures who can’t survive without the assistance of others. Cooperation is a major distinction between us and animals. If you accept this, then refusing to guarantee access to the tools required to participate is effectively condemning some people to lives of isolation and alienation.

This is nothing to do with whether services that we think should be human rights are provided by the state or by the private sector. And it doesn’t compel providers to serve any given individual. What it does is provides a spur to government to ensure that everyone gets access. Whether government deals with that through regulation, subsidy or direct provision is up to it.

To sum up: I think there is a real case for regarding broadband access as a human right. I’m delighted to see Finland – a country with a great many similarities to New Zealand – legislating for this. Will New Zealand follow suit?

UPDATE: Lawyer and smart person Guy Burgess wrote about Internet as a human right last month. And Juha Saarinen, who speaks Finnish (of course), has commented on what the Finnish government is really doing.

Subsequently I met Anni and Michele of Digitalbrand, who were contracted by Microsoft to run the session. They had recently run something similar for Microsoft in Canberra, and a couple of New Zealand government people had gone over for it. We talked a lot about the difference between a self-organising informal unconference and a formal conference with a set agenda and speakers.

This was certainly not the first informal session to be organised around open government data in Wellington. There have been several self-organised bar camps and there will presumably be more. The government folk and the open data types are used to just rolling up their sleeves and making these things happen. So, we were slightly amused and a little nervous to see how a large corporate would approach the notion.

The day before the session I met with the organisers again, and with Julian Carver of Seradigm who had just allowed himself to be talked into chairing it. It became clear then that there was a tension between the un- and the conference, and Julian spent a lot of time working out how to manage this.

I should say at this stage that my respect for Julian, already high, has gone up hugely. It was controversial that he even accepted the job of chairing (which he did pro bono). Nevertheless he put all his formidable talents into the planning and the day itself. His performance was stellar.

And so on to the day itself – today, although it seems longer ago. There was indeed the the tension between an organised agenda and an unconference-style self-directed group. This was partly managed by calling for lists of topics before and during the session, then self-selecting into breakout groups to brainstorm these topics and report back. Of the attendees I spoke to, some seemed uncomfortable with the informal part of the day, and others with the formal part, so perhaps a balance was a reasonable thing to attempt.

Many of the formal presentations were very good. Hamish McArdle of the NZ Police, Minister Steven Joyce and the idea-per-second Glen Barnes stick in my mind. There was a panel discussion which was probably the best run of any such I have seen. (I did say that Julian was good at this.) And there weren’t any presentations coming in over Skype, video feeds or other potential technical nightmares. But, most of all – especially – there wasn’t any selling. Product and specific technology did not get mentioned. That was good for several reasons, perhaps the most trivial being that Oliver and I had an agreement in advance that he would have to supply me with a beer immediately for delivery offsite if selling occurred. I didn’t collect on that one.

The break out groups produced some interesting material, although a lot of it was reasonably anodyne. It’s clear that there is great enthusiasm to open government data – the NZGOAL framework at SSC is an example – and external encouragement isn’t needed, although welcome.

I was concerned by the output of one group which evaluated open source software as a key plank of open data – it concluded, perhaps predictably, that OSS wasn’t necessary for open data or even fit for government’s purposes. After all, who are you going to sue if it goes wrong? And do people know how much investment commercial software houses put into their products? These rather tired points have been rebuffed many times and no-one saw the point in doing so again at the meeting. That was the prompt for my acerbic tweet Microsoft unconference decides open source no good. Film at 11.

To me, the self-serving bit about the alleged unsuitability of open source was the only serious fly in the ointment on the day. The rest was at least neutral and often worth while. But, the intended beneficiaries of this day were the government folk who are opening up data as part of a move towards more open government, so I asked a few of them how they thought the day went. “Mixed” was a typical response. Like the curate’s egg, said one (hence the title of this post).

My overall conclusion here is that there was an attempt to make an elephant dance, in that Microsoft did at least try to run a session with a fluid agenda. Anything could have happened. The day was sell-free and mostly free of the kind of rancour which has poisoned Microsoft’s relationships with open source and open data people over the last few years. Politely, no one mentioned OOXML, and even when Clare Curran expressed her frustration that the Select Committee’s clear view on disallowing software patents has yet to reach some quarters, she refrained from rubbing the host’s corporate nose in its own support for software patents.

For Microsoft I suspect this was a walk on the wild side. Good on them at least for trying something. From the government’s – well, many of the government folk involved were well-used to informal bar camps. The bar campers wanted more informality and the others felt happier being lectured. From the open source, open data and general “want to help” types such as yours truly – the day gave an opportunity to spread the message wider.

To repurpose an old Data General ad: People are saying that Microsoft’s entry into open government unconferences will legitimise the field. The bastards say: welcome!

The value of information depends on several things, including its scarcity and its usefulness to the potential end-user. I’m left wondering if there is information that is inherently valueless. I can think of examples of obscure trivia, but someone, somewhere, always seems to care. It can be argued (and Oliver presumably is arguing this) that search engines monetize obscure information by using it to sell eyeballs to advertisers.

Of course, search engines don’t sell the information itself. They sell a way of discovering it. The information itself has generally already been published for free. The information has value based on the network effect, i.e. that its a published in a standard form using the World Wide Web. The search engines are very much part of this system that imputes value to freely-published information.

So, then, the monetary value of freely-published information derives as much from the great mass of other web sites, from the search engines and from the Internet itself as it does from the information.

However, I’m interested as much in what we can do with information in bulk as I am in in assigning a numerical value to individual chunks. If I write a piece of software, say, is its optimal value realized if I sell licenses to use it or if I simply publish it for others to use as they see fit without monetary recompense? The answer to that question depends partly on who recognizes the monetary value. If we look at value to the community of computer users as a whole, allowing anyone to use the software will have the greatest value. If I look at it in terms of personal revenue-maximization for that piece of software, I would presumably retain the source code as a secret and sell licences to use it on the basis of my perception of each user’s ability to pay. This applies to any information goods, i.e. things that can be copied without using up physical resources.

There are two components to value of information in the Internet age – value derived from maintaining its scarcity and value derived from making it available. Both are highly dependent on usefulness. The former is usually captured by the publisher, the latter accrues to the community.

There may, as Oliver suggests, one day be a market for all kinds of personal information. The individual worth of each piece is likely to be very low. The worth to the community as a whole of pooling its information is likely to represent the major part of its technology and its culture.

I’ll be on air after the 11am news. You can listen live, or soon afterwards you will be able to pull the podcast or download the audio as ogg or mp3.

There’s no doubt in my mind that the Internet is the greatest engine of prosperity since since, say, the telephone or even since mass transportation. It allows us all to interact with people and business around the world without using up fossil fuels and personal resources in travel. It provides businesses with a customer communications channel connected directly to their back-end systems. On the Internet, life is good. And, as I have said on numerous occasions, it only got that way because the Internet is an open conduit for anything people can think of.

It has been recognized by lawmakers for years that openness is the key to the Internet’s usefulness. But, increasingly, that is coming to an end. The Chinese government routinely censors its domestic Internet and forces all Internet traffic entering and leaving the country through a giant gateway it controls. The US allows private companies to remove material placed on the Internet by third parties on accusation of copyright infringement. Australia looks likely to implement a national Internet filter in the name of pornography suppression. The UK is considering a “Digital Economy Bill” which would force Internet disconnections and filter access to websites. Even the New Zealand government is looking at a limited filtering system to combat child pornography.

All this brings me to my point: Can we, humankind, actually stand an open communications medium? One that lets all of us talk to all of us? Along with the huge list of economic and social benefits that brings? Observing the actions of government world wide, I’d have to answer “no”.

It appears that the Internet is just too open and too useful for humanity to come to terms with. Since the Internet is just a communications tool, this means that we, as a species, can’t tolerate open communications between all our members. That’s why I question whether the Internet is just too good for us, whether we deserve it at all.

But then, what can you expect from a species that can’t organize itself to operate in an environment of finite resources? There is no functioning mechanism for us to deal with global environment destruction or fossil fuel exhaustion, for instance. You don’t have to accept anthropogenic climate change to agree that we don’t have a way of dealing with it.

So, then, we are a deeply flawed race careering off a cliff of our own making. Does that mean we shouldn’t fight – that we should just eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we die? I don’t think so. For me, each of us who recognizes the problems should act as best we can to hold a mirror to human activities. That means calling governments and industries when they try to hold progress to ransom. It means arguing for cooperative approaches to dealing issues that face us. It means not hiding our heads in the sand about limited resources.

I certainly don’t have all the answers. But until we at least accept the questions, neither will any of us.

How we deal with the Internet and its ability for us all to communicate will the question I posed in the title: is the Internet too good for us?

There are various measures available to Internet censors. China, for instance, runs the so-called “Great Firewall” – a single point of access for all Internet traffic entering and leaving the country. Centralized national firewalls offer a high level of control, but they find it hard to deal with traffic which is encrypted (as a lot of Internet traffic is, routinely). Almost invariably, they have to block a lot of material which is wider than their intended purpose, just to be sure. You can’t allow free access to Google if you don’t your population to even be able to search for specific concepts. Another issue is that the engineering for the great firewall gets quite problematic. It needs to be able to pass a great deal of traffic very quickly while filtering out the “bad” stuff. Finally, there needs to be a staff who are dedicated to controlling the filter, adding new sites to it, perhaps removing old ones, and generally dealing with issues it throws up.

A more limited technical measure is to control the Domain Name System (DNS) in the country. This means that people typing the address of a “bad” site into their browser would instead get a page saying “naughty naughty” or some such. In fact, if they knew the IP number to go to – and it wouldn’t be hard for a determined person to find this – they will evade this form of censorship altogether. This technique would involve its own engineering challenges as well as the problem of managing the list of bad sites.

And deciding what gets blocked is the core of the problem with automated, technical measures like the two described above. There’s no way for the general public to inspect the list of what gets blocked – if you publish the list, you are just publishing a list of sites that you don’t want people to go to. If you don’t publish the list, there is no accountability that governments will only block CAI (or whatever they have said they will). The list can and will expand for several reasons: incompetence, in the case of the Queensland dentist’s site blocked by the Australian filter; a desire to protect the filter itself (Wikileaks); and an extension or what we regard as repugnant or harmful, but don’t necessarily want a public debate about.

There is another technique that governments use to control what people do on the Internet. That is, simply, to watch what is going on within their country and apply real-world sanctions to people breaking the law. All countries do this to a greater or lesser extent. In New Zealand, for instance, the Department of Internal Affairs looks for images of child abuse (i.e. child pornography) and prosecutes people involved in making or trading them. The recent charges brought against a blogger for allegedly breaking a suppression order are another example. This approach seems the natural one for an open society like New Zealand to take. It relies on humans to detect and discern illegal activity rather than machines. That’s how our court system works. It’s also how law enforcement works. We don’t require people to have licences for cameras; of course not, cameras are widely used for a variety of entirely legal purposes. We prosecute people who use cameras to break the law. It should be the same for computers and the Internet.

To summarise: filtering the Internet is problematic technically, but most of all it is incompatible with a democratic open society. Prosecute the wrongdoers but leave the Internet alone.

When I was writing this presentation, what struck me most was that the values that have made the Internet successful – openness, thrift, lack of centralised ownership – are exactly those you find in community organisations. It’s no coincidence that the Internet grew to dominate the online world, rather than the privately-owned Compuserve or Prodigy.

I’m hoping to meet a lot of engaged and enthusiastic people at the session today. Perhaps I’ll see you there!

You can listen live 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.

A: A few comments about the ongoing situation on copyright. First of all, we have an excellent story by James Boyle, who is a high-powered academic and well-qualified to comment.

Q: Is that about the Google Books settlement?

A: Partly, yes. He’s worried that copyright law as written might give Google, if the Google Books settlement happens, exclusive rights to our culture. He may have a point. But his solution, rather than to throw out the good things about having Google indexing every book ever written, or for that matter being able to see what you read – is to change copyright law so that there’s wider access to commercially-unavailable works, which it says are the main ones it wants to index.

And, now, two European Commissioners have come out and said that they want copyright law changed as well. Some cynics have that’s because they were encouraged to do so by Google, but I think there’s less to that than meets the eye. One of them, Commissioner Reding, has clashed hard with Microsoft on many occasions, and its clear that Microsoft regards Google as almost its only serious competitor. To be clear, here – I’m not suggesting that the Commissioners are dancing to anyone’s tune but their own, rather that their actions are being portrayed differently according to which corporate lens you look through.

Q: Surely there are some valid concerns with the Google Book Settlement?

A: Frankly, not many. When TV3 News highlighted it a couple weeks ago the best it could come up with was that an author might someday strike it big and would then find it hard to increase prices on their back catalogue.

Q: You don’t buy that?

A: No I don’t. I’m sure that for books as well for music, the greatest threat to an author is obscurity – and getting your work on Google has got to be good for you.
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Authors get 63c in the dollar from books sold on the site. That’s a lot more than they do from bricks and mortar publishing I’m certain
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Google proposes to make available a huge number of “orphan” works – stuff that’s out of print

The real point here is that copyright law is a complete mishmash. The only way to put a large corpus of material online is to deal separately with a huge number of publishers. The difference with the music business, where something like iTunes can exist, is that there are four main music companies there, compared with many, many publishers.

Q: Part of the problem is that the deal is exclusive

A: That actually isn’t the case. Google could have tried for this, but instead its setting up and seed-funding a rights-clearing house which makes the rights to online access available to all online providers.

There are some other good bits as well – it can all be made accessible, so that blind people would be able to read any book in the collection. That doesn’t happen a lot at the moment because publishers lock down electronic books so that blind people cant use their machines to read them. Incredibly, some publishers want blind people to pay more for something that is already in electronic form, and even more incredibly we let them get away with it.

And Libraries and universities can get access to the entire collection for a single fee.

The more I dig into this, those arguing against it look like the hysterical people in the US who have been misled by lies into arguing against reforming the US’s dreadful health system.

Q: So you are in favour of it, I take it?

A: Yes, of course. But what I’m really, really in favour is reforming copyright so that its not so convoluted and it doesn’t impose so much deadweight cost

A: I’d also like to talk about fictitious numbers being put out by the content industries about copyright infringements on the Internet

Q: And Elton John and Paul McCartney have come out and said something?

A: Elton came out years ago! But, no, Sir Elton John and Sir Paul McCartney – who have a lot to lose through so-called music piracy have come out swinging against a UK proposal to disconnect the Internet of people illegally downloading music. They say it’s a totally disproportionate penalty, and the industry should concentrate on finding better ways of selling to music to people. And, in another story, we find that the inflated figures that the UK has been using to discuss the number of illegal downloaders are just that: inflated figures. They were taken off a very small survey sponsored by the music industry and then substantially rounded when they didn’t look high enough.

As tech journalist Juha Saarinen put it the other day: despite whatever the music companies want you to believe:

* The number of file sharers isn’t anywhere near as large as thought

* The Internet isn’t 99.9 per cent P2P traffic

* The losses suffered by entertainment industry conglomerates are in fact massive profits

* Home taping still isn’t killing music.

The worst part of this is that the British government appears to have bought the numbers and is looking to use them as a basis for policy without understanding where they came from. That’s really not good enough. The press in this country would crucify a government who tried to that and rightly so.

Links

A copyright black hole swallows our culture.

European Commissioners want to change copyright law.

How to turn 136 people into 7m – bad survey of illegal downloaders.

The site for the Wellington event is here, the Waikato one here, and if you know of others please put them into the comments.

I’ll be on just after the 11am news. Listen live, or after the broadcast you’ll be able to download the audio as ogg or mp3.

A: Let’s talk about Software Freedom Day, 20th September 2009 in Wellington, and events on in other parts of the country as well. This event has been running for at least the last three years but it seems to have grown real legs this time round. It’s being hosted by none other than Nat Torkington, so if you want to see what he really looks like, get down to the Wellington Convention Centre between 9 and 6 on Sunday 20th. Just tell them I sent you.

Q: This used to be just a few people giving away CDs in previous years.

A: It did, and now it’s grown into the kind of thing that can take over the Wellington Town Hall and the Michael Fowler Centre.

Q: What is the purpose of software freedom day?

A: It’s a celebration of all aspects of free software. There are at least seven parallel streams running down there, including a bar camp for people to brainstorm ideas, an installfest for people to install free software on their computers, a kids programme – which might be a good thing if you are a parent of primary kids, and a student programme. Incidentally, if you think your kids would be interested in a day playing with computers – download the program called Scratch first, if you get time. It’s a neat way of learning how to do interactive graphics programming – it’s a lot more fun than it sounds. Scratch runs on Windows and Macs and you get it from the MIT website – in today’s links.

Q: So is the event free?

A: Free as the air. If you’re in Wellington and you have any interest in computers – or your kids have – go and have a look at what’s going on in the Town Hall on Sunday 20th.

Q: That’s not the only thing they mean by free, is it?

A: No, they’re referring in part to Richard Stallman’s concept of free – that’s the so-called four software freedoms. They are: the freedom to run software for any purpose, the freedom to study how software works and change it to suit your purpose, the freedom to give copies of software away, and the freedom to improve software and give those copies back to the community. If all software was like that we would all be building on each other’s ideas and work and making huge progress – and if you don’t think software has the potential to make progress for people, just look at the Internet, at how banking has changed, how modern cars just start first time…

Q: So is this event just happening in Wellington?

A: Wellington is certainly having a big one this year. But there are events in Auckland, Albany, Hawke’s Bay, and probably other centres. I can’t say for certain what’s on in those places but there will definitely be things happening.

It’s not my purpose here to rehearse the arguments against software patents in New Zealand, but to discuss how to go about submitting your views to Parliament for its consideration. It’s something I have done a couple of times, and I have also been, in the distant past, an official helping a Select Committee, so I have seen both sides.

The first step is know that a Select Committee is calling for submissions on a topic. If it’s an issue you care about – and I wouldn’t bother writing submissions about a topic I didn’t care about – you would likely know already that a Bill was before the House. Normally Bills, as draft Acts of Parliament are called, are referred to Select Committees soon after they are first introduced. The Select Committee will then typically call for public submission on the Bill. You can find out about this, including which Bills are open for submissions, on Parliament’s website.

Once you have decided to write a submission, spend some time thinking of the points you want to make. Don’t just rail against something, but think about what you want the Committee to do and why you want it do that. Write those down as clearly and concisely as you can. If it would help the Committee, comment on specific numbered sections of the Bill, and tell the Committee what you think those sections should say instead. Keep it short and to the point.

My experience went like this. I wrote a submission – about 2 pages making my points and urging the Committee not to allow software patents in New Zealand, and asking it for the opportunity to present orally to the Committee. I was later emailed and then telephoned by the Clerk of the Committee who arranged a time for me to appear in front of it.

The Committee met in the Maori Affairs Committee Room in Parliament, which is room full of beautiful carvings. There were about 8 member of the Committee present and handful of advisors, plus a few others waiting to deliver their submissions. I was told I had 15 minutes. I did not read out my submission, but rather I made some parallel points which illustrated and backed up my arguments. I was questioned on specific points by the Committee, and it was clear that they were very engaged on the detail of what they were considering and were asking me to help them clarify parts of that.

I was impressed by the dedication they were showing. Most of the members were clearly engaged in what is, frankly, pretty dry stuff with a lot of legal and technical detail to get right. The way the Chair handled the submitter after me was very impressive – she managed to get right to the heart of what seemed at first to be a rambling complaint, and revealed what seemed to be a genuine problem with the Bill (outside my area of expertise so I can’t comment on the detail).

Overall it was in interesting and empowering experience. The Select Committee does appear to be doing its best to consider every point of view. I hope it gets a law that we can all live with.