www.felixcohen.co.uk

I'm off to the iCommons iSummit in Dubrovnik tomorrow; very exciting times. You can find my blog posts while I'm there on openDemocracy (and probably some here too...)

Felix

A little back story: over beers after on of the Open Rights Group volunteer events, we got to talking about cocktails. And I rather foolishly offered to give at least one of my fine cocktail recipes to ORG, under an appropriate licence (ratified by being published on this site, no less!). These cocktails will hopefully be available at the Support ORG And Party event in Shoreditch tomorrow night...come along!
Anyway, I came up with these two recipes on saturday night (my first night back on bar in ages, with the lovely Miss Polly Rae (in the middle here (NSFW)!), which were very well recieved then:

Great news this morning from the BBC ; it appears that the Gower Report has recommended that copyright term for recorded work remain at the current length of 50 years, not be extended to 95 years. This is despite extensive lobbying behind the scenes from the major record industry players and high-profile artists, such as Cliff Richards.
Interestingly, however, the BBC appear to be the only people reporting this. Is it possible that someone from the Gowers report has leaked this information in order to hold the government to task when the full report comes out (we're expecting it Wednesday 6th December at 12.30)? At least that way, if the Government does turn round and support the lobbying of the large record labels, it will be clear that this is not what Gowers recommended, so there is a clear accountability issue. Certainly the wording of the article suggests that this is a preliminary announcement before the main report arrives, so let's hope that now the results of the inquiry have entered the public domain, there will be enough pressure on the government to act on these recommendations.

Tonights releasethemusic event was very successful, with a healthy turn out in the beatiful Conway Hall in Holborn. The event started late, luckily for me, as as usual, computers were on the blink at openDemocracy.
First speaker of the evening was Jonathan Zittrain, professor at both Harvard and Oxford (wow) in Internet Governance & Regulation, and that rarest of things; an interesting, nay fascinating, law expert (disclosure: Jonathan is also a Technical Advisor for openDemocracy). He started the talk with a discussion of what is apparently the classic legal notion of property; a bundle of sticks. All notions of property are sticks in the bundle; in land ownership this might mean that access rights, leasing rights and living rights are sticks in a bundle that is the entire ownership. That was a lot clearer when Zittrain was explaining it. Hey, it may even be worth checking out my honourable forebearer, Felix Cohen for some of his thoughts on property!

Tomorrow night is the Open Rights Foundation releasethemusic event, with keynote and debates from a whole host of luminaries on both sides of the debate.
And, best of all, a DJ set of public domain, pre 1955 music from The Chaps. Which makes two nights of swing, jazz and entertaining retro dancing in three days for me, which should be ideal.
The issue of whether the government should extend the copyright term from 50 years to a longer term has been heated this year; great news from the IPPR, who called for keeping the current 50 year term and decrimilasing the act of putting music onto iPods (or whatever our choice of MP3 players is).

The big question this week it seems, other than existential dating crises, is Microsoft cuddling up to SuSe/Novell and, incredibly, endorsing a Linux distribution, in exchange for, as far as one can see, some sort of open standards exchange and, most importantly for SuSe, a 'Covenant Not to Sue' Novell/SuSe for any potential IP infringement in their Linux distro. Which rather leaves the rest of the distro's out in the cold when it comes to potential lawsuits; sure, the green chameleon is ok, but are we going to see SCO-esque warning shots being fired again soon. Although one can't help but wonder how much specific UNIX code and art Microsoft has patented, they sure as hell are likely to have a lot of algorithms, protocols and the like, a lot of which will have been implemented and integrated (hmmm. Implegrated?) into the GNU/Linux core system over time. Is Microsoft going to come out guns blazing now it has a partner.