Telematics Freedom

On the occasion of the Feast of the Pirates, which will be held tomorrow, Saturday, March 19th at the cinema Capranica in Rome, just steps from Parliament, to discuss multimedia piracy and the future of copyright, Telematics Freedom Foundation is now bringing forward its proposal for a substantial disintermediation and expansion of the content market, and fair and democratic remuneration of authors and producers, through collective licensing systems inclusive of legalization of sharing digital content.

From piracy to the disintermediation of the content market

Proposal for a substantial disintermediation and expansion of the content market, and a democratic and fair remuneration of authors and producers, through collective licensing systems inclusive of legalization of sharing digital content.
This Saturday, March 19th, in Rome, in the cinema Capranica, near Parliament, the Feast of the Pirates will be held to discuss multimedia piracy and the future of copyright with the participation of various political figures from the right and the left, associations and activists who are part of a very broad and diverse movement in the country.
The event will be held apparently with the absence of representatives of authors and producers, who, by the way, are starting to surface proposals that include the legalization of free trade in content.
This absence is symptomatic of a serious lack of dialogue with them, which has encouraged the spread in the “movement” of a position that promotes a mere legalization of piracy, without considering the problem of a decent and fair compensation for those who decide to live on culture.
Taking the opportunity of this event and the discussion related, we are here to present a solution that we believe should solve the dilemma of how to legalize the sharing of content and, at the same time, fairly remunerate authors and rights holders, besides promoting a strong disintermediation of the content market.

PROPOSED SOLUTIONS AS OF TODAY

For a long time there has been an intense debate on how to fairly compensate authors and producers if piracy were to continue its rapid spread and if a way to prevent it both constitutionally and technically is difficult to be found.
Especially in the case music, some of these solutions are already a practical reality for many mobile operators in the world, with a monthly fee of a few euros entitling users to a kind of “collective licensing” for millions of songs.
Most of these solutions provide a fixed fee for the user, either mandatory (through taxes, also applied to products) or voluntary (contribution) – which would then be allocated between the authors, based on some set criteria and procedures.
Almost all the proposed solutions require the allocation of these revenues on the monitoring and counting of individual content as it travel through IP networks
This monitoring presents enormous challenges for the citizens’ privacy and the fairness of compensation of authors and producers, and more. In fact, it would be technically impossible to carry out completely, verifiably, constitutional, and equitable. It would be:
- Seriously incomplete, because more and more content moving online is encrypted and therefore is not monitored;
- Subject to fraud, since it would be very unlikely to discover by citizens and associations the possible large scale manipulation by third parties, for counting contained within the proprietary computer systems;
- Severely invasive of privacy, as private or public bodies should constantly monitor the content shared by citizens with increased opportunities for a large or very large scale abuse of the right to secrecy of communications under the constitution.
- Unfair to the authors, because it is far from clear that the content most downloaded is also the most appreciated (many download content in the wake of advertising campaigns and then never benefit from them.)

OUR SOLUTION

Our proposal draws heavily on a proposal made in 2009 by Francis Muguet and Richard Stallman, the creator of the licenses of free software / open-source operating system GNU / Linux, clearly illustrated by an article on Gaia Bottà, Computer Point, 19 March 2009.
Instead of monitoring the content in the web, it is expected that this fee, however acquired (mandatory or voluntary), is than allocated among authors and producers on the basis of citizens’ choices, expressed in part directly and in part through private interviews to random samples of users. For example, the direct expression could be made publicly, over the internet, or private, offline wihile paying yearly income taxes.
This solution would effect not only the fairly compensated rights holders, but more importantly, would contribute greatly to democratize, decentralize and liberalize the market for content, thus alleviating the tremendous influence that many players – publishers, advertisers, broadcasters etc. – have on the promotion and monetization of content creation, and indirectly on its financiability.
This solution, for example, if implemented in government acts, would result in a significant disintermediation of the market for digital content, making a direct financial relationship between the producer / author and consumer / citizen, “from producer to consumer.”
Every author and producer will have increased freedom to create, knowing that the actual monetization and distribution of its cultural product will be more than ever dependent on the appreciation by an appropriate number of citizens.
Two additional political economic occurrences would be key factors in further realizing the huge potential for democratization and liberalization of culture through the spread of Internet-based multimedia fruition. These are: (1) the adoption of effective laws supporting the neutrality of the fixed and mobile networks, and (2) spread of major equipment and computerized systems for the use of digital content are made exclusively free software / open-source software platform, or those whose importance is managed and administered by an “open consortium” of content producers. 
These issues will be dealt with in subsequent posts.

On a Smart Mobs blog post; i just discovered today about Copowi that is set out to offer a fully FLOSS ISP service, which would include also several additional guarantees for several rights of its users. They plan to release all their code under Affero License, as much as possible. They seemed very aligned towards our same goal of putting users in control of their telematics through social control (“Community” in their language) and FLOSS. It seems that our proposed tecniques of individual control through democratic processes could complement their approach very well.

Here is a letter we wrote to them today:

Hello,we just discovered your project. We have been working on very similar lines. From discussions with Henri Poole (creator of the Affero) and Richard Stallman, we have been working on ways to enable web user to have the same freedom over a web service as they have over a FLOSS app running on a GNU/Linux PC. We are in the process of devising ways in which, certain hosting requirements and joint democratic control by users could achieve such individual control. We’d be interested for example in a partnership in the implementation of a first deployment.Rufo Guerreschiwww.telematicsfreedom.org

Powered by ScribeFire.

The thousands of generic software patents held by large software giants, and other dedicated private entities, are increasingly becoming a huge and unfair barrier for new software companies, development communities and products to achieve wide market adoption.
In fact, as a software product competes with a product made by one of those large patent holders, they will sue or threaten to sue developers and/or large organization and corporate users for the infringement of their patents.

There are 2 approaches to solve this problem:
(1) The problem would be easily solved politically: (a) Put some sanity in the standards for approval of software patent claims; (b) re-proportion the duration of patent holders rights to the average duration of “useful economic life” of a software invention, so as not to prevent the ability of the wider population to and new creators to benefit from the use and remixing of those ideas. Efforts to enact this changes are under way, but it seems that lobbying efforts in the opposite direction are stronger (see for example the extension of copyright duration in the US and the continued awarding of ridiculous software patents).

(2) Another solutions is represented by the creation of a “copylefted” patent pool.
Here’s how it would work: A well founded and solid non-profit organization would:
- aggressively solicit the assignment to it of a large number of software patent rights
- it would instantly issue an irrevocable full license to such patents ideas to anyone in the world, except to anyone who will anytime in the future sue, or threaten to sue, anyone over software patent claims.

This article that appeared today shows encouraging signs for the possible success of this strategy.

It is great news that California – the software capital state of the world, the economy best positioned to benefit from a worldwide e-voting market, and lead state in many areas of legislation – has decided to de-certify all e-voting systems.
Most, or possibly all, e-voting systems available today are just not at all ready for prime time!

Let’s hope well-intentioned world politicians hear this loud and clear message among the PR noise of e-voting system sellers!

At the very least, this should push back lunatic attempts to have, at present, binding web or sms governmental elections.

We have photos from the Innovation Festival, from the 7th to the 10th of June in Rome.

The Festival was held in the area surrounding Piazza Augusto Imperatore, and particularly, within the new Ara Pacis Museum complex – work of the internationally renowned architect Richard Meier – a prestigious venue with a high communicative, historical and architectural impact.

The Lazio Region counted with the sponsorship of the Department of Consumer Rights and Simplification of Administrative Procedures as well as the Municipality of Rome to realize this event with thousands of people and raise two main issues: what do we really mean when we talk about innovation? And, are we really sure that innovation is limited to purely technological fields?

The Telematics Freedom Foundation in conjunction with The Winston Smith Project and MG Engineering, showcased a transparent cube to demonstrate the Free Telematics Model.

The cube contained multiple keypad locks (fictitious for the sake of demonstration) to secure the server running the Free Telematic Services and needed to support the Access Policies the foundation is promoting.

Sustaining an ecosystem of “truly copylefted” telematics applications through the “Work-for-hire” loophole of FLOSS licenses

– - – Imagine Google decided to aggressively responsiblize and incentivize his employees, consultants and partner companies.
It would offer them very extensive performance bonuses on profits generated by software services, which they could design, develop and manage, by extending both publicly available FLOSS and unreleased Google-derivatived FLOSS.
It would offer them a “Consulting/Partnering Agreements” where it irrevocably stated to hire their services (as “work-for-hire”) to modify such source code; as well as to hold full responsibility for the managing and hosting, except for its obligation towards Google to respect a set of specific (mainly) hosting requirements. They would sign concurrently the assignment of all copyrights and other intellectual goods generated from their work on such code to Google.
Google, as the provider of partially-copyrighted source code, branding (and possibly some inevitable liabilities), would get 1-5% of the direct revenue generated by the service. The Partner, in turn, would get 95-99% of the revenue, sustain all consulting and hosting costs, as well as and fully “manage”, and be responsible for, the hosting of such service on behalf of Google.

It would also offer “Software Quality Review Agreements” to the same parties, in order to apply the same decentralization principles to quality and security assurance of its code. All such parties would be offered (under “work-for-hire” terms) a small symbolic amount to: obtain the code, review it and offer their feedback at their will.

Now, let’s imagine instead that all these would done by a foundation (or governmental entities, or a redundant network of national governments), which irrevocably commits to the following:
* any user and anyone in the world could decide at anytime to become a “Partner”
* all source code that is assigned to the foundation, and therefore that running on any of the partner-managed “derived services”, would always be available to anyone willing to sign (online or on paper) one of those 2 agreements.
* Requires that those Partners abide (possibly just above a certain number of “active users”) by severe hosting requirements (similar to the ones we have drafted here) for the running of those services, which concretely and enforceably places all hardware and software, running beyond the point of decryption, under the collective democratic control of its users.
* As the foundation reaches X thousands of active users of services hosted by it or by Partners; it would offer to each of those users to join other willing users in forming the sovereign body of the foundation, though a carefully designed constituent processes.

I am suggesting this may be a good thing, as it would create an ecosystem of developers and users where anyone, though partly limited from such democratically-controlled foundation, could access remotely-accessible software applications under “practically-copylefted” terms
They could start building new applications, as well as derivative works from any publicly-available FLOSS. Those works would never be “released” to anyone and, although still bound to the derivative terms of  GNU GPLv2 or other FLOSS license, would be made accessible to users and everyone under terms that amount practically to those of the current Affero, plus the means to collectively verify the code that is actually running.

It is not enough for citizens to be told to have certain rights as users of a given telematic service, under a license (such as FLOSS), or a legislations (such a national and global privacy protection regulations) or under a contract with the service provider (such as Terms of Use).
To actually control a telematic service, or a web service, a user needs reasonable practical means to verify the software AND the hardware of all servers which run at and beyond the point of decryption of his communications with such service (or “end servers”).
If such “end servers” interact with other external network services, he will know – by having access to the code of the “end servers” – which services, and all the details and conditions of such interactions.
It is not necessary to control servers and networks in between the client device and the “end servers”, as we can reasonably rely on the power of the latest encryption to totally secure from all software, hardware and cables in between. In fact, the communication could be intercepted in between, but the content could not be read. It could be stopped or deviated in between, but there is free software that, installed on both client and server can prevent that, or at least verify that it did happens.
This is not new. Democracies, for centuries now, have always provided citizens with reasonable means to verify that key constitutional rights were not widely abused. When I go to vote, I do not simply have the right that my vote be secret and fairly counted, but I rely on a good number of other citizens, randomly selected or with conflicting interests, which prevent the bad guys to put in place large scale abuses of such rights. There are also a number of process regulations, such as recounts, that further prevent such frauds.
In fact, in order to provide such concrete control over telematics, server rooms (or “cages”) hosting a such “free” telematic service could be physically managed applying those same (or enhanced) physical security provisions that are currently applied to ballot boxes during an election. In practice, physical access to such servers would be enabled only while a few randomly selected or elected users (or citizens) are physically present. For a more detail explanation on how that may be accomplished, see our proposed hosting requirements for such service
According to this model of telematic service provisioning, anyone could deploy a “free” telematic services, by developing new software or freely installing or extending any publicly available FLOSS software, and running those according to such hosting requirements.
Anyone can do this, without breaching any FLOSS license, by requiring the signing of a copyright assignment, or similar statement, whenever users, or anyone, wants to access the software source code.

For more info on how set up such “free” telematics service, see our draft Service Access Policies at Plonegroups.org

Rufo Guerreschi

Powered by ScribeFire.

Telematics, the integrated use of telecommunications and informatics, is the most crucial industry sector for the future of humanity. It is key to the indispensable updating and possible deepening of our democratic systems, through their adequate extension to the global level and to the main systems of public opinion formation. Only such extension, in fact, will avoid that citizens of the world will stand, both powerless and unaware, while largely unaccountable interests lead them to ultimate nuclear, environmental and biological catastrophe.
The patterns of control over network-enabled software that will become legal and predominant over the next few years, will weigh more than anything on a definite slide of humanity towards, either its extinction, or an unprecedented deepening of democracy and freedom.

Telematics can be defined as ways software programs are used to control hardware devices and data networks to provide a communication experience. Software is not only the key element of information networks like the Internet and the Web but, by now and increasingly, of practically all those media that originated as bare telecommunication channels, such as: radio, analog TV, satellite and digital TV, mobile phones.

Paradoxically, over the next few years, the practical nature of certain telematics innovations, especially those enabling remote democratic organizing and audience-controlled mass self communications, and the way our democratic societies will legislate and enforce their access and control, will be the main potential instrument for reviving democracy and therefore substantially reducing the abovementioned risks.