Software patentability – intergroup motion in the German Parliament

In the German Parliament Bundestag a motion is pending review and backed by all relevant political groups (except the left fringe party Die Linke). It concerns the need to better draw the line between the spheres of patentable inventions and of copyrightable data processing. A legal clarification of patent law is sought to prevent an unwanted expansion of its material scope. The intergroup motion has been translated to English by an association for small and medium sized software companies.

Deutsche Telekom in the privacy spin zone

Dr. Claus Ulmer of Deutsche Telekom on the European Data Protection Reform projet:

However, the text of the regulation still has to be adapted to the extent that multinational corporations with numerous legal units are also clearly covered by the regulation and can therefore profit from it.

At first sight it’s spin for data protection. The sort of expressions you hope these persons don’t take home from work, and it gets you pleased as a punch. Anyway, what seems to contradict the lobbying from Us corporations in Brussels against data protection makes sense from the perspective of Deutsche Telekom. Deutsche Telekom is satisfied with the current data protection regime under German law and as a multinational corporation appreciates equivalent uniform rules for Europe, refutes self-regulation as a too lenghty process, embarks into a simple one-stop-shop approach. Interesting interview.

Philip Vermeer speaks to European legislators

Ambassador Philip Verveer addresses internet governance and casts water on European cloud privacy concerns.

W3C Encrypted Media Extensions

W3C Encrypted Media Extensions “…allows JavaScript to select content protection mechanisms, control license/key exchange, and implement custom license management algorithms. It supports a wide range of use cases without requiring client-side modifications in each user agent for each use case. This also enables content providers to develop a single application solution for all devices.”

Multistakeholder WCIT

ITU is the new multistakeholder? From an analysis of Alexander Klimburg on the ITU WCIT summit for a ITRs revision:

According to noted Internet governance scholar Wolfgang Kleinwächter, the language in the new ITRs could actually imply the creation of a “new” multistakeholder system for Internet governance, one that ultimately replaces the existing system with something working under the aegis and ultimate control of the ITU.

There are quite a few academics that tried to transform the ITU into a multi-stakeholder governance mechanism. But the reformist approach overlooks in the difficulties of a world organisation as the ITU. The article of Klimburg compares a clash between “Cybersovereignty” and “Multistakeholder” at the WCIT to the Yalta meeting.

The article of Klimburg overlooks that ITU-T is a multistakeholder organisation and European players embark on a cybersovereignty approach, simply because the multistakeholderism of the US does not give them a fair share, still they cannot support an expansion of power for ITU world governance: In a world with more than 200 nations “world governance” leads to hypocrite political corruption, nurtures a political class that at best trickles down the “capacity building and technical assistance” in their nation. There is simply no reason why leading industrial nations would want to let questionable regimes of nations with an irrelevant internet share meddle with the governance of the internet. And also you hardly discover good reason why the expensive closed-shop ITU-T multistakeholderism or the IGF would seem qualified. The US excitement for flat multistakeholder governance was build on an engineer perspective of the kind “railways to the railway people” along libertarian scepticism against the US government capabilities to get it right. The ITU-T exemplifies a more static industrial multistakeholderism that does not suit the internet.

Egg, bacon, sausage and Microsoft Windows RT branding

I am confused. I don’t get the branding. Windows RT, or Windows Surface RT, the Operating System or Microsoft’s own tablet device (where Microsoft competes with OEMs)? We do know “Windows NT”, the server and enterprise operating environment from Microsoft, where I guess NT stood for the next/new technology kernel of the operating system. But what does RT mean? Dennis E. Hamilton says RT stands for “Retweet”, the legacy method of relaying twitter messages. I was aware of that of course, but… Wikipedia says there is no official explanaition! RT means RT.

Apparently “Windows RT” IS a special version of Windows 8 for the ARM processor architecture. Surface was the amazing study for an interactive multi-touch table (which actually went into production), and inspired an entire new generation of tablets and devices. The Surface table was cool, so they somehow attached the brand to their (arm powered?) tablet pcs aimed to compete with the iPad.

My take: If you port Microsoft Windows (x86 processor architecture) to ARM processors, you may come up with a nice brand like Microsoft ARMSTRONG. What you don’t do with brands is spam your multiple brands to multiple devices and platforms. In fact, it is the original meaning of SPAM.

Microsoft’s marketing concept is platform: you kind of distribute 10 000 zune clippy mouse pads then you claim that these 10 000 devices strengthen your zune clippy platform and are in productive use. Still, the branding strategy gets me deeply confused and I guess I am not the only one. It’s not 1998 anymore. Once consumers find out that their x86 software won’t run on ARM processor powered devices the whole brand spam may heavily backfire.

Update: Paul Thurott, Dell Urged Microsoft to Reconsider Windows RT Branding:

Dell executives asked Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to reconsider using the Windows RT branding for its ARM-based version of Windows 8, noting that the name would confuse consumers into believing that the OS could run Windows applications. This is of course exactly what happened.

Unipat call

Breyer vs. Kommission

Im Fall Breyer verweigert die Kommission den Zugang zu einem Rechtsgutachen zur Anwendbarkeit des Gemeinschaftsrechts in einem Zweitantrag mit dem Hinweis auf den Schutz der Rechtsberatung. Wie schon in ähnlichen Fällen ist dabei ein allgemeiner rechtlicher Sachverhalt Gegenstand. Breyer hat jetzt Klage eingelegt. Besonders merkwürdig ist, dass die Kommission sich gegen die Offenlegung der Klageschrift wendet, konträr zu ihren Prinzipien aus Art 15(1) AEUV.

2001 The European Parliament wants Open Source for security reasons

29.   Urges the Commission and Member States to devise appropriate measures to promote, develop and manufacture European encryption technology and software and above all to support projects aimed at developing user-friendly open-source encryption software;

30.   Calls on the Commission and Member States to promote software projects whose source text is made public (open-source software), as this is the only way of guaranteeing that no backdoors are built into programmes;

31.   Calls on the Commission to lay down a standard for the level of security of e-mail software packages, placing those packages whose source code has not been made public in the ‘least reliable’ category;

Source

Düsseldorfer Programm der Europa-Union

Die Europa-Union hat sich ein neues Programm gegeben, dabei sind die Forderunge durchaus nicht mehr verfassungskonform in Deutschland, so will die Europa-Union Wahlrecht auf allen Ebene nur im Wohnsitzland gewähren. Das widerspricht dem Grundgesetz und ist daher technisch kaum umsetzbar.