A website and blog by Peter Lewis
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Richard Stallman comes to the UK
A couple of weeks ago I had the pleasure of doing something I'd wanted to do for quite a long time; see Richard Stallman speak. Stallman, for those not in the know (RMS for those who are) is the founder of the Free Software Foundation and the GNU project, and writer of the original General Public Licence (GPL). The lovely recursively acronymous GNU's Not Unix has arguably been the biggest contributing factor to the widespread availability of free software as it is today. Again, for those unfamiliar with GNU, it's probably safe to say that it's most of what you'd usually end up calling Linux. (I'll probably blog about the name thing later...)
Stallman, an American, doesn't get to these shores very often, so the chance to see him speak in Manchester was one not to be missed. I travelled up in the car with Dan and Zeth. Pete Ashton and Jez Higgins also went up from Brum.
I've actually been holding off posting anything about the talk, since I wanted to mull over my thoughts about it, rather than merely contribute to the flurry of "i haz seen rms omg" posts which litter the internet ;-)
I'm not quite sure when I first heard of Richard Stallman, but it was probably rather soon after I started using GNU/Linux in 1998 (PC Plus coverdisk of SuSE 5.2). Having had some rather lefty teenage years (not to say that I've grown out of it), the idea that software could be driven socially rather than by capital excited me quite a bit. As I read more, the philosophy of software being knowledge to be shared, rather than a shrink-wrapped product, seemed to be rather more obvious than I'd been led to believe by the aisles at PC World. Articles claiming that Stallman was as much a philosopher as a programmer encouraged me to look at my computer in a different way. My commitment, it seemed, had begun to develop.
So, I guess I had some rather pre-conceived ideas about what I expected Stallman to be like in real life. Sure, he's a kind of geek-monk as a person, but his speeches? This guy had inspired a movement, right?
He was actually every bit as inspiring as I had hoped; and every bit the geek-monk. The talk (the video of which is available via OneBigTorrent here) roamed all over the current state of play with free software, DRM and asserting the right to control your own computing. I won't recount the details - that's what the video is for - but the evening did give some perspective and crystalisation to a subject area which I believe I know pretty well. And it was nice to be among friends.
At the end of the almost two hour lecture, Stallman took plenty of time for questions. This was really good I think, though the guy really has to learn to let questioners finish what they're saying before jumping in with an answer. I guess this is due to his enthusiasm for the subject, even after 25 years of being evangelist-in-chief of the free software movement.
One thought provoking topic which did come up in a couple of questions was that of whether sofware is unique in its position of being able to be "freed" in this manner. Could the same principles be applied to harware, or to pharmaceuticals? The questioners almost seemed to be begging him to lead a charge from his barracks in software into the world in general, with copyleft principles becoming all-pervasive in advancing the tide of social over capital in all areas of life.
But Stallman was decidedly cautious about this, and mostly argued that software was unique in its suitability for liberation, due to the programmable nature of computers. The basic example discussed was that if you demand certain freedoms for your computer, why not for your microwave too? Stallman's argument, weak in my view, was that since computers are programmable and microwaves aren't, then the principles just don't apply to microwaves. On the one hand, I can't help but be reminded of Stan's fight for the right to have babies in Monty Python's Life of Brian, even though it was be a physical impossibility, but I really can't see that this is what's happening here. Stallman's argument to me boils down to "if you can, you should have the right to", which I think is both wrong and dangerous if applied generally. There are things which you can and both should and shouldn't have the right to do (think walk to the shop vs murder) and things which you can't physically do (yet) but likewise should and shouldn't have the right to (think swim to the bottom of the ocean vs build a nuclear bomb out of potatoes). This approach is clearly nonsensical.
The OpenMoko project is just one example of how the pricincples of free software are being transferred to hardware, and the free culture movement is borrowing heavily from free sofware too. I can't help thinking that Stallman is trying to stop himself from biting off more than he can chew with this self-imposed restriction to software-only freedom. After all, it's a big enough task in itself.
So, all in all, it was a very inspriring, thought-provoking and satisfying evening. I'd encourage anyone - free software convert or not - to take the opportunity to see Stallman if they get the chance.
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Photographers' rights
Fellow Birmingham blogger Andy Pryke has recently written about the right to photograph in the UK. He points out that this BBC News article, including its quite interesting comments I might add, describes a worrying increase in the number of mis-informed police officers attempting to illegally stop photographers from taking pictures in public places. In some cases, officers even demanded that the photographer delete their images.
As pointed out by Linda MacPherson, a lecturer in law at Heriot Watt University, taking photographs in public is, except for a few specific exceptions, a right guaranteed by law in the UK. She has produced this rather useful factsheet for photographers, which can be carried around and checked up on if and when the police start making demands.
Austin Mitchell MP has tabled an Early Day Motion in the House of Commons calling on the government to clarify to police the law on the right to photograph, according to the BBC article. Andy Pryke also points out that there is an online petition in support of such a clarification, which can be signed here.
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One of the most sensible things the government could do
As reported in the IMPACT legal blog and elsewhere, the UK government has launched a consultation on copyright exceptions. Perhaps unknown to many people, it is currently illegal in the UK to copy works, such as music and video, from format to format, device to device, unless explicitly permitted by the licence. Although many millions of people have probably copied music from CDs to their computer or music player, or from their computer to a CD to listen to in their car, this is usually illegal.
The proposals being consulted about, however, include the idea that consumers should be able to "make a copy of a work they legally own, so that they can make the work accessible in another format for playback on a device in their lawful possession". The aim of this exception would be to permit "format shifting", the "copying of legitimately owned works to different formats for use on different devices". The full consultation document is available here.
This seems to me to be one of the most immediately sensible and non-controversial things the government could do in the field of copyright at present.
But, restrictive DRM technology has been quietly, and not so quietly, weaving its way into people's homes and lives, on devices and in their music and video files. Current DRM technologies physically prohibit the kind of copying being proposed in the consultation, without reference to any national laws. How can these two ideas be reconciled?
Well, it's no secret that I am no fan of DRM, and would love this to signal the demise of such schemes which impose technical restrictions far beyond legal limitations. So, would this kind of DRM under such a new law be illegal? That seems an unknown at present, but even if not it seems unfair to criminalise anyone hacking such a DRM system in order to obtain their legal rights.
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Climate Change and Carbon Footprints
This Saturday, apart from being my birthday, is also an international day of action on climate change. There will be, amongst many other things, a demo in central London, which quite a few of my friends from a variety of different backgrounds are going to. There's more info on the demo and the campaign against climate change more generally on the website of the Campaign Against Climate Change.
The government here in the UK is now committed to some sort of climate change bill this parliament, thanks in no small part to the dedication of groups like Friends of the Earth, though as described, amongst other places, in George Monbiot's book Heat, most scientists appear to agree that far far more than what is currently on the table will be required in order to avoid starvation, suffering and migration on a scale never before seen in human history.
The government is also unfortunately, in my view, engaged in the diversionary tactic of passing the responsibility of action required back onto us. Of course it is vital that we all begin to understand our role in building a different kind of society, with an economy which is not reliant on high levels of carbon emission, and the government has an important role to play in this. However, though I hope to be proved wrong, it seems that initiatives like their television advertisements and "carbon footprint calculator" are droplets of change when compared with the carbon legacy ocean created by airport expansions, road building and support for expansions in fossil fuel extraction and new coal-powered electricity generation.
Incidentally, I just calculated my carbon footprint (to whatever accuracy can be determined in five minutes by a small flash animation with rather limited questions and answers). Apparently 9.84 tonnes of carbon are emitted each year in my name. Anyone know what 9.84 tonnes of carbon looks like? Sure sounds like a lot of pencils... Calculate yours here.
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University removes right to freedom of speech on campus
I was just about to blog about this, when I realised that my friend Zeth has already done a fantastic job of summing up the recent changes to university policy in this post. Thanks to the joys of the Creative Commons Licence, I can make his comments available here...
I often receive emails from various online services saying there has been a change in their privacy policy, which almost always means you have less privacy than before, and they are now going to share your personal information with another third party. So the real purpose of privacy policies is often to take away your privacy rather than to give you privacy.
This time I received a controversial email from my University that had been forwarded from the centre down eventually to my little corner of geekdom. The email explained that there had been a change in the 'Freedom of Speech' policy (I didn't know we had one), so now anyone from outside the University must be given written permission to speak on campus. So the 'Freedom of Speech' policy now restricts freedom of speech.
Without a lot of careful steering, Universities always tend to drift into ivory tower mode, now we are pulling up the drawbridge too. Here is the email:
Colleagues,
I have attached for your information and subsequent action the revised policy on the Code of the Practice on Freedom of Speech on Campus which was approved by Council on 19 September 2007 to be implemented from 30 September 2007. The Authorising Officer for Freedom of Speech is [Senator McCarthy], Director of [Big Brother] who has nominated me to act on his behalf.
I have also attached a PDF speaker request form which includes a section from the policy regarding conduct of meetings on university premises to be given to people making an application for an outside speaker. I would be grateful if all requests were made on this form with immediate effect.
The Code of Practice defines Outside Speakers as persons who are not students, employees or other members of the University, who are invited to speak on University premises on occasions other than as a normal part of an existing academic programme of study authorised by the relevant budget centre, or as a normal part of a regular careers exhibition or similar event.
I would be grateful if you would cascade this policy and new speaker request form within your School to staff and students who are involved in booking outside speakers.
If you require any further information please let me know.
Thank you
[Corporate Drone X]
So it is a classic bit of Orwellian doublethink where 'Freedom' of speech requires an application form to be submitted three weeks before to obtain permission from a central bureaucrat, thus not actually being free any more but a privilege handed down by a neo-monarchy.
I'm sure the changes to the (un)freedom of speech policy comes from people with seemingly good motives, i.e. to protect us all from those dirty and scary common real people outside the campus gates. Like the British Empire was created with seemingly good motives or those who set up Guantanamo Bay had seemingly good motives. The problem with the British Empire, like a 'Freedom of Speech' policy, is that it is paternalistic.
The British did not trust the 'natives' to run their own affairs; even though the native cultures were thousands of years old, they did not have the signs and symbols of the Western world, so therefore they must be inferior and Western control and Western signs and symbols must be introduced. Likewise, even though dozens of events involving the public have been held on our campus, on almost every week for over 100 years, the Council does not trust academics and students to run their own events involving 'outsiders'. Common sense and good manners must be replaced with the signs and symbols of bureaucracy.
I find it very unlikely that all our academics and students are secretly harbouring subversive ideologies; I find it very unlikely that our academics are secretly communist revolutionaries, Islamic fundamentalists or members of the national front (though I hear the Masons do quite well here). Perhaps even if a minority are, then engagement is surely the correct policy. If the universities stop believing in the power of free thought and open discussion, then why is society funding the universities at all?. If there were radical elements on campus who refuse to discuss with rational academia, then we would need to do a lot more than email a couple of PDFs to combat them.
The most bizarre thing is that the people tasked with implementing this policy are not academics, but the department that deals with accommodation, gardening, postal services, cleaning and so on. I have no idea who [Senator McCarthy] is, but we could (in theory) have someone who started as a gardener or porter telling professors and lecturers who can and cannot speak at their events. University cleaners are the latest recruits in George W. Bush's war on terror.
Even if we put the censorship issues aside for a moment, the required three weeks notice is just not practical for many of the events, including the most dynamic and interesting ones, so it either means the policy will just be ignored or outsiders will be invited onto campus less often. There is a grandfather clause for some existing events, but in general this extra layer of red-tape means the University becomes even more cut off from the public who fund the whole University. British Universities are almost exclusively financed by the tax-paying public. There is an elaborate dance of quangos and bureaucrats between to help burn a bit more cash, but it is the tax-payer who foots all the bills. Research Councils == tax-payers. HEFCE == tax-payers. The grants and subsidised loans that students use to pay their fees == tax-payers.
So in return for all their support, the public, who are paying for the whole thing, need written permission and at least three weeks notice to open their mouths on campus. Charming. Even though I benefit a little from all this tax-payers money, I find this lack of respect for the public somewhat tasteless.
Recently someone was found to have gambled away 4 million pounds of the University's money, i.e. tax-payers' money, no one in the senior administration resigned or lost their job over it; even though the senior administration was responsible for overseeing and reforming the structure that allowed this to happen. If the university's senior administration and council would spend a bit more attention on their core role as custodians of other people's money and therefore know where this money is, then maybe they would have less time to waste on censoring invited guests who speak at University events.
Thanks, Zeth. Though I'm really not surprised. I'm not quite sure what exactly the problem is, which they are attempting to solve with this new policy, but presumably it has something to do with the odd person who came to campus and made them feel a little uncomfortable. However, Albert Einstein quite famously said that for every problem there is a solution which is simple, obvious, and wrong, and I'm convinced that is what's going on here.
Similarly, I've also recently become involved in the Young Greens, an environmental group on campus, affiliated to the Green Party. One of our planned activities for the early part of this semester was to have a stall on campus, handing out some free food as a bit of a gimmick, along with fliers about some upcoming events. However, even to carry out this innocuous activity and even though we are all students, required three week's notice. We were also handed regulations requiring the brand names of all food on the stall to be submitted to the university authorities, along with written recipes. We were also prohibited from using any nuts or eggs. Now, I have a bit of experience of the relationship between university administrations and students, and rather than based on anything useful, this appears to me to be nothing more than an attempt at disincentivising students from carrying out such activities.
But, as a previous senior university colleague of mine frequently used to remind those with whom he came in contact, universities in the 21st century are businesses. I'm extrapolating now, but as such, mustn't any activity which might potentially have a negative impact on the efficiency of the multinational-company's-graduate-training-programme-participant-production-machine be discouraged, shut down or banned? Operating within its current market environment (the inevitable outcome of the sadly unstoppable move towards ever increasing tuition fees in higher education - the issue which first motivated me to get involved in politics by the way), can anything else be expected of universities? University administrations are, I would argue, caught between the rock of failure (and therefore replacement of the management) and the hardplace of their current approach.
The answer? More to come later I guess from me on that, but a refocus on the role of education in today's society at the very least...
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Bloggers leading the way in Burma
With all the war, conflict and protests which we've become accustomed to seeing on the news in recent years, it's easy to let the events going on in Burma just wash over and blend into the background. I'd urge anyone reading this not to let this happen and take a second look at Burma right now.
Burma (also known as Myanmar; read about why, and the significance here) is ruled by probably one of the most dreadful military dictatorships in the world. According to the BBC, the junta "suppresses almost all dissent and wields absolute power in the face of international condemnation and sanctions". The United Nations has charged the military government with a “crime against humanity” for its systematic abuses of human rights, including according to a recent BBC documentary, ethnic cleansing and the burning of entire villages to the ground.
I myself have known about this since the plight of the popular pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi was brought to my attention back when I was President of the Students' Union at the University of Leicester (as is traditional in students' unions, we named a room after her). Despite having won a general election and a Nobel Peace Prize, Suu Kyi has, with a few brief spells of exception, been kept under house arrest since her return from exile in 1988.
I don't pretend by any means to be an expert on Burma, but there is enough information around for those who are interested, including a campaign group here in the UK. Since the news companies in Burma are state-owned, and the entire population is subjected to heavy censorship, accurate reports of the actual events occurring are not easy to come by. However, bloggers such as Ko Htike (who is based in London, but in contact with people in Burma who are able to avoid the government's censorship) are providing a window on Burma through the accounts of ordinary people on the ground. Much of his blog is in Burmese, but significant portions are also in English. The BBC also comments on those using the internet to get information out of Burma, including how the government is attempting to hijack the system to spread misinformation.
After a night of military raids, in which the state-owned television claimed that nine protesters were killed, the demonstrations are now in their tenth day.
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Happy International Park(ing) Day!
Today, 21st September, is International Park(ing) Day. I just came across this, thanks to TreeHugger's post. The motivation behind the day, which originated two years ago in San Fransisco, California, is that so much of our cities' space is given over to vehicles, so why not, for a day, reclaim a bit as a public park. The idea is therefore pretty simple: find a parking spot, and turn it into a park for a day.
I didn't search for long, but the only example of the day being observed here in the UK was in Manchester last year. It'll be good to see if this grows this year. One in Birmingham would be great, and if I'd have found out about this earlier, I might have been quite up for helping to organise it.
This reminds me of a Reclaim the Streets style party which we held in Leicester a few years back, occupying part of Evington Road and moving in with barbeques and music. That day was a huge success; over a hundred people surprised themselves by joining in, bringing food, music and sofas out onto the street. It was actually kind of weird to see everyday people just stopping and chatting, having a free bite to eat, meeting new people and going away saying what a good idea it was. One local shoe shop owner even spontaneously suggested that we hooked up a sound system to his electricity supply to keep the thing going rather than use a generator.
Anyway, I'm all for the kind of thing that keeps public spaces for people. So, if anyone knows of a local effort or feels like doing this next year, let me know!
(Photo copyright Scott Beale / Laughing Squid. Thanks Scott!)
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Is it just me or does the idea of an American arms company running the UK census just seem wrong?
I've just found out through the lovely process of following links around from website to website that the American arms manufacturer Lockheed Martin is in the shortlist of the UK government to run the 2011 census. For some reason the Office of National Statistics (ONS) has decided to contract out the process to a private company, meaning that the winning bidder will be responsible for the collection and management of census information for the entire of the UK. Lockheed Martin is the world's biggest military contractor and arms exporter. Apparently, they build U-2 and SR-71 Blackbird spy planes, F-16 and F/A-22 jet fighters, Hellfire and Javelin missiles, the F-117 stealth attack fighters used at the beginning of the US invasion of Iraq and the PAC-3 Patriot missile. As if that weren't enough, the US Vice-President, Dick Cheney's wife is on the board of the company. The New York Times said in 2004 that "Lockheed Martin doesn't run the United States. But it does help run a breathtakingly big part of it."
I mean, to the British government: Come on guys, what on Earth are you playing at?
Read more about it here, and sign the petition to the Prime Minister against the idea here.
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