Pete Carroll’s Comments

• Jun 17th, 2011 @ 8:17am

  UK OGL change of licence of archiving

  on Does It Make Sense For Governments To Make Their Content Creative Commons... Or Fully Public Domain?
  I'd agree with @Joscelyn that "We in the UK probably need to shout more about the OGL and the extent of government material that is available for reuse on similar terms of a CC BY licence"
  
  One problem though is that when this material is archived via the National Archives:
  
  http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/webarchive/
  
  the archived material has a new licence applied to it by the European Archives http://www.europarchive.org/ who host the UK gov web archives. This licence is much more restrictive:
  
  "1. NON COMMERCIAL USE
  
  The Site is and the Collections are provided to you at no cost and are for personal use and for scholarship and research purposes only and may not be used in connection with any commercial endeavours."
  http://www.europarchive.org/terms.php
  
  This matters as much UK government information, including data sets, has been archived off the main web sites and is now only available through the web archives.
  
  One final point, the European Archives are now out of step on this "non-commercial" restriction with Europeana, a major initiative to digitise and disseminate Europe's cultural heritage. Europeana's new agreement with providers has dropped the present NC clause see:
  
  http://www.europeana-libraries.eu/web/europeana-project/newagreement/
  
  faqs: Why drop the non-commercial clause from the agreement?
  
  Of course, Mike Masnick is right, if all this UK government information was public domain from the start we wouldn't have these down-stream licensing problems. But that might be a bit too re(public)an for us - it's called crown copyright for a reason!
• Apr 21st, 2011 @ 1:50pm

  Whoa! Vaizey told MPs to take a hike on Google probe

  on UK Politicians Want To Regulate Google... Because It's Good At What It Does
  Just hold your horses there. The MPs may have wanted the UK Office of Fair Trading (OFT) to investigate Google- but the bottom line was he told MPs that:
  
  "The EU anti-trust probe is, I think, an adequate remedy at the moment, and I gather that the OFT looked into the matter three or four years ago and does not feel the need to do so again at this time."
  
  source for this is the April 6th Story in the The Register:
  
  http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/04/06/net_neutrality_foundem_google_uk_probe_rejected /
  
  Of course Vaizey's answer wouldn't have had anything to do with Google helping the UK government out over blocking digital "piracy" sites
  
  q15....
  "Jeremy Hunt: Yes, but the other point I would make is that there may be other ways to do this. One of them, for example, is making it harder to find those sites on search engines like Google. One of the encouraging things that has happened as a result of roundtables that have been set up by Ed Vaizey has been that Google is co-operating in a way that has not happened previously. It is now much harder to find many of those sites than it has been before, but I am sure there is much more work that can be done.
  
  Q16 Ms Bagshawe: That is a tremendous achievement for the Minister for the Arts, which the industry is very grateful for. …"
  
  (taken from the uncorrected transcript of March 30th meeting of parliamentary Culture, Media, Sport Committee, questions to Jeremy Hunt (Vaizey's boss) about our Digital Economy Act )
  
  see http://scibella.wordpress.com/2011/04/07/the-lion-the-lamb-shall-lie-down-together/ for links to the transcript etc..
  
  Last thing, now that the Judicial Review of the Digital Economy Act has come out in favour of the UK government maybe they don't need Google so much anymore over digital piracy - so who knows how that feeds into the Hargreaves IP review/Google=fair use= "End of civilisation as we know it" (Daily mail, ITV, record companies etc) fight that's shaping up in the UK.
• Apr 12th, 2011 @ 7:14am

  HMS Daily Waily sails into Pirates Bay

  on UK Paper Insists Google Is Out To Destroy British Culture
  Twas a fine sight this weekend - Her Majesty's Ship of the line The Daily Waily sailing into Pirates Bay- her sails billowing full with indignation. And not just Captain Brummer at the guns but Ensign Delves Broughton firing salvo after salvo:
  
  "Why David Cameron must stand up to his friends at Google: The future of music, books and even the law could be threatened"
  
  Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1375276/Googles-latest-power-grab-threaten-future-music-book s-law.html#ixzz1JJc68hF9
  
  Yep, not just Brummer's article but 2 more of the same ilk from the Mail this weekend by Philip Delves Broughton. My favorite line "even the law threatened".
  
  Of course, USA readers should realise that this is all part of a Whitehall/Westminster bunfight going on in the UK. The Hargreaves IP Review (the "Google review") was set up by one government department Business,Innovation, Skills (BIS - political boss Vince Cable - Liberal Democrat-falling star) but implementation of digital copyright aspects now seems to be with another department, Culture, Media, Sports (CMS- political boss Jeremy Hunt -Conservative-rising star). The "creative sector" were never happy about the "open rights bias" of the Hargreaves panel and now with the shift of power to Hunt are belatedly lobbying like mad via all channels against fair use in the UK. Thus HMS Daily Waily firing broadsides. A complicating factor is that Dynamic Dave, our beloved leader, having got the hots for Google and fair use and set up the Hargreaves Review cannot be seen to lose too much face when the review finally appears. It would all be a laugh if it wasn't for the risk of collateral damage to copyright reforms badly needed by the educational and research sectors in the UK.