Well, ok let’s start with this one from a Wired Opinion by Manny W. Schecter “Chief Patent Counsel, Associate General Counsel, and Managing IP Attorney at IBM – the top annual U.S. patentee for the past 19 years.” I won’t discuss the argument about how patents supposedly promote innovation, this rebuttal opinion already does it. So let’s concentrate on this piece of nonsense:

Eliminating patents for software will not enhance innovation or benefit our economy. Software is also the most easily appropriated type of intellectual property. Ever since U.S. courts made it clear that copyright is unavailable to protect their ideas, developers have sought to protect inventions embodied in their software via patents. Denying patent protection for software will cause these developers to look for other ways to protect their IP investment — resulting in code that is less open, less accessible, and less interoperable.

Such balkanization would discourage many of the collaborative ingredients of the very software ecosystem that has had enormous economic and technological impact.

Copyright can’t “protect” (i.e. monopolise) ideas implemented in software. So that’s why patents are used. We’ll pass on the rhetoric (ideas/inventions as if they’re the same thing).

The argument is: if we don’t grant patents to protect software developers, they’ll seek other means to protect themselves, and that will result in the production of less Free Software (aka open source software). That does not make any sense at all. Phew.

Patents and Free Software are antagonistic. They can’t work together, unless the patent owner grant a royalty-free license to anyone using the software covered by the patents, rendering the patent basically useless. So what would happen if we abolish patents? As the argument goes: we would have less Free Software because software developers would seek other ways to protect “their IP investment.” Well it’s funny, because it’s exactly what happens, and it’s a good thing.

Software is actually covered by copyright, and developers use copyright licenses to foster their development all the time! And this is exactly what’s used in Free Software, for instance with a copyleft license such as the GNU GPL. And that helps produce more Free Software, not less.

Cryptography is the ultimate form of non-violent direct action. While nuclear weapons states can exert unlimited violence over even millions of individuals, strong cryptography means that a state, even by exercising unlimited violence, cannot violate the intent of individuals to keep secrets from them.

Strong cryptography can resist an unlimited application of violence. No amount of coercive force will ever solve a math problem.

But could we take this strange fact about the world and build it up to be a basic emancipatory building block for the independence of mankind in the platonic realm of the internet? And as societies merged with the internet could that liberty then be reflected back into physical reality to redefine the state?

Recall that states are the systems which determine where and how coercive force is consistently applied.

The question of how much coercive force can seep into the platonic realm of the internet from the physical world is answered by cryptography and the cypherpunks’ ideals.

As states merge with the internet and the future of our civilization becomes the future of the internet, we must redefine force relations.

If we do not, the universality of the internet will merge global humanity into one giant grid of mass surveillance and mass control.

We must raise an alarm. This book is a watchman’s shout in the night.

— Julian Assange, A Call to Cryptographic Arms

Meanwhile, for the lazy ones, I’m sharing my personal extracts. Here are some interesting facts pointed out in the article. Consider this the TL;DR version

Enlarge your patentz!

• 2009-2011: $20 billion was spent on patent litigation and patent purchases.
  In 2011, for Apple and Google, this spending exceeded spending on research and development. #
  

  In the smartphone industry alone, according to a Stanford University analysis, as much as $20 billion was spent on patent litigation and patent purchases in the last two years — an amount equal to eight Mars rover missions. Last year, for the first time, spending by Apple and Google on patent lawsuits and unusually big-dollar patent purchases exceeded spending on research and development of new products, according to public filings.

• 2001-2011: the number of patents filed each year in the US has increased by more than 50%. #
  

  The number of patent applications, computer-related and otherwise, filed each year at the United States patent office has increased by more than 50 percent over the last decade to more than 540,000 in 2011. Google has received 2,700 patents since 2000, according to the patent analysis firm M-CAM. Microsoft has received 21,000.

• 2001-2011: the number of patents filed each year in the US by Apple has risen “almost tenfold.” #
  

  “Even if we knew it wouldn’t get approved, we would file the application anyway,” the former Apple lawyer said in an interview. “If nothing else, it prevents another company from trying to patent the idea.” […] In the last decade, the number of patent applications submitted by Apple each year has risen almost tenfold. The company has won ownership of pinching a screen to zoom in, of using magnets to affix a cover to a tablet computer and of the glass staircases in Apple stores. It has received more than 4,100 patents since 2000, according to M-CAM.

  Privately, Mr. Jobs gathered his senior managers. While Apple had long been adept at filing patents, when it came to the new iPhone, “we’re going to patent it all,” he declared, according to a former executive who, like other former employees, requested anonymity because of confidentiality agreements.

• 1990-2010: the number of patent lawsuits filed each year in the US has tripled. #
  

  The number of patent lawsuits filed in United States district courts each year has almost tripled in the last two decades to 3,260 in 2010, the last year for which federal data is available. Microsoft has sued Motorola; Motorola has sued Apple and Research in Motion; Research in Motion has sued Visto, a mobile technology company; and in August, Google, through its Motorola unit, sued Apple, contending that Siri had infringed on its patents. (Google dropped the suit last week, leaving open the possibility of refiling at a later date.) All of those companies have also been sued numerous times by trolls.

It’s always worth filing for a patent anyway for big corporations

• In the smartphone industry, patents add as much as 20% to research and development costs. #
  

  Patents for software and some kinds of electronics, particularly smartphones, are now so problematic that they contribute to a so-called patent tax that adds as much as 20 percent to companies’ research and development costs, according to a study conducted last year by two Boston University professors.

• A new patent application gets allotted about 23 hours for reviewing. The US patent office has 7,650 examiners for 540,000 applications in 2011. #
  

  In the next two years, a small cast of officials spent about 23 hours — the time generally allotted for reviewing a new application — examining the three dozen pages before recommending rejection. […] Officials pointed out that the agency’s 7,650 examiners received more than half a million applications last year, and the numbers have kept climbing.

• (Keep trying until no becomes yes) About 70% of patent applications are approved after the applicant altered claims. #
  

  On its 10th attempt, Apple got patent 8,086,604 approved. […] All the while, the application traveled quietly through the patent office, where officials rejected it twice in 2007, three times in 2008, once in 2009, twice in 2010 and once in 2011. […] After patent 8,086,604 was first rejected in 2007, Apple’s lawyers made small adjustments to the application, changing the word “documents” to “items of information” and inserting the phrase “heuristic modules” to refer to bits of software code. A few years later, the inclusion of the word “predetermined” further narrowed Apple’s approach.

  Though submitting an application repeatedly can incur large legal fees, it is often effective. About 70 percent of patent applications are eventually approved after an applicant has altered claims, tinkered with language or worn down the patent examiners.

Update: Removed the iPhone-fact for lack of good source.

Since June, I have put about 250 hours of work: reviewing Terms, pointing out what’s good or bad, thinking about how to come up with a rating system that makes sense, how to integrate with other projects such as Tosback2 which helps track and archive changes. Writing JSON, a bit of JavaScript, and HTML/CSS and, of course, a lot of emails.

So far, we’ve got very positive feedback, even though the project isn’t yet to alpha release. A lot of stuff breaks, I make changes all the time, and also its load of mistakes.

But if there’s one thing for sure, it’s that I’m as enthusiastic as ever. Everybody seems to be so grateful that some people decided to help fix the biggest lie on the web.

But this project will never work without a community. We need diversity of opinions, legal expertise, some JavaScript coders, and we need other projects to cooperate with us!

In the media

Huffintgton Post: ToS;DR Explains Those Ridiculous Terms Of Service You Agreed To, 10/08/2012

Time MoneyLand – Decision Making: New Site Grades Those Pesky ‘Terms of Service’ Agreements You Never Read, 10/08/2012

Hacker News / Reddit

In German

Nerdcore, 13/08/2012

Crowdsourcing: Ein Tüv für AGB will für schnellen Überblick sorgen, 7/08/2012

Datenschutz: Projekt analysiert AGB der Webunternehmen auf Gemeinheiten, 6/08/2012

For one example of how Facebook can serve as a proxy for examining society at large, consider a recent study of the notion that any person on the globe is just six degrees of separation from any other. The best-known real-world study, in 1967, involved a few hundred people trying to send postcards to a particular Boston stockholder. Facebook’s version, conducted in collaboration with researchers from the University of Milan, involved the entire social network as of May 2011, which amounted to more than 10 percent of the world’s population. Analyzing the 69 billion friend connections among those 721 million people showed that the world is smaller than we thought: four intermediary friends are usually enough to introduce anyone to a random stranger. « When considering another person in the world, a friend of your friend knows a friend of their friend, on average, » the technical paper pithily concluded. That result may not extend to everyone on the planet, but there’s good reason to believe that it and other findings from the Data Science Team are true to life outside Facebook. Last year the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project found that 93 percent of Facebook friends had met in person. One of Marlow’s researchers has developed a way to calculate a country’s « gross national happiness » from its Facebook activity by logging the occurrence of words and phrases that signal positive or negative emotion. Gross national happiness fluctuates in a way that suggests the measure is accurate: it jumps during holidays and dips when popular public figures die. After a major earthquake in Chile in February 2010, the country’s score plummeted and took many months to return to normal. That event seemed to make the country as a whole more sympathetic when Japan suffered its own big earthquake and subsequent tsunami in March 2011; while Chile’s gross national happiness dipped, the figure didn’t waver in any other countries tracked (Japan wasn’t among them). Adam Kramer, who created the index, says he intended it to show that Facebook’s data could provide cheap and accurate ways to track social trends—methods that could be useful to economists and other researchers.

Other work published by the group has more obvious utility for Facebook’s basic strategy, which involves encouraging us to make the site central to our lives and then using what it learns to sell ads. An early study looked at what types of updates from friends encourage newcomers to the network to add their own contributions. Right before Valentine’s Day this year a blog post from the Data Science Team listed the songs most popular with people who had recently signaled on Facebook that they had entered or left a relationship. It was a hint of the type of correlation that could help Facebook make useful predictions about users’ behavior—knowledge that could help it make better guesses about which ads you might be more or less open to at any given time. Perhaps people who have just left a relationship might be interested in an album of ballads, or perhaps no company should associate its brand with the flood of emotion attending the death of a friend. The most valuable online ads today are those displayed alongside certain Web searches, because the searchers are expressing precisely what they want. This is one reason why Google’s revenue is 10 times Facebook’s. But Facebook might eventually be able to guess what people want or don’t want even before they realize it.

Recently the Data Science Team has begun to use its unique position to experiment with the way Facebook works, tweaking the site—the way scientists might prod an ant’s nest—to see how users react. Eytan Bakshy, who joined Facebook last year after collaborating with Marlow as a PhD student at the University of Michigan, wanted to learn whether our actions on Facebook are mainly influenced by those of our close friends, who are likely to have similar tastes. That would shed light on the theory that our Facebook friends create an « echo chamber » that amplifies news and opinions we have already heard about. So he messed with how Facebook operated for a quarter of a billion users. Over a seven-week period, the 76 million links that those users shared with each other were logged. Then, on 219 million randomly chosen occasions, Facebook prevented someone from seeing a link shared by a friend. Hiding links this way created a control group so that Bakshy could assess how often people end up promoting the same links because they have similar information sources and interests.

He found that our close friends strongly sway which information we share, but overall their impact is dwarfed by the collective influence of numerous more distant contacts—what sociologists call « weak ties. » It is our diverse collection of weak ties that most powerfully determines what information we’re exposed to.

Read the article

Marlow says his team wants to divine the rules of online social life to understand what’s going on inside Facebook, not to develop ways to manipulate it. « Our goal is not to change the pattern of communication in society, » he says. « Our goal is to understand it so we can adapt our platform to give people the experience that they want. » But some of his team’s work and the attitudes of Facebook’s leaders show that the company is not above using its platform to tweak users’ behavior. Unlike academic social scientists, Facebook’s employees have a short path from an idea to an experiment on hundreds of millions of people.

In April, influenced in part by conversations over dinner with his med-student girlfriend (now his wife), Zuckerberg decided that he should use social influence within Facebook to increase organ donor registrations. Users were given an opportunity to click a box on their Timeline pages to signal that they were registered donors, which triggered a notification to their friends. The new feature started a cascade of social pressure, and organ donor enrollment increased by a factor of 23 across 44 states.

Read the article

0. The Myth of Technology

“There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things.”

— Niccolo Macchiavelli, The Prince (quoted in 1. The Nightmare of files and directories)

Comme le site de LQDN croule sous les visites, voici une copie du communiqué, sous licence creative commons BY-SA il me semble (thx olive)

Je crois que c’est approprié :

Strasbourg, 4 juillet 2012 – Le Parlement européen a rejeté ACTA par une large majorité, le détruisant définitivement. Ce rejet constitue une victoire majeure pour la multitude de citoyens et d’organisations connectés qui ont travaillé dur pendant plusieurs années, mais aussi un espoir d’ampleur globale pour une meilleure démocratie. Sur les ruines d’ACTA, nous devons désormais bâtir une réforme positive du droit d’auteur, qui devra prendre en compte nos droits plutôt que les combattre. La victoire contre ACTA doit retentir comme un avertissement pour les législateurs : les libertés fondamentales et l’Internet libre et ouvert doivent prévaloir sur les intérêts privés.

Les citoyens de l’Internet et du monde entier ont gagné ! Par 478 voix contre 39 lors du vote final, les membres du Parlement européen ont tué ACTA une fois pour toutes. Ensemble, connectés au travers d’un réseau de communication décentralisé, nous avons mis en échec ce traité dangereux, négocié en secret par un club d’intérêts privés et de fonctionnaires dogmatiques. La bataille contre ACTA a prouvé à quel point la sphère publique en réseau est devenue cruciale pour l’avenir de nos sociétés et de nos démocraties.

Philippe Aigrain, co-fondateur et conseiller stratégique de La Quadrature du Net, déclare : « Les institutions européennes doivent reconnaître que l’alliance entre les citoyens, les organisations de la société civile et le Parlement européen est au fondement d’une nouvelle ère démocratique en Europe. Les politiques européennes du droit d’auteur doivent désormais être élaborées avec la participation des citoyens ».

La Quadrature du Net tient à remercier chaleureusement et à féliciter tous les citoyens, organisations ou réseaux qui ont œuvré collectivement à cette victoire ! Fêtons-la dignement et tâchons de tirer les leçons de ce succès, afin d’être encore plus forts lors des prochaines batailles !

« Au-delà d’ACTA, nous devons mettre un terme à l’escalade répressive imposant des dispositifs qui mettent à mal Internet et les libertés fondamentales. Les citoyens doivent exiger une réforme positive du droit d’auteur qui permettra d’encourager les pratiques culturelles en ligne, telles que le partage et le remix, plutôt que de les réprimer. La victoire contre ACTA doit marquer le début d’une nouvelle ère dans laquelle les décideurs publics font passer les libertés et l’Internet libre – notre bien commun – avant les intérêts privés » conclut Jérémie Zimmermann, porte-parole de l’organisation citoyenne.

<3

But now, thanks to DuckDuckGo‘s powerful !bang you can do it very quickly: you can tweet directly from your address bar: just add “!tweet Your Tweet” next to the URI of the page you’re on and that’s it!

Of course, that only works if you’ve set up DuckDuckGo to replace Google in your address bar search feature. Just follow the instructions in the bottom-right hand corner on www.duckduckgo.com.

Direct link to the video

Also see how to add DuckDuckGo as a search engine in Gnome Shell built-in web search.