The legal right to ramble stems from the Charter of the Forest, the 1217 social compact grudgingly ratified by King John that formally recognized commoners’ rights of access to the forest. The right was part of a larger constellation of rights won by commoners after their long struggle with the Crown over who shall have access to the forest – only the King and his lords and retainers, or ordinary people, too?

Because of the right to ramble, a sprawling network of paths evolved in Great Britain over the centuries, bringing together villages, roads, farms, and natural landmarks throughout the landscape. The pathways were once regarded as vital infrastructure for commerce, social tradition, and everyday convenience. Now the pathways are mostly seen as a beloved cultural heritage and recreational commons. Millions of people roam the pathways every year. 

Like so many social limitations on private private property, however, people forget about what belongs to them – while property owners are ever-alert to the prospect of expanding their rights. Many modern-day property owners in England and Wales despise the right to ramble because it limits, however marginally, their absolute, exclusive control of the land. 

In 2000, property owners prevailed upon the British Parliament to terminate the ancient right to ramble unless a given pathway has been formally mapped and officially recognized. The Countryside and Rights of Way Act set a deadline for such mapping: January 1, 2026. (Parliament originally set a ten-year deadline.) After 2026, unmapped historic pathways will revert to private property and the public right to ramble on such lands will expire forever.

To counter this threat, the Ramblers – a long-time association of walking enthusiasts dedicated to the sense of freedom and benefits that come from being outdoors on foot” — has organized a campaign, Don’t Lose Your Way, along with a guidebook for ramblers, “Protect Where You Love to Walk.” The goal: to help a small army of volunteers map all of the pathways in England and Wales by 2026, and in so doing, keep them available to commoners.

This task is difficult because some historic pathways may not exist on any contemporary maps. Many pathways are known only through informal, customary use.Their very existence is known because one generation introduces the next generation to the joy of walking them. The official maps made by local authorities may or may not recognize the paths, and newer maps may omit older, less-used paths. Sometimes unscrupulous landowners have actually altered pathways to discourage people from using them, or to eradicate local memory of them.

The Ramblers say that identifying and verifying the existence of many pathways really requires a “systemic trawling through archives.” There is no other way to be definitive. But this task is plainly impractical. Chances are good that some pathways will be overlooked and lost to private enclosure. 

But Brits have a history of standing up for their “right to roam.” In a still-remembered episode in 1932, there was a mass trespass on the mountain area known as Kinder Scout — a deliberate act of civil disobedience by hundreds — to protest the lack of access to open countryside in England and Wales.

The mapping requirement by Parliament reminds me of other enclosures in modern life. Think how Indians (on the subcontinent) have had to document the medicinal value of hundreds of traditional plants and herbal medicines in order to keep them available to all.Without such documentation, transnational pharmaceutical companies could patent traditional medicines that have been freely used for centuries. Without affirmative evidence marshaled by commoners — the Traditional Knowledge Digital Library — Big Pharma could claim private, proprietary control over the biowealth of the commons.

I am also reminded of the way that the music industry used copyright law to privatize the commercial use of the 1858 song “Happy Birthday.” Another example of how the culture of commoning is an irresistible target for private commercialization. (Happily, a US federal court declared the copyright of “Happy Birthday” to be invalid in 2016.)

It is encouraging to know that the Ramblers and their allies are on the case. Their campaign to map English and Welsh walking trails serves as another reminder that the rights of commoners cannot be taken for granted. They must be secured through hard work and struggle.

The post A Looming Deadline for the Right to Ramble appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Cory Doctorow: Stanford’s Futurity interviews Stanford Law expert Ryan Singel and International Studies expert Didi Kuo about the meaning of a non-Neutral internet, and the pair make an excellent and chilling point about the subtle, profound ways that Ajit Pai’s rollback of Net Neutrality rules to pre-2005 levels will distort and hobble the future internet.

The Pai rules allow ISPs to block rival services, but the real impact is likely to be much more subtle (and thus harder to spot in the moment and stop while there’s still time).

The ISPs are much more likely to approach the existing internet services like Netflix and demand money in return for a guarantee that their bits will reach you, the ISPs’ customers. The services, in turn, will simply raise their prices to make up the difference, resulting in you paying your ISP twice: once to connect to the internet, and a second time to subsidize the blackmail payments the internet services you make are now obliged to make to your ISP.

There’s another, even subtler and scarier distortion at work here. The ISPs want to create steady revenue streams from these services, and so the blackmail payments they demand will not exceed the services’ ability to pay. But they will limit who else can enter the market: Netflix and Youtube and the other established players were able to start because the capital needs of a video-on-demand service did not include a line item for blackmail to ISPs.

Future Netflix and Youtube challengers will have it different: their startup costs will include millions for hard-drives and marketing and bandwidth — and millions more for bribes to the telcos.

This is bad news for people who like watching videos, but it’s even worse news for people who make videos. With upstarts permanently, structurally frozen out of the market, today’s incumbent providers will become much like the telcos themselves: cozy, cooperative, and more interested in colluding than competing. Some of that will take the form of explicit conspiracies, but highly concentrated, stable industries can collude without conspiring: the executives tend to have worked at all the major firms at some point in their careers, know each other socially, understand one-another’s turf and territories, maintain out-of-work friendships and even intermarry. Without anyone having to draw up an agreement, these industries are perfectly capable of creating arrangements that are mutually beneficial and that freeze out any new entrants.

The online service providers understand that Pai’s rules mean that they’re just going to have to divert some profits to the telcos, but will not face an existential threat. They’ll always have a seat at the table: but the companies that don’t exist yet? They never get a seat at the table.

Here’s how to understand Net Neutrality: you get in a cab and ask it to take you to a Safeway, and you notice that it’s circling the block for no reason, delaying your arrival. “What gives?” you ask. The cabby explains that Whole Foods has paid for “premium carriage” by the cab firm, and so it gets “fast lane” service — which means that everyone else gets the slow lane. The cab driver explains that running a taxi is expensive and hard work, and that choosing one grocer over another helps the cab company fund its maintenance, operations and upgrades.

That’s nice for the cab company, but you didn’t get into the cab to be taken to the most profitable destination for the cab company — you got in to be taken to the place you wanted to go.

The cabbie says, “Hell, why are you being so particular? Safeway and Whole Foods aren’t that different. Besides, Safeway makes decisions about what food you buy: they don’t carry every possible grocery item, and they arrange their groceries in the way that suits them, not you. Why do you get pissed off when the cab company steers you toward the stores of its choosing, but you’re happy to shop at a store that sends you to the items of its choosing?”

The answer, of course, is that it’s none of the taxi’s business. Maybe Safeway is gouging its suppliers for endcaps, and maybe it isn’t, but that’s between you and Safeway. You might choose to tackle that yourself, or it might not matter to you. It’s not the cab company’s job to tell you where to go: it’s their job to go where you tell them.

Singel: The effects we’re likely to see will affect users secondarily. Verizon, for instance, can now go to a Yelp or a Netflix and say, “You need to pay us X amount of money per month, so your content loads for Verizon subscribers.” And there’s no other way for Netflix to get to Verizon subscribers except through Verizon, so they’ll be forced to pay. That cost will then get pushed onto people that subscribe to Netflix.

So what users do online will become more expensive, we’ll see fewer free things, and thus the internet will become more consolidated. Websites, blogs, and startups that don’t have the money to pay won’t survive. I like to think of it as the internet is going to get more boring.

Kuo: The worst-case scenario would be if ISPs blocked access to websites based on their content, but that scenario seems unlikely outside of a few limited applications, such as file-sharing. The ISPs have an interest in being apolitical and letting the internet remain “open,” at least in the ways that will be most apparent to consumers.

More likely, the rollback of net neutrality will have consequences for start-ups and companies with a web presence. It will allow ISPs to charge companies more to reach consumers. While large technology platforms can afford to pay for fast access, start-ups and competitors will have a far more difficult time.

What could net neutrality’s end mean for you? [Futurity]

(via Naked Capitalism)

The post The catastrophic consequences of the non-Neutral Net will be very hard to spot, until it’s too late appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Cory Doctorow: In July, the Director of the World Wide Web Consortium overruled dozens of members’ objections to publishing a DRM standard without a compromise to protect accessibility, security research, archiving, and competition.

EFF appealed the decision, the first-ever appeal in W3C history, which concluded last week with a deeply divided membership. 58.4% of the group voted to go on with publication, and the W3C did so today, an unprecedented move in a body that has always operated on consensus and compromise. In their public statements about the standard, the W3C executive repeatedly said that they didn’t think the DRM advocates would be willing to compromise, and in the absence of such willingness, the exec have given them everything they demanded.

This is a bad day for the W3C: it’s the day it publishes a standard designed to control, rather than empower, web users. That standard that was explicitly published without any protections — even the most minimal compromise was rejected without discussion, an intransigence that the W3C leadership tacitly approved. It’s the day that the W3C changed its process to reward stonewalling over compromise, provided those doing the stonewalling are the biggest corporations in the consortium.

EFF no longer believes that the W3C process is suited to defending the open web. We have resigned from the Consortium, effective today. Below is our resignation letter:

Dear Jeff, Tim, and colleagues,

In 2013, EFF was disappointed to learn that the W3C had taken on the project of standardizing “Encrypted Media Extensions,” an API whose sole function was to provide a first-class role for DRM within the Web browser ecosystem. By doing so, the organization offered the use of its patent pool, its staff support, and its moral authority to the idea that browsers can and should be designed to cede control over key aspects from users to remote parties.

When it became clear, following our formal objection, that the W3C’s largest corporate members and leadership were wedded to this project despite strong discontent from within the W3C membership and staff, their most important partners, and other supporters of the open Web, we proposed a compromise. We agreed to stand down regarding the EME standard, provided that the W3C extend its existing IPR policies to deter members from using DRM laws in connection with the EME (such as Section 1201 of the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act or European national implementations of Article 6 of the EUCD) except in combination with another cause of action.

This covenant would allow the W3C’s large corporate members to enforce their copyrights. Indeed, it kept intact every legal right to which entertainment companies, DRM vendors, and their business partners can otherwise lay claim. The compromise merely restricted their ability to use the W3C’s DRM to shut down legitimate activities, like research and modifications, that required circumvention of DRM. It would signal to the world that the W3C wanted to make a difference in how DRM was enforced: that it would use its authority to draw a line between the acceptability of DRM as an optional technology, as opposed to an excuse to undermine legitimate research and innovation.

More directly, such a covenant would have helped protect the key stakeholders, present and future, who both depend on the openness of the Web, and who actively work to protect its safety and universality. It would offer some legal clarity for those who bypass DRM to engage in security research to find defects that would endanger billions of web users; or who automate the creation of enhanced, accessible video for people with disabilities; or who archive the Web for posterity. It would help protect new market entrants intent on creating competitive, innovative products, unimagined by the vendors locking down web video.

Despite the support of W3C members from many sectors, the leadership of the W3C rejected this compromise. The W3C leadership countered with proposals — like the chartering of a nonbinding discussion group on the policy questions that was not scheduled to report in until long after the EME ship had sailed — that would have still left researchers, governments, archives, security experts unprotected.

The W3C is a body that ostensibly operates on consensus. Nevertheless, as the coalition in support of a DRM compromise grew and grew — and the large corporate members continued to reject any meaningful compromise — the W3C leadership persisted in treating EME as topic that could be decided by one side of the debate. In essence, a core of EME proponents was able to impose its will on the Consortium, over the wishes of a sizeable group of objectors — and every person who uses the web. The Director decided to personally override every single objection raised by the members, articulating several benefits that EME offered over the DRM that HTML5 had made impossible.

But those very benefits (such as improvements to accessibility and privacy) depend on the public being able to exercise rights they lose under DRM law — which meant that without the compromise the Director was overriding, none of those benefits could be realized, either. That rejection prompted the first appeal against the Director in W3C history.

In our campaigning on this issue, we have spoken to many, many members’ representatives who privately confided their belief that the EME was a terrible idea (generally they used stronger language) and their sincere desire that their employer wasn’t on the wrong side of this issue. This is unsurprising. You have to search long and hard to find an independent technologist who believes that DRM is possible, let alone a good idea. Yet, somewhere along the way, the business values of those outside the web got important enough, and the values of technologists who built it got disposable enough, that even the wise elders who make our standards voted for something they know to be a fool’s errand.

We believe they will regret that choice. Today, the W3C bequeaths an legally unauditable attack-surface to browsers used by billions of people. They give media companies the power to sue or intimidate away those who might re-purpose video for people with disabilities. They side against the archivists who are scrambling to preserve the public record of our era. The W3C process has been abused by companies that made their fortunes by upsetting the established order, and now, thanks to EME, they’ll be able to ensure no one ever subjects them to the same innovative pressures.

So we’ll keep fighting to fight to keep the web free and open. We’ll keep suing the US government to overturn the laws that make DRM so toxic, and we’ll keep bringing that fight to the world’s legislatures that are being misled by the US Trade Representative to instigate local equivalents to America’s legal mistakes.

We will renew our work to battle the media companies that fail to adapt videos for accessibility purposes, even though the W3C squandered the perfect moment to exact a promise to protect those who are doing that work for them.

We will defend those who are put in harm’s way for blowing the whistle on defects in EME implementations.

It is a tragedy that we will be doing that without our friends at the W3C, and with the world believing that the pioneers and creators of the web no longer care about these matters.

Effective today, EFF is resigning from the W3C.

Thank you,

Cory Doctorow
Advisory Committee Representative to the W3C for the Electronic Frontier Foundation

Photo by Intrepidteacher

The post W3C abandons consensus, standardizes DRM, EFF resigns appeared first on P2P Foundation.

“Germany’s DEAL project, which includes over 60 major research institutions, has announced that all of its members are canceling their subscriptions to all of Elsevier’s academic and scientific journals, effective January 1, 2017.

The boycott is in response to Elsevier’s refusal to adopt “transparent business models” to “make publications more openly accessible.”

Elsevier is notorious even among academic publishers for its hostility to open access, but it also publishes some of the most prestigious journals in many fields. This creates a vicious cycle, where the best publicly funded research is published in Elsevier journals, which then claims ownership over the research (Elsevier, like most academic journals, requires authors to sign their copyrights over, though it does not pay them for their writing, nor does it pay for their research expenses). Then, the public institutions that are producing this research have to pay very high costs to access the journals in which it appears. Journal prices have skyrocketed over the past 40 years.

No one institution can afford to boycott Elsevier, but collectively, the institutions have great power. The high price-ticket on journals means that the entire customer base for them is institutions, not individuals, and the increasing prices have narrowed the field of institutions that can afford to participate — but that has also narrowed the number of institutions that need to cooperate to cripple Elsevier and bring it to heel.

Even so, this kind of boycott was unimaginable until recently — but the rise of guerrilla open access sites like Sci-Hub mean that researchers at participating institutions can continue to access Elsevier papers by other means.

All participants in this process are aware of the imminent effects this has on research and teaching. However, they share the firm conviction that, for the present, the pressure built up by the joint action of many research institutions is the only way to to reach an outcome advantageous for the German scientific community.

No full-text access to Elsevier journals to be expected from 1 January 2017 on [Göttingen State and University Library]”

The post Germany-wide consortium of research libraries announce boycott of Elsevier journals over open access appeared first on P2P Foundation.