 I'm on the board of the Open Rights Group in the UK, so I help them with campaigns. So the Open Rights Group is a group of digital liberty activists. And what we have done is we've raised funds in order to hire a staff who do the thinking behind public policy that allows us to understand how public policy affects digital liberties. So they campaign for free culture, they campaign against the enclosure of copyright. At the moment we've got a campaign running about actor, we have a campaign running about parody law because in the UK there is no fair use exception that lets you create parody. So we've got a campaign running about that. So it's a digital liberties organization that is running campaigns to develop and protect digital rights in the UK. So do that. I'm also involved with the Document Foundation. The Document Foundation is the group that is developing Libra Office and the Document Foundation has just been incorporated. So here at FOSDEM they're signing an incorporation. And Libra Office has been really an amazing success with people able to recruit new developers, implement new features. There's been regular releases coming out for a year and a half now. So I work on Libra Office too. And then I also talk with the folk from the Libra Java community. So that's one of the communities here that I'll be dealing with. And then I work as an open source consultant. So I work with nonprofit organizations and companies to understand open source licensing, open source policy, open source law. All the ambassadors signed actor in Japan secretly, which was a despicable piece of betrayal of their citizenship. And I think they're going to get a lot of trouble because of that. Not least because they've really failed to have a transparent inclusive process even for members of the European Parliament. So you saw that last week the rapporteur on actor resigned. I've never seen a rapporteur make a public statement against the subject for which he's the rapporteur before. And so that shows you just how improper the actor has been conducted. So yeah, it was signed but that doesn't mean anything. It isn't real in Europe until the European Parliament approves it and they don't have the vote about that until June. So there is still plenty of time to tell MEPs how disgusted citizens are. I joined in with a civil society campaign against actor a couple of weeks back. We signed that there was being organized by Access Now and we signed a public statement by Access Now. Going forward, because we've got a new governance, it will be up to our members to determine exactly what actions we take. But I fully anticipate that we'll be taking specific actions against actor. And then Open Rights Group is doing the same thing. Open Rights Group is going to be running a campaign where we're one of the stewards of the public protest against actor which is happening on February 11th in all around Europe. And we're also investigating what the best way of using our resources is to highlight the problem. Because we think that when members of the European Parliament have actor explained to them by citizens rather than by lobbyists, they will realize just how bad it is. Just what happened to SOFA and TIPA? Yes. So looking back, I was involved in the software patent directive in 2005 in opposing that. And we found that once politicians realized that the story they had been told wasn't the whole story, their vote changed. And we think that's what has to happen with actor as well. We think politicians need to understand that although the European Commission is telling them that everything is fine, they're not hearing the whole story, that they're completely missing the impact that actor will have on free culture. They're completely missing the impact that actor will have on emerging business models. And by passing actor, they risk keeping European industry in the 20th century and stopping it from being able to progress to the 21st century. Well, I'll give you some general statements about it. One of the things that actor does is actor takes away discretion. Now, if you in most cases in law, geeks like to think that the law is a programming language, and that you can run the law through, you know, GCL, the new compact law compiler, and that they're going to get a list of error messages and warnings that come out that they can then go back and fix. The law doesn't work that way. The law depends on there being lots of discretion, lots of gray areas, and people making decisions based on all those gray areas. And if they can't agree, eventually, you go to a court, the judge makes a final decision for you. Now, what actor is doing is actually squeezing the discretion out of copyright law, so that all of the things that in Europe allow you to create parody that they allow you to use other people's ideas, all of those things rely on common sense and discretion. And actor is going to squeeze the common sense and discretion out of copyright law. That's the general statement about it. Specifically, the actor is trying to make things that have always been civil law violations, criminal law violations. It has a very vague test, which if you fail the test in there of commercial use or commercial scale, sorry, you fail the commercial scale test, you become subject to criminal law instead of civil law. And that means that maybe you're a movie maker. And maybe you have been filming in Brussels and in the background, there has been something going on that's copyrighted. And you upload your video to a website and your video gets downloaded by 100,000 people. Well, you are now operating on a commercial scale. And if the copyright holder of that copyrighted work in the background decides to sue you, you're subject to criminal penalties, not civil penalties. That's one. And there are plenty of examples like that where the law is being made brittle. The law is having discretion squeezed out of it. And that's all serving the interests of people who own lots of copyright and lots of patents. One of the great shames about all of this copyright law stuff is that the US trade representative is using America's power to make the law worse everywhere else in the world. And that's a great shame that's going on there. We have to understand that just because you don't live in a country that has an American law, that doesn't mean your government won't be putting in American laws soon. Because the US trade representative is going and saying, you know, would you like subsidy on your motor industry? If you change your copyright law to be like ours, we'll give you a subsidy for your motor industry. Would you like us to buy your wheat and your rice? Oh, we'll buy your wheat and your rice if you change your copyright law to be like our copyright law. So they're going around making a world where everybody has got the same restrictive laws. And we need to be very concerned even if we think we live in a country that isn't affected. The difficulty that we have with eBooks is that publishers believe that they can get away with it. What's going on here? So the problem that we face here comes from something that Lawrence Lessig wrote about. Lawrence Lessig explained that copyright was never meant to apply to your name. Copyright was a set of laws to regulate what happened between producers. It was it was there actually to stop printing presses stealing each other's work. And when you buy a book, you're not subject to copyright because none of the things that you do with a book involve copying. When you give the book to somebody else, copyright law doesn't apply because you're not copying the book. You're giving up giving the book away. Now in the digital realm, the analogs of all the things you do with books involve a copy. So when you buy a book from a bookstore in Brussels, you go into the bookstore and you pay them your money and they give you the book. At no point are you affected by copyright law because there's no act of copying has taken place. Whereas when you buy a book on your Kindle, everything you do involves a copy. The act of buying it involves copying it from here to there into your library. The act of reading it involves copying it out of your library onto your Kindle. And consequently publishers have been able to gain power that they're not entitled to. They've been able to gain power over your use of culture. With copyright law was never intended to give them. They were never supposed to have power of culture. They were supposed to have power of copy. And so the problem we're seeing with ebooks is we're seeing an abuse or an illegitimately gained power. That's why there is a problem. Now we can mitigate that problem by encouraging them to treat licensing as rental. So I would be willing to pay 99 cents to rent a copy of a book if I conveniently got it delivered to my Linux desktop. But I feel that I was looking at a book yesterday on Amazon. The book was £6.99 or for £6.95 I could have the Kindle version. And I thought well why would I do that? If I'm going to pay nearly £7 why wouldn't I just ask them to give me the book? Why would I want the ebook? So I think there's got to be a big change in this industry. First of all the control that they're exercising is illegitimately gained. Society never meant to give them that power. And secondly the way that they're using it is abusive. They should be using it to create reasonable markets not to create unreasonable markets. The whole academic publishing world is in massive need of reform in the connect age. Again, what Apple is doing there is entirely typical of Apple. I put a picture on the screen in my talk of what they're like and people shouldn't be in any way surprised that they're acting this way. If you've already decided that you are happy to be locked in then what they're doing there is is no worse than the rest of what they're doing. Personally if I was involved in a college I would be really keen to get open academic publications and open coursework and there's plenty of it out there. The thing is that the specific textbooks that they're publishing the publishers who are involved are still living in the 20th century and so find Apple's 20th century approach to book publishing very pleasing. So all I'm saying here is I think the problem is somewhere else. I think what Apple is doing is it isn't like you've got an alternative once you've decided to be that kind of slave. It's like a slave complaining about the kind of whip his master is using. I prefer the knotted cord rather than the bones please. That's the point that we've got to in this argument I think. The things that I'm passionate about at the moment are I'm focused on actor. We have a short five month window to defeat it and I think we need to make sure that we watch carefully for how every individual digital citizen can play their part because we're going to need everyone. Freedom doesn't have any lobbyists. The only lobbyists that freedom has is us. So if we decide not to play if we decide we're a bit tired or you know that this doesn't seem very interesting this is our last chance to stop it.