Ye pyrates of olden days

Piracy of intellectual property is nothing new. To some, plagiarism was a problem already in first century Rome. Illegal copying of books was done long before the modern concept of copyright as a creator’s right was conceived. The right to copy during the first centuries of printing belonged to printers and booksellers (sometimes for generations), not like today when an author owns it and might or might not assign his or her rights to a publisher for a limited time.

Printers often pirated books that legally belonged to other printers. The first known instance of print piracy was probably Gutenberg’s former financier Johann Fust, who reprinted Johann Mentel’s edition of St Augustine’s De Arte Prædicatoria. A more well-known case is Martin Luther, whose works were pirated in all of the German states (and in many other countries as well). There were lots of printers who for many years made their living entirely from unlicensed printing of Luther’s works. Luther complained about this, not so much on economical grounds as because the pirated editions were sloppy and the content distorted. At this time pirates even gathered at the Frankfurt Book Fair to sell their wares.

Francis Kirkman on the title pages of his book The Unlucky Citizen (1673).

Piracy was very common, especially during the 17th and 18th centuries, and not just smaller, poorer Stationers yielded to this shady custom, but even large well-established members of the Stationers Company spent some of their working hours on unlicensed printing or the printing of ”overnumbers”, that could be sold by chapmen or exchanged for other books from other printers.

What happened to Google Translate?

Some four months ago, I was planning to write an enthusiastic article about how great Google’s translation service had become. Outside of linguistic institutions, translation from Swedish into another language has not been available to the public for so long (I believe Babelfish was the first), and I was extremely impressed with how well Google managed also complex sentence patterns with parenthetical subordinate clauses, and how the translation engine managed to keep track of pronouns and various correlates. Sure, there were errors, but still, it was quite remarkable.

Now, not much of this seems to work any longer, and I get the feeling that maybe a hard drive containing exceptions and phraseology might have crashed in Googleland. This is very sad, since the current translations are almost unreadable. The Swedish word ”hyllningskör” (approx. ‘unanimous praise’) became ”tribute fragile” the other day. And today it became ”tribute shoes”. So, obviously Google learns. But it learns erroneously.

Swedish Pirate Party: A Critical Examination

(This is a translation of a blog entry in Swedish from June 14th, which was the hitherto most read article since the blog started in 2003.)

Now that the Swedish Pirate Party has got their 7 percent of the voters in the Swedish election for the European Parliament, I suppose it is time to write something about their goal, as it is presented in the party program.

Apparently, the party toned down its agitation in the file sharing issue before the election, and focused on the topic of personal integrity and privacy. This was probably, from their point of view, a good strategy. Otherwise, the party would probably to a much larger extent than now have been associated with selfish people who just want to safeguard their free-of-charge access to entertainment. What they say in privacy issues is much easier to agree with, even if not everything on this point is opposition-free either.

Copyright reform – or abolition?

The other day I came across a web site called Question Copyright. One of its leading men is the software developer Karl Fogel, and a prominence such as Brewster Kahle seems to be involved as well.

Their ”mission is to educate the public about the history of copyright, and to promote methods of distribution that do not depend on restricting people from making copies”. They say they want copyright reform, but ”if abolition is that better policy, then so be it”.

More on trigger points & muscle lumps

In 2003 I published a book about mercury poisoning from dental amalgam, fibromyalgia and the role in society of scientific research. It was built upon my own experiences as chronically ill. The print version is available in Swedish only, but there is a version in English available on line as a 131 page PDF.

After the book was published, I also uploaded a few web pages with further comments on these topics, but those were in Swedish only. I believe, however, that especially one of those texts, concerning muscle lumps, should reach also non-Swedish readers. I have therefore translated it into English.

What has copyright to do with democracy?

In view of recent debates, not the least those in Sweden, I wrote this article about the democratic aspects of copyright legislation:

Abstract: The debates on whether or not copyright and democracy are compatible concepts are not new. It has been discussed since the 1700s and concerns a form of separation of powers. Copyright is a monopoly, but at the same time, when copyright came, it was a strike at another form of monopoly, the printers’ rights, with their roots in the guild system. Copyright could not occur until censorship was abolished, and it can actually be seen as a complement to the freedom of expression. Copyright was early associated with privacy issues. However, if proportionality is not followed in the maintenance of law, both integrity and freedom of expression could be threatened.

This text is part of the annual book ”For or Against the Citizenry: Power sharing”, which is published for the third time by the democracy study group D2D. The book is in Swedish, with short summaries in English. It is available free of charge on the web.

Read the whole article at:
http://www.nisus.se/archive/090525e.html

Pingad på Intressant.

Sweden’s first copyright acts (1810-1877)

”Every script [copy] shall be the author’s or his legal rights holder’s property. He who prints or reprints a script [copy] without the author’s or publisher’s written permission, shall lose the entire edition or pay a fine to its full value, undividedly accrued to the plaintiff.”

This was the first, very brief, copyright legislation in Sweden. It was subsection 8 of the first section of the (constitutional) Freedom of the Press Act of 1810. In 1855 came a civil law, outside of the constitutional laws, concerning dramatic works, and in 1876 came the first ”regulation on ownership of script [copy]”. It was a temporary solution, and already the next year saw the enactment of the first more elaborate Swedish law on authors’ rights, 1877.

I have for many years been working on a book about copyright history. At the book’s web site, I have now uploaded these first four Swedish copyright laws. At the bottom of the web pages there are comments in Swedish and English.

See http://www.copyrighthistory.com

Pingad på Intressant.

Is illegal tobacco more dangerous than legal?

When I wrote about the tobacco industry and its mafia methods the other day (in Swedish) I had missed an ad that was published in Swedish daily Svenska Dagbladet on December 7. Advertisers are the Swedish Tobacco Manufacturer’s Association and an association for Swedish Stores & Fast Food.

The main message appears on the facsimile above: ”Illegal tobacco causes organized crime”, designed so that it resembles a warning on a cigarette packet.

An interesting attempt by an industry with very little goodwill to try to improve its image somewhat by pointing the finger at a branch of the same industry, which in some respects is even worse than themselves.

The products of the pirates and their business practices are perhaps a bit worse than those in the official channels, but you should be aware that they operate in a market that is created and maintained through decades by exactly the so-called legal tobacco industry. This has been done by systematically hiding the known dangers regarding tobacco harm.

The ad contains four statements:

* Those who sell illegal tobacco ignore age limits and market to young people.

* 2 billion Swedish crowns are being withheld from the state since pirated tobacco is tax free.

* Criminal activities are financed through the enormous profits from illegal tobacco.

* Pirated [counterfeit] cigarettes may have higher rates of various substances than is allowed as expressed in the approved limit values.

They try to make it sound as if only the illegal businesses focus on the young. But that is not true. Remember when Austria Tabak some years ago arranged special smoke parties for young people in Sweden, where they had the opportunity to buy cheap cigarettes. As late as the mid-1990s there were still tobacco advertisements that clearly aimed at the youth. Today, product placement in movies obviously aims at a young audience. And, as is well known, all of a suddden people smoke a lot again in TV serials.

I ask Pascal Diethelm about this. Diethelm is a well-known health activist at OxyGenève in Switzerland, who was one of the two sued in the so-called Rylander affair a few years ago.

– The ad in the Swedish dailies is a smokescreen to distract the attention away from the real problem, Diethelm says, namely the fact that the main suppliers of illegal tobacco trade are the cigarette companies themselves. It could be that less than 1% of the traffic is related to the pirates, but the industry uses them to mask the fact that the rest comes from them – except for counterfeit cigarettes, which mostly come from China, and which represent an increasing, but still small, share of the illegal market.

– Intergovernmental negotiations are underway for the elaboration of a protocol on illicit tobacco trade, and the tobacco industry is trying everywhere to preempt that future protocol by concluding separate agreements (with loopholes) with each country at the local level – perhaps this is what they are trying to do in Sweden.

When it comes to the talk about higher rates of various harmful substances in illicit cigarettes, Pascal Diethelm says that this is a myth, which has two purposes – as a scare tactic and to pass the message that regular cigarettes are safer, which is known not to be true.

Pingad på Intressant.

Scientific fraud must be investigated – also in Sweden!

In Swedish magazine Axess (No 2/2008) I have an article about how important it is that Sweden finally gets an impartial institution that may investigate science fraud. Other Nordic countries have such agencies – while Sweden turns a blind eye to a lot of irregularities that should be classified as either science fraud or scientific misconduct. There is presently a proposal in parliament suggesting the founding of a committee on scientific misconduct. This would at least be a start, therefore it is worth supporting. It is far from an ideal solution, but better than what we have now.

The line of argument in my article is based on a case I have followed for several years, the case of Swedish professor Ragnar Rylander, tobacco researcher who on the one hand, had a series of public health assignments (e.g. scientific advisor to the Swedish National Board of Health and Welfare), and on the other, was secretly working as a consultant to the tobacco industry. In that capacity he helped to keep secret such research results that could adversely affect the industry’s business. He also assisted in withholding incriminating documents concerning these affairs from the prosecutors in the major trials against the tobacco industry that took place in the USA in the 1990s.

Read the whole article in English translation from my archive!

Pingad på Intressant.

Joseph Weizenbaum dead at 85

Mathematician and professor of computer science at MIT, Joseph Weizenbaum, died at 85 on March the 5th.

He is probably best known for his ”psychoanalysis program” Eliza – named after Eliza Doolittle in Pygmalion. Many people were fascinated by this relatively simple program’s ability to mimic ”human” conversation. On the other hand, Weizenbaum chose to emulate an orthodox psychoanalyst and his rather laconic comments – often a rather mechanic repetition of the analysand’s statements in query form. This limitation made it comparatively easy to construct the program.