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[edit] Inter-galactic infrastructure rights for the digital era, the hackers wish-list

Our goal was to write a fundamental rights statement at the infrastructure level

CondensedVersionOfIntergalactikHackersWishlist

[edit] Mind Map

[edit] Demands

[edit] User and citizen's rights

Governments must guarantee a non-exclusive free Internet access to every citizen independently of its place of residence (at least to the level required to exercise its rights as a citizen and to take part in democracy and relate to its public institutions).
Any individual shall be allowed to browse the Internet and access content anonymously.
All the range of electromagnetic spectrum released should be freed for citizen use. Uses of these ranges should include at least the following:
- A completely free band of the spectrum wireless citizen networks. For example: 2.4 and 5 GHz
- All the whitespace spectrum freed up by the introduction of the DVB standard.
- Creation of citizen radio and TV channels to broadcast (freedom of speech) in television digital multiplexing electromagnetic range (e.g. DVB-T European standard).
- In general, for any band of the electromagnetic spectrum there should always be at leas a 25% of it free for citizen's self-management without fees, charges or restrictions of any kind.
No individual shall be held liable for malware or malicious code running on their personal computer beyond their knowledge.
Right to investigate, document and modify the hardware of any device. Manufacturers must provide all production specifications and patent information they have used for the design of the device so as to make possible the construction of the device from scratch with currently available techonology.
Right to decide at any time to modify or remove the your user data from any online service.
Right to not receive unsolicited messages.
Right to connect networks (tethering)
Interception of data transfer on any communication channels must follow a judicial order.
Right to encrypt our communication at any level of depth with no limit of key length or algorithm.
The right not to reveal your keys or decrypt your data. // AFAIK this won't hold water in a court.
Any media content acquired by an individual shall be available for private use on any device, at any time, for any type of use, without any restriction (exactly as it happens when you buy an cucumber or a t-shirt).

[edit] Infrastructure and market regulation

Neutrality: The Internet providers cannot execute any kind of manipulation, distortion, prevention, diversion, priority routing or delay of any data transferred by users. The exercise of this right must be independent from the source or target of the communication, from the protocol or application used, from the type of data content, or from any other consideration external to the wish of the citizen. Data traffic will be treated as a private communication and it will only be possible to spy, trace or analyse its content under a judicial order (exactly like in the case of any other current private mail).
Symmetry: Communication enterprises must grant a symmetrical connection and a bandwidth/price ratio to level Internet access rights between citizens.
Diversity: To prevent monopolies in telecom infrastructures, telecom operators must not be allowed to provide the last mile service together with other telecom services. Last mile providers must be specialized only on such a concrete service. The same shareholder must not be allowed to control telecom companies that provide the last mile service and companies that provide the other telecom services. No telecom company must control more than 25% of any market service.
Network providers must fulfill agreed-upon access speeds; in pre-payment contracts, only the traffic explicitly transferred or demanded by the user must be charged.
Software is mathematical knowledge embodied in algorithms and should be treated as such not being liable for any kind of patenting.

[edit] Public Administration

Public sector, publicly founded projects and those that commit cityzens by law or in a manner affecting their fundamental rights, should always use free software, unless there's no free software available with the required specifications. When a free solution does not exist, the government or the corresponding public institution should promote the development of the software needed.
Results of development funded by public money should always be licensed under a free and open source license and all developed patents should be released under royalty free terms and free or any other restriction.
Civil society must have the right to provide and implement telecom services without any kind of restriction
Public sector must use devices with interfaces based on open standards.
In order to warranty the democratic process as a whole, all publicly founded and used software and specially software that is involved in the democratic processes, must be fully auditable.

[edit] Regarding how software evaluation and purchase should proceed in public administration

Public purchases of software must evaluate the total cost of using it, including the costs of stopping using it and migrating to an alternative software.
Public accounting must clearly separate between the costs of software licenses, maintenance, support and service, all them appart of hardware.

[edit] Interoperability guidelines

International character encoding standards should be respected.
Standards and formats should never discriminate users at any level; document formats and communication protocols should be open, free of royalty patents, without any condition. Free access to documentation and specifications should be guaranteed for all standards and formats.
To avoid discrimination to the citizens and other entities, based on their legitimate technological choosing, Public Administrations must base all their technical interoperability on open standards.
Public Administrations must promote the use and development of open standards, specially on those technological fields where no standard is currently available or the existing ones are deprecated.

[edit] Discuss

Goverments must base their interoperability rules (technical, organizational, semantic and common services) on mandatory interoperability frameworks. Public Interoperability frameworks must be based on open standards, in a way that is not discrimated any kind of software development model.
A company that produces and sells closed source software for use on computers shall be responsible for the security of that product, and a user has a right to seek damages in the event of a failure to secure their product

[edit] Definitions of instrumental concepts

[edit] Bundled sale

[edit] Firmware

Firmware is Software. Software that internally control various electronic devices. Any Software demand must apply to Firmware.

[edit] Software auditing

Auditing of software includes the revision of code, the modification of code, the compilation of code and the execution of the code. Auditing of software must include the auditing of the tools on which such software is based (compilers, libraries, operative systems on which it runs, etc.)

[edit] Broadband

[edit] Net Neutrality

Citizens' right of not suffering in their digital sent or received data any kind of manipulation, distortion, prevention, diversion, priorization or delay. The exercise of this right must be independent from the source or target of the communication, from the protocol or application used, from the type of data content, or from any other consideration external to the wish of the citizen. This data trafic will be treated as a private communication and it will only be possible to spy, trace or analyse its content under a judicial order. That traffic is treated as private and therefore secret and should only be sequestered, spied on, track, archive, or analyzed in its content or history, and mandated remedy, can not in any case be subjected to prior censorship , or administrative content hijacking IP addresses of citizens and consumers are potentially identifiable data and the data subject has a right of access to correct, delete, or prevent the transfer of their personal information. Citizens have the right to access content, run applications and use services of their choice and to connect devices to the network, connect hardware and use software of their choice that do not harm the network, without further restriction on interoperability than the one established by law. Citizens and consumers are entitled to access to a free, unlicensed band of the spectrum for digital communications

[edit] Technological Neutrality

Citizens' right of not suffering in their digital sent or received data any kind of manipulation, distortion, prevention, diversion, priorization or delay. The exercise of this right must be independent from the source or target of the communication, from the protocol or application used, from the type of data content, or from any other consideration external to the wish of the citizen. This data traffic will be treated as a private communication and it will only be possible to spy, trace or analyse its content under a judicial order (exactly like in the case of any other current private mail).

[edit] Interoperability

Interoperability is the capacity of the information systems, and the procedures to which they support, to share data, export functionality and to possibility to the exchange of information and knowledge between them and their users.

[edit] Open Standard

See at the end of the definitions chapter for a legal definition of all kinds of standards in terms of openess.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_standard#IETF_definition (IETF has no "open standard" definition, the first paragraph that appears in Wikipedia under "IETF definition" has been written by Microsoft mercenaries)

[edit] Open Format

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_format

[edit] FLOSS (Free/Libre/Open Source Software)

"Here is where the difference between free software and open source starts to matter. Open source focuses on new model for development. Free software is not interested in how the program is developed. We are interested in the ethics of how the program is distributed." Richard Stallman

[edit] Free Software

FSF definition The program's users have the four essential freedoms:

The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0).
The freedom to study how the program works, and change it to make it do what you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).
The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements (and modified versions in general) to the public, so that the whole community benefits (freedom 3). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

[edit] Open Source

OSI definition

Free Redistribution: The license shall not restrict any party from selling or giving away the software as a component of an aggregate software distribution containing programs from several different sources. The license shall not require a royalty or other fee for such sale.
Source Code: The program must include source code, and must allow distribution in source code as well as compiled form. Where some form of a product is not distributed with source code, there must be a well-publicized means of obtaining the source code for no more than a reasonable reproduction cost preferably, downloading via the Internet without charge. The source code must be the preferred form in which a programmer would modify the program. Deliberately obfuscated source code is not allowed. Intermediate forms such as the output of a preprocessor or translator are not allowed.
Derived Works: The license must allow modifications and derived works, and must allow them to be distributed under the same terms as the license of the original software.
Integrity of The Author's Source Code: The license may restrict source-code from being distributed in modified form only if the license allows the distribution of "patch files" with the source code for the purpose of modifying the program at build time. The license must explicitly permit distribution of software built from modified source code. The license may require derived works to carry a different name or version number from the original software.
No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups: The license must not discriminate against any person or group of persons.
No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor: The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research.
Distribution of License: The rights attached to the program must apply to all to whom the program is redistributed without the need for execution of an additional license by those parties.
License Must Not Be Specific to a Product: The rights attached to the program must not depend on the program's being part of a particular software distribution. If the program is extracted from that distribution and used or distributed within the terms of the program's license, all parties to whom the program is redistributed should have the same rights as those that are granted in conjunction with the original software distribution.
License Must Not Restrict Other Software: The license must not place restrictions on other software that is distributed along with the licensed software. For example, the license must not insist that all other programs distributed on the same medium must be open-source software.
License Must Be Technology-Neutral: No provision of the license may be predicated on any individual technology or style of interface.

[edit] Patents

[edit] Software Patent

Sofware patent is a patent that covers with its claims any logic computer feature, idea or method in a way that partiallly or totally monopolizes it.

[edit] Computer Implemented Invention

Computer implemented invention is any patent that has any relation to computers. There are several kinds of CII: 1) computer aided inventions; software patents; computer implemented bussiness methods; computer implemented gaming rules; and, computer implemented mathematic algorithms.

[edit] Repository

[edit] Software application

[edit] Information Infrastructure

[edit] Intelectual property

Metaphysical imposibility and conceptual falacy used to label Author's rights and copyright.

[edit] Industrial property

Patents, utility models, trademarks, industrial secrecy, commercial secrecy, data base rights,

[edit] Monopoly

TODO: Just refer the EU legal definition or similar here?

[edit] Types of standards

[edit] A non standard

The specification is not public, neither normalized by any recognized national or international standardization body. This is no matter how widely used the format/protocol/methodology/process/etc is. If widely used, it is common to denominate it in slang language as "de facto standard", but it is not a standard.

[edit] Closed standard

A specification normalized and licensed in any non free form indeed not public and not common for all the licensees (you have to negotiate with the owner of the IPRs). Specification itself could cost money but should be public (if not, it wouldn't be a standard). ECMA should be included in that category, since during its specification process doesn't warranty enough that Technical Committee members reveal its IPRs (patents mainly) covering the standard.

[edit] RAND standard

A public specification normalized and licensed under terms that are public and common for all the licensees. Patent rights should be declared during the standardization process. Usually RAND terms is the minimum that standardization bodies ask for to grant a standard (ie. ISO and OASIS). Specification itself could cost money. ISO/IEC should be included in that category. Should be noticed that, contrary to what RAND stands for ("Reasonable and Non Discriminatory"), that RAND standards frequently discriminate to part of the industry or to some development models as FLOSS. Ie. FLOSS and other free distribution software are taken apart from the possibility to implement the standard just from the moment that the RAND license states a fee per copy, since it is impossible to account the number of copies distributed. Additionally, some RAND licenses include terms that explicitly discriminate to FLOSS and other development models that show the source code of the programs, by forcing to the implementers to close the code of the implementation of the standard.

[edit] Open standard

A specification that is public, the standard is inclusive and it has been developed and is maintained in an open standardization process, everybody can implement it without any restriction, neither payment, to license the IPR (granted to everybody for free and without any condition). This is the minimum license terms asked by standardization bodies as W3C. Of course, all the other bodies accept open standards. But specification itself could cost a fair amount of money (ie. 100-400Eur per copy as in ISO because copyright and publication of the document itself). FFII definition of open standard coincides with the definition issued in the European Interoperability Framework released on 2004 1.

[edit] Free (as libre) standard

An open standard of which there is a complete reference implementation of the standard under a FLOSS license, or indeed GPLd software, and whose complete specification can be got for free and without any condition.

[edit] Guifi.net and others Wireless communities

Guifi.net is essentially open and free wireless network that is beginning to explore the uses of fiber optics. Now there are just over 8000 nodes operating, approximately 11,500 kilometers into links. Other experiences that we emphasize are the communities of PilsFree from Czech Republic or FreFunk from the Germany.

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