[sclug] OT Looking for interesting stories on copyright etc

[John Dickson]

Better late than never! The following has been the rounds to an unintended 
recipient, but I hope it is not too late,

Douglas Holden wrote [snip]
> I am thinking of doing a talk along the
> lines of "But information wants to be free", on copyright, intellectual
> property or whatever,
 You might like to add secrecy to your "whatever".
 I find the launch and content of the Hutton Enquiry web-site 
http://www.the-hutton-enquiry.org.uk interesting for several reasons:-
 All the government information posted here (however innocuous/trivial) 
would normally have been kept secret for 30 years!! (the norm in our 
paranoid society)  The opening up of a window on how the Blair regime 
actually operates will have far reaching repercussions, since politicians 
will not be able to revert to the old stonewalling tactics when asked for 
this kind of information in future.
 A second issue which this raises is that many long standing political 
pundits are now saying that this kind of breakdown of cabinet government 
has happened in the past and was known by them at the time , but they 
couldn't reveal it for fear of prosecution under the Official Secrets Act.  
The misuse of this Act to cover up political shenanigans will also now come 
out into the open.
 The site illustrates some of the major problems with the government's 
attempts to publish information "on the web".  The top page is a typical 
mishmash of javascript, frames and all the other non-standard rubbish which 
has accumulated over the last few years.  Hence the effort reported by NTK  
"... Yes, Odeon recoder MATTHEW SOMERVILLE has struck again, improving the 
world's accessibility one web site at a time..." 
http://www.dracos.co.uk/hutton
 The site also illustrates to some extent the other stupidity, which is 
rife in government departments, of "publishing" documents on the web to be 
downloaded in either pdf or 'Word' .doc formats when they could simply be 
published in HTML (modern style of course).
 How free is information if you need proprietary technology, which is 
designed to enforce DRM, or an obsolete non standard browser like IE5.5, to 
read it?
 And last, but by no means least, have a look at the daily transcripts 
themselves. These show the wonders of a mentality that cannot grasp that 
publishing on the web is a "new" paradigm, so they torture the html to 
render as though the pages had been printed on government printing presses 
which were set up to print Hansard in this format some time in the 19th 
century!

Footnote:  Since the above was first composed the Hutton Enquiry web-site 
http://www.the-hutton-enquiry.org.uk has had its top page re-jigged.  I 
hope that this was in response to Matthew Somerville's efforts.


-- 
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John Dickson  johnd at cavcomp.co.uk

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