Wednesday, July 4, 2018

Copyright in the Digital Single Market

I asked my EU representatives to stop #CensorshipMachines. Yesterday for Belgium and now for Estonia. I sent them an email using the saveyourinternet.eu platform where they summarize the campaign as follows: “On 20 June 2018, the European Parliament’s Legal Affairs Committee adopted the dreadful Article 13 proposal by Rapporteur MEP Axel Voss, during its vote on their Report on Copyright in the Digital Single Market. With this vote, 15 out of 25 MEPs have blatantly ignored the calls of experts from all areas, as well as the 188.990 messages sent over two weeks by EU citizens using the #SaveYourInternet tools, as well as the many thousands of others conveyed through other platforms. Read more.

Some Wikipedias (including the Estonian one are disabled today as a sign of protest against the copyright reform in the EU.

I support these campaigns because they try to avoid yet another step into the wrong direction.

The right direction is to alltogether remove the concept of “intellectual property” from our legislations and to abolish property rights on immaterial things, including text, music, movies and patents. Intellectual work is something you cannot “own”. When published it becomes like the air and the sun: everybody may use it, and nobody may spoil it. Publishing an intellectual work should be the irrevocable act of sharing your work with others and giving them permission to use and share your work. While legislations must continue to protect the right of being identified and honored as the author, we can’t go on with counting the number of copies of an idea in order to reward its author. We must and we can use different ways to reward authors for their creative work.

Yes, that’s an utopic dream. Even Creative Commons and Wikipedia don’t go that far. Many people believe that it won’t happen because too much money depends on copyright. It would probably require a team of experts in different areas for explaining how it actually can happen. Or maybe such a team exists and I just don’t know them?

More about the daily planner

I reviewed and updated the specs about the DailyPlanner in cal : Calendar functionality. For #2382.

TODO: lino_xl.lib.cal.Event is clickable but lino_xl.lib.cal.DailyPlanner isn’t.

As a side effect, the seqno field of a Sequenced no longer has sums because I added this line:

Sequenced.set_widget_options('seqno', hide_sum=True)