orgcon- Digital Economy bill and Microsoft in the cloud

[severedsolo]

   Information

Moderators note: This news story is entirely my own work and so doesn't follow the normal news format

Today I attended ORGcon the Open Right's Group's annual conference, who among other things campaign against things like DRM and the Digital Economy Act. I also managed to get a very telling quote from one of Microsofts top privacy experts.

A very interesting day all round, it started with a keynote speech entitled "Thriving in the true Digital Economy" which set the tone for the day. We discussed things like DRM protection and how the only people it helps are publishers (in this context anyone who distributes content such as record labels are publishers) and is in fact detrimental to both end users and artists.

Once the opening ceremony was out the way there was an excellent speech by Professor James Boyle. He discussed how due to overlegisation and our stupid attitude to copyright laws now extending to "Life + 7 years" even for works where the author cannot be traced we are "The only generation which is deliberately depriving ourselves of the opportunity to build upon the works of our contempories"

Most interestingly of all, the last discussion of the day was concerning the future of privacy, and I got a chance to field a question to Caspar Bowden, who is the Chief Privacy Advisor for Microsof Europe. The question i asked was "With cloud computing being the "next big thing" how long do you think it will be before our data is no longer secure once it all gets onto a Microsoft server?" although he didn't answer my question, I did get this out of him. "It depends on what context you mean it in, do you mean from hackers, the police, or others? Microsoft takes these concerns very seriously, Microsoft plan to set up several regional data centres, and if an individual or company asks for their data to only be stored in that centre then it will be."

I'll post a more detailed report on this event tomorrow, i'm on my phone at the moment, and dislike typing on it but it seems from that quote that Microsoft plan to send all our data to the cloud and local storage will become a thing of the past.

 

[Dave76]

Interesting event, but won't they only be able to store what we give them?

I'm sure we will end up giving them much more than we planned.

In two or three OS releases we'll be at least 80% in the cloud.

I suppose if any of us have used on-line banking or purchased anything on-line, some of our most important information is already on the cloud.

 

[BomberAF]

Hi and give me 6 SeveredSolo!

I don't think it is necesarily such a bad thing to stop making news papers free on the web, after all the newspapers in question do have to pay reporters a wage to write the stories in the first place.

So ask youself the question why should we get it free, after all you wouldn't say it's acceptable to dowload music, movies or software free so how is stopping newspaper articles being free on the web such a bad thing.

 

[severedsolo]

Hi and give me 6 SeveredSolo!

I don't think it is necesarily such a bad thing to stop making news papers free on the web, after all the newspapers in question do have to pay reporters a wage to write the stories in the first place.

So ask youself the question why should we get it free, after all you wouldn't say it's acceptable to dowload music, movies or software free so how is stopping newspaper articles being free on the web such a bad thing.

uhhh.... what?

I didn't post anything about Newspapers..... The event was mainly centred around Copyright law and how messed up it is. I agree with you about the whole "downloading music etc. for free" thing, thats not what ORG is about. Its more about stuff which should be in the public domain, because it is no longer available to buy, or because the original author is dead/cant be traced isn't.

 

[BomberAF]

Hi and give me 6 SeveredSolo!

I don't think it is necesarily such a bad thing to stop making news papers free on the web, after all the newspapers in question do have to pay reporters a wage to write the stories in the first place.

So ask youself the question why should we get it free, after all you wouldn't say it's acceptable to dowload music, movies or software free so how is stopping newspaper articles being free on the web such a bad thing.

uhhh.... what?

I didn't post anything about Newspapers..... The event was mainly centred around Copyright law and how messed up it is. I agree with you about the whole "downloading music etc. for free" thing, thats not what ORG is about. Its more about stuff which should be in the public domain, because it is no longer available to buy, or because the original author is dead/cant be traced isn't.

Well if something should be in the public domain et.c then I agree but I remember reading something about this and a big stink being kicked up about newspapers being able to prevent their storys from being either reproduced or available on the web.

If I am wrong then do forgive me, but I am sure this bill also covers the press.

Once again gimme 6!

 

[Layback Bear]

I'm not going to give a long list of sites. If one is interested Google Cloud Computing Security and there is a lot of concern about security using cloud computing.