Topic: Digital Rights

Rick Falkvinge is a Swedish politician who recently founded a new party. Its values include freedom, upholding laws, and rights to privacy. These may sound like safe and just laws - things that are constant and don't need defending; so what's jeopardizing them? According to Falkvinge, that would be copyrights and patents.

As high quality spectrum is repurposed after the digital TV transition, what is the best way to ensure fair network access and promote innovation in this valuable new space? US Department of Commerce technology policy expert John Kneuer argues that market forces, not government regulation, are most likely to produce benefits for network providers, internet application developers and consumers. Stirring quite a controversy, this substantive talk concludes with a lively discussion of broadband policy and network neutrality.

OpenIDDevCamp was a gathering to develop web-based applications that use OpenID. Attendees included web designers, developers and testers all working together over the weekend to enable OpenID on their sites or just learn more about this technology. Scott joined Phil to discus the event as well as the OpenID concept.

Everyone is leaving an electronic slime trail behind them on the internet, according to Bob Lucky. On this edition of IEEE Spectrum Radio, Bob Lucky shares his thoughts on the records we're all creating on the internet, and Spectrum takes a look at the Homebrew Computer Club's illegitimate child: the Homebrew Cellphone Club.

As online fraud continues to grow as a major issue, enterprises are trying to come up with new ways to reduce the problem. Unfortunately, we have traded convenience for strong authentication, so other methods must be used. Dan Lulich, Vice President of Technology for iovation, joins Phil and Scott to discuss the concept of end-user machine reputation as a way to establish identity. He talks about how authenticating the device is a better method to identify users.

In the digital world, where information can be spread easily, there is a counterforce attempting to lock it up. Shared culture, illustrated by the creative commons movement, continues to be fought against by traditional commercial culture. Gerd and Glen discuss these issues, assessing how things are likely to change in the future. They talk about how content owners have found ways to quickly filter internet content to assert their copyright rights and share examples about how companies are trying to find ways to be part of the sharing process.

Dick Hardt, founder and CEO of Sxip Identity, has been working with the Canadian government on a new virtual ID card that will streamline online interaction among government agencies, public-sector organizations, and citizens. In this conversation with Jon Udell, Hardt explains how this new program will work, and offers perspectives on a variety of online identity issues.

What are the challenges to traditional copyright caused by technology? What new rules must be written to protect intellectual property rights, but not overly limit usage in an age where the computer is a copying device and the internet is a giant network of copying devices? In this episode of Future Talks, Gerd and Glen discuss how technology is leaving old rules behind They also talk about open source and how it relates to possible changes in the current copyright model. They also review how patents are subject to the same technology challenges.

Glen Hiemstra and Gerd Leonhard talk about the important megatrends that are shaping the future of media. They discuss a number of topics, including user generated content and media, globalization, access versus ownership, copyright versus usage right, the digital natives, the net generation and the aging of the baby boomers, the growth in wireless broadband and mobility, convergence, the decline of the hit culture, the rise of the ubiquity paradigm and much more.

In his new book "The End of Control", Gerd Leonhard expands on the key topics introduced in his first book "The Future of Music" while escalating the debate out of the music realm and into media at large. He addresses the single most important issue underlying many debates about the future of media: who controls what, why, when, and where, and how can digital content still generate revenues when most of the traditional ways of controlling its flow ( i.e., distribution) are no longer available.