Copyright in software better defined

I've always understood that there is a difference between form and content. There is no intellectual property in the form and structure of a book but there is in the content of the book: the design of the cover and pages and the words and images it contains. In computing (and hence interactive media) this distinction is less clear cut because everything is 'made' of computer program and we tend to also talk of the form and function (what it looks like and what it does) of a program as well as any content that a user might produce using that program.

A recent decision by the UK High Court has clarified what is protected by copyright when it comes to a computer program. This follows from decisions by the Court of Justice of the European Union and the late Lord Justice Pumfrey.

The case before the High Court was a battle between two software companies, SAS Institute Inc and World Programming Limited where SAS claimed that WPL, in reproducing the functionality of piece of software had infringed copyright.

The whole judgement makes for somewhat arcane reading but one key quote is this:

...copyright in a computer program does not protect either the programming language in which it is written or its interfaces (specifically, its data file formats) or its functionality from being copied.

I must assume that programming language has the obvious meaning here: PHP, C++, Algol ... whatever the application was written in (in the case here it appears to be a bespoke language). The component parts of a computer language are words (albeit ones with very specific meanings) and it is up the the programmers how they use these words to tell the computer what to do. In this sense it is like a recipe written in English. The recipe might be copyright but the English language it uses is not. So the computer program is copyright (as a work of literature if nothing else) but the language is not (although it might have elements that could be patented as covered by this BBC news story). That seems sensible.

The file formats make an interesting case. Finding a linguistic analogy is tortuous but you could say that the format of a haiku is like a file format. If you write your poem in the appropriate way it is a haiku, otherwise it's not. However, that doesn't mean that anyone could claim copyright in the form of a haiku does it? If you're reverse engineering something such as a word processor then you need to be able to write files in the appropriate format; so this judgement clarifies that situation.

Funtionality takes us back to long-standing arguments about copying how a program works and what it does. The graphical and textual elements of an interface can be copyright if either is, as the judgement notes, "... its author's own intellectual creation...". This does not apply to the function: so we can broadly say that form (notably any graphical user interface) may be copyright but function can not be.

As it happens, the only thing that was infringed in this case was copyright in the user manuals, which is a literary work (presumably with a few illustrations) in any case so had to be a slam dunk.

See SCL and Field Fisher Waterhouse's Tech Bytes blog for more detail and the ruling itself for the literal chapter and verse ... and remember that I am not a lawyer and this blog does not constitute legal advice.

The present e-marketing perspective and its implications

Tablet-driven – that’s the trend for the next few years. It seems that the smart-phones that have dominated the market are due to give way to tablets. The pros for tablets are bigger screens, they offer more variety of use to consumers (watch videos more comfortably, access to web pages designed for them, buy online more easily etc.), better access to corporate data for employees on the move – among others.

The tablet market is hotting up as more companies are offering tablets and their price comes down. There’s a short, sweet summary of research, report highlights and trends in the Rippleeffect, Breakfast Waffle, blog (7.1.13)

And, this analysis is confirmed for the digital entertainment market by Jerome Rota, (10.1.13) in the Netimperative blog.

There’s a far more detailed report on Customer Loyalty and marketing strategy at The Loyalty Guide.com. Although the tablet frenzy is not explicitly noted, there are fascinating insights into changes in consumer behaviour, the value of brand in online ventures, and a ‘What the experts say’, section that consolidates sector information on: Supermarket and Grocery Loyalty, General Retail Loyalty, Financial Services Loyalty, Airlines FFPs and Airport Loyalty, Hotel and Resort Loyalty, General Travel and Tourism Loyalty, Food, Drink and Entertainments Loyalty, Mobile, Fixed Line and ISP Loyalty, Automotive and Fuel Loyalty, Media and Publishing Loyalty, and Loyalty in Other Sectors (mainly public service oriented).

Then we get an in-depth treatment of how e-marketing trends are likely to go in 2013 from Ashley Friedlien, e-consultancy (8.1.13). His 17 pointers offer a wide-ranging romp through aspects of the markets that he finds significant; digital mainstream - the ‘new norm’, digital talent – war, putting effort into cross-channel customer experiences, focus on the long-term rather than just short term, watch digital internationalisation in such uncertain financial times, customer choice for channels settling down, transparently knowing what customers want, content, content, content, mobile maturity including m-commerce, better understanding of the social media market, design and user experience influenced by screen size, native advertising versus other models, digital analysis improving across channels and types of user experience, emerging digital TV spin-offs, bettering email and SEO marketing through intelligence, among others.

So exciting times on the marketing front for 2013. It doesn’t take much to understand the impact across the board for everyone involved in digital. Commissioned products have to achieve business ends and these are dictated by customer needs while marketeers give us the insights between them - for those that are willing to listen.

Outsourcing or cheating

While it looks potentially apocryphal, the story last week of 'Bob' the programmer who came up with an innovative way of doing his job has made for an interesting read.

It all started with a posting on the blog of security firm Verizon telling how a review of logs revealed a connection to China. (Shades of the Cuckoo's Egg as discussed earlier.) Bob's security credentials were being used via a virtual private network while the man himself was sitting at his desk. Since his employer was an American 'critical infrastructure company' they were worried about security, especially since the security keys for the VPN were changed regularly and the Chinese connection had been going for as long as the logs recorded (six months in this case).

Cutting to the chase; Bob had outsourced his job to a Chinese company and he had sent the security credentials over to them. Have a read of the story as also covered by The Register, The Guardian and the BBC ... and also an interesting comment piece from Steve Poole at the Guardian.

The various reader comments range from rage to admiration, with several saying he should be promoted to management. He actually had several such coding jobs and outsourced them all to his Chinese sub-contractors. Bob was seen as a model employee, people ask whether his contract of employment allowed sub-contracting (this is an issue for freelancers as well since the right to supply an alternative is one factor to distinguish employment from freelancing).

Could such a thing happen in your organisation? Would it matter if it did? And what did our enterprising coder do all day (up to the point he wrote a progress email to his employers). Apparently he spent his time online, including watching YouTube videos of cats; something which gave the Guardian the opportunity for a couple of really 'aah' kitten pics. Personally I'm still following Henri.

Bob? Oh ... he was fired.

The time, cost and quality debate continues

The mantra from Project Management states that time, cost and quality are interdependent so that if one of the factors is changed, the others have to change too. This has been used across all types of projects to try and define what a developer will do for a client in a stated amount of time and for a known cost.

This trio has been referred to as the golden or iron triangle. Project Managers of more traditional projects than interactive electronic projects have found it hard enough to apply, but iMedia projects have suffered from:

• a lack of a clear definition at the beginning of projects from clients,
• a fast changing environment that forces changes in markets and therefore changes in the products that are offered,
• faster obsolescence of skills and expertise in the workforce or accelerating costs of expertise in the workforce through new need outstripping supply, because of the volatile environment.

As a result of this last consideration, resource costs become variable and unstable while the end product requirements shift too.

Despite the difficult nature of the iMedia environment, the Time Cost Quality processes are sought after as attributes in many current interactive job descriptions. iMedia management wants these to work and who can blame them. They want their companies to be successful i.e. make money. They want the costs controlled. They want the expended time controlled. But, everyone wants to push the boundaries (quality and creativity) as well. Can we have it all?

Time, Cost and Quality are good principles to start from but they don’t give the whole answer. As we’ve explained before, there are variations offered that try to capture more control mechanisms within a project environment such as iMedia. We’ve noted such variations as scope, stakeholders, Agile programming methods and users in our book and previous blogs (for example here and here).

Sometimes you get a clash of disciplines. The Agile programming explosion that has its scrums and sprints – iterative small developments that are agreed with clients rather than the older sequential development models – has clashed with traditional controls of time, cost and quality because it is iterative not incremental. For an up-to-date perspective on this, see Keith Richards’ white paper on how to integrate Agile with Prince2,December 2012, Prince methodology itself adds in extra control mechanisms but very often they are extensions of the core trio processes. Prince takes a strong stand on defining the project parameters, for example, so that the trio can be applied. As an alternative perspective, it appears that the triplet has expanded to a sextuplet and includes risk, resources and scope for Voyager 8 in his blog February 2010. Can this give better control?

We all know that different markets affect the products. The emphasis on projects to sell, to convince, to brand etc. are more about the users of the product and how they relate to it than what the client or developer think they need. User experience can drive projects more than clients do. Time, Cost and Quality work with tight specifications upfront and strict control of changes but these are so very hard to attain in iMedia particularly when user experience shifts so quickly.

So, the debate goes on. There are so many factors to consider in the mix of stakeholders, clients, team, and users in defining the end product that will serve defined business needs. Always a thorny issue: jelly and walls come to mind! Anyone have a better take on all this?

Happy Birthday TCP/IP

Is this week the Internet's birthday?

True, by 1st January 1983 every computer on the ARPANET (all 400 of them) had to have switched over the that new-fangled packet-switching (finger-licking) protocol TCP/IP: you know, the one where all the computer networks can talk to each other and it becomes an interconnected network? With one bound communications are freed and the Internet is born ... or at least it's operational. So it's 30 years old today and there's more on the story at The Register.

Of course, there are claims to be 'the birth of the Internet' that predate 1983: 1969 for example. That's when the first node on ARPANET (the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the US Department of Defense ... Network) was set up. If such historical things appeal then I recommend you check out the second-best book I ever read involving computer networks, Where Wizards Stay up Late by Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon. (The best book? That would be The Cuckoo's Egg by Cliff Stoll. Moonlighting astronomy professor tracks hacker through the jungle of 1980s computer networking ... all for the sake of 75 cents.)

The 1969 date makes sense of the cartoon you'll find on this page of the ex delicto blog but you should check out the rest of the blog as well. It's a webcomic of law and nonsense and  the nonsense bits remind us all that the legendary (but fictional)  Mr Justice Cocklecarrot is actually alive and well.

A Happy New Year to one and all on the network.

All I want for Christmas is ...

If you have a problem, there is probably a technological way of solving it. Sometimes you can do this even if you didn't know you had a problem ...or if someone else thinks you did have a problem ... even if there isn't really a problem ... if you get my drift. As our last post for 2012 dear old Santa Fe has a few items for your delectation

All I want for Christmas is an Internet of my own

If you have your own country to play with then what follows more naturally than your own computer operating system and even your very own internet. Fresh from being voted Sexiest Man Alive the top man in North Korea is revealed to also have that bit of JavaScript you always wanted that automatically makes your name bigger on every web page. Find out about Red Star, the balloon network and Kwangmyong in this story from the BBC.

All I want for Christmas is a buggy for my parrot

Sometimes you know academia has a sense of humour ... and I really hope Andrew Gray gets a masters or better for this amazing piece of work. Wired reports on the remote controlled buggy he designed and built for his parrot. Note the protective newspaper cover folks. Pity about the music: Mr Slater's Parrot would have been much better.

All I want for Christmas is a hum or a whistle

You know that annoying hum you sometimes hear? Well often it comes from mains electricity in some way, vibrating wires or parts of transformers. Would you believe that the hum is useful for forensics ... allowing you to determine just when a sound recording was made? Well, this story on the BBC web site (and the associated programme) tells you how.

I'm a bit suspicious as to how reliable the speed of the recording might be ... but then these days they're all digital aren't they ... and crystal locked. A few years ago I came across a guy in the USA who had developed a system for improving the quality of analogue audio tape recordings. Since all tape recordings included a very high frequency tone (called the ultrasonic bias) it is possible to detect the tone on the tape and adjust the recording, moment by moment, to make the speed absolutely constant ... and this improves the sound quality. His company is called Plangent Processes. Worth a look if you're an audio nut.

All I want for Christmas is a sing-song

And finally. Just watch this video (of a school nativity play) on YouTube and try not to laugh. No kittens, I promise. I'll say no more ... except 'Condiments of the Season to One and All'.

Accessibility and the evolving digital arena

The whole concept of accessibility is being questioned and we need to understand what is happening so that we're not caught unaware. We were a bit late applying retro standards to our web sites after legislation about website accessibility in the updated Disability Discrimination Act 1995 called, The Equality Act, 2010. We have kept an eye on the issues in this blog. See some previous posts.

But, there is a sea-change coming: perhaps helped through the positive legacy of the Para-Olympics where overcoming disability was celebrated. Within the last month a report by Kevin Carey commissioned by AbilityNet, Universal Citizen Access, Universal Consumer Access: A New Approach, has upped the anti. The Key Concepts Summaries from Page 29 should give the gist and 7.5 Key Concepts relating to Technology, (Page 31), are as follows:

• Digital information systems should be defaulted to the maximum access state and the simplest information array
• Publishers should adopt uniformity in their displays, taxonomy, terminology, navigation and controls
• Conformity between major publishers is unlikely in the short term, so investment should be in inter-operability applications.

The key change is to redefine disability of access as anything that stops any citizen obtaining the same access to information as a peer group norm. This expands the concern for access radically. It includes age as well as physical impairments. So if extra information is only made accessible by QR (Quick Response) code on the assumption that people will have suitable mobile devices to hand to decode these, or, if—as is happening—large businesses, like banks, are now insisting that statements/information will only be made available electronically, they are mandating some minimal requirements for the customer that can exclude access. Note that restricted access here is not physical and not even age related, but device dependant which is linked to life-style and income. Oh, and just in case, those QR codes are the square matrix designs on ads, packaging, magazines, and in some museums etc. that can give you labels, layers of information and links to other digital environments. They are effectively matrix bar-codes.

In response to Kevin’s report, AbilityNet has launched Mind the Digital Gap, a proposal for a strategic initiative launched at a parliamentary reception at the House of Commons on 21st November. Once the concept of access is expanded to any citizen outside a peer norm, the numbers should ring alarm bells. There are millions of defined registered disabled people just in the UK so yes, we should be taking notice. Imagine asking your clients if they’d mind excluding X million potential customers worldwide from their information.

If you have higher education institutions among your clients then you might be interested in the Mobile Technologies and the Law Overview, by JISC, 19th November, that covers accessibility, as well as copyright issues.

Times, they are a-changing!