I’m going to be appearing regularly on Nine to Noon on National Radio Radio New Zealand National. I’m every other week, alternating with Colin Jackson. After the show airs, I’ll post my notes and a link to the audio. Here’s last week’s:

I’m going to talk about a few groups and websites working on keeping the government honest and useful.

I’ll talk about:

• “Rouge Archivist” Carl Malamud and his website http://public.resource.org. He was featured in Wired recently.
• MySociety and their projects, particularly They Work For You which has a NZ version, Fix My Street and What Do They Know. TWFY aims to make parliamentary record more useful. FMS lets you report potholes, graffiti, etc. WDTK lets people who make Freedom of Information Act requests share what they learn.
• The Economist article about these transparency projects which specifically singles out the local government portal of Missouri and the crowdsourcing project which hopes to get volunteers reading the proposal and build a database of where the money goes. Even a simple picture helps citizens (and journalists) make sense of what’s going on.

The show aired Feb 12, 2009, and is available as MP3 and Ogg Vorbis files.

The Telecommunications Carriers Forum have released a note to ISPs saying that while they’re working on a policy that will comply with S92A of the Copyright Act (“An Internet Service Provider must adopt and reasonably implement a policy that provides for termination, in appropriate circumstances, of the account with that Internet service provider of a repeat infringer”), it’s not clear that the policy will be finished 28 days before the 28 Feb 2009 deadline when the law takes effect. As such, ISPs should formulate their own interim policy, just in case.

SUBMISSION ON THE TRANSPACIFIC STRATEGIC ECONOMIC PARTNERSHIP AGREEMENT NEGOTIATIONS WITH THE UNITED STATES

To: Ministry of Foreign Affairs & Trade

Introduction

This Submission is from Nathan Torkington, an author, musician, and software professional whose address is […].

Summary

I strongly oppose any proposals to extend the term of copyright, entrench digital rights management, assign investigation or enforcement powers to rights holders beyond those already in law, or otherwise use copyright law against consumers and artists. I also strongly oppose any interference with parallel importing.

My friend Aaron Swartz writes about the increasingly-evil OCLC:

Not satisfied with controlling the world’s largest source of book information, it wants to take over all the smaller ones as well. It’s now demanding that every library that uses WorldCat give control over all its catalog records to OCLC. It literally is asking libraries to put an OCLC policy notice on every book record in their catalog. It wants to own every library.

James McGlinn emailed me a great reply to my piece on the business cofounder shortage in NZ, and he’s finally posted it. You should read it because I agree with everything he says.

Mark Harris lead this session. Was at SSC, MORST, now Independent. When Wikileaks in May released ACTA doc, saw NZ mentioned, began digging.

ACTA is the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. Proposed by Japan and USA, but not limited to them at all. About eight countries, mainly G8 and a few others like us and Morocco. Mainly about IP. Calling it “counterfeit” gets it under the radar.

Also very much about the Internet. While it did talk about physical products, morphed over last four years and now about more. Don’t really know what it is about: unnerving level of secrecy. Can’t find anything official about what it is, other than US trade representatives office official line “it’s about enforcement”, a universal framework of enforcement procedures around the world. All have signed non-disclosure agreements.