A little background: prior to the US-Australian Free Trade Agreement from 2005, copyright in Australia expired 50 years after the authors death. After the FTA was signed in 2005, copyright now expires 70 years after the authors death. That’s how it is in Europe, too.

George Orwell, the author of “Animal Farm”, “Nineteen Eighty-Four”, and four other novels, died January 21st, 1950. So in Australia, his works where in the public domain since 2001. And that didn’t change with the FTA from 2005. While George Orwell’s novels are not in the public domain and are still under copyright in Europe, the opposite is true for Australia. That’s why Australian web sites like Project Gutenberg Australia can legally offer George Orwell’s works for download. George Orwell’s works are also in the public domain in Russia and Canada. In Europe, his works will be in the public domain in 2021, and even later in the US.

Who does expect a kid to know that? If I buy a book, I can legally lend it to as many people as I like. That I can lend it to only one person at a time is a technical limitation of the thing called “book”. Files containing text, music, or film don’t have that technical limitation. Copying and giving it to as many people simultaneously is possible and intuitive. That’s why kids do it all the time. That copyright violations by copying files are described as “stealing” is also counter-intuitive. After you copy a file, it’s not taken away from the original owner, but you’ve made one thing more. If a kid finds something useful on the Internet it will probably use it in intuitive ways: copy it, share it – and thereby potentially breaking the law.

Ok, you can educate the kid in order to minimize copyright violations, but – as shown with “Animal Farm” – you cannot eliminate them completely without making your kid a copyright lawyer. Other options are removing access to the Internet or supervising your kid all the time.

Accessing the Internet via a trustworthy VPN (virtual private network) service provider is another option. My VPN service provider is Ipredator. How to set it up on Windows and OSX is shown on their web site. Instructions for Ubuntu Linux can be found here. I’ll now show you how to set it up under Android 1.6:

Go to “Settings > Wireless controls > VPN settings” and add a new VPN with “Add VPN > Add PPTP VPN”.

Enter the following information:

VPN name: Ipredator
Set VPN server: vpn.ipredator.se
PPT encryption is enabled

Now, you’re ready to connect to the VPN. Tap on “Ipredator” to connect.

Fill in the required account information (user name and password). Hit “Connect”.

You’re now connected to your VPN service provider – see the key in the status bar marked red (I added the marks with Gimp)?

Safely surf the Internet.

While surfing the web, you can get information on the VPN connection.

To Disconnect from your VPN service provider, go to “Settings > Wireless controls > VPN settings” again.

Tap on the VPN named “Ipredator” to disconnect.

If you switch from 3G network to WLAN, you’ll be disconnected from Ipredator. Just reconnect.

I know that PPTP is vulnerable to some sorts of attacks, but using VPN with Ipredator (or other VPN service providers) that way is more of a political statement: we need to change copyright law! All non-commercial copying and sharing of files needs to be legal. Otherwise it’s done anyway and as safely as possible. Trying to prevent people from doing it is like trying to prevent people from Iran or China to access certain parts of the Internet: it will not work.

While this might be an easy problem for grownups, it seemed not so easy for her. She drew a grid model of the cube, connected the opposite vertices, and measured off the length of the resulting diagonal. It seem logical and right for her. When I asked her about the actual angles in a cube, and how they relate to her projection, it became quite clear, that some angles in the drawing weren’t quite what they should have been.

In my opinion, kids have to learn how to ask the right questions, and how to find answers. And then they should explain it to somebody else. As a freshman I earned some extra money by giving private lessons for juniors and seniors. I quickly learned, that I was only able to explain a problem and its solution in depth, when I was able to answer all kinds of questions they were throwing at me. It didn’t have anything to do with knowledge, but with the ability to express it. And that is quite harder. So whenever you want to make sure you truly understand something, talk to someone about it for a couple of minutes, and have her or him ask you questions.

Finally, she was able to find a solution to the problem. I didn’t explain it to her, but I asked her some questions. She had to explain it to me.

Although the EPO is issuing patents on software, they cannot be enforced, because the European Patent Convention excludes software from being patentable. I hope it stays that way. But companies like Microsoft are lobbying extensively in order to change that. If that happens, those patents would not be used to fuel innovation, but to bring down competitors. Software patents are used primarily for that purpose in the US. That’s exactly the opposite of what was intended.

I actually like some of Microsoft’s products, and I still use Windows as a desktop OS. But personal ethics make it harder every day to use products from a company that behaves like Microsoft.