kNOw Future Inc.

What am I?

Alan Toner, copyright and data protection researcher, living in Central European Time. You may have met me long ago at New York University, where I was a fellow at the Information Law Institute and the Engelberg Center on Law and Innovation, read something I wrote for Mute or Diagonal, conspired around WSIS: We Seize!, or met me through Steal This Film.

Leave a comment on an article if you want to get in touch.

Current Interest: Tracking of users via browser, mobile, or any other digital prosthesis. I believe that users need a universal opt-out from practices that put their web-reading habits in the hands of third parties – Do Not Track. Our online environment should be redesigned to make ubiquitous commercial surveillance impossible, just as it should make the political surveillance revealed by Snowden impossible. Those who believe that such observation brings them benefits are free to hold that point of view, but it just shouldn’t be hardwired into the architecture and should be a matter of free and informed choice.

Earlier I followed developments at the new-born European Observatory on Infringements of Intellectual Property Rights, and its first major project: the Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive (IPRED 2), which will propose new criminal sanctions for IP offenses. The Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure page dedicated to its previous instantiation can be found here. I’m also interested in ACTA and support the work of the people from Knowledge Ecology International, La Quadrature du Net, the FFII.

And I’m always interested in the conflicts around peer production, p2p and piracy.If you’re interested in this subject you can download and watch Steal This Film, and check out our searchable archive of interviews, built on an early version of pad.ma.

Continuing on the same theme I spent much of 2009 following events in France around the Creation and Internet law (Hadopi), and the Pirate Bay trial in Sweden.

Since 2008 I have participated in a network organised by La Ex promoting alternatives to traditional copyright thinking, am a signatory of their Charter for Innovation, Creativity and Access to Knowledge, and a contributor to their work on Sustainable Models for Creativity in the Digital Age.

In 2005 and 2006 I spent time in Argentina, looking at disputes in the field of pharmaceuticals and biotechnology. At some point I’ll get back to this area, in the meantime, check out GRAIN.

Hedonism and the need to maintain some connection with material culture lies behind the occasional investigative wine tangent: how it’s made, the story it tells, and of course, how it tastes. Responsibility for this vice can safely be attributed to Critical Wine, a network of small producers in Italy who presented it in a political/cultural context that I found… compelling!

Here are links to some blog entries which I think are important:

• Akerman, Branco, Deneuve et al. Against Three strikes/Hadopi Law in France
• Three strikes Law against P2p in France (Hadopi)
• Anthropology Ethnography of P2P: A Day in the Life of a User
• 0xdb movie database goes live
• Resuscitating Alternatives to Copyright
• Intellectual Property Enforcement, European Style: Dogma Internally, Coercion Externally
• Search & Destroy: Enforcement in Eastern Europe
• Not Just Information: Sharing Physical Resources

• IVIR Review of the EU Copyright Acquis Communautaire
• Television Without Frontiers Reloaded