10.06.07
Posted in Copyright/Trademark/Patent Law at 8:14 am by Clay
Slashdot linked to a news.com article that quoted a Bush administration official as saying:
Cases such as this remind us strong enforcement is a significant part of the effort to eliminate piracy, and that we have an effective legal system in the U.S. that enables rights holders to protect their intellectual property
And, indeed, this case does lead to a very obvious conclusion: Jammie Thomas should’ve gone to the store and stolen the CDs off the shelf instead, since, if memory serves, she would’ve been on the hook for up to $1,000 per CD, rather than ending up being stuck with over $9,000 per song.
Oh, and my title is a bit over-the-top, but when there’s research claiming that fair use is worth more to the economy than copyright, and the Bush Administration prefers an expansive view of copyright, I have to conclude that Bush is less interested in having a thriving, expanding, vibrant economy than he is in protecting his friends in the content industries, and thus must be an “enemy of freedom”, to borrow a Bush-ism.
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08.18.07
Posted in Copyright/Trademark/Patent Law at 8:52 am by Clay
In an SFGate article, linked to from Darknet:
Fox News has no plans to offer unlimited use of its debate content.
“That, to me, is giving up too much control to somebody who didn’t create the content and who can then turn around and monetize it,” said Chris Silvestri, vice president of legal and business affairs at Fox News.
Because, of course, it’s rather difficult to assemble ten politicians who already intend to pay large sums of money for media exposure.
Way to go, Fox; way to push the envelope on creativity, going where no one without a network and video equipment can go, but everyone with a network has gone.
I hope(unrealistically) that some politician will boycott the Fox News debate because of Fox’s morally repugnant stance on copyright of debates, so that I could have a clear candidate to whom I would gladly give my vote and money to.
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05.30.07
Posted in Copyright/Trademark/Patent Law, Freedom of Speech, General at 7:52 pm by Clay
There’s an article on Slashdot today about McCain’s appearance at D5: All Things Digital conference. Despite the fact that it’s supposedly about “all things digital”, about half the questions are about the Iraq war. Being annoyed about the fact that an “all things digital” conference spent lots of time talking about Iraq, rather than, oh, digital things, I wrote a comment on Slashdot that sparked a nice conversation of mostly me ranting.
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02.10.07
Posted in Copyright/Trademark/Patent Law at 7:59 pm by Clay
Steve Jobs had an interesting, and somewhat surprising message about iTunes’ DRM. To quickly summarize, he says that Apple would be perfectly willing to have DRM-free songs, if only the music labels would allow it.
I have to agree with DVD Jon’s position; Steve Jobs is looking out for Apple, and is just using his reality distortion field to make it seem as though he’s fighting the good fight.
And, frankly, from Apple’s point of view, this is a wonderful idea; he’s phrasing the iTunes DRM issue as, “We’d be happy to sell MP3s, but the record companies won’t let us.”, instead of, “We don’t want to have a DRM that everyone uses; that’d make it easier for users to use a non-Apple MP3 player.”.
This is important because Apple is currently fighting with several European countries about the fact that their DRM won’t work on other company’s players. So, Steve’s pretending to take the high road might help him fend off the governments trying to crack Apple’s dominance.
That said, I hope he succeeds. I hope he succeeds with his reality distortion, as it frames the debate as being restrictive DRM versus no DRM. That means that, eventually, if Apple has near total control over the digital music industry, the record companies will release more things as MP3s, because they don’t want to be beholden to Apple.
The thing is, DRM is always annoying, as that’s the point; DRM’s purpose is to stop you from doing what you want to do. And, frankly, if you want to do illegal things, you’d be much better off stopping at my library, borrowing some CDs, and ripping the songs yourself. It’s hard to trace, easier to use, of whatever quality you desire, and is free. Or you could use one of the file-sharing programs; it’s only the legal, above-board users who get to be treated like law-breakers.
So go, Mr. Jobs; make the world think that you’re leading the fight against DRM. Maybe eventually the people will know what “DRM” stands for, or at least that it’s a bad thing that we don’t want.
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05.09.06
Posted in Copyright/Trademark/Patent Law at 1:09 pm by Clay
From the BBC, reporting from Los Angeles, about Time Warner’s coming service that will allow for legal downloads by bit torrent:
Pricing for a feature film will be about the same as the DVD release.
…
Warner added that whether a TV show or feature film, it will only play on the initial computer used to make the download.
So, with a DVD, I would have something that is:
·relatively easy to use on a bunch of different devices
·reasonably likely to still work in 5 years
·easy to lend to a friend
·possible to sell(or donate to the library)
Or, with pirated movies, I would have something that is:
·free
·relatively easy to use on a bunch of different devices
·reasonably likely to still work in 5 years
·easy to give to a friend
Or, with legal downloads, I would have something that is:
·unlikely to get me sued or put in jail
·possibly easier to find
Now, the legal download people would make the argument that it would be a higher-quality download, free of malware, but the thing is, with the illegal downloads, those in the know have an idea of which formats are dangerous and which aren’t. On the other hand, we’re supposed to trust Time Warner to not harm us when they’ve already included a layer of CRAP because they don’t trust us, and Sony deliberately included malware on their CDs on two separate occasions.
Yet, somehow after thinking over this situation, the content industry thinks that enough consumers will jump at the chance to pay extra for less service.
Perhaps they will. Me, I’ll stick to watching video blogs, where I’m not considered a thief for wanting to watch them on my Palm device.
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04.27.06
Posted in Copyright/Trademark/Patent Law, General at 9:05 pm by Clay
As I’m sure all of you know, gas prices are high.
So, of course, there’s a congressional inquiry into price fixing, and many Republicans are talking about passing new laws to protect consumers.
At the same time, Republicans in congress are, as far as I can tell, unified against net neutrality legislation, which would make it so that the broadband providers would not be allowed to provide an extra fast pipe to the companies that pay extra. It would also disallow broadband providers from providing preferential service to their own products, such as by offering a Voice Over IP(VOIP) solution while degrading the performance of their competitors.
So, on one hand you have many gas stations in every city in the nation, along with multiple producers, refiners, and distributors of the gasoline itself. Oh, and the investigations into price fixing have pretty much uniformly come up empty.
On the other hand you have broadband providers, of which there are generally(if you’re lucky) two providers in an area, and where switching from one to the other will cause weeks of headaches and hundreds of dollars. Oh, and both industries have a long track record of overcharging the consumer, providing poor service, and being monopolistic.
So somehow competition is failing to provide low enough gas prices, while competition will decide whether or not it’s fair to take money from 1) the consumer, 2) the taxpayer, 3) the content provider(for the T1 and other lines that Google, Yahoo, and the others pay to have their site on the web), and 4) the content provider again(for access to the consumer who already paid for access to the content provider.).
I’ll admit that many people are pro-”competition” in both cases(The Wall Street Journal editors are one example), but I’d like for the country to get to a time where legislation that encourages competition(like the net neutrality proposal) gets passed, and the anti-competitive laws(like the Digital Millenium Copyright Act or the huge ethanol requirements) get shot down quickly.
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02.16.06
Posted in Copyright/Trademark/Patent Law at 6:49 pm by Clay
From the EFF:
RIAA Says Ripping CDs to Your iPod is NOT Fair Use
…as well as Arstechnica. Which says to me that using paid-for content the way I want to use it is pretty much inherently illegal. Unless, of course, I’m specifically and fully cleared by the content owner to do what I want in the way that I want.
No thanks, RIAA. I’m not going to buy your (DRM) C.R.A.P. unless I truly have no choice. With the explosion of podcasts and video blogs, as well as wonderful indie artists like The Alpha Conspiracy, I don’t think I have to.
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Posted in Copyright/Trademark/Patent Law at 6:36 pm by Clay
I came across an article at Variety.com through Slashdot, and in that article I found this interesting paragraph:
Some have reasoned that sales may have slowed recently because of a shortage of new titles in the last month and because users may be illegally copying films from DVDs onto a memory chip the PSPs can read.
The emphasis is mine.
I once attempted to put my copy of Spirited Away onto my Tapwave Zodiac, so that I could view it whenever and wherever I wanted to. Evidently some people think this is illegal. Why, exactly? I own a copy of the movie. I am not giving it to anyone else. I am not displaying it in two places at once. I am merely making it so that I don’t have to carry a DVD player around with me in order to watch my own movie.
And somehow this is illegal? There’s some reason why we’re legally required to buy every movie in multiple formats because Sony decided they wanted to sell UMDs? Or that we’re not allowed to watch Finding Nemo on the PSP unless Sony and Disney say it’s a good idea?
That’s silly. Ripping DVDs in order to watch them in a more convenient setting is the epitomy of fair use.
To be fair, though, it’s possible that ripping DVDs is illegal because most DVDs are encrypted with CSS, and that using DeCSS violates the DMCA, which has no fair use exemption. Some DVDs do not have CSS encryption, though, and thus would fall under fair use.
And, of course, I Am Not A Lawyer.
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11.20.05
Posted in Copyright/Trademark/Patent Law at 11:58 am by Clay
As part of my continuing outrage with Sony BMG (and, to a lesser extent, the parts of the music industry that use some form of DRM.), I was reading the Freedom to Tinker blog, which I believe was created by Ed Felten.
On Freedom to Tinker I saw a couple of interesting posts. One talked about the various hoops Sony BMG makes you jump through, and exactly how XCP qualifies as spyware. To quote:
·The software comes with a EULA which, at the very least, misleads users about what the software does.
·The software interferes with the efforts of ordinary users and programs, including virus checkers and other security software, to identify it.
·Without telling the user or obtaining consent, the software sends information to the vendor about the user’s activities.
·No uninstaller is provided with the software, or even on the vendor’s website, despite indications to the contrary in the EULA.
·The vendor has an uninstaller but refuses to make it available except to individual users who jump through a long series of hoops.
·The vendor makes misleading statements to the press about the software.
The Second article talks about how Sony is evidently still shipping Mediamax copy protection, and how it also qualifies as spyware. The other interesting point in the article was this question:
Does MediaMax also create security problems as serious as the Sony rootkit’s? Finding out for sure may be difficult, since the license agreement specifically prohibits disassembling the software.
Thank you, congress critters, for making it illegal to hack spyware to see exactly how it’s screwing things up. Also, thank you, congress critters and President Clinton, for passing the DMCA, which had to be violated in order for us to find out the sheer extent of bad behavior that XCP does.
Again, I say, support independent artists.
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11.19.05
Posted in Copyright/Trademark/Patent Law, Wall Street Journal Opinion at 7:51 pm by Clay
Taken from the Wall Street Journal(Thursday, November 17th, 2005, D5):
Mitch Bainwol, chief executive of the Recording Industry Association of America, said the Sony BMG episode was an anomaly and shouldn’t become a reason to condemn all digital-rights-management efforts. “For new models to get traction in the digital world, there has to be DRM,” Mr. Bainwol said. “DRM is a fact of life.”
So, it’s a fact of life that the consumer will have to pay money to purchase something that’s significantly less useful than the pirated item?
The only way I’ll put up with that is if the DRM is so transparent that I don’t ever(meaning that I think I’ll still be able to use the item 20 years down the road) notice its restrictions, or I have an easy way to hack it.
Since the former isn’t likely to happen, and the latter is too much work, I’m happy that I no longer buy anything the RIAA has a hand in. If you prefer to be able to use the things you buy in the way you want to use them, I’d suggest you do the same. Support independant artists.
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