My colleague Michael Dales went looking for an open source datebase and in the process made some interesting discoveries about licences.
Category Archives: Intellectual Property
DRM for chargers
The news that Apple has filed a patent application on a technology for tethering rechargeable devices (like iPods) to particular chargers caused a perceptible rise in this blogger’s blood pressure. The idea is that the device will only allow its batteries to be recharged if it is connected to an authorized charger. But Ed Felten has some characteristically measured thoughts about the idea — for example it’s utility as an anti-theft measure — so I’ve calmed down.
Brown government turns down copyright extension
Hooray! Here’e how Techcrunch puts it…
The British government turned down a request by the UK music industry to extend copyright for sound recordings beyond 50 years to 70. Artists are now particularly concerned with copyright as demand for their back catalog and accompanying royalties grow.
Such an extension would retain the ownership rights and royalties for artists like Cliff Richard, Paul McCartney, and their publishers. Cliff Richard, whose 1958 hit “Move It!” is nearing the cut off, would be one of the first to lose his ownership.
The government decided against the extension because it would require pushing the European Commission for changes and may increase costs while not benefiting the majority of performers. Predictably, artists and the industry fired back saying the government was simply refusing to support artists…
Reuters report here.
Queue here to put some money in Cliff Richard’s hat.
Calling Universal’s bluff
Ed Felten has some interesting thoughts about why Universal was threatening to pull out of iTunes…
The political implications of Universal’s threat are pretty interesting. For years the major record companies have been arguing that the Internet is hurting them and that policymakers should therefore intervene to protect the majors’ business. iTunes’ success has supplied the major counterargument, suggesting that it’s possible to sell lots of music online.
Walking away from iTunes would cause a big political problem for Universal. How could Universal keep asking government to prop up its online business, when it was walking away from the biggest and most lucrative distribution channel for digital music?
And it’s not just Universal whose political pull would diminish. The other majors would suffer as well; so to the extent that the majors act as a cartel, there would have to be pressure on Universal not to pull out of iTunes.
Most likely, Universal was just bluffing and had no real plan to cut its iTunes ties. If this was a bluff, then it was most likely Apple who leaked the story, as a way of raising the stakes. It’s bluff having failed, Universal is stuck doing business on Apple’s terms.
One can’t help wondering what the world would be like had the majors moved early and aggressively to build an online business that customers liked. Having failed to do so, they seem doomed to be followers rather than leaders.
That last paragraph echoes my own puzzlement ever since Napster appeared in 1999. The record companies could have had it all to themselves. Why didn’t they see the potential of the Net?
Here are some candidates for an explanation:
1. They were managed by troglodytes.
2. Their top management didn’t understand the technology. Those who did were too far down the management chain.
3. Their senior management was dominated by lawyers and accountants — who were viscerally obsessed with intellectual property and ‘assets’.
4. Their senior management was remunerated and incentivised in terms of the old business model — which was about ‘shipping atoms in order to ship bits’ (as Nicholas Negroponte used to put it). So their only interest lay in selling discs.
5. The economics of the CD business meant that selling singles (‘tracks’) became uneconomic — so the industry focussed on forcing customers to buy albums. But the demand for tracks was always there — it was just that the industry didn’t see an economic way of meeting the demand. So it left a huge demand unsatisfied. Eventually something cropped up which could supply tracks: it was called Napster.
On reflection, I don’t really believe 1, much as I’d like to. So we’re left with some combination of 2 to 5. Or have I missed something?
Digital decision making
My colleague Ray Corrigan’s book is out! Hooray! Now all he needs is a good holiday.
Arrangements for a launch party are in hand.
The Magnatune revolution
Fascinating openDemocracy article by John Buckman about Magnatune.
Four years ago, inspired by the open-source movement, I launched Magnatune – an internet-based record label based on a model I called “open music”. At the time, the major-label music industry was on a self-destructive rampage, destroying companies that attempted new business models and trying to create an all-pervasive “permission society”. Their customers hated them, and “piracy”, far from being seen as anti-social behaviour, was viewed as a strike against injustice: copying music illegally as facilitating the demise of a malevolent system.
Against this backdrop, I use the slogan “we are not evil” for Magnatune, to encompass everything I wanted the music business to be. This is stronger than Google’s “don’t be evil”, which is a recommendation, a goal, but not a rule. “We are not evil” means that we won’t ever do anything evil, but it also insinuates that someone else in the music industry is evil. It also means – and with interesting results – that Magnatune can’t get involved in certain parts of the music business (for example, physical CD distribution) because those areas demand its participants to be evil or they don’t have a chance of surviving…
Read on. It’s a good story of an ingenious idea which is already enjoying modest success.
John Buckman is the founder/owner of the record label Magnatune, and organiser of the peer-to-peer book exchange BookMooch (which is also very ingenious). He is a member of the board of directors at Creative Commons and the advisory board of the Open Rights Group
DRM-free publication
This morning’s Observer column…
From the moment the internet appeared in 1983, it was obvious to the meanest intelligence that it was a heaven-sent machine for delivering bits from one place to another. This insight, however, somehow eluded the record companies, despite the fact that they had just gone digital (the CD was launched in 1982) and were in the business of transporting bits from recording studios to consumers’ CD players.
Over the next decade and a half, the music industry continued to ignore the net. As a result, the record companies failed to develop a legal method for consumers to buy music online. In 1999, Shawn Fanning launched Napster and unleashed the illicit file-sharing habits that nearly destroyed the industry…
Steal this laptop
Richard Charkin is a Big Cheese in Macmillan, the publishers. On his blog he admits to a heist. He posts a photograph of the Google stand at a trade fair (BookExpo America). Then, he continues:
There’s no computer where a computer should be to the left of the gentleman’s arm. You will also notice that there is no sign saying ‘please do not steal the computers’. I confess that a colleague and I simply picked up two computers from the Google stand and waited in close proximity until someone noticed. This took more than an hour.
Our justification for this appalling piece of criminal behaviour? The owner of the computer had not specifically told us not to steal it. If s/he had, we would not have done so. When s/he asked for its return, we did so. It is exactly what Google expects publishers to expect and accept in respect to intellectual property.
‘If you don’t tell us we may not digitise something, we shall do so. But we do no evil. So if you tell us to desist we shall.’
I felt rather shabby playing this trick on Google. They should feel the same playing the same trick on authors and publishers…
Well it’s one way of making your point. And an even better way of getting attention.
Apple sells DRM-free music. Throws in your personal data for free
Well, well. I’d been wondering about this, and now ArsTechnica confirms it…
With great power comes great responsibility, and apparently with DRM-free music comes files embedded with identifying information. Such is the situation with Apple’s new DRM-free music: songs sold without DRM still have a user’s full name and account e-mail embedded in them, which means that dropping that new DRM-free song on your favorite P2P network could come back to bite you.
We started examining the files this morning and noticed our names and e-mail addresses in the files, and we’ve found corroboration of the find at TUAW, as well. But there’s more to the story: Apple embeds your account information in all songs sold on the store, not just DRM-free songs. Previously it wasn’t much of a big deal, since no one could imagine users sharing encrypted, DRMed content. But now that DRM-free music from Apple is on the loose, the hidden data is more significant since it could theoretically be used to trace shared tunes back to the original owner. It must also be kept in mind that this kind of information could be spoofed.
Concerned users could convert selections to MP3, but there will be a generational loss in quality resulting from the transcoding. We also have to wonder: who is buying DRM-free music with the plans of slapping it up on a P2P share, anyway? It’s not like there aren’t dozens of other ways to get access to music without paying for it…
Why would anyone want to buy EMI?
Apparently, people do. Richard Wachman has a good piece explaining both the problems and the opportunities of the music business.
It has taken this long for the record companies to fight back by collaborating with legal downloading sites such as iTunes in a bid to offset lost revenue from plummeting CD sales. But internet piracy is still costing them billions a year and the recorded-music arms of the majors look to be in terminal decline.
According to the IFPI, the international music industry lobby group, 40 songs are being downloaded illegally for every legal download. Put another way, they say 20 billion songs were downloaded illegally in 2006 and the situation is set to worsen following the spread of broadband to eastern Europe and other emerging markets.
The effect of piracy on the industry has been to spur consolidation as the big players scramble to cut costs by merging with each other. There are now only four major music groups: Universal, Sony/BMG, EMI and Warner Music.
Last week, British-based EMI, which has been struggling with falling profitability for years, said it was recommending to shareholders a takeover approach from Terra Firma, the private equity group headed by Guy Hands, which only last month tried unsuccessfully to bid for Alliance Boots…