Category Archives: IP madness

The madness of record labels

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And I thought I was critical of the music industry. (Well, I am, in the sense that I think only the skills of a psychiatrist can explain how the industry failed to spot the opportunity offered by online music.) But here’s a rant that’s far more dismissive than anything I’ve managed to date. Sample:

It continues to astonish, but the recording industry STILL does not have a clue WTF they are doing. Utterly amazing.

A story in the NYT Thursday reveals that the actual levels of business knowledge and economic understanding that exists in the recording industry. The answer, it turns out, is nonewhatosever.

Proof for this revelation is what the RIAA braintrust now thinks is hurting CD sales: it’s legal digital downloading that is holding back CD sales. Not illegal P2P, as the RIAA likes to tell us, but legal sales!

Like I say, it needs a psychiatrist…

Trading standards and free software

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Wonderful piece in the Times by Gervase Markham, who looks after licensing for the Mozilla Foundation.

A little while ago, I received an e-mail from a lady in the Trading Standards department of a large northern town. They had encountered businesses which were selling copies of Firefox, and wanted to confirm that this was in violation of our licence agreements before taking action against them.

I wrote back, politely explaining the principles of copyleft – that the software was free, both as in speech and as in price, and that people copying and redistributing it was a feature, not a bug. I said that selling verbatim copies of Firefox on physical media was absolutely fine with us, and we would like her to return any confiscated CDs and allow us to continue with our plan for world domination (or words to that effect).

Unfortunately, this was not well received. Her reply was incredulous:

“I can’t believe that your company would allow people to make money from something that you allow people to have free access to. Is this really the case?” she asked.

“If Mozilla permit the sale of copied versions of its software, it makes it virtually impossible for us, from a practical point of view, to enforce UK anti-piracy legislation, as it is difficult for us to give general advice to businesses over what is/is not permitted.”

I felt somewhat unnerved at being held responsible for the disintegration of the UK anti-piracy system. Who would have thought giving away software could cause such difficulties?

Who indeed? Sometimes, it’s difficult to explain altruism to people. Sigh.

Thanks to Seb for the link.

Why does the content mouse terrify the technology elephant?

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One of the things that baffles me is why the relatively puny copyright industries (movies, music, publishing) seem to terrify the massive computing and telecoms industries. Thanks, then, to Bill Thompson for pointing me to this post. Excerpt:

The total cost of Peter Jackson’s King Kong was somewhere north of US$200 million. That’s quite a bit, but such big-budget blockbusters are rare, and you can make and market a Hollywood movie for well under half that figure. Indeed, Brokeback Mountain had a production budget of only US$14 million.

In the tech industry, the price of a new fab is currently around US$5 billion, a price that puts such facilities out of reach for all but the biggest players like Intel and IBM. Still, that’s 25 King Kongs, or over 350 Brokeback Mountains, or 1,000 five million dollar episodes of a big-budget HBO series like Rome or The Sopranos. My point is that, for even just half the price of a single 65nm fab, the tech industry could buy a few small studios and just start throwing tons of free content at the world. Or, for the full price of a fab, they could fund almost a decade worth of low- and medium-budget content to give away as an inducement for people to buy hardware.

Intel, IBM, and other tech companies with large investments in Linux know full well that you can sell a lot of hardware by giving away the software. Why not give away the content too? How many dollars worth of media center, home networking, and home network attached storage hardware could you sell if consumers knew that there were terabytes of free, unencumbered, high-definition, processor-intensive, storage-hungry, bandwidth burning, digital content awaiting them on the Internet—content that they could copy, share, and shuffle around among as many newly purchased media devices as they like?

Sony BMG demotes CEO for deploying DRM

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From Boing Boing

Sony BMG music has demoted its CEO, Andrew Lack. One of the reasons he got the sack was that he oversaw the release of eight million music CDs that were deliberately infected with malicious software that covertly installed itself on music lovers’ PCs, spied on them, and destabilized their systems, and left them vulnerable to opportunistic infections from other malicious programs.

Divine IP Right

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Andrew Brown draws my attention to the fact that the Vatican is now claiming IP Rights over papal encyclicals. According to the Times story,

For the first time all papal documents, including encyclicals, will be governed by copyright invested in the official Vatican publishing house, the Libreria Editrice Vaticana.

The edict covers Pope Benedict XVI’s first encyclical, which is to be issued this week amid huge international interest. The edict is retroactive, covering not only the writings of the present pontiff — as Pope and as cardinal — but also those of his predecessors over the past 50 years. It therefore includes anything written by John Paul II, John Paul I, Paul VI and John XXIII.

Ahem, but isn’t there a small problem here? Encyclicals are utterances ex cathedra: in them the pope claims to be speaking as the ‘Vicar of Christ’ — i.e. he is a mouthpiece for the Lord. So logically, the IP Rights, such as they are, belong to the author, not to the conduit. Hmmm…. time to call for Professor Lessig.

The Alice in Wonderland World of DRM

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Ed Felten has an amazing story on his Blog. Here’s the gist:

If you’ve been reading here lately, you know that I’m no fan of the Sensenbrenner/Conyers analog hole bill. The bill would require almost all analog video devices to implement two technologies called CGMS-A and VEIL. CGMS-A is reasonably well known, but the VEIL content protection technology is relatively new. I wanted to learn more about it.

So I emailed the company that sells VEIL and asked for a copy of the specification. I figured I would be able to get it. After all, the bill would make compliance with the VEIL spec mandatory — the spec would in effect be part of the law. Surely, I thought, they’re not proposing passing a secret law. Surely they’re not going to say that the citizenry isn’t allowed to know what’s in the law that Congress is considering. We’re talking about television here, not national security.

After some discussion, the company helpfully explained that I could get the spec, if I first signed their license agreement. The agreement requires me (a) to pay them $10,000, and (b) to promise not to talk to anybody about what is in the spec. In other words, I can know the contents of the bill Congress is debating, but only if I pay $10k to a private party, and only if I promise not to tell anybody what is in the bill or engage in public debate about it.

Worse yet, this license covers only half of the technology: the VEIL decoder, which detects VEIL signals. There is no way you or I can find out about the encoder technology that puts VEIL signals into video.

The details of this technology are important for evaluating this bill. How much would the proposed law increase the cost of televisions? How much would it limit the future development of TV technology? How likely is the technology to mistakenly block authorized copying? How adaptable is the technology to the future? All of these questions are important in debating the bill. And none of them can be answered if the technology part of the bill is secret.

Download news

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From Good morning, Silicon Valley…

OK, maybe there’s something to this … what do they call it? … this downloading thing after all. The yuletide season proved a lucrative one for the recording industry. Driven by a plethora of iPods left under tree and menorah, legal downloads achieved a new record in the week between Christmas and New Year’s. According to Nielsen SoundScan, legal downloads nearly hit the 20 million mark in those seven days — almost three times the number of tracks downloaded in the same period the year before. That’s a phenomenal spike and one that suggests we’ve undergone a fundamental shift in the way we consume music. And indeed we have: NPD Group recently confirmed that MP3 player sales now exceed CD player sales in the U.S.

Sony to settle anti-piracy CD row

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According to BBC NEWS,

Free music downloads and cash refunds could soon be offered to owners of Sony BMG CDs loaded with controversial anti-piracy software.

The offers are part of a proposed settlement of lawsuits against Sony BMG over the use of software aimed at thwarting illegal copying of CDs.

The sea-change in the music industry

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File-sharing and downloading is just the tip of the iceberg. What’s really happening is that the old-style, RIAA-approved music industry is on the slide for a good old capitalistic reason: it’s losing touch with its best customers. There’s an extraordinarily perceptive article by Laura Barton which explains how guerrilla gigs, the Net and fan-friendly bands are enabling music lovers to reclaim the charts — and the industry. Excerpt:

This has been the year fans have increasingly taken music into their own hands, rejecting the over-processed diet served up by many major labels in favour of something a little more homemade. In the process they have notched up numerous high-profile successes, including Arctic Monkeys, Arcade Fire, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Spinto Band and Nizlopi.
Enabled largely by the internet, bands have been able to record and promote their own music, and fans to revel in it and pass it on – without the aid of major label backing, stylist and towering billboard advertisements. Furthermore, fans are finding it ever easier to interact directly with their favourite bands, rather than seek nourishment from the insubstantial publicist- approved quotes given in interviews. The result, of course, is that the charts in 2005 have become imbued with a rather joyous and friendly anarchy.

Arguably, it was the Libertines who set the pace; the baton then passed to Babyshambles and imminently to Carl Barat’s new band, Dirty Pretty Things. Characteristically, Libertines gigs (and those of their circle) eschewed the overpriced ticketing, over-priced ale gig-going conventions that had become standard in the Clear Channel era, and instead guerrilla gigs were played ad-hoc in bizarre venues, such as rooftops, farms and the London underground. Fans were informed of the “venue” hours before in a flurry of emails, website postings and text messages, and would travel from all over the country to congregate at the elected hour and see their favourite band play inches from them (and probably go to the pub with them afterwards). Pete Doherty allowed fans to bed down in his flat if they missed the last train home.

A corporate pantomime

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This morning’s Observer column…

Since this is the time of the year for pantomime, how about one for a corporate audience? It’s called Sony and the Rootkit and it’s a true story.

It tells of how a once-great electronics company fell in with bad company, did some stupid things, was found out by a plucky band of bloggers and now is being pursued through the US courts by some avenging lawyers.

The only thing lacking at the moment is a happy ending for Sony…

More…

Mediamax is the other company Sony called upon for help with DRM. Ed Felten has an interesting post summarising what another blogger found in the prospectus Mediamax filed with the SEC. The Prospectus states, en passant, that “several enhancements have been implemented to make it very difficult to locate and/or remove the device drivers” and that “the software is designed to be completely invisible to users, programs and system components.” Remember that this is their description of their software, not some barbed interpretation by a blogger!