You couldn’t make this stuff up. Hilary Rosen, formerly of the RIAA, is complaining about Apple’s Digital Rights Management (DRM) system on the iPod/iTunes system. Eh? Guess who created this DRM nightmare in the first place? Yep: MS Rosen and her buddies in the RIAA. Ye Gods!
Category Archives: IP madness
James Boyle: Deconstructing stupidity
Another terrific FT column by James Boyle, dissecting the imbecility of our IP lawmaking regime. Sample:
Since only about 4 per cent of copyrighted works more than 20 years old are commercially available, this locks up 96 per cent of 20th century culture to benefit 4 per cent. The harm to the public is huge, the benefit to authors, tiny. In any other field, the officials responsible would be fired. Not here.
It is as if we had signed an international stupidity pact, one that required us to ignore the evidence, to hand out new rights without asking for the simplest assessment of need. If the stakes were trivial, no one would care. But intellectual property (IP) is important. These are the ground rules of the information society. Mistakes hurt us. They have costs to free speech, competition, innovation, and science. Why are we making them?
The BBC’s Creative Archive
My Observer column on the significance of the Creative Archive is here. The Open University, for which I work, is one of the Creative Archive partners, and is currently mulling over how it should contribute to it. In the meantime, one of my colleagues, Ray Corrigan, has released the materials for his course on Law, the Internet and Society under a Creative Commons licence. The course started life as part of my Relevant Knowledge programme, but was dropped when it came to the end of its designated life. It seemed crazy just to bury something that could be useful and interesting to many people simply because the university didn’t have space for it in its curriculum. So now it has a new lease of life, courtesy of the open content movement.
Hollywood sees light at the end of the tunnel?
From Good Morning Silicon Valley…
In opening remarks delivered at the first inaugural Email Technology Conference, Vint Cerf, chairman of the board of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers and one of the architects of the Net, said he’d recently discussed BitTorrent with at least two interested movie producers. “I know personally for a fact that various members of the movie industry are really getting interested in how to use the Internet — even BitTorrent — as a … method for distributing content,” said Cerf. “I’ve spoken with several movie producers in the last month. They are only just now starting to come to honest grips with the possibilities of using the Internet.”
The Grokster case: transcript
Jordan Running has performed a terrific service in providing an HTML version of the transcript of oral arguments in the Supreme Court hearing. It’s a long read (55 pages in pdf form) but fascinating. What I love about the Supremes is the way they constantly butt in, so that the lawyers never get a chance to hit their rhetorical strides.
The Grokster case
My Observer column on the case now before the US Supreme Court is out.
In a high-ceilinged courtroom in Washington last Monday, seven men and two women sat listening to arguments about technology. As far as we know, none of them is especially knowledgeable about technology.
Indeed, one of them disdains even to use a laptop, and writes his judicial opinions by hand on a yellow legal pad. But these are the highest judges in the US, and they are deciding the future of computing and possibly of the internet itself.
This may seem a grandiose claim, but bear with me…
Copyright madness: latest absurdity
Clay Shirky, quoted in Boing Boing:
At Etech this year, I gave a talk entitled Ontology is Overrated. I want to put a transcript up online, and Mary Hodder, who recorded the talk, graciously agreed to give me a copy of the video.
When she came by NYC last week, she dropped off a DVD, which I then wanted to convert to AVI (the format used by my transcription service.) I installed ffmpeg and tried to convert the material, at which point I got an error message which read “To comply with copyright laws, DVD device input is not allowed.” Except, of course, there are no copyright laws at issue here, since I’M THE COPYRIGHT HOLDER.
Got that? I am in possession of a video, of me, shot by a friend, copied to a piece of physical media given to me as a gift. In the video, I am speaking words written by me, and for which I am the clear holder of the copyright. I am working with said video on a machine I own. Every modern legal judgment concerning copyright, from the Berne Convention to the Betamax case, is on my side. AND I CAN’T MAKE A COPY DIRECTLY FROM THE DEVICE. This is because copyright laws do not exist to defend the moral rights of copyright holders — they exist to help enforce artificial scarcity.
Quote of the day
No one knows which way the Supreme Court will go, but the tech industry fears disaster: If the creators of programs that enable sharing over the Internet are liable for what people do with the software, then the manufacturers of any devices that enable copying could also be at risk. So everyone on the trail that leads from you to a given digital file is in danger — the computer manufacturer, the CD-burner manufacturer, the audio-editing software writer, the Internet service provider and the telecom company.
Andrew Leonard, writing in Salon about MGM v. Grokster, now before the US Supreme Court.
Chinese puzzles
China is the great enigma of our time, riddled with contradictions. It’s clearly an awakening geopolitical giant, and is potentially the only country which might one day challenge the US for global supremacy (a thought which keeps many right-wing US crazies awake at night). Almost every piece of electronics kit I buy (yea, even the sleekest stuff from Apple) has “Made in China” stamped on it somewhere. Microsoft has set up two labs in China — one to do R&D, the other to speed up the transition from R&D lab to product. Bill Gates spends a lot of time wooing the Chinese leadership. Yet the official position of the leadereship is that a special Chinese version of Linux is what will underpin all computing on its territory.
The Chinese (communist) government proclaims its desire to become a fully-fledged member of capitalist society and has even signed up to WIPO. And yet Mark Anderson (who keeps his eye on these things) says that no US company would dream of risking its intellectual property in China. Western companies are happy to have their hardware made there, but wouldn’t risk revealing their software there because of fears of being ripped off.
This has had an interesting side-effect. The Indian government, which hitherto has been one of the few administrations to take a relatively enlightened line on intellectual property at WIPO, seems to be hardening its stance and moving towards the ‘Strong IP’ side of the argument. One explanation for this could be that the Indians (who see China as their major rival) have spotted what’s going on and think that by having a Strong IP regime they can attract the Western investment that eschews China. This might be a shrewd move in the short-term, though in the longer term it may lock the Indians into the unfolding IP catastrophe.
In the course of seeking enlightenment on the Chinese enigma, I came on this elegant lecture, “Peering into the Future of China” by Brad DeLong of Berkeley. I wish more academics were as clear as this.
Microsoft’s subliminal message: an exegesis
Such a helpful page from Redmond giving “Six Tips for Buying an MP3 Player with Flash Memory”. In the interests of objectivity, the Apple Turns Blog has provided an even more helpful crib, to which I am happy to add. Let’s take the six ‘tips’ in turn, shall we?
1. Understand the basics.
For the active person, a player that uses flash memory to store music has distinct advantages over a player that uses a hard disk. Simply put, flash memory players have no moving parts, meaning that you can take them jogging and your music won’t skip.
Translation: Don’t buy an iPod, which has a nasty hard drive for storing thousands of songs, compared with the measly hundreds you can fit on a flash player.
2. Make sure you’re getting all the goodies.
Many portable music players can do more than just play music. Some players have a built-in voice recorder, FM recorder, or stopwatch. And some come with extra accessories like high-quality headphones, a belt clip, or an armband. Because most of these features are included at no additional cost, make sure the device you choose is filled with these fun extras.
Translation: you just won’t be happy unless your player can record FM radio and includes, for some reason, a stopwatch. And it just so happens that iPods don’t do any of these things.
3. You’ll want a display.
When you have hundreds of songs on your player, you really need an easy way to select your music by artist, album, or genre. This is critical if you want to find that one song or artist you really want to hear. A display also comes in handy when you’re looking for your favorite radio station.
Translation: don’t buy a nasty iPod shuffle, even if it doesn’t have a hard drive (see 1 above) because it doesn’t have a display.
4. Let a professional make your next playlist.
Having an FM radio lets you put your player on autopilot as you mountain bike, cycle, or rollerblade. And when you’re sweating it out on the stationary bike at your health club, you can listen to the program airing on the club’s TV. You want to have something that is fun, lightweight, and flexible. And FM radio is a key feature that many players offer at no extra cost, even for less than $100.
Translation: why listen to your own music when you can listen to nonstop commercials and obnoxious local DJs on FM radio? And record them digitally, so you can share that great beer jingle with your friends and loved ones?
5. Pick the right size for you.
The price of a player will depend on its storage capacity—the more megabytes (MB) of storage it has, the more music it can hold and the more it will cost. If you’re ripping your own CDs, using a player with Windows Media Audio (WMA) support as well as MP3 support gives you the most music per megabyte.
Translation: Windows Media is great, and we just wanted to harp on that for a minute. Have we mentioned that Windows Media is great? And it’s much better than that nasty compression stuff used by Apple.
6. Don’t get locked into one online store.
Have you ever been on the hunt for a particular song? Some obscure indie rock tune or rare jazz performance you heard on the radio? You might have to shop at more than one store before you find the song you’re looking for. Having the flexibility to choose from over 1 million tracks of music from multiple online music stores such as MSN Music, Napster, MusicMatch, and Wal-Mart can be the key to getting the music you want. Several stores even offer subscription services so you can download all the songs you want for about the cost of a CD each month. If you buy a device that has the PlaysForSure logo, you’ll know that you can use it with your choice of PlaysForSure music stores.
Translation: it is, however, just fine to get locked into one proprietary data format and DRM scheme– as long as it’s ours. And be sure to avoid that nasty iTunes store.
Summary:
1. Don’t buy an iPod, iPod mini, or iPod photo.
2. Don’t buy an iPod shuffle.
3. Don’t buy an iPod shuffle.
4. Don’t buy an iPod shuffle.
5. Pick the right size for you (as long as you don’t buy an iPod shuffle).
6. Don’t buy an iPod of any kind whatsoever. And don’t buy songs from Apple.