Category Archives: IP madness

The $64 billion question

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This morning’s Observer column…

So the 64-billion-dollar question is: how did it happen? The obvious hypothesis – that the senior executives of all the record companies were idiots – has always seemed implausible to me. Or it did until I read the recent interview in Wired magazine with Doug Morris, chairman and CEO of Universal Music Group. Morris’s ascent to the top of Universal in the 1990s coincided with the rise of CDs – the biggest boom the music business has ever known. The colossal profits blinded Morris & Co to the threat/potential of the net.

Pressed by the interviewer, Morris went into rant mode, insisting that there wasn’t a thing he or anyone else could have done differently. ‘There’s no one in the record company that’s a technologist,’ he said. ‘That’s a misconception writers make all the time, that the record industry missed this. They didn’t. They just didn’t know what to do. It’s like if you were suddenly asked to operate on your dog to remove his kidney. What would you do?’

The BBC iPlayer shambles

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Cory Doctorow isn’t impressed…

In a recent podcast, Ashley Highfield, director of Future Media and Technology for the BBC, remarked on the difficulty of creating an “open source Digital Rights Management system”. This is a system of software locks that prevents unauthorised copying, while still being “open” in the sense of allowing users the freedom to take it apart, understand it and improve upon it.

Highfield is right: you can’t make a free and open DRM system. That’s because DRMs (which some like to call “Digital Restrictions Management”) treat their users as untrusted parties who have to be policed lest they transgress and make naughty copies. DRMs are designed to resist user modification and “tampering” because users might just open them up and remove the prohibitions they impose. For example, the BBC’s iPlayer DRM prevents you from watching a show more than 28 days after you downloaded it. By contrast, shows that you record on your VCR or PC can be watched forever…

Bogus email ‘agreements’

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I’m perpetually irritated by the ludicrous legalese that organisations force employees to tag onto the end of email messages. Here’s a typical example:

This e-mail and all attachments are confidential and may also be privileged. If you are not the named recipient, please notify the sender and delete the e-mail and all attachments immediately. Do not disclose the contents to another person. You may not use the information for any purpose, or store, or copy, it in any way.

Up to now, my standard reaction has been to mutter “Oh Yeah! You and whose army?” But I’ve just noticed that Cory Doctorow, Whom God Preserve, has had a better idea. He has decided that ridicule is the best defence against this nonsense. His boilerplate legalese reads:

READ CAREFULLY. By reading this email, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies (“BOGUS AGREEMENTS”) that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer.

I’m going to add this to my email signature options so that anyone who signs off with legalese will have the compliment returned, in spades.

Later: Hmmm… I’ve obviously touched a chord here. Lovely email from James Cridland pointing me to his personal legalese:

Terms and conditions of receipt of email

These terms and conditions apply to emails sent to the above email addresses or any containing ‘james’ before the @ sign and ‘cridland.net’ after the @ sign. Unsolicited email is herein defined as email which is not the result of demonstrable prior contact using or quoting such an address. No guarantee of confidentiality is given, or honoured, on receipt of unsolicited email, irrespective of any terms and conditions block contained therein. It is illegal to send EU citizens unsolicited commercial email without the users’ explicit (opt-in) permission, according to The Directive on Privacy and Electronic Communications (2002/58/EC). This site owner reports all such mail direct to your ISP.

That’s the stuff! I feel better already.

Vicious beasts and melting butter

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This morning’s Observer column…

It is said that savage beasts are most dangerous when cornered. Cue the record industry, lashing out with increasing viciousness in its death throes. It’s been pursuing a policy of suing file-sharers, most of whom have settled out of court. But a court in Minnesota has been hearing the first of these cases that has actually come to court….

Virgin unplugs its subscribers

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Here’s an interesting insight into Digital Restrictions Management, aka DRM.

Virgin has closed Virgin Digital, its Windows Media-based alternative to Apple’s iTunes. It stopped selling one-off downloads on Friday, though subscribers will still have access to their collections until their next monthly payment is due.

After that, their songs will no longer be playable, thanks to the limitations placed on playback by the DRM technology built into each track.

Virgin announced the move this weekend in an email sent out to all its customers, all of whom have presumably been busy backing up their tracks or – in the case of subscribers – burning them to CD so they can be re-imported as MP3s.

The service will formally close on Friday, 28 September – coincidentally the day Apple’s new iPod Touch is due to arrive in the UK – and finally shut down on Friday, 19 October.

Translate that into non-digital terms. You buy an album from a record store, and play it happily on your CD player. And then, one day, it won’t play any more. Why? Because the store from which you bought it has — for some reason decided upon by the store’s owners — closed.

NBC unveils self-destructing, ad-addled anti-iTunes service

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From The Register

Less than a month after its very public breakup with Apple iTunes, NBC Universal has announced its own rights-restricting video download service.

With the new NBC Direct, due for beta testing sometime in October, you’ll have the power to download shows like “The Office” and “Heroes” immediately after they’re broadcast on national television – without paying a penny. But don’t get too excited. You can’t view these videos on more than one Windows PC. They’re riddled with commercials you can’t skip. And they self-destruct after seven days.

In announcing the service, Vivi Zigler, executive vice president of NBC digital entertainment, decided to make no sense whatsoever. “With the creation of this new service, we are acknowledging that now, more than ever, viewers want to be in control of how, when and where they consumer their favorite entertainment,” he said. “Not only does this feature give them more control, but it also gives them a higher quality video experience.”

At the end of August, NBC informed Apple that it was not renewing its contract to sell “The Office,” “Heroes,” and other inane shows over iTunes. The contract wasn due to expire in December, but Apple threw a fit, saying it would pre-emptively axe NBC’s shows sometime this month.

Judge Says Unix Copyrights Rightfully Belong to Novell

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Hooray! Here’s the New York Times report…

SAN FRANCISCO, Aug. 10 — In a decision that may finally settle one of the most bitter legal battles surrounding software widely used in corporate data centers, a federal district court judge in Utah ruled Friday afternoon that Novell, not the SCO Group, is the rightful owner of the copyrights covering the Unix operating system.

In the 102-page ruling, the judge, Dale A. Kimball, also said Novell could force SCO to abandon its claims against I.B.M., which SCO had sued. Judge Kimball’s decision in favor of Novell could almost entirely undermine SCO’s 2003 lawsuit against I.B.M.

The ruling could remove the cloud over open-source software like Linux, an operating system loosely modeled on the proprietary Unix. The unresolved ownership has been seen as a limiting factor in the willingness of computing managers for businesses large and small to adopt open-source software, which can be adapted freely by software developers and can be legally shared or modified by end users…

The beauty of Plain English

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This morning’s Observer column…

‘Political language’, observed George Orwell in his great essay on ‘Politics and the English Language’, ‘is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.’ Much the same applies to the output of the public relations industry. One of the most important public services that mainstream journalism can provide, therefore, consists of decoding PR-speak: translating its half-truths, unsupported assertions and evasions into plain English…

This column is really a celebration of John Gruber’s lovely translation of Macrovision CEO Fred Amoroso’s Response to Steve Jobs’s ‘Thoughts on Music’.

Orwell would have loved it.

Microsoft rattles patent sabre — again

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From Tech News on ZDNet

Microsoft claims that free and open-source software violates 235 of its patents, according to a magazine report published Sunday.

In an interview with Fortune, Microsoft top lawyer Brad Smith alleges that the Linux kernel violates 42 Microsoft patents, while its user interface and other design elements infringe on a further 65. OpenOffice.org is accused of infringing 45, along with 83 more in other free and open-source programs, according to Fortune.

It is not entirely clear how Microsoft might proceed in enforcing these patents, but the company has been encouraging large tech companies that depend on Linux to ink patent deals, starting with its controversial pact with Novell last November. Microsoft has also cited Linux protection playing a role in recent patent swap deals with Samsung and Fuji Xerox. Microsoft has also had discussions but not reached a deal with Red Hat, as noted in the Fortune article.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is also quoted in the article as saying Microsoft’s open-source competitors need to “play by the same rules as the rest of the business.”

“What’s fair is fair,” Ballmer told Fortune. “We live in a world where we honor, and support the honoring of, intellectual property.”

The story notes that some big tech proponents of open source have been stockpiling intellectual property as part of the Open Invention Network, set up in 2005 by folks like Sony, Red Hat, IBM, NEC and Philips. The article surmises that if Microsoft were to go after open source, these companies’ combined know-how might give it some patent weapons to go after Windows…

Fancy a bit of digital, er, enablement?

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From Ed Felten…

People have had lots of objections to Digital Rights Management (DRM) technology — centering mainly on its clumsiness and the futility of its anti-infringement rationale — but until recently nobody had complained that the term “Digital Rights Management” was insufficiently Orwellian.

That changed on Tuesday, when HBO’s Chief Technology Officer, Bob Zitter, suggested at an industry conference that DRM needs a name change. Zitter’s suggested name: Digital Consumer Enablement, or DCE.

The irony here is that “rights management” is itself an industry-sponsored euphemism for what would more straightforwardly be
called “restrictions”. But somehow the public got the idea that DRM is restrictive, hence the need for a name change.

Zitter went on to discuss HBO’s strategy. HBO wants to sell shows in HighDef, but the problem is that many consumers are watching HD content using the analog outputs on their set-top boxes — often because their fancy new HD televisions don’t implement HBO’s favorite form of DRM. So what HBO wants is to disable the analog outputs on the set-top box, so consumers have no choice but to adopt HBO’s favored DRM.

Which makes the nature of the “enablement” clear. By enabling your set-top box to be incompatible with your TV, HBO will enable you to buy an expensive new TV…