Sometimes, satire is the only way to deal with oppression. Ed Felten’s been working overtime after the AACS claimed that it ‘owned’ a decryption key.

Remember last week’s kerfuffle over whether the movie industry could own random 128-bit numbers?

Now, thanks to our newly developed VirtualLandGrab technology, you can own a 128-bit integer of your very own.

Here’s how we do it. First, we generate a fresh pseudorandom integer, just for you. Then we use your integer to encrypt a copyrighted haiku, thereby transforming your integer into a circumvention device capable of decrypting the haiku without your permission. We then give you all of our rights to decrypt the haiku using your integer. The DMCA does the rest.

Here’s mine:

5A 3F 7B A3 1C 75 88 F6 18 53 C6 09 75 83 CC 71

I will be Very Cross if you use it!

Thanks to Bill Thompson for the hint.

(Bill’s number is 7E 3D 4C 5A 75 37 5D 28 82 1B 95 D5 D3 AF CB 3B and he’s equally possessive of it btw.)

From SaveNetRadio.org…

On Friday March 2nd 2007, the Copyright Royalty Board announced new royalty rates for Internet Radio stations. The rates are retroactive to January of 2006.

The new rates are far higher than any industry experts expected. In fact, if they remain unchanged, bankruptcy looms for many online radio stations.

The new rates essentially levy a tax of $0.0011 per performance. Now, that doesn’t sound bad does it. But consider this. Each hour, the average radio station plays 16 songs. So that’s about 1.76c per hour, per listener. A station with 500 listener average would be hit with fees of $211 per day, $6,336 a month or $76,000 a year.

This amount of money is beyond the resources of all but the very wealthiest of corporations. Many of the internet radio stations are run by enthusiasts and hobbyists. These small stations are the ones bringing new music, and old favorites to you every day. Music you can’t hear on corporate-owned terrestrial stations.

Could this be the day the music died?

Thanks to Rex Hughes for the link.

I know one is not supposed to start the year on a gloomy note, but Quentin has a really sombre post about the implications of the DRM measures built into Vista.

Peter Gutman’s A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection should be required reading for anybody in the technology business. It’s an analysis of the way Microsoft’s devotion to ‘content protection’ is crippling the PC of the future.

It should also give pause to those thinking of building a media-centre around Microsoft technologies in the New Year, or of upgrading their PC to one based on Vista.

The good news is that you may be able to play Hollywood movies in high-definition on your Vista machine (as opposed to, say, on a dedicated DVD player). The bad news is that almost everything else about the PC platform will be made worse as a result…

Quentin quotes Peter Gutman’s illustration of what this could mean in practice:

Consider a medical IT worker who’s using a medical imaging PC while listening to audio/video played back by the computer (the CDROM drives installed in workplace PCs inevitably spend most of their working lives playing music or MP3 CDs to drown out workplace noise). If there’s any premium content present in there, the image will be subtly altered by Vista’s content protection, potentially creating exactly the life-threatening situation that the medical industry has worked so hard to avoid. The scary thing is that there’s no easy way around this – Vista will silently modify displayed content…

The strange thing is that most of this DRM lunacy seems to have been created at the behest of the recording and movie industries. Microsoft is bigger than all of those companies combined. It could have said — as someone (it’s not clear who from Quentin’s post) commented:

While it’s convenient to paint an industry that sues 12-year-old kids and 80-year-old grandmothers as the scapegoat, no-one’s holding a gun to Microsoft’s head to force them do this. The content industry is desperate to get its content onto PCs, and it would have quite easy for Microsoft to say “Here’s what we’ll do with Vista, take it or leave it. We won’t seriously cripple our own and our business partners’ products just to suit your fancy”. In other words they could make it clear to Hollywood who’s the tail and who’s the dog.

Before Vista, I thought that anyone who willingly used a Microsoft operating system was merely foolish; from now on, I think they will have to be regarded as certifiable.