The real significance of the DVD

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Normal Lebrecht ponders what happens when you can have everything on your bookshelf (or on your hard drive):

The complete works of Ingmar Bergman and Francois Truffaut are about to go on sale and no self-respecting cineaste will walk by without feeling a tug at the purse strings. To have and to hold every film that guided your artistic and emotional maturation, through adolescence and beyond, is something many will find irresistible. Kurosawa, Hitchcock, Tarkovsky and the Ealing comedies are equally on offer. What was formerly part of a romanticised past, glimpsed infrequently on late-night TV, has become urgently present (perhaps the perfect present). The eternally elusive turns up in plastic boxes.

What this means, in cultural terms, is that film now takes its place beside literature, music and visual imagery as an art that can be owned and bookmarked. Where once you had to visit a cinema or spool through half a mile of clunky videotape in order to access a seminal scene in an essential movie, you now zone into it on DVD as quickly as finding a name in the index of an artist biography.

Publish and be downloaded

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This morning’s Observer column.

While the internet has been rampaging through the business models of the music, newspaper and movie industries, book publishers have been quietly hoping that if they keep their heads down the monster will go away. After all, print is rather low-tech and unsexy, and teenagers aren’t much interested in it, so the dangers of being ripped off wholesale by online text-sharing seemed remote…

Sony retreats, but doesn’t apologise

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From Good Morning, Silicon Valley…

WASHINGTON (AP) – Stung by continuing criticism, the world’s second-largest music label, Sony BMG Music Entertainment, promised Friday to temporarily suspend making music CDs with antipiracy technology that can leave computers vulnerable to hackers.

Sony defended its right to prevent customers from illegally copying music but said it will halt manufacturing CDs with the “XCP” technology as a precautionary measure. “We also intend to re-examine all aspects of our content protection initiative to be sure that it continues to meet our goals of security and ease of consumer use,” the company said in a statement.

The antipiracy technology, which works only on Windows computers, prevents customers from making more than a few copies of the CD and prevents them from loading the CD’s songs onto Apple Computer’s popular iPod portable music players. Some other music players, which recognize Microsoft’s proprietary music format, would work.

Sony’s announcement came one day after leading security companies disclosed that hackers were distributing malicious programs over the Internet that exploited the antipiracy technology’s ability to avoid detection. Hackers discovered they can effectively render their programs invisible by using names for computer files similar to ones cloaked by the Sony technology.

More… It turns out that Sony also has plans for Mac users too. According to this post, Darren Dittrich followed up on the discovery that Sony was playing a dirty trick on its customers, secretly installing a malware-style “root kit” on their computers via audio CDs:

I recently purchased Imogen Heap’s new CD (Speak for Yourself), an RCA Victor release, but with distribution credited to Sony/BMG. Reading recent reports of a Sony rootkit, I decided to poke around. In addition to the standard volume for AIFF files, there’s a smaller extra partition for “enhanced” content. I was surprised to find a “Start.app” Mac application in addition to the expected Windows-related files. Running this app brings up a long legal agreement, clicking Continue prompts you for your username/password (uh-oh!), and then promptly exits. Digging around a bit, I find that Start.app actually installs 2 files: PhoenixNub1.kext and PhoenixNub12.kext.

Personally, I’m not a big fan of anyone installing kernel extensions on my Mac. In Sony’s defense, upon closer reading of the EULA, they essentially tell you that they will be installing software. Also, this is apparently not the same technology used in the recent Windows rootkits (made by XCP), but rather a DRM codebase developed by SunnComm, who promotes their Mac-aware DRM technology on their site.

So, as I was saying the other day, the best thing is just to shun anything emanating from Sony.

And another thing…

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… about the vote on the Terror Bill. I’m tired of all the media hyperbole about ‘defeat’. The scandal is not that Blair lost the vote, but that this is the first one he’s lost since he became Prime Minister in 1997. A sure sign that a deliberative democracy is working is occasional — or even regular — defeats of governments in Commons debates. It means that issues are being decided on the basis of MPs making up their own minds, rather than voting to the Whips’ instructions. But Blair’s first two (huge) parliamentary majorities meant that Britain was governed for nearly a decade by an elected dictatorship. Now at last we have something a little more representative — and possibly also a bit more reflective. Hooray!

The madness of King Tony

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All political careers end in failure, as the old adage goes. What is less often remarked is that most Prime Ministers go mad eventually. And the longer they are in power, the madder they get. By the time she was finally ejected, Margaret Thatcher was barmy. Watching the crazed run-up to yesterday’s government defeat in the House of Commons over the length of detention without charge to be allowed under the new Terror Bill, the thing that struck me most was how Blair steadily escalated the issue to the point where it was all about his ‘authority’. And that, of course is a dead giveaway. That, and his increasingly pop-eyed appearance in TV interview after TV interview in which he argues that He Knows Best. In that, he greatly resembles Thatcher — but with one important difference: whereas she always believed that she was Right, Blair believes that he is not only Right but Good.

The reason Prime Ministers go mad is simple. They live inside a bubble which comprehensively insulates them from the real world. I first discovered this when I met John Major, the last Tory Prime Minister, towards the end of his premiership (see fuzzy newspaper picture). At that time he was, to all intents and purposes, a busted flush — head of a sleazy, incompetent, incoherent, tired administration which was falling apart. Yet when I met him he was surrounded by four Cabinet ministers, and a phalanx of security people, flunkeys, secretaries and runners. I noticed that everyone, but everyone, around him was smiling, agreeing with him and generally being eager to please. It was “Prime Minister this” and “Prime Minister that”. If you didn’t know any better, you’d have assumed he was Caesar at the height of his powers. Yet, as I say, it was patently obvious that, electorally speaking, the man was dead meat.

That’s how British Prime Ministers live — with a coterie of lackeys who treat them like Gods and insulate them from the real world. It’s basically a reality-distortion field. Tony Blair’s been inside such a field since 1997, and boy is it beginning to show.

Sony’s new licence agreement

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The Electronic Frontier Foundation has been reading the End User License Agreement that comes with Sony’s new copy-protected CDs (yep — the ones that install a security hole on your Windows machine).

Before detailing some of the implications of the License, the EFF provides some background:

When you buy a regular CD, you own it. You do not “license” it. You own it outright. You’re allowed to do anything with it you like, so long as you don’t violate one of the exclusive rights reserved to the copyright owner. So you can play the CD at your next dinner party (copyright owners get no rights over private performances), you can loan it to a friend (thanks to the “first sale” doctrine), or make a copy for use on your iPod (thanks to “fair use”). Every use that falls outside the limited exclusive rights of the copyright owner belongs to you, the owner of the CD.

Now compare that with the world according to the Sony-BMG EULA, which applies to any digital copies you make of the music on the CD:

If your house gets burgled, you have to delete all your music from your laptop when you get home. That’s because the EULA says that your rights to any copies terminate as soon as you no longer possess the original CD.

You can’t keep your music on any computers at work. The EULA only gives you the right to put copies on a “personal home computer system owned by you.”

If you move out of the country, you have to delete all your music. The EULA specifically forbids “export” outside the country where you reside.

You must install any and all updates, or else lose the music on your computer. The EULA immediately terminates if you fail to install any update. No more holding out on those hobble-ware downgrades masquerading as updates.

Sony-BMG can install and use backdoors in the copy protection software or media player to “enforce their rights” against you, at any time, without notice. And Sony-BMG disclaims any liability if this “self help” crashes your computer, exposes you to security risks, or any other harm.

The EULA says Sony-BMG will never be liable to you for more than $5.00. That’s right, no matter what happens, you can’t even get back what you paid for the CD.

If you file for bankruptcy, you have to delete all the music on your computer. Seriously.

You have no right to transfer the music on your computer, even along with the original CD.

Forget about using the music as a soundtrack for your latest family photo slideshow, or mash-ups, or sampling. The EULA forbids changing, altering, or make derivative works from the music on your computer.

Simple suggestion: just give Sony products a miss from now on. Any company that behaves like this deserves to go bust.

That leaked Microsoft memo

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From Bill Gates to his troops. Once more into the breach etc… Dave Winer’s Blog was one of the sites carrying it today. Key passage reads:

The broad and rich foundation of the internet will unleash a “services wave” of applications and experiences available instantly over the internet to millions of users. Advertising has emerged as a powerful new means by which to directly and indirectly fund the creation and delivery of software and services along with subscriptions and license fees. Services designed to scale to tens or hundreds of millions will dramatically change the nature and cost of solutions deliverable to enterprises or small businesses.

We will build our strategies around Internet services and we will provide a broad set of service APIs and use them in all of our key applications.

This coming “services wave” will be very disruptive. We have competitors who will seize on these approaches and challenge us – still, the opportunity for us to lead is very clear. More than any other company, we have the vision, assets, experience, and aspirations to deliver experiences and solutions across the entire range of digital workstyle & digital lifestyle scenarios, and to do so at scale, reaching users, developers and businesses across all markets.

But in order to execute on this opportunity, as we’ve done before we must act quickly and decisively. This next generation of the internet is being shaped by its “grassroots” adoption and popularization model, and the cost-effective “seamless experiences” delivered through the intentional fusion of services, software and sometimes hardware. We must reflect upon what and for whom we are building, how best to deliver new functionality given the internet services model, what kind of a platform in this new context might enable partners to build great profitable businesses, and how our applications might be reshaped to create service-enabled experiences uniquely compelling to both users and businesses alike.

Steve and I recently expanded Ray Ozzie’s role as CTO to include leading our services strategy across all three divisions. We did this because we believe our services challenges and opportunities will impact most everything we do. Ray has long demonstrated his passion for software, and through his work at Groove he also came to realize the transformative potential for combining software and services. I’ve attached a memo from Ray which I feel sure we will look back on as being as critical as The Internet Tidal Wave memo was when it came out. Ray outlines the great things we and our partners can do using the Internet Services approach.

The next sea change is upon us. We must recognize this change as an opportunity to take our offerings to the next level, compete in a manner commensurate with our industry responsibilities, and utilize our assets and our broad reach to reshape our business for the benefit of the users of our products, our customers, our partners and ourselves.

Pitfalls of using Microsoft Word

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From today’s New York Times…

The United Nations issued a long-awaited report on Syria’s suspected involvement in the assassination of Lebanon’s former prime minister, Rafik Hariri. It was a damning report for Syria by any standard, but recipients of a version of the report that went out on Oct. 20 were able to track the editing changes, which included the deletion of names of officials allegedly involved in the plot, including the Syrian president’s brother and brother-in-law.

A similar gaffe embarrassed the network software company SCO Group in 2004, when it filed suit against DaimlerChrysler for violations of their software agreement. A carelessly distributed Microsoft Word version of the suit revealed, among other things, that the company had spent a good deal of time aiming the suit at Bank of America instead. “It just sort of made it look like they were looking for the easiest target,” Mr. Kennedy said.

At about the same time, California’s attorney general, Bill Lockyer, floated a letter calling peer-to-peer file-sharing software – long the bane of the entertainment industry’s interests – “a dangerous product.” But a peek at the document’s properties revealed that someone dubbed “stevensonv” had a hand in its creation.

Vans Stevenson, a senior vice president with the Motion Picture Association of America, said later that he had offered input on the document but had not written it.

“California AG Plays Sock Puppet to the MPAA,” was one blogger’s response.

The issue increasingly nags at the legal system, as lawyers become aware of the advantages of requesting discovery of the metadata buried in word-processed documents (or debate the ethics of scrubbing the metadata from a file before turning it over to the other side).

This is an old story. The most celebrated case of the pitfalls of using Word came in February 2003, when Tony Blair’s office published the infamous ‘dossier’ about Saddam Hussein’s alleged armory in Word format. (Much of it turned out to be plagiarised from a research student’s article in the journal Middle East Review of International Affairs entitled “Iraq’s Security and Intelligence Network: A Guide and Analysis”.) Richard M. Smith conducted a terrific analysis of the Downing Street document’s metadata and identified the people who had authored and revised it. As a result, the UK government has largely abandoned Microsoft Word for documents that become public and now tends to circulate them in pdf format. However, my experience is that most companies continue blithely to reveal the origins of, and revisions to, their internal documents!

If you must use Word, be careful to turn off ‘Track Changes’, save the document as an rtf file and then convert it to pdf before letting it out into the world.

57% of US teenage Net users create, remix or share content online

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From the latest Pew Internet and American Life survey…

WASHINGTON, November 2, 2005- American teenagers today are utilizing the interactive capabilities of the internet as they create and share their own media creations. Fully half of all teens and 57% of teens who use the internet could be considered Content Creators. They have created a blog or webpage, posted original artwork, photography, stories or videos online or remixed online content into their own new creations.