Great column by Dan Gillmor on the way the entertainment industry is increasingly treating everyone as a thief.

“If the business people who rule the entertainment industry had been as powerful 25 years ago as they are today, you’d be breaking the law if you set your videocassette recorder to tape your favorite Olympic event for later viewing. The VCR, assuming the entertainment industry would have allowed a manufacturer to sell it, would not have a fast-forward button because it would let you skip through the commercials without viewing them.

As for tape recorders, you would not have been able to make a copy of the music you just bought so you could play it in your car.”

Hollywood studios sue makers of digital recorders.
LA Times story.

“The lawsuits, which were brought by the largest TV networks and all seven major Hollywood movie companies, say the ReplayTV recorders violate copyrights by enabling users to send videos to other ReplayTV boxes over the Internet and skip commercials automatically. The suit filed by MGM, Fox, Universal Studios and Orion Pictures goes furthest, arguing that it’s illegal to let consumers record and store shows based on the genre, actors or other words in the program description. This claim threatens not just the ReplayTV devices, some copyright experts say, but all recorders like it. Unlike VCRs, which require users to record shows by time slot or unique number, PVRs record based on a show’s name or program description. Users don’t need to know when “Friends” is on. They just need to know the name or a leading actor. Once a program is found, the device can be set to capture it whenever it’s on the air.”

Interesting workshop today on “New Directions in Internet Policy” at Georgia Tech. My IPEF colleague Rex Hughes is a speaker.

John Perry Barlow on the copyright land grab.

“We are born savage and self-centered, and then, unless we move to Hollywood, we get over it. We become civilized. We enter a state in which we understand that sharing is good.

And just as sharing makes us civilized, it’s sharing that makes civilization. It lets us build a great collective work from the exchange of stories, myths, songs, poems, facts, jokes, beliefs, scientific discoveries, elegant engineering hacks, and all of the other products of human thought and discourse.

I know that this is a fairly obvious observation. That’s why I’m stunned that so many kinds of sharing have suddenly, without public debate, become criminal acts. For instance, lending a book to a friend is still all right, but letting him read the same book electronically is now a theft.

Over the last several years, the entertainment industry has railroaded a number of laws and treaties through Washington and Geneva that are driving us rapidly toward a future in which the fruits of the mind cannot be shared. Instead they must be purchased — not from the human beings who created them in the first place, but only from the media megaliths. “

I love the way JPB writes. He is concerned about the same issues that enrage me, and yet manages to package them in more digestible literary packages. Comes from having been a rock lyricist in an earlier life, I suppose. Sigh.

Here’s the text of BT’s ‘complaint’ re infringement of their alleged patent.

More Wired coverage of the BT patent case.

“Assuming for a moment that they have a valid case, then BT made a huge error in allowing that patent to sit unclaimed for so long,” said patent attorney Vincent Jerham. “Had the company piped up when those first Web pages were published and informed people that it owned hyperlink technology, then businesses and Web publishers could have chosen to use hyperlinks or not. Showing up now, more than a decade after the party started, has effectively killed any chance of collecting prior-usage fees.”

John McChesney of NPR visits Aspen and talks about Pringles cans, free networking, and Boingo [RealAudio required]: The intro said that these networks may pose a threat to existing telephone networks. McChesney interviews Jim Selby, and gets the facts right: he notes that the technology was designed for a few hundred feet, but that Shelby (like many others) can range for miles.

[80211b News]

I know that Bob Cringely gets up people’s noses, but I really like his approach to WiFi. And if you lived like me in a village that was a communications black hole, you would too. This particular column has some interesting stuff about how some smart guys are providing broadband in Starbucks without having to ask Starbucks’ permission — or sharing the revenue with them!

It turns out, though, that the folks at O’Reilly can’t quite bring themselves to believe Cringeley’s claims about his revised home broadband set-up. They also have a nice account of how they made a high-gain antenna from a coffee can.

Financial Times report on the BT ‘hyperlink patent’ case.

‘If the court finds that patent number 4,873,662 on “Information handling system and terminal apparatus” does give BT rights over hyperlinks, its victory would be embarrassing, albeit lucrative.

BT admits this apparent goldmine lay unnoticed for decades before being unearthed in a routine trawl of its intellectual property portfolio.

Any chance to exploit the patent in Europe had gone by the time BT woke up to its significance. But a delay in issuing the patent in the US means it does not expire there until 2006.

If BT wins its case, its delay in latching on to the potential of the patent may anger shareholders. ‘

Yet more on the BT ‘hyperlink patent’ case. The patent [No 4, 873,662] is dated October 10, 1989. The application was filed on August 15, 1980 and there is some reference to 1976 — though this seems to be in relation to a British patent. Something strange here…