Monthly Archives: January 2008
Copyright Extensions and ISP Filtering: Breaking EU Culture, One Amendment at a Time
As you may recall, the European Parliament’s forthcoming
Cultural Industries has become the latest target of lobbying by the
recording industry. First, they attempted to
language that advocated that European ISPs filter and block their own
users on the basis of suspected infringement. As we
to European Members of Parliament, such policies would not only harm the
privacy and security of Net users – they would not even work to combat
infringement. Like DRM, everyone would lose, including the music industry and
artists that IFPI seeks to protect.
But if ISP spying on customers and users denied access to the Net on the
hearsay of rightsholders were not bad enough, the recording industry is now
another addition (amendment 82), advocating the extension of copyright “to
protect artists who risk seeing their work fall within the public domain in
their lifetime, and to consider the competitive disadvantage posed by less
generous protection terms in Europe than in the United States”.
As
Nobel-prize winning economists including Milton Friedman, Ronald Coase and
Kenneth Arrow petitioned in
recent Gowers Report in the UK concluded, copyright term extension is
unjustified both as a protection
to current artists (
as an economic positive for society as a whole. Yet the music industry, fearful of losing
tight control of its own back catalog, still continues to advocate for more
copyright, no matter the cost.
The Guy Bono report is the tip of the iceberg for this kind of rightsholder
lobbying, at both a Brussels and a national level. The report has no legal
force, but by gently dropping these unfounded policy ideas into its pages and
putting them in front of politicians and civil servants, IFPI and others can
claim that they are uncontroversial, familiar solutions when the time comes to
write the real laws.
It’s painful to watch an otherwise thoughtful report on the cultural
industries by the European Parliament be buried under the lobbying agenda of
the music industry – especially when its suggestions go so far against
economics and common sense. We can only hope that the committee can retrieve
the original paper from this last-minute bargaining, and keep these ridiculous
ideas on the policy fringes where they deserve to remain.
ODF Alliance Reports ‘ODF Momentum’ in 2007
As has been reported by many elsewhere, the ODF Alliance published their annual report for 2007 noting, among other things: Twelve countries and six regional governments have adopted “pro-ODF policies” The latest countries are the Netherlands and South Africa, which … Continue reading
Presidential Primaries and ‘geek’ Issues – Barack Obama
Even though I much prefer to dwell on local politics, it would seem that now is a good time to think about the presidential primaries, especially since the Feb. 5 California primary is just around the corner. On the Democratic … Continue reading
New York State Request for Public Comment Extended to Jan. 18
To give some background on this issue, New York was the 5th state last year with some form of open formats legislation: In its 2007 session, the New York State Legislature directed NYS Chief Information Officer/Director of the Office For … Continue reading
Bringing in Outside News
As you may have noticed, I’ve added a feed aggregator to more easily bring in pertinent news from the outside. So far, I’m tracking stories from the EFF, ConsortiumInfo.org, and Groklaw. If you have any requests, be sure to add … Continue reading
Last Major Label Gives Up DRM
Back in December 2005, we announced the beginning of the end for DRM on music. Well, two years later, we’re getting close to the end of the end, with Sony-BMG announcing that it, too, will be giving up on DRM for music downloads (at least for some of its catalog). Sony-BMG is the last of the four major labels to take this step.
It’s about time. As online music retailers have been pointing out for years, DRM has only held back the authorized downloading services in their efforts to compete against the unauthorized world of P2P file sharing.
This isn’t quite the end of DRM on digital music, however. The last hold out is DRM on subscription services like Rhapsody and Napster. Some have argued that DRM is necessary for the subscription business model, an argument that I think doesn’t hold up under scrutiny. After all, anyone with any motivation can convert their Rhapsody “streams” into downloads, DRM notwithstanding. So it’s not the DRM that keeps people paying their monthly subscription bills — it’s convenience, inventory, and other features that add value to the experience (DRM, on the other hand, is about subtracting value from the fan’s experience).
But there is also evidence suggesting that DRM on streams may be dying, as well. Leading next-generation streaming music services, like iMeem, are using FLV (a streaming format with no DRM) for their music offerings. And iMeem is licensed by all of the major labels, so it appears that DRM is no longer a requirement for authorized music streaming, either.
Next step (and I hear that at least one major label is considering it) will be a blanket license for music fans — pay a small monthly fee, and download whatever you like, from wherever you like, in whatever format you like. This is the inevitable end-game in a world where file sharing remains hugely popular and the labels want to prevent new retailers (like iTunes) from controlling distribution.
ODF vs. OOXML: War of the Words Chapter 5
This is the fifth chapter in a real-time eBook writing project I launched and explained in late November. Constructive comments, corrections and suggestions are welcome. All product names used below are registered trademarks of their vendors.
Chapter 5: Open Standards
One of the two articles of faith that Eric Kriss and Peter Quinn embraced in drafting their evolving Enterprise Technical Reference Model (ETRM) was this: products built to "open standards" are more desirable than those that aren’t. Superficially, the concept made perfect sense – only buy products t… Continue reading
2008: DRM continues to punish paying customers
Just three days into the new year, we have another example of DRM punishing paying customers, rather than “pirates.” Netflix subscriber Davis Freeberg ran headlong into an incompatibility between Microsoft DRM and … Microsoft DRM.
The trouble all started when Freeberg bought a new monitor for his Vista computer. When he decided to watch streaming movies from Netflix, Netflix documentation warned him that the recommended means of fixing a problem with DRM-restricted Netflix programming “may remove licenses to other content using Microsoft DRM” — including, in particular, restricted programming he had already purchased through Amazon Unbox. Trying to resolve this problem just got Freeberg a tech-support runaround, with each company involved pointing the finger at another.
Tech support problems are not unfamiliar to PC users, but where did this problem come from? Freeberg was just trying to use a new monitor with his computer; his reward, apparently, was broken DRM software, which couldn’t be sure the new monitor met movie studios’ arbitrary requirements (or perhaps just couldn’t be sure whether it could be sure). Furthermore, the DRM industry — which has already spent countless engineer-hours making “approved” and “licensed” products (seemingly at the expense of “compatible” and “interoperable” devices) — couldn’t even offer Freeberg a clear path out of this jam.
Is this mess stopping copyright infringement? Nope — it’s still easy to copy media and easy to find unauthorized copies. In fact, one commenter points out that the easiest “fix” for Freeberg’s trouble appears to be downloading the movie from an unauthorized torrent tracker.
Freeberg’s conundrum is likely the product of the Protected Media Path (PMP) (mis)features that have been added to Microsoft’s Vista operating system. Thanks to PMP, Vista computers can now “audit” the video outputs, supposedly to ensure that only “authorized” (aka DRM-laden) video boards and monitors can receive Hollywood content. Unfortunately, these kinds of (mis)features generally (1) don’t stop pirates and (2) result in compatibility headaches for paying customers.
At a Loss for Words
It’s not often I find myself at a loss for words when I read something, but this is one of those times.
Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that it isn’t really necessary for me to add any words to the following news, other than to characterize them with a Latin phrase lawyers use: Res ipse loquitor, which translates as "the thing speaks for itself." I’ll give one clue, though: I’ve added this blog post to the "ODF and OOXML" folder. That’s "OOXML" as in "the world must have this standard so that our customers can open the billions of documents that have already been created in older versions of" a certain office productivity suite.
So without further ado, here’s the news, along with what a few other people have had to say about it [Update:  … Continue reading
Key Open Government Reform Legislation Becomes Law
In one of his last official acts of 2007, President Bush signed into law the first major overhaul of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) in more than a decade. The Open Government Act of 2007 makes much-needed changes to the FOIA process that will give Americans better access to information about their government at work, such as:
- Ensuring that freelance and alternative journalists are considered representatives of the media, making it less expensive for them to get information from the government.
- Providing for attorney fees when a requester’s lawsuit prompts an agency to change its position on a request, even if a court doesn’t order it.
- Creating a tracking system to help make sure that FOIA requests don’t become hopelessly tangled in red tape.
- Establishing the Office of Government Information Services, which will be tasked with helping to resolve conflicts between agencies and requesters.
- Penalizing agencies that don’t process FOIA requests on time.
- Making it clear that requesters can get government records maintained by private contractors, not just the agencies themselves.
- Imposing greater reporting requirements to let Congress and the public know more about how agencies handle requests.
The changes made by the OPEN Government Act are a hard-fought victory that will help EFF and other requesters make better use of the FOIA and keep the government accountable to the people.
In the past few months, EFF’s FOIA requests have uncovered illegal government demands for phone customers’ “communities of interest” and revealed details about the FBI’s misuse of National Security Letters. Our work was also cited in a congressional call for an investigation of former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. To learn more about EFF’s FOIA efforts, visit our FOIA Litigation for Accountable Government (FLAG) Project page.