UK Copyright Law Reignites Piracy Row
Reuters
A new copyright law designed to curb the unauthorised exchange of music, film and software on the internet has gone into effect in the UK, reigniting the debate on the proper way to tackle rampant digital piracy.
The law, known as the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003, was drafted by the Patent Office. It is modelled on the controversial European Union Copyright Directive, broad legislation designed to protect content makers from the growing phenomenon of digital piracy that has ravaged media and software companies.
The UK joins Austria, Denmark, Germany, Greece and Italy in ratifying the legislation whose deadline for adoption passed 10 months ago. It remains in limbo in the other nine EU member states, according to legal experts following the directive.
Francisco Mingorance, director of public policy for software trade body the Business Software Alliance, said: "It's unfortunate, but at least it's moving forward."
Consumer protection groups, legal experts and industry executives differ on how to stop piracy while preserving consumer rights in an era in which all manner of protected works are just a mouse click away.
Content makers have sought harsh penalties for downloading copyrighted materials from internet file-sharing networks such as Kazaa or for burning songs onto blank compact discs, saying it is a form of theft.
Civil liberty advocates, meanwhile, have urged lawmakers to adopt new laws that protect consumer freedoms, many of which are written into law in the form of "fair use" exceptions for protected works.
In some countries, including Germany, consumers are permitted to make backup copies of a purchased CD, for example. In the UK, however, no such fair-use provision exists.
The EU directive failed to get member countries to agree on a single set of fair-use exceptions, setting the stage for a mishmash of laws governing how consumers can store and play media and software on their PCs or other digital devices.
"The national governments could never agree," said Mingorance, whose trade group represents tech companies such as Microsoft and Apple Computer.
The EU also gave the individual country the right to decide on how to treat new digital rights management technologies, which, for example, would prevent consumers from copying CDs or DVDs. The UK affords new protections to such technologies.
The UK has adopted what many consider to be Europe's toughest digital copyright law, seeking to protect a media industry that exports many of its works to overseas audiences.
Struan Robertson, an IT and ecommerce lawyer for the law firm Masons, posted a statement on legal website out-law.com earlier this month accusing the new UK law of being too broad, one that could imprison music fans who download works from free file-sharing, or peer-to-peer (P2P), networks.
"The law on the provision of P2P services was ambiguous before, and it remains ambiguous," he said. "But those using the services in this country...are facing a new threat."
A spokesman for the UK Patent Office said the law is not designed to imprison or fine individual who share files.
"This law is aimed at the most dangerous activity: the organised crime gangs with warehouses of pirated materials," patent office spokesman Jeremy Philpott said. "It is not meant to bring criminal charges to individual downloaders."
He added that individual downloaders would still be subject to civil penalties, which would include injunctions and/or a demand of payment for damages. They would not be hit with prison term or fines, he said.
http://www.silicon.com/management/government/ 0,39024677,39116716,00.htm
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Treaty Casts Shadow On Webcast Rights
Declan McCullagh
A United Nations committee on Wednesday approved the world's first Webcasting treaty, which has drawn criticism that it limits the use of works that are in the public domain.
At a meeting in Geneva, the World Intellectual Property Organization's Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights agreed to prepare a draft of the treaty by April 1, 2004. A second meeting is scheduled for June, followed by an expected diplomatic conference during which nations that are members of WIPO — a UN agency — could sign the final treaty.
The treaty — which was proposed by the Bush administration and is backed by Yahoo, the Washington-based Digital Media Association and other U.S. Webcasters — generally seeks to extend to Webcasters the same level of international intellectual property protection that TV and radio broadcasters currently enjoy. The Webcasting sections are part of a broader proposal titled "Protection of the Rights of Broadcasting Organizations."
Jamie Love, who works for the Ralph Nader-affiliated Consumer Project on Technology, says the treaty is worrisome because it creates an additional legal protection for works in the public domain that are Webcast.
"Say there's a film that's out of copyright and in the public domain, but it's in the vault of some movie studio," Mr. Love said. "If you got it from the broadcast, you're not allowed to make a copy. You have to go to the original source."
In other words, anyone viewing a Webcast of material that falls outside of copyright — such as a government-created documentary or a very old movie or audio recording — may not be able to freely store and redistribute that content.
Mr. Love added that some nations consider sports events to be in the public domain, but the treaty would give both Webcasters and TV broadcasters the right to block retransmission. "Broadcasters see this as a way to extend rights to noncopyrighted information," said Mr. Love, who attended the WIPO meeting in Geneva.
Seth Greenstein, a partner at law firm McDermott Will & Emery who represents the Digital Media Association, said the treaty is necessary to protect the rights of Webcasters in WIPO nations that do not have copyright laws as extensive as those in the United States.
"Because Webcasting is already delivered by digital networks, it's particularly susceptible to retransmission via the Internet," Mr. Greenstein said. "So far, a number of Internet companies have successfully used technological fixes to thwart piracy of their signal, but it would be more effective if those technological fixes were supported by legal prohibitions and remedies as well."
Mr. Greenstein is legal counsel to the Digital Media Association, whose members include AOL, FullAudio, Listen.com, RealNetworks and Yahoo. He acknowledged Love's concern about the sweep of the treaty, but said such restrictions were necessary to protect the economic investment of Webcasters. "What we're saying is that if you take a look at what Webcasters do, it's the same acts that you've been trying to protect for all these years with broadcasting," Greenstein said. "Don't focus on the differences in technology."
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, which sent a delegation to Geneva on behalf of the Bush administration, did not immediately return phone calls on Thursday.
According to the treaty language proposed by the U.S. delegation, Webcasting means "the making accessible of transmissions of the same sounds, images, or sounds and images or the representations thereof, by wire or wireless means over a computer network at substantially the same time."
Mr. Love warned that definition is broad enough to include Web pages, which would create a new intellectual property right for virtually all Internet publishers — perhaps even peer-to-peer networks — and further curb consumers' access to works in the public domain. Supporters of the proposal say that interpretation is incorrect, and the definition could be tweaked for clarification if necessary.
http://www.globetechnology.com/servl...ry/Technology/
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An Experiment In Internet Self-Regulation
Declan McCullagh
STOCKHOLM, Sweden--As an employee of the Norwegian government, Elisabeth Staksrud's job title used to be official film censor.
Now, the 30-year-old social scientist has an additional job description: project coordinator for the SAFT program, a government-managed Internet project funded by the European Commission. SAFT, which stands for Safety Awareness Facts and Tools, is something of an experiment in Internet self-regulation and comes as European national governments and the commission itself are weighing whether additional laws are necessary.
Staksrud is no stranger to this idea--she gave her graduate thesis at the University of Oslo the provocative title of "How to censor the Internet." The thesis, which analyzed Singapore's ban on scores of overseas Web sites that have controversial political or sexual content, concluded that "Singapore's model can be used by other nations that aim to regulate the information flow on the Internet."
SAFT's stated purpose is "raising awareness on the positive potential and the dangers of the Internet to youths and kids." It also serves as a kind of liaison between technology firms, Internet service providers and European governments.
After a recent conference in Stockholm, CNET News.com spoke with Skaksrud about censorship, children and legislation.
Q: You're a film censor. But you say you believe in free speech on the Internet. How do you reconcile that?
A: That's just part of my job. Giving age limits is about giving advice to parents. We have this parent guardian rule that says younger people can go to certain movies-- but only if they're accompanied by an adult.
You're okay with being called a censor?
Yes. We can ban movies. We haven't done it for mainstream movies for years. If someone is going to show it in a movie theater, we have to see it first. It's a cool job, huh? Surf on the Internet and screen movies before they're shown.
What's your biggest worry about children and the Internet?
Hysterical parents.
Why? They're demanding unnecessary legislation?
The problem isn't the Internet. The Internet is just a technology. It facilitates communication, and it can be used for good and bad. The problem is if fear gets the upper hand. If something bad happens, the most important thing is to be prepared, to know what to do--and if you're a child, to call your parents. Fear often creates a sense of silence.
Your regular job is to rate movies. Without a rating--an official government stamp--they can't be shown, sold or rented, right?
I do work as a film classifier. Just before I came here, I rated "Kill Bill."
What did you rate it?
We had a split decision in the classification board. There was a division between marking it as appropriate for age 15 or age 18.
How did you vote?
I can't tell you. It's a secret to protect our classifiers. If you let in a movie that's too graphic, like genitals in motion, people will call and leave death threats. Reading Bible verses--that kind of thing.
What did you find in your survey of European attitudes toward the Internet?
We interviewed 11,000 parents in Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Ireland and Iceland. A total of 12 percent said they use blocking software. There's not a public outcry for
filters. One of the reasons is that parents are more afraid of other things, or their concern is at other levels. The girls tend not to have any rules, because they never do anything wrong. The boys tend to get rules from their fathers, but they're general, such as, "Don't do anything stupid."
What we also found from the survey is that most parents will say they have a very good knowledge of what their kids are doing. Of course, when we spoke with children, we found that that's not true.
Are you talking about pornography? Or peer-to-peer networks and copyright infringement?
What our survey says is that kids have a very high level of conscience themselves. They have their own rules about what's acceptable and unacceptable themselves. Especially when they're 14 or 15, they feel that this is their arena, and they know what's going on. They're not so likely to listen to their parents.
http://news.com.com/2008-1028-5103481.html
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Are PCs Next In Hollywood Piracy Battle?
Declan McCullagh
The U.S. Federal Communications Commission took a historic step this week toward limiting piracy of digital television signals, enacting regulations that will affect not only consumer-electronics manufacturers, but Silicon Valley companies as well.
Starting in mid-2005, it will become illegal to sell or distribute any product that can receive certain digital TV streams — unless it includes government-approved copy protection.
FCC Chairman Michael Powell called Tuesday's decision "an important step toward preserving the viability of free over-the-air television."
Commissioner Kathleen Abernathy said that "by protecting against digital piracy, we also encourage entertainment companies to deliver, via free over-the-air broadcast, [their] most valuable programs."
What FCC officials did not stress, but their regulations do, is that the product definitions are broad enough to cover not just TV tuners but also PCs.
"This necessarily includes PC and [information technology] products that are used for off-air DTV [digital television] reception," the FCC's order says.
As convergence between media types accelerates and traditional divisions become more porous, the FCC's regulations will expand to sweep in far more than just the television sets in America's living rooms. Media centre PCs, handheld devices with television receivers and other gadgets will also be affected and will likely have higher price tags.
This represents a landmark victory for the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), which had pressed the FCC to enact regulations that were broad enough to cover more than just digital televisions. The MPAA and TV networks had steadfastly argued that without some form of technological protection, they were unwilling to risk airing high-quality HDTV signals because the broadcasts would be pirated on the Internet. In a statement, the MPAA hailed the decision as "a big victory for consumers and the preservation of high value over-the-air free broadcasting."
Will Rodger, director of public policy at the Computer and Communications Industry Association (CCIA), said the rule is troubling because it means the FCC is encroaching on a technological sector that has flourished in the absence of regulation. (CCIA's members include America On-line, Sun Microsystems, Nokia, Kodak and Fujitsu.)
"The immediate effect isn't so huge," Mr. Rodger said. "What it really affects is the tuner cards that go into your computer. But there's a real slippery slope here. This is going to draw the FCC into the Internet, unless it makes a conscious decision not to go there ... It's difficult to see how the FCC and the government won't get more directly involved in designing hardware, routers and other devices."
http://www.globetechnology.com/servl...ry/Technology/
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'hoo Knew That Free Online File Sharing Is Still Rewarding?
Yoo-hoo Creates Unprecedented Online Partnership Dubbed 'The Future' of The Music Business -
Press Release
This week, Yoo-hoo Chocolate drink and Kevin Martin (former lead singer of Candlebox) and his new band the HiWatts, unveiled the next big thing in online file sharing. On the heels of lawsuits from major record labels against those who download and file share, Yoo-hoo is providing a new way to think about how the Internet can satisfy music fans and musicians simultaneously.
The program has been dubbed "Yoo-Play We Pay." With financial backing from Yoo-hoo, fans will be able to download and share five brand new MP3s from Kevin Martin and the HiWatts for free via the global file sharing community, or, if they wish, off the Yoo-Play.com website (
http://www.yoo-play.com ).
Together with Jun Group, Inc. the deal was created through a proprietary method of reaching the global file sharing community so that users of Kazaa, Bearshare, Limewire and other software packages can get the music in the manner in which they're accustomed. A patent is pending that will allow Yoo-hoo to continue to distribute free music to millions of fans around the world via the global file sharing community.
"Our faithful Yoo-hoo fans are passionate about their music and it's an understatement that their recent inability to freely download and file share has been a buzz kill to them," said Kristin Krumpe, Yoo-hoo's Top Guru and Director of Marketing, Yoo-hoo Chocolate Beverage Corp. "We've provided an innovative solution for an unconventional cyber world by developing a new way to support the file sharing community and the independent musicians at the same time."
And the results have been off the charts. In the first seven days, more than 1,000,000 consumers have downloaded Yoo-hoo's music. "That's a whole lot of happy fans," said Mitchell Reichgut of Jun Group, Inc. "For most musicians, it's not about record deals and CD sales that often show no profit, rather it's about getting heard, developing a following and doing what they love to do best -- playing music."
Not to mention, yoo too can be the next artist or band that is featured on Yoo-Play.com. "For our consumers it's not all about celebrity," added Krumpe. "The Yoo-hoo world is about being a participant in the things that are important, like music."
The Yoo-Play model is a way for artists to distribute their music to a wide audience and make a living at the same time. Under the terms of the deal, Yoo-hoo is providing some of the backing the band needs to be full-time musicians. At the end of October, the band kicks-off a seventeen-city tour.
"We're giving consumers exactly what they want," added Reichgut. "The file sharing community is the next great marketing frontier, and as others try to figure out what it is, we're becoming an integral part of it. 'Yoo-Play We Pay' addresses the needs of this consumer and is a perfect model for this emerging marketplace."
And it's no surprise that Kevin Martin has been a longtime Yoo-hoo devotee. "The fans are going to be totally psyched that Yoo-hoo is supporting our cause," said Martin. "Hoo-else could and would?"
"Unlike traditional endorsements, Yoo-Play is all about the music fans," added Krumpe. "Music has been a part of the Yoo-hoo brand for years, whether we're on tour supporting emerging artists or on the Internet giving them free music. It's in our DNA."
http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/st...2003,+05:00+AM
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Media Companies Quietly Using P2P Networks
Reuters
Even as entertainment companies remain locked in legal battles against file-sharing services, some are quietly experimenting with ways to use the networks to their advantage.
One company, called BigChampagne, is tracking music downloads for radio giant Clear Channel. Another, Jun Group, is deliberately releasing music to Web file sharers in order to generate buzz.
Jun Group's Mitchell Reichgut, a former advertising executive, said his service provides record labels with the means to transform their decades-old model for selling music.
"Basically, the labels have a choice. They can fight and continue losing money or try to tweak this 100- year-old model and get immediate results for artists, consumers and sponsors," Reichgut said.
Jun Group recently reached agreements with a songwriter, a beverage company and a TV network-- entities that would normally be very careful to protect their products--to release their content onto peer- to-peer networks.
BigChampagne also tracks song-swapping networks such as Kazaa and Morpheus for record labels, which in turn use the data to persuade radio stations to play their songs.
Tracking downloading activity can predict a hit before a song gets radio airplay. If a particular song is heavily downloaded, a record label could use that as a selling point to ask radio stations to put the song in a heavier rotation.
"At any particular moment, we're working with most of the labels. This is an industry that relies on immediate data on consumer reaction," said Eric Garland, BigChampagne's chief executive officer.
Label executives say BigChampagne provides both a gauge of consumer tastes and an indication of piracy trends.
"We're definitely using it as a tool. It's just part of a bigger trend of the labels using real data to figure out marketing plans--as opposed to radio charts that are not tied directly to consumer information," said Jeremy Welt, head of new media at Maverick Records, a Time Warner label.
Many labels are hesitant to admit that they are talking with Jun Group or using BigChampagne, due to the industry's antipiracy fight. The industry's argument in court battles against file sharing hinges in large part on the argument that file-sharing networks serve no purpose other than to foster copyright infringement.
Record labels' use of file-sharing networks for market research or promotion purposes could undercut that legal claim.
"It's remarkable, the disparity between the labels' legal battle and their understanding that product is moving online and a desire to be at the fore of the movement," Garland said.
While BigChampagne uses music download data for market research, Jun's promotion method is more direct. It distributes material to the top levels of the file-sharing universe--the more technical users who trade files on Internet Relay Chat and Usenet.
"Known as the Internet arbiters of cool, they get the content first and distribute it through the rest of the community, creating a buzz. That is why it is such a powerful vehicle for marketing," Reichgut said.
From this top tier of Internet hipsters, the content potentially trickles down to millions of people on networks like Kazaa.
Reichgut said Jun used this method to boost ratings for a daytime program on a TV network that wished to remain anonymous.
"The show had a spike in ratings after Jun made a clip available on file-sharing networks," said Reichgut, who formed Jun with a former Harvard University physics professor, Mitch Golden, and antipiracy consultant Bruce Forest.
Jun detailed another deal with chocolate drink maker Yoo-hoo, which is owned by Cadbury Schweppes, and Kevin Martin, former front man for the rock band Candlebox.
Under the deal, Yoo-hoo sponsored a five-song release by Martin's new band, Kevin Martin & the HiWatts, which involved giving the songs away online. Unlike typical record deals, the songs carry no restrictions and can be freely copied. The catch is that, when played, they display a message on listeners' computers that credits Yoo-hoo.
Under the deal, Martin got a fee from Yoo-hoo and financial support for his tour, while Yoo-hoo gained access to millions of file sharers.
Jun and Yoo-hoo now have a patent that's pending on Jun's proprietary method for distributing content.
Jun expects to announce more deals with recording artists and movie companies, while BigChampagne recently signed a deal to provide data to Clear Channel Communications' Premiere Radio Networks, which runs the airplay-tracking system Mediabase.
Maverick Records' Welt said there were still mixed feelings about using the services.
"It's unfortunate that all this file sharing is happening, and we have to see all the music that is being taken, but at the same time, we have to look at it from every angle. We'd rather get this data from legitimate digital sales and stores, but we're in a transition phase right now," he said.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104-5101550.html
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Fight Against File-Sharing Is Misguided
Doug Stanley
No matter where you stand on sharing copyrighted music files on the Internet, the case of Brianna LaHara is just plain wrong.
Brianna, 12, is a middle school honor student who lives in New York. She also is among the first people to be sued in the music industry's misguided and heavy-handed crusade against file-sharing.
Brianna's family lives in public housing on the Upper West Side and mistakenly believed the $30 file-sharing software they bought entitled Brianna to download her favorite songs.
It's not much of a stretch to believe that explanation. Many legal issues surrounding the Internet in general, and file-sharing in particular, are murky. And subscription services have emerged that do entitle people to download copyrighted songs.
But the fat cats at the Recording Industry Association of America are determined not to let 12-year-old girls stand in the way of profits.
Within a day of suing Brianna, the RIAA agreed to settle the case for $2,000, a public apology and an admission that file-sharing violates U.S. copyright law.
"I am sorry for what I have done," Brianna said in a statement released by the industry. "I love music and don't want to hurt the artists I love."
Brianna's case was the first of 261 lawsuits against individuals to reach a conclusion. The RIAA says the recent filings are only the first wave in what could ultimately become thousands of civil lawsuits against music lovers.
"Nobody likes playing the heavy and having to resort to litigation," RIAA President Cary Sherman said in announcing the legal blitzkrieg. "But when your product is being regularly stolen, there comes a time when you have to take appropriate action."
Sadly, the RIAA finds it appropriate to sue a 12-year-old girl and to accept money from her cash-strapped family.
Eventually, perhaps, the industry will see the folly in blaming its customers for declining sales and work harder to fill the clear demand for convenient music downloads.
In its first four months of operation, Apple Computer's iTunes Music Store sold 10 million songs - about 500,000 a week - at 99 cents each.
Consider that iTunes works only with Apple computers, which have less than 5 percent of the U.S. market, and the sales figures are even more staggering.
It's time the music industry stops wasting its time, energy and money on suing its customers and instead refocuses its efforts on meeting consumer demand for alternative distribution methods.
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http://www.timesdispatch.com/servlet...71949752&path=!news!columnists&s=1045855935174
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US Downloads Beat CD Sales
BBC
Music fans in the US are buying almost twice as many singles in digital form over the internet as they are on CDs from stores, according to a report.
Some 7.7 million tracks were bought and downloaded since the end of June - compared with four million CD singles sold, Billboard magazine reported. The figures show the success of new legitimate music download services. But some say online and CD single sales cannot be compared because so few singles are now released on CD. Record companies have cut CD single releases because of falling sales, but fans can choose from 500,000 songs for $0.99 (£0.60) each on some internet services.
Legitimate download sites, such as Apple's iTunes, the newly relaunched Napster and Musicmatch, are the most popular. They are trying to tempt fans from unauthorised free download services like Kazaa and Morpheus, which have been blamed by the music industry for falling CD sales.
In the week ending 26 October, 857,000 songs were sold over the internet - compared to just 170,000 in record shops, Billboard said. But the best-selling CD single is still outstripping the most popular download, the magazine reported. The top CD single, I Can Only Imagine by MercyMe, sold 6,900 copies in one week, compared with 4,700 for the biggest online track, OutKast's Hey Ya!, according to Billboard.
The digital sales had a "symbolic significance" because they marked the music industry's move to digital operations, Sean Ryan, vice president of music at RealNetworks, said. "Selling individual songs as an offline strategy wasn't working all that well, but online it can be a huge hit," he said.
EMI Music executive Phil Quartararo said he was happy with the trend but was not yet attributing too much significance to it.
"Any way we can drive a consumer to purchase music as opposed to taking music is a win for the industry," he said.
Official sales tracking body Nielsen SoundScan began tracking download sales in the last week of June.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/3237021.stm
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Digital TV Flags 'Will Not Stop Piracy'
Celeste Biever
The US "broadcast flag" system aiming to prevent online piracy of digital TV programming will not work, say computer experts.
On Tuesday, the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) announced that all hardware digital TV receivers built after 2005 must be capable of responding to a copyright protection mechanism embedded in digital broadcasts.
But computer scientists say that injecting a string of bits called a broadcast flag into the signal will not stop widespread redistribution of TV shows on the internet.
"Is this going to do what the movie industry is looking for? No. This will not have the desired effect," says Drew Dean of the Computer Science Laboratory at the SRI Institute in Menlo Park, California.
The Moving Picture Association of America (MPAA) fears that the advent of digital TV could boost the number of movies being freely and illegally shared online, and had demanded the FCC respond to the threat.
"By taking preventative action, we can forestall the development of a problem in the future similar to that currently being experienced by the music industry," states the FCC report. The new regulations will apply to TVs specifically made to receive digital signals, as well as add-ons for PCs and ordinary TVs.
But many computer experts agree that the distribution of digital information is unstoppable. "These technologies will get defeated - there are always work-arounds," says Dan Wallach, a computer scientist at Rice University in Texas.
The broadcast flag is a short string of data that sits within the stream of bits that make up the signal broadcast
by the TV station. The stream delivers a compressed version of the TV show and must be decompressed by a receiver to be viewed.
The new hardware will read the broadcast flag during decompression and then impose restrictions on the data. The FCC has not yet issued specifications, but a likely scenario is that when a device detects a broadcast flag, it will not be capable of uploading the file to the internet.
The most obvious problem is that this broadcast flag will be invisible to all existing devices and any made before 2005. So after 2005 people could still use older devices to record digital content and then distribute it.
Another problem is that the rules only apply to hardware. But software already exists that decompresses radio signals and converts them into music. This software could be easily adapted to receive TV signals on a general purpose computer and would thereby dodge the new FCC laws.
Edward Felten, a computer scientist at Princeton University, notes: "Once even one skilled person has
extracted the content, it can be made available to everybody on the internet."
But he says that people are unlikely to make a habit of sharing movies online as they do music files, because more bandwidth and storage space are required for this than most ordinary consumers can afford.
"These limitations are much more important in practice, and the broadcast flag does not affect them one way or the other," he told New Scientist.
But even if the broadcast flag is unlikely to be effective, computer experts say, they are not necessarily harmless. "Criminals will not be dissuaded by something as simple as a broadcast flag," says Wallach, but ordinary consumers who legitimately want to record a show for a neighbour or a friend might be.
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99994355
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Stalemate On Digital Content?
John Borland
Travis Kalanick has a problem with the emerging world of legal online music services.
As the head of peer-to-peer content distribution company Red Swoosh, he was naturally curious to try Roxio's new Napster download service when it launched last week. Trouble is, Napster uses Microsoft technology that doesn't work with his iPod, the best-selling portable music player, produced by Apple Computer.
"People don't like that," Kalanik said. "Until these services have standards, and they're compatible, and you can play whatever you have on whatever device you have, people are going to resort to the services that do give them that. And those are illicit."
Incompatible anticopying technologies known as digital rights management (DRM) are being applied to everything from music files to Microsoft Word documents, and the lack of rules that can make these schemes work together is increasingly prompting calls for a standards revolution.
The problem, critics say, is that companies can all too easily turn DRM into a powerful tool for locking customers into proprietary technologies. For example, files users purchase through Apple's iTunes music store won't work with portable music players other than the company's own iPod device.
More broadly, some worry that Microsoft's new Office suite of software, and its ability to prevent unauthorized distribution of e-mail or Word files, will lock the business world even more deeply into using Office, since other programs might not be able to read the locked files. A recent report from a panel of security experts warned against this trend, saying that using content protection to tie users to Microsoft Office and Windows could create damaging security risks.
Indeed, Microsoft's rise in a number of different copy protection arenas worries critics. They're calling for cross-industry agreements that will let multiple companies create and produce standard ways of protecting content, in much the same way that multiple companies can create Web browsers or e-mail programs that send secure communications to each other.
"Unless users can access content without all the hassle of dealing with different digital rights management systems, DRM is a nonstarter," said Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) founder Leonardo Chiariglione, who recently created a new international group focused on content protection issues. "The alternative is a digital media stalemate, where nothing moves."
A host of traditional standards bodies already exist to handle individual pieces of this task. Chiariglione's MPEG organization is working slowly on rules for multimedia. The Open Mobile Alliance is working on rules for mobile phones. The TV-Anytime Forum is working on content protection standards for consumer storage devices such as TiVo.
Microsoft says it's working with all of these groups. Despite being a market leader in several areas, it is actively pursuing digital rights management standards, its executives say.
Rather than a specific standard for the locks themselves, standards need to focus on interoperability so that when a file goes from one device to another--say, a cell phone to a personal computer--both devices know how to read the file and protect it from unauthorized use. That kind of interoperability is Microsoft's goal in all the groups it's working with, the company says.
"There is no one silver bullet," said Andrew Moss, director of technical policy for Microsoft's Windows division. "If we want to ensure that information can flow and can be protected properly as it flows, the world needs to come up with mechanisms for trust and authentication as that information gets handed off."
But Chiariglione isn't the only one that feels traditional standards bodies aren't moving fast enough. And even Moss concedes that no standards body is looking at rights management for corporate documents, even though that might be "desirable."
As a result, Sun Microsystems has become one of the latest, largest entities to mount a cry for interoperability in digital rights management--and it's taking matters into its own hands.
Sun is looking at its experience with the Liberty Alliance, a group that formed several years ago to provide an alternative to Microsoft's Passport online identity services. Now, the company wants to create a similar cross-industry alliance to create standards ensuring that authorized data can be swapped across different companies' digital rights management tools, whether the subject is the latest "Matrix" movie or a top-secret corporate memo.
"The notion there is that you don't have to be beholden to a single vendor," said John Fowler, Sun's chief technology officer for software. "I think it is incumbent on us to get something started. It's just a matter of getting (the effort) going."
None of these ideas is wholly new. Other companies and other organizations have long since tried and failed to create momentum behind content protection standards.
In the music realm, the Secure Digital Music Initiative, sponsored by the big record labels, collapsed under the weight of disagreements between consumer electronics companies, labels and computer makers.
Wary of Microsoft's early digital rights moves, RealNetworks tried to pull together an open-standards drive, beginning in mid-2001, but never gained serious traction.
Analysts say the ambitious cross-media efforts Sun and Chiariglione launched could well meet the same fate.
"I'm not convinced that an open DRM standard is possible across everything," IDC analyst Joshua Duhl said. "You've got a lot of constituents with a lot of agendas, and in some sense, no demand for the use of it...I think standards are coming, but they're coming in different ways in different markets."
http://news.com.com/2100-1025-5103601.html
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A Continent Full Of Criminals
Technology analyst Bill Thompson is only one of millions of file sharers who will be turned into criminals by a new European law.
Last Tuesday, in committee room A3G-3 of the Altiero Spinelli building of the European Parliament, just across the road from Gare Leopold in Brussels, a group of MEPs and administrators gathered to hear Janelly Fourtou argue that I should be sent to prison.
Of course, they didn't mention me by name, but Ms Fourtou, an MEP and the driving force behind the European Intellectual Property Enforcement Directive, wants to make a criminal of anyone who uses peer-to-peer networking software to share unlicensed copies of music, movies and other products of the entertainment industry.
Since I've got KaZaA on my laptop, and have been known both to download remixes of the White Stripes or old Velvet Underground numbers (please don't judge me too harshly - it's my age), and to share the occasional file that might be lying on my hard drive, that means me.
It probably means you as well, if you're a regular internet user who has realised that there is a lot of old music out there that you simply can't find in record stores, but is easily available over one or other of the P2P networks.
The IP Enforcement Directive is the latest of a whole batch of internet-related legislative proposals to have come out of Brussels this year.
We've had the Copyright Directive, a directive covering direct marketing and spam email, and proposals to allow software to be patented.
Since the IP Directive was first proposed in January it has attracted a great deal of attention, and a lot of adverse criticism, because it would provide the same sort of legal protection to copyright holders in Europe as they currently have under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in the United States.
This means that anyone who thinks that their copyrights are being breached could use the courts to obtain personal information from internet service providers or web hosting companies.
It also means that breaking technical copyright protection measures for any reason, even if it is to make a legally-permissible copy of a file for backup purposes, would itself be illegal.
In theory, harmonising the way copyright is protected throughout the EU is a good thing.
As a writer I rely on copyright law to ensure that I get paid for the things I publish, and I do not want to see copyright disappear because of the ease of online file copying.
But any new law should attempt to balance the interests of rights holders, whether they are large multinational corporations or individuals, and those of the wider community.
We should never forget that copyright and patents are a bargain, a deal between the people and the creators of anything from a story to a song to a great film, and the bargain needs to work for both sides.
It is probably not a coincidence that Janelly Fourtou, the MEP who is pushing the current draft directive forward, is married to Jean-Rene Fourtou, the Chairman of Vivendi, one of the world's largest media corporations.
All of the proposals she has made, especially the suggestion that even non-commercial file sharing over P2P networks should be a criminal act, favour large corporations like the one her husband works for.
Fortunately, the Directive has a long way to go before it is accepted, and even then member governments have to apply it in their national law, which always takes a while - the EU Directive on Copyright Protection was only implemented in UK law this month.
In the UK, the Patent Office has just announced a consultation on the draft IP enforcement directive, which runs until January 12.
Jail terms
That might seem to be rather too late, since the Council of Ministers plans to discuss the Directive on December 15, but these timetables are always rather flexible and there are a lot of steps to go through before a directive becomes community law.
I don't want to go to jail just because I share a few songs online in the way that I've shared cassette tapes and videos for years
The obvious first step is to respond to the Patent Office request for input.
However, its ability to disregard comments that do not fit with the government's agenda was clearly demonstrated when the protests about the EU
Copyright Directive were ignored, so that the law we got was effectively the one that was initially proposed despite the extensive 'consultation'.
It may be better to work with campaigning groups like CODE and ffii (the Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure), both of which are arguing strongly against these measures.
Their recent success in delaying the vote on whether software patents should be allowed in Europe shows that the legislators can be influenced.
It is also important to press for changes before the Directive is finalised, since national governments have limited scope for changing things after that point.
I don't want to go to jail just because I share a few songs online in the way that I've shared cassette tapes and videos for years, and I don't see why copyrights in music, movies or software should be enforced with criminal sanctions when my rights to make reasonable and fair use of the same material are taken away from me.
If I was sitting in a warehouse in Bristol making thousands of copies of the new Sophie Ellis-Bextor album, then I'd hold my hands up when the police came knocking at the door, but making a copy so my daughter can listen to it on her own CD player doesn't seem like breaking the law to me.
Or, I suspect, to many other people outside the record industry.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3250075.stm
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The Copyright Divide
Peter K. Yu
Michigan State University-DCL College of Law
MSU-DCL Public Law Research Paper No. 01-21
Cardozo Law Review, Vol. 25, 2003
Abstract:
Most recently, the recording industry filed 261 lawsuits against individuals who illegally downloaded and distributed a large amount of music via peer-to-peer file-sharing networks, such as KaZaA, Grokster, iMesh, and Gnutella. Although the industry's recent approach was controversial and resulted in major criticisms from legislators, academics, civil libertarians, consumer advocates, and university officials, the copyright holders' aggressive tactics are not new.
In fact, copyright holders have been known for using, or encouraging their government to use, coercive power to protect their creative works. Only a decade ago, the U.S. copyright industries have lobbied their government to use strong-armed tactics to coerce China into protecting intellectual property rights. Succumbing to U.S. trade pressure, the Chinese authorities eventually raided pirate factories and handed out harsh penalties, including the death penalty and life imprisonment in severe cases, on their citizens.
The similarities between the RIAA and China stories were more than a coincidence and could be further linked to a third story. That story took place two centuries ago when the United States was still a less developed country. At that time, book piracy was rampant, and the United States was considered one of the most notorious pirating nations in the world.
This Article brings together, for the first time, eighteenth- and nineteenth- century America, twentieth-century China, and twenty-first-century cyberspace and analyzes them using a cross-cultural, cross-systemic, cross-temporal, and cross-sectoral approach. This Article not only highlights the striking similarities among the three stories, but also argues that these similarities provide insight into the war on piracy, intellectual property law reforms, and international harmonization efforts.
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.c...ract_id=460740
Download Document
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Review: How To Copy VHS Tapes To DVD
AP
As DVD players push the venerable videocassette recorder toward obsolescence, all those tapes of birthday parties, vacations and weddings -- not to mention your Hollywood movies -- are at risk of becoming technology orphans.
Just about any recent-vintage personal computer loaded with the right equipment and software can solve the problem, but converting analog video into a digital format, such as DVDs or video CDs, has until recently been a costly endeavor with a steep learning curve.
Hewlett-Packard Co.'s $399 DVD Movie Writer dc3000 is billed as a simple, all-in- one device that includes a DVD player- recorder, the cables and the software necessary to get the tape-to-digital job done.
It works as advertised, though it's not perfect.
The biggest drawback is that it supports copy-protection schemes built into many commercial videos, particularly Hollywood movies. So much for converting the closet full of films you've already bought on tape.
For that job, those of us who want to make fair-use copies -- and pirates, for that matter -- would be better off buying a separate DVD burner and converters such as ADS Technologies' Instant DVD 2.0 ($199) or Adaptec's VideOh! DVD ($149). Both include the software and hardware needed for simple transfers but don't include a DVD or CD burner.
Hewlett-Packard's dc3000 is basically an external DVD player-recorder in a silver- and-black case with added jacks and buttons. The cables from a VCR or analog camcorder plug into the jacks. It connects to a computer via Universal Serial Bus 2.0 or 1.1.
The unit ships with a wealth of Windows-only software, including HP Video Transfer Wizard for simple transfers, ArcSoft ShowBiz 2 for capturing, authoring and editing video, Veritas' RecordNow for burning data and music discs, and Simple Backup for backing up the PC's hard drive. Other programs support DVD playback and automated video editing.
Attempts to transfer several videos brought mixed results.
Using an 11-year-old videotape of a college graduation, one button on the dc3000 automatically launched HP's transfer wizard, which guided the reviewer through five easy steps from inserting a blank DVD+R and connecting my VCR to creating simple menus for the finished DVD and the jewel box label.
Transfer is in real time, so if you've got an hour of video, it will take an hour to transfer. After that, it takes more time to process and burn it to the blank DVD.
The finished DVD, whether played on a computer or on a three-year-old DVD player, looked as good as the original videotape.
Another videotape, recorded years ago while flipping through channels, didn't transfer so well. The channel-changing caused the audio to be several seconds out of synch with the video.
The final test was an attempt to copy a Hollywood movie. It seemed fine at first, but then the picture started distorting and the soundtrack was marred with pops and clicks -- apparently the copy protection at work.
It's not clear why HP made this gesture to Hollywood while its rivals do not. Transferring a VHS video to DVD for personal use is a great way to preserve what you've paid for. Instead, everyone becomes a suspected pirate.
The ADS Tech and Adaptec analog-to-digital video converters don't support the copy- protection system. They also cost considerably less than the HP device since they don't include the DVD recorder. They're a very good deal if you already have a burner.
For $285, ADS Tech sells a similar unit (Instant DVD+DV) that includes a jack for connecting a digital video camera. It's a good way to ensure the device doesn't just gather dust once all your videotapes have been transferred.
The products shipped with different video editing and burning software that produced roughly the same results. For capturing, a reviewer preferred Sonic's myDVD, which shipped with the Adaptec unit. It made it easy to manually break the video into chapters by simply clicking the spacebar.
For editing, the reviewer enjoyed ArcSoft's ShowBiz 2, which shipped with the HP gadget. It comes with a variety of transitions and effects, and makes it easy to create a movie by dropping clips into a timeline, much like Microsoft's free MovieMaker 2 or Apple Computer's free iMovie.
Still, those boring home movies are likely to remain, well, boring. HP included software that can help out. MuVee AutoProducer turns even the worst home movie into a music video. Just add video, music and choose the style.
http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/ptech/1....ap/index.html
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Electronic Frontier Foundation and Stanford Law Clinic Sue Electronic Voting Company
Student Publishers and ISP Aim to Stop Diebold's Abusive Copyright Claims
Press Release
San Francisco - A nonprofit Internet Service Provider (ISP) and two Swarthmore College students are seeking a court order on Election Day tomorrow to stop electronic voting machine manufacturer Diebold Systems, Inc., from issuing specious legal threats. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the Center for Internet and Society Cyberlaw Clinic at Stanford Law School are providing legal representation in this important case to prevent abusive copyright claims from silencing public debate about voting, the very foundation of our democratic process.
Diebold has delivered dozens of cease-and-desist notices to website publishers and ISPs demanding that they take down corporate documents revealing flaws in the company's electronic voting systems as well as difficulties with certifying the systems for actual elections.
Swarthmore students Nelson Pavlosky and Luke Smith have published an email archive of the Diebold documents, which contain descriptions of these flaws written by the company's own employees.
"Diebold's blanket cease-and-desist notices are a blatant abuse of copyright law," said EFF Staff Attorney Wendy Seltzer. "Publication of the Diebold documents is clear fair use because of their importance to the public debate over the accuracy of electronic voting machines."
Diebold threatened not only the ISPs of direct publishers of the corporate documents, but also the ISPs of those who merely publish links to the documents. In one such instance, the ISP Online Policy Group (OPG) refused to comply with Diebold's demand that it prohibit Independent Media Network (IndyMedia) from linking to Diebold documents. Neither IndyMedia nor any other publisher hosted by OPG has yet published the Diebold documents directly.
"As an ISP committed to free speech, we are defending our users' right to link to information that's critical to the debate on the reliability of electronic voting machines," said OPG's Colocation Director David Weekly. "This case is an important step in defending free speech by helping protect small publishers and ISPs from frivolous legal threats by large corporations."
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), passed by Congress in 1998, provides a "safe harbor" provision as an incentive for ISPs to take down user-posted content when they receive cease-and-desist letters such as the ones sent by Diebold. By removing the content, or forcing the user to do so, for a minimum of 10 days, an ISP can take itself out of the middle of any copyright claim. As a result, few ISPs have tested whether they would face liability for such user activity in a court of law. EFF has been exposing some of the ways that the safe harbor provision can be used to silence legitimate online speech through the Chilling Effects Clearinghouse.
"Instead of paying lawyers to threaten its critics, Diebold should invest in creating electronic voting machines that include voter-verified paper ballots and other security protections," said EFF Legal Director Cindy Cohn.
http://www.eff.org/Legal/ISP_liabili...103_eff_pr.php
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Students Buck DMCA Threat
Declan McCullagh
When Diebold Election Systems learned that its internal e-mail correspondence had popped up on the Web, it used a common legal tactic: sending cease- and-desist letters to Webmasters.
But in the months since the North Canton, Ohio-based company began trying to rid the Internet of those copyrighted files, it has arrived at a very unusual impasse. Far from vanishing, the files have appeared on more than 50 Web sites, run mostly by students who claim Diebold has a suspiciously cozy relationship with the Republican Party and that the e-mail conversations demonstrate its election software is flawed and should not be trusted.
On Tuesday, Diebold will find itself on the defensive in court as well. The Electronic Frontier Foundation and Stanford Law School's Center for Internet and Society are planning to file a lawsuit asking for a temporary restraining order that would effectively halt Diebold's campaign against the loosely organized network of mirror sites. A hearing could be held as early as Tuesday in federal district court in San Francisco.
EFF attorneys say the case is the first time that someone who has received a "notice and takedown" request--one of the many Diebold made, repeatedly invoking the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA)--has attempted such a pre-emptive strike before being sued.
"We're saying that the hosting of the documents is fair use" and therefore legal, said Wendy Seltzer, an EFF staff attorney. "They're very thinly protected by copyright in the first place and being posted as part of a political debate."
Diebold did not respond on Monday to a request for comment. Diebold Election Systems sells electronic voting systems used in states including California, Georgia, Ohio and Texas. Its parent company, Diebold Inc., is publicly traded and reported revenue of $1.9 billion in 2002.
As part of the same suit, Stanford's Jennifer Granick is representing two Swarthmore College students, Nelson Pavlosky and Luke Smith, who mirrored the Diebold documents and received a DMCA notification. EFF is representing the Online Policy Group, a free hosting service that had hyperlinks to the Diebold documents, but not to the documents themselves, on its server.
"Irregardless of the copyright status of the underlying documents, copyright law does not allow you to go after someone who merely links to the documents," Seltzer said.
Because the legal status of hyperlinking to copyrighted documents is unclear, the lawsuit is noteworthy for that reason as well. In a November 2001 case that pitted the major movie studios against 2600 magazine, the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that linking to illegal content can be restricted "consistent with the limitations of the First Amendment." That ruling is not binding on California courts.
In an unusual move for a college, Swarthmore decided to back its students against the legal threats by Diebold. Its president, Alfred Bloom said in a statement: "The college is deeply proud of its students' resolve to act on behalf of an open and fair democracy."
The wealth of Diebold e-mail, which totals about 11MB when compressed, includes internal conversations that cast doubt on the company's ability to sell secure software. Some messages note that lists of bugs were "irrecoverably lost," while others complain that "I have never been at any other company that has been so miss (sic) managed."
Diebold gave at least $195,000 to the Republican Party during a two-year period starting in 2000, and its chief executive, Walden W. O'Dell, once pledged to deliver Ohio's electoral votes for President George W. Bush.
Joseph Lorenzo Hall, a 28-year-old master's student at the University of California at Berkeley, said he mirrored the Diebold documents because the broader issue involves the "fundamental tenets of our democracy, which is a fair and open election process."
"My opinion is that it's clearly a misuse of copyright law," said Hall, a Linux buff who recently finished his master's degree in astrophysics and is now enrolled in the School of Information Management and Systems. After receiving a DMCA notice from Diebold last Thursday, Hall disabled his mirror and has not decided whether to put it back online, which would expose him to a possible lawsuit.
A typical DMCA letter sent out by Diebold's attorneys says: "Please note that (your) page actively encourages infringing activity. It initially pointed to one infringing Web site. When that Web site was removed two additional links were added pointing to a new Web site hosting the same infringing material."
http://news.com.com/2100-1028-5101623.html
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On Diebold: The DMCA Is An Anti-Freedom-Of-Information-Act
Seth Finkelstein
Inspired by all that's been going on with the Diebold Election Systems / Swarthmore story today, such as NYT: File Sharing Pits Copyright Against Free Speech, and Online Policy Group v. Diebold case archive:
People are told to think of the DMCA as an "anti-piracy" law. It's supposed to stop copyright infringement. But in terms of implications, the DMCA is an anti-freedom-of-information-act. It's turned into an all-purpose gag-order tool. The reason is stated to be infringement - but it's very easy for that reason to turn into an excuse. This is the exact same phenomena as when material is improperly classified as "secret". The ostensible reason is protecting national security, but too often in reality it's hiding government incompetence or corruption. Except that now, "copyright infringement" works much better in certain contexts than "national security".
Consider this - the process of voting is perhaps the most fundamental aspect of a functioning democracy. And yet, we're expected to accept that we are not permitted to check and monitor the mechanics by which the votes are being counted. It's "secret balloting", in a very negative sense! Rather than control the votes, it's control of the vote- counting machines.
http://sethf.com/infothought/blog/archives/000464.html
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Can't Tune In To MTV? Download It
Kenneth Li
MTV Networks is preparing to launch a music download service with plans to go up against Apple Computer Inc.'s iTunes and other competitors, said MTV chief Tom Freston on Monday.
Freston, who addressed investors at the Harris Nesbitt Gerard Playtime conference, said the as-yet-unnamed service would debut within the first half of next year, but gave few details.
(Can music-download services pose a challenge to music channels?)
"It will compete with iTunes and everyone else," he told Reuters in an interview.
The expected launch will mark yet another stab by MTV at courting its contingent of younger viewers with a music download offering.
The Viacom Inc.-owned music television network had considered offering music streaming and the ability to download actual songs in 2000. The service was to be a cornerstone in its strategy to spin off the online division of MTV and other Viacom properties in the same year.
But the collapse of the Internet boom forced Viacom to scale back lofty ambitions and shelve the public offering.
While MTV.com currently lets users download some music tracks, they expire after about a month and cannot be burned to a compact disc or uploaded to a portable digital player.
Analysts said MTV, with its global presence and ubiquity in the living rooms of teenagers and young adults would have a leg up on established competitors but was slow in entering the market for music downloads.
Apple launched a Microsoft Windows-compatible version of its software in October and its online music store has sold approximately 13 million songs since its launch in April, analysts said.
"There's no doubt it's a strong brand, with a strong profile of viewers," said Phil Leigh, senior analyst at Inside Digital Media, about MTV's plans. "But they can't rely solely on their brand come next year ... After iTunes launched in April, MTV should have been like a hawk on a field mouse."
MTV will also be competing with a relaunched Napster and recently launched BuyMusic.com. Time Warner Inc.'s America Online is also bolstering its MusicNet service this year.
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/...ow?msid=266163
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Digital Content Models
Dan Gilmore
Today at the Micropayments Conference at the Harvard Club, hosted by Peppercoin, an MP company (named after the smallest possible coin payment in England - quarter penny=farthing?), digital content and payment systems were the order of the day.
On the Digital Music panel: David Card (blog) of Jupiter Research moderated, and panelists included Richard Burgess of Smithsonian Folkways, Brian Cullinan of Sony, David Goldberg of Yahoo and Howie Singer, CTO of Warner.
Notable exchange at the end of that panel:
Steven Levy/Newsweek (from the Audience): Is there a standardized DRM model?
Singer/Warner: For rules, or an expression language? Is there a marketplace solution? ITunes appeared successful, with rules on the PC – and 3 m downloads. Not yet known.
Cullinan/Sony: Precedent? For DRM? Don’t know until things play out, but there is no market benchmark.
Levy/Newsweek: But what will it take, what will keep things going at this level with DRM?
Cullinan/Sony: Deals are only as good as the marketplace will bear, and the next deal is only as good as set up; every company is different, can’t speak for others… but there is a least common denominator problem with the labels, every label wants the most restrictive rule, although Universal wants no rules and they are adamant, and upset that they can’t sell their stuff through iTunes with this least restrictive DRM but instead have to go with the lowest common denominator of iTunes which is set by the most restrictive models.
The future? We won’t have the rules we have today, because even now, if you burn something once, you can rip it and it’s analog, what’s the point of DRM? So songs eventually will be sold in the marketplace, unrestricted. There is no reason to restrict people to give less than what they have with other media, with analog or digital.
The conference covered a variety of topics from the technical, to the theoretical, looking at content, a couple of success stories now on the web, subscriptions verses downloads, granular content verses bundled, and mostly asking a lot of questions about media, the internet, and what all the considerations are regarding consumers, media companies, copyright and money. Interesting day with interesting people. Though I did hear that a couple of the journalists were unhappy due to the lack of soundbites. But these are complicated issues and it takes time to learn the intricacies and figure out the solutions, so I guess at this stage there is too much confusion over MPs for soundbites. However, it was a great opportunity to learn what people are doing and thinking about on these issues. And there were some nuggets that were very useful.
BTW, the Harvard Club is nice, surprisingly good food too. Makes you almost want to go to Harvard, just so you can hang out there.
http://journalism.berkeley.edu/proje...ve/001413.html
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Taking On The DMCA
John Borland
Rob Semaan's 321 Studios is a unique enterprise: It's deemed by Hollywood to be one of the most dangerous, piracy-abetting technology companies around, but its products are available without hint of any controversy on the shelves of local computer stores.
The company's most popular software enables people to make copies--backups, CEO Semaan says--of DVDs. That's controversial, because DVDs are supposed to be loaded with high-tech digital locks that block copying. But programmers figured out how to pick those locks years ago, and 321's X Copy software is just the most high-profile of the packages that do this.
Semaan's company and others that produce this software say making backups of DVDs, for archival or strictly personal use, is perfectly permissible. DVDs get lost or damaged, and blocking consumers from protecting their investment doesn't make any sense, they say.
But Hollywood studios say this copying is flatly illegal, under provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) that bar the circumvention of "access control" measures that protect digital content. It might not be illegal in the abstract to make a personal copy of a DVD, but it is against the law to break through the copy protection locks to do it, Hollywood lawyers say.
The two sides have been waiting for nearly six months for a judge to rule on the issues in the case, and the long delay has many observers wondering if a surprise is in order. In the meantime, the Librarian of Congress started a scheduled process of looking for digital lock-breaking activities that should be allowed despite the DMCA's restrictions, and 321 decided to apply.
Late last week, the Librarian of Congress came back with his ruling, and making DVD backups wasn't on the list of legalized activities. Many DMCA critics protested--but Semaan now says his company is convinced enough of its position that it will appeal the Librarian's ruling to a federal court.
This could be even more of a long shot than the company's original legal case, but Semaan says the issue is worth fighting for on several fronts. Besides, he says, the legal case has helped spur considerable sales of his software. CNET News.com spoke to him last week about his rapidly expanding legal plans.
Q: The Librarian of Congress denied your request to make DVD copying, or making backups of DVDs, legal under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Does that affect your overall legal strategy at all?
A: I don't know that it affects our legal position. There were there two separate matters, pursued in entirely separate venues. We went into the copyright office hoping to seek an exemption for our class of works, allowing people to make backup copies of movies. But out of 200 different applications, they only granted four exemptions, so the effort was probably from the outset doomed to failure. We didn't get what we hoped for, but it doesn't put us any worse off legally, either.
You're going to appeal the ruling, however.
Yeah. We've decided that they ignored certain evidence. For example, they ignored evidence we brought that many DVDs are out of print and hard to replace. Disney does that--brings movies into print for a few months or years and then takes them off the market again. "Little Mermaid" was one of those. So how do people protect their investment in that case? Their reason they gave is that a marketplace has established itself, and the way to protect yourself is to go back
The fact is that they ignored lots of evidence that we put in front of them.
into the marketplace and buy the movie again. Sometimes you can do that at an auction or at eBay. But in some cases that's not possible.
So the fact is that they ignored lots of evidence that we put in front of them. That includes public domain movies. We provided evidence to show that studios have actually encrypted movies that are public domain material. So with evidence like that, we're going to go back to a federal appeals court.
Is the appeal focused just on DVDs, or could it apply to other digital media?
Our push for fair-use rights applies to anything within the digital realm: CDs and DVDs and any other digital medium. But this is just DVDs. That's largely because this issue deals with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Only DVDs, not CDs, have encryption devices put on them, with the CSS (Content Scrambling System). There are very few access control-protected CDs in the market today. Maybe a handful. At some point, music studios are going to start releasing more CDs that are copy-protected. But for the appeal, we're only talking about DVDs.
If you do win on the Library of Congress ruling, does that pre-empt your earlier legal case?
I don't think so. I don't know whether it pre-empts. I think it's two entirely different directions. A federal court judge isn't necessarily persuaded or bound by the copyright office, and vice versa.
But my opinion is that (our original case) will go to the Supreme Court. The loser will appeal. I'm sure they will, and I know we will. That will catapult it to the appeals level, and win or lose, it will go to the Supremes. Either that, or the issue needs to go in front of Congress again to clarify the DMCA.
Has the trial and the impending decision affected sales and distribution of your software?
Yes, but positively. Because the media has covered these issues--and covered them very fairly--that has helped educate the market about what we're doing and what we represent. As we educate the market, people realize that the product exists. In the course of learning about these things, they buy the product.
This is not some underground operation.
Have large retailers had any trepidation about carrying the product because of the lawsuit?
They did initially. But then they saw that we were the ones that took the issue to court in the first place. We're the good guys; we're not hiding here. This is not some underground operation. They felt comfortable, so they picked up the product.
They believe in the cause. Retailers are consumer-oriented machines, and they believe in the cause. They've expressed to us an interest in helping. They've even thrown some resources at our ProtectFairUse.org Web site.
So they've actually given you financial support?
I wouldn't say it is cash support. It's more moral support. They're telling their customers that they think our products are legal by carrying them on their shelves.
We don't need their money and don't want their money--we've never asked anyone for legal defense help. The way we support ourselves is by selling our product.
How is the product doing?
Got 10 products on store shelves. The most popular is the X Copy line (of DVD-copying software). We've sold more than 1 million copies, mostly in the United States--mostly through retailers. The fourth quarter is an exciting period. It's a huge period for retailers, and we expect to do well. We didn't exist a few years ago, and now have a few hundred employees here.
http://news.com.com/2008-1025-5101389.html
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Product Activation Glitch Hits Symantec
Robert Lemos
Some of the 1.2 million customers that have installed software maker Symantec's latest Norton PC security package have been unable to use the software because of new antipiracy technology, the company confirmed Thursday.
A few consumers have complained to Symantec that the U.S. and British versions of a package that includes Norton Antivirus 2004, Norton Internet Security 2004, Norton Antispam 2004 and Norton SystemWorks 2004 mistakenly asks for a product activation code every time a PC is rebooted. Eventually, the software informs the consumers that they have reached the activation limit and the software will cease to function.
"As of last night, our engineers were able to reproduce the problem on one type of machine," said Del Smith, senior product manager for Symantec. "This really has been a top priority for our product activation development team."
Smith said the problem has not been easy to locate and asked the consumers to go to the company's site and run the Symantec Automated Support Assistant to submit data on their particular PC. He also recommended that customers who encounter the problem not restart their computers.
"For customers that have hit the limit, they should contact a support representative," Smith said. A toll- free number should be displayed when a customer reaches the product activation limit, he added.
Symantec is the latest software maker to experience problems with product activation, a controversial antipiracy technique in which a software maker ties a copy of a program to a specific PC. Symantec estimates that at least 3.6 million bogus copies of its programs are sold annually, causing headaches both for the company and for unsuspecting buyers, who find out too late that the software isn't doing its job.
Microsoft was the first major software maker to broadly use product activation, introducing it in the Windows XP operating system and deflecting concerns that the technology would balk at simple changes in a PC's hardware.
Financial software and services company Intuit encountered criticism when it introduced product activation to its most recent version of its TurboTax product for tax preparation. Customers complained the technology made the software difficult to install and also made changes to their PC hard drive that were difficult to undo. In an open letter to customers that ran on Oct. 8 in several major publications, the software maker apologized for the myriad problems with product activation and reiterated promises to leave the technology out of future TurboTax products.
Intuit's antipiracy technology was based on software from Macrovision, which is working to make the technique more palatable to consumers.
Symantec's software activation is not based on Macrovision technology, Smith said, adding that the company had extensively tested it over the past year without any problems. Symantec's system generates a unique alphanumeric code to identify a PC configuration and ties it to the product key for a particular piece of software. It stores license information on the PC's hard drive and allows for up to five activations for the same product key.
"We thoroughly tested the technology," Smith said. "We ran extensive tests worldwide. You had well over 250,000 customers complete activation, and we didn't have any complaints about this."
Smith said the company hasn't determined how effective product activation has been in deterring piracy but said Symantec was studying the issue.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1105-5099884.html
Until next week,
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js.
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