yeah yeah I know...
I went and got all pissed off again. It's just hard to watch people do stupid things....
More to follow I'm sure, as reading about this sort of stuff always gets me really angry
Letter Written by A consortium of content provide companies urging them to not let themselves get duped into doing something stupid
This will be a busy week in the House -- Congress goes into summer recess Friday, but not before considering the Section 115 Reform Act of 2006 (SIRA). Never heard of SIRA? That’s the way Big Copyright and their lackey’s want it, and it's bad news for you.
Simply put, SIRA fundamentally redefines copyright and fair use in the digital world. It would require all incidental copies of music to be licensed separately from the originating copy. Even copies of songs that are cached in your computer's memory or buffered over a network would need yet another license. Once again, Big Copyright is looking for a way to double-dip into your wallet, extracting payment for the same content at multiple levels.
Today, so-called "incidental" copies don't need to be licensed; they're made in the process of doing *other* things, like listening to your MP3 library or plugging into a Net radio station. If you paid for the MP3 and the radio station is up-to-date with its bookkeeping, nobody should have to pay again, right? Not if SIRA becomes law. Out of the blue, copyright holders would have created an entire new market to charge for -- and sue over. Good for them. Bad for us...
Celebrity Death Match: Hello world edition!
As a personal note, I don’t really care about celebrity gossip. I find it completely uninteresting. But there are millions of people that care passionately about which B-List actor is dating which pop star of the moment. For these people Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt’s baby has been the biggest news story in a while. I don’t get it, but I’m not one to judge. I mean, people think I’m crazy for caring about copyright and patent law.Which brings me to my point.
Gawker published a small photo of their new baby. One that Time Inc. paid over $4 million to have the exclusive American rights to. Time Inc., obviously unhappy, decides that the old cease and desist racket is the way to go.
Dear Mr. Steele:
Your thumbnail is 2.5 x 3.5 inches on my screen. With all respect, this is not “fair use” but willful copyright infringement in an attempt to use a valuable photograph to enhance your site even though you have obtained no rights to do so.
The Time Inc. Law Department is coordinating with the lawyers for Hello!. Matthew Higdon, who acts for Hello! in the UK, authorized me to inform you that under U.K. law there is not even a colorable claim that Gawker’s posting of the Hello! cover is within the bounds of “fair use.” As you know, the copyright law in the U.K. is much less flexible in this respect than the law of the U.S. Gawker can be sued in the U.S. by both Time Inc. and the publisher of Hello!
Hello! and Time Inc. are coordinating our pursuit of websites which have posted the Hello! cover. The first step is an notice, which is also the last step if the sites take the cover down immediately. If they do not, we are coordinating legal action.
I repeat my demand that Gawker take down the Hello! cover immediately.
Won’t somebody think of the children?
The
EFF breaks down the four criteria of determining fair use:
Let's look at the four fair use factors. First, the use is for news reporting, an activity explicitly recognized as deserving of fair use protection in Section 107 of the Copyright Act. On the second factor, the nature of the work, while there is certainly creativity in the photograph, it is principally a factual subject -- Brad and Angelina's baby. The third factor -- how much of the original was taken -- also ought to favor Gawker. After all, they only took a 160 pixel thumbnail of the original. (It's not clear to me whether these photos are still "unpublished," but the Supreme Court in Harper & Rowe v. The Nation made it clear that the unpublished nature of a work does not preclude a fair use finding.)
Just because Time Inc. paid $4 million for the photo does not magically make fair use go way, as much as they would like it to. If anything, by paying so much Time has shown that the photo is newsworthy and open for debate and criticism.
The moral of the story is that fair use is under attack from all sides, not just Big Copyright in California, despite being recognized by the Supreme Court as protected speech.
Neutrality, Net and Otherwise
Net Neutrality is today's white-hot technology policy issue. The coalition at
SavetheInternet.com currently includes over 800,000 individual supporters, 760 groups and 11,319 MySpace friends. They've had a
tangible impact on the fight over net neutrality in Congress. While the "Communications Opportunity, Promotion, and Enhancement Act" (HR 5252, COPE Act) recently passed the House without adopting protections for net neutrality, it still has to be reconciled with its Senate counterpart, which is likely to be Sen. Ted Stevens' "Communications, Consumers' Choice, and Broadband Deployment Act of 2006" (S 2686).
This is where things get even more exciting for people who care about information policy. The Stevens bill is a reminder of why "omnibus" rhymes with "screw the public." Whenever a bill has momentum in Congress, less-popular measures -- measures that wouldn't pass on their own -- leap from the woodwork, parasitically attaching themselves to legislation with a better chance of survival. Two such parasites on the Stevens bill are known as the "
broadcast flag" and the "
audio flag", which would limit the functionality of next-generation receivers of digital content.
Today, anybody can build a radio or television receiver and there are no restrictions on which devices that receiver can interact with. That has been a fertile environment for new technologies and the economies that they drive. It has also been an important factor in allowing the public to exercise a wide array of rights with respect to the media broadcast into their homes. Time-shifting for later viewing, format-shifting to different devices, and a huge selection of devices are just a few of the benefits that we've enjoyed because of the tech-neutral nature of broadcast receivers. The broadcast and audio flags would change that completely. Citing the concerns of Big Copyright, these proposals mandate that all devices capable of receiving digital video or audio signals be built in a particular fashion. That's bad for the economy and bad for the public, but Big Copyright has successfully tacked it onto the Stevens' omnibus bill. And so the fight for net neutrality in the Senate isn't just about ensuring that the backbone of the web is a level playing field. It's also about protecting the right to build multipurpose technologies whose designs are not dictated by Hollywood or the FCC.
At first glance, this breakdown is supremely ironic. With net neutrality, public interest advocates want the government to adopt a stronger role in the defense of consumers. With the flags, we're trying to keep the government out of our hair. Why such different approaches? In a word: competition. Today's broadband market is not competitive; it's a collection of fiefdoms and natural monopolies that provide the average American with two or fewer choices for the provision of broadband. The market for digital broadcast receivers, on the other hand, is an embarrassment of riches. Consumers can buy dozens of different receivers without leaving their zip code.
In other words, the Stevens bill has it completely backwards. It fails to regulate where it is arguably needed (net neutrality), then saddles a totally healthy industry with nonsensical design mandates (broadcast and audio flags). It's time to stop the omnibus.
The tech world is abuzz with news of XM being sued by the Hollywood cartels. I've compiled a lot of comments from tech leaders and organizations:
Gigi Sohn of
Public Knowledge:
Consumers for years have had the legal right to record music for their own use. This lawsuit threatens that right on the grounds that consumers now have advanced technology at their disposal in recording songs. The shame of the legal action, however, is that this is really a dispute between XM and the recording industry over licensing fees. The companies should be left to figure out a solution without interference from the courts or from Congress.
CEA:There they go again. The record industry is returning to the courts in their non-stop efforts to stop new technology, frustrate consumers and make illegal long-standing consumer home recording activities. Their new target is XM Satellite Radio, one of America's top technology success stories of the new millennium. XM's only offense is providing legal and exciting programming options to millions of Americans, while opening new revenue and promotional opportunities for the recording industry.
The lawsuit announced yesterday is a brazen effort by the labels to strong-arm more money from a successful technology industry startup. XM Radio already is the largest single payer of digital music broadcast royalties. More, the record labels receive royalties on every XM recording device sold as provided by Congress under the Audio Home Recording Act (AHRA).
...
It is time to say 'enough is enough.' It is time to put an end to ill-founded lawsuits and over-reaching legislation that impose an 'innovation tax' on consumers and technology developers. These ongoing efforts discourage innovation and jeopardize America's global technology leadership.
If only the music industry spent as much time adopting digital business models as they do filing lawsuits and advocating anti-consumer legislation, they might find that technology can actually expand their market. Instead, this litigation undermines our efforts to work with the recording industry on digital technology issues of mutual interest.
On behalf of American consumers and technology innovators, we look forward to standing with XM as it defends this lawsuit. The consumer technology industry will continue to take a strong stand against persistent, punitive, and over-reaching efforts by the record labels to control innovation and limit reasonable consumer activities.
And of course, the
EFF is on top of it:
An attack on home taping: In the RIAA's view, home taping is illegal, at least when done with today's digital tools: "The XM+MP3 subscribers are creating unauthorized reproductions of Plaintiffs' copyrighted sound recordings,... and therefore are guilty of direct copyright infringement...." So much for fair use. So much for the AHRA. Sorry Pioneer, Samsung, and all the other innovators out there, but apparently home taping is only legal so long as the RIAA dictates the feature-set of the recorders.
...
Transmission + Recording = Distribution: As we've discussed previously, the RIAA has been trying to expand the scope of the "distribution" right on the backs of individual P2P file-sharing defendants in cases like Elektra v. Barker. The goal? To force broadcasters (and others who thought all they were doing was publicly performing music) to pay a second time for distribution licenses. If the RIAA wins on this score, then radio stations and webcasters are all in hot water, too.
...
Holding design against innovators. The RIAA claims that XM should be held liable for both inducement and vicarious liability because it could have designed its technology differently, an argument familiar from the MGM v. Grokster battle. Of course, in that case even the Department of Justice (see fn.3) rejected the RIAA "you could have designed it differently" argument as baseless. If the RIAA succeeds this time, innovators could face liability whenever a court decides they didn't do "enough" to prevent infringement. The value of "enough," of course, will not be revealed to you until after you spend millions in legal fees and risk losing your company to ruinous statutory damages.
It would seem pretty clear that the Hollywood cartels are operating under the legal precedent of 'backsies'.
“[T]he cable industry wanted a way to know that any particular PC that was sold as “Digital Cable Ready” would absolutely be able to deliver on the wide range of things that you couldn’t predict with certainty would happen on a home-built PC.”
Translation: By certifying hardware, we can guarantee the entertainment and cable industry that it will successfully restrict fair-use rights such as time shifting or copying to other formats (e.g., Video iPod). Consumers will voluntarily agree to surrendering these rights because it will be in the license agreement and because they basically have no other choice. Companies that try to break ranks and restore these rights to consumers will be hit with a DMCA suit.
Goddamn this fucking bullshit!!!
Makes me wanna kill someone....
When the industry is being allowed to open up new revenue streams through litigious actions against their customers, I have a feeling we're not far from seeing the argument "We spent $3.9 Bil on this copy protection, which Little Billy Palmer here bypassed and therefore, he owes us $125,000"
Why is it that the DMCA is so retarded yet noone knows it??!?!?!?
My opinions on the subject:
1) The average consumer is not aware of DRM and its ultimate implications, but are catching on more and more. Education of the masses is important at this point. Until people realize how they are being treated by these companies, and how they will be treated in the future, they will do NOTHING.
2) Those who are aware feel crippled, that they can't do anything by themselves and there is not big movement to be swept into. There needs to be an accessible movement that offers action to be performed for the average person, not just sending in a check. The DRM-mongers (MPAA, et al) need to have consequences for their actions.
3) Geeks need to get into politics. You can make a difference is not just by lobbying, voting, and calling your congressperson, but by running for office yourself.
There are many organizations that exist to combat this sort of garbage, but they remain on the fringes of society, seemingly reserved for the geeky/open source people. This needs to change and needs to change now. Encourage your friends, family, whoever you can to get educated and get involved.
http://www.eff.org/http://www.fsf.org/ (In the same realm of consumer's rights)
http://www.epic.org/ (I'm not too familiar with them)
http://www.cdt.org/http://www.cpsr.org/(For purposes of clarity IP means Intellectual Property, and if I have to describe that any further then you should probably just stop reading now)
1. Creators of ideas and inventions have the right to be compensated for their work, but not to limit political expression, veto technological innovation, or restrict education and scientific research.
Creators of ideas and inventions have the right to be compensated for their work, but not to limit political expression, veto technological innovation, or restrict education and scientific research.
Creators should be fairly compensated for their work. Large intellectual property holders, however, have started to misinterpret "compensation" as "absolute control." This mindset has led to a one-way ratchet of increasing entitlements for intellectual property-holders while the public's rights diminish.
For example, laws like the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) have been used over and over again to stifle scientific research, silence political expression, and chill technical innovation. IP laws need to be reigned in to protect free expression, technical innovation, and robust democratic debate.
2. Intellectual property laws should be judged by their potential to foster new creativity, as required by the U.S. Constitution.
The U.S. Constitution explicitly states that intellectual property protections should last only "for limited times" and promote the progress of "science and the useful arts." In other words, valuable ideas and expressions are supposed to become part of the public domain, where everyone can enjoy and use them equally. However, rights-holders have an interest in extending the amount of time that they can exploit their work. This tension has created a situation where copyright and patent terms are extended retroactively, in spite of the Constitution's plain language.
For instance, it doesn't make sense to extend the copyright term on a work that was created 60 years ago. Its creator was likely compensated long before, and the extension certainly can't encourage her to make something that she has already produced. Meanwhile, the Constitution's promise that the work fall into the public domain is indefinitely deferred.
Intellectual property was meant to be an incentive to create work that the public can enjoy, not an ever-lengthening entitlement for rights-holders.
3. Intellectual property laws should be clear and explicit, so anybody can create without fear of lawsuits.
Today's IP law is a thicket of jargon that makes lawyers necessary for almost any creative act. Sampling music in a new song, combining movie clips for a film class, or even removing objectionable content from your lawfully purchased DVDs can draw the ire of rights-holders. Companies routinely use patents against small inventors and businesses that can't fight back. And since fighting even frivolous claims is terribly expensive, creators and innovators may self-censor rather than attract a lawsuit.
This kind of predatory intellectual property is bad for society. It chills artistic and political expression. It stops technical innovation that could benefit society. And it directly contradicts the purpose of intellectual property by ensuring that less work, not more, is produced by our creators.
