US attempting to strongarm Costa Rica into compliance with IP laws

Under the auspices of "free trade." The Bahamas are also discussed in the article.

Obama administration doesn't actually like transparency

In a 180 from his professed love of transparency (as embodied in his executive order), Obama is now claiming 'national security' reasons for rejecting a FOIA request to release details about a new secret, international copyright treaty. Looks like this administration's love of secrecy is not so different from the past's. And reading the list of people who are allowed to view this treaty reads like a who's who of Big Media and their lobbyists.

French 3-strikes Copyright Law

A new, terrible law is making its way through the French senate right now. It requires ISPs to disconnect a user after three alleged copyrighted content downloads. This is an insanely terrible law for many reasons, including:

• Virtually everything on the internet is copyrighted in some form, and any "visit" to a web page requires a download of HTML, so this effectively outlaws the entire web.
• The bill, of course, is intended to apply mainly to video and audio bits. Since everyone effectively becomes a criminal under this law, selective enforcement will be the name of the game. Media companies, who are behind the whole initiative in the first place, will move to enforce the law's provisions against those who they feel are most threatening to their profits. That is, users of peer-to-peer networks.
• There is no due process mentioned in the article, (not to mention that a constant due process procedure for every internet user is way too costly for the bureaucracy) so we can only presume that these 'strikes' will be tallied at the whim of the ISPs and media companies.
• Internet access is becoming more and more of a necessity as more functionality moves on to it (communication with friends and family, banking, shopping, employment, etc.)

A commenter on Slashdot points out that this law is supported by a corresponding business interest for basically every layer of the network stack:

This law was mainly pushed by Vivendi but there are powerful backers from all across the spectrum:

* Telecoms firms that want a mandate to filter all Internet traffic so that they can block all P2P, and then VoIP, and then video streaming and then anything which competes with their monopoly products.
* Large ISPs, because these are now all owned by the telecoms firms.
* Vendors like Cisco because they want to sell loads and loads of expensive filtering equipment.
* The music industry, because it still thinks it's going to sue its way back onto the right side of history. Stupid kloten, when will they learn?
* The movie industry, because they've drunk the music industry koolaid.
* The TV industry, because they want to sell more DVDs and because their distributors in the digital age are, of course, the ISPs.
* And finally, certain software firms, because the only way to implement this law, finally, is to use a fully locked down operating system that only runs authorized software, so no Linux.

The French tried so hard to get this same law pushed through the European Parliament, but that seems to be saner.

There are similar legislative pushes all around Europe, at the national level, and for the same reasons.

The Internet is, really, under attack from concerted and powerful forces that hate what those free packets represent.

At Least Some Good News this Week...

The woman with the baby dancing to Prince on YouTube is cleared of wrongdoing, the court ordering that fair use must be considered in the sending of a DMCA takedown notice.

People on the No-Fly list can sue to have their names be taken off the list, a court rules.

Next battleground in the copyfight: textbooks

Great site: textbooktorrents.com

How long until publishing houses come along and engage in that time-honored tradition of copyright holding organizations: suing already penniless students?

Found via this ars technica article

Artists contemplating suing RIAA

So where does all the money from those lawsuits against grandmothers, students and dead people that the RIAA brings go? Not to the artists, apparently. Artists are now contemplating taking legal action against the RIAA for their "fair share" of the winnings.

I don't know whether to cheer because the RIAA might be losing some money, or cry because the artists are just as shortsighted. Anytime you hear a group complaining that the money it receives is not "fair," you know the lobbyists and lawyers can't be far off...

So this is the future of music? Artists suing the RIAA? The RIAA suing everyone else? Everyone bickering over the winnings? And what about all of the other "collection" agencies? How depressing. At least I have isohunt.

RIAA, again, fights to lower artists' royalties

Well, look who isn't sticking up for those starving artists (again). It's their old "friend" the RIAA. The spin the RIAA is putting on this issue is making even me dizzy:

"Record companies are suffering a contraction of their business at a time when music publisher revenues and margins have increased markedly," the trade group wrote. "While record companies have been forced to drastically cut costs and employees, music publisher catalogs have increased in value due to steadily rising mechanical royalty rates and alternative revenue streams made possible, but not enjoyed, by record companies."

NFL and copyright vs. The Faithful

So it seems that the NFL has convinced legislators to put its ridiculous preferences into law. Case in point: a law the NFL was trotting out recently to disallow anyone other than sportsbars from showing an NFL broadcast in public on a screen larger than 55 inches across. The NFL is making this somewhat of a habit, preventing church-goers from gathering to watch the Super Bowl in their houses of worship this year as well as last. The copyright insanity continues...

Copyright and Free Speech are not Compatible, and other Follies of Dan Glickman

For anyone that thinks that copyright and free speech can be enforced simultaneously on the Internet, the statements and actions of the MPAA can be a rude awakening. The MPAA and others are trying to get ISPs to build in packet-sniffing technology into the architecture of their networks solely to enforce the interests of copyright owners. Trouble is, there is no standard for identifying certain 1's and 0's over a wire as 'copyrighted' and others as 'not copyrighted.' Not to mention that you can't try and determine the copyrighted-ness of data without examining all of the data, thus violating the privacy of a (formerly) two-party, private exchange.

The MPAA's Dan Glickman has a lot of laughably misinformed opinions and spouts a number of misleading statements in the Ars article which merit addressing.

"Protection of content from theft."

Woah, buddy. "Theft" is when I steal something. You can't steal data. It's impossible. When I make a copy of someone else's data, they still retain that data. Contrast that to say, stealing a car, which is an act of theft after which the rightful owner can no longer use the car. Peer to peer file sharing also differs from theft in that the transaction is consensual, whereas with theft it is not.

"Piracy costs the studios $6 billion worldwide every year"

$6 billion, eh? Well, it's worthwhile noting that you have an interest in inflating this figure to make the "problem" seem like it is larger than it really is. Second, where are you getting these figures? Studies have come out that argue that file sharing actually increases sales. I can't find the link, but I think I remember reading that the RIAA attorney in Capitol v Thomas said that there was no basis for determining those figures. Even if that isn't true, the way the MPAA is coming up with these figures is arbitrary.

"'Traditional organized criminals would drool' over the margins made by pirates."

Oh, really? You think everyone that downloads anything is making money off of the transaction somehow? Get real. 99.9% of file sharing has to be non-commercial between fans who just want to trade songs that they are interested in. I would also think that robbing a bank would pay WAY higher margins than selling DVDs of Police Academy on Chinese streets. The cost of production is essentially the price of the physical DVD, and there's no significant barrier to entry. So if you charge a billion yuan for Rush Hour 2, someone will certainly undercut you, if not download the movie for free themselves.

"Piracy"

Let us also remember that this term in and of itself is overloaded. This used to be a term for distributors that would print an author's work without paying him. (See Stallman's Free Software, Free Society) Let's call it what it is: file sharing of copyrighted content that is illegal in the American jurisdiction. Not 'piracy.'

Thoughtcrime, fine, but Windows? The horror!

Another day, another ridiculous copyright-related story that is a testament to how our government and its Big Media puppeteers are ruining peoples lives. This one comes courtesy of the lovely Family Entertainment and Copyright Act of 2005. It makes the innocuous act of turning on anything capable of recording multimedia (your phone or camcorder today, perhaps your cuff links tomorrow at the rate technology is getting more portable and powerful) punishable by three to six years in prison. Nice.

Today's unlucky soul is an ex-administrator of a BitTorrent tracker who pled guilty to counts of ‘conspiracy to commit copyright infringement’ (Thoughtcrime, anyone?) and ‘criminal copyright infringement.’ This meant some jail time for him, followed by some ankle-bracelet accompaniment following. Now the government wants to monitor him even more, tracking his internet and computer usage. But, wait! It gets worse:

"'I had a meeting with my probation officer today, and he told me that he has to install monitoring software onto my PC. No big deal to me, that is part of my sentence. However, their software doesnt (sic) support GNU/Linux (Which is what I use). So, he told me that if I want to use a computer, I would have to use an OS that the software can be installed on.' ...
Sk0t is left with a tough choice. Give in to the evils of the monitoring software, format his hard drive and install Windows - or be barred from using a PC completely."

"Piracy," not burglary should be law enforcement's priority, says Big Media

From Ars Technica:

"Our law enforcement resources are seriously misaligned," Cotton said. "If you add up all the various kinds of property crimes in this country, everything from theft, to fraud, to burglary, bank-robbing, all of it, it costs the country $16 billion a year. But intellectual property crime runs to hundreds of billions [of dollars] a year." Cotton's comments come in Paul Stweeting's report on Hollywood's latest shenanigans on Capitol Hill.

Just what we need... more bank robberies and burglaries, less sharing of online music. Give me a break. Exactly the kind of delusions, greed and illogical argumentation that I would expect from the industry that, as Ars Technica puts it, "defines solipsism."

Apple: turning into law enforcement, one step at a time

When Apple announced that it was going to sell DRM-free music, most people thought that that would be a good thing for the iPod-addicted masses. DRM restricts consumers options and freedoms, and is entirely unwanted on their end. Even though Apple was raising the cost 30 cents (for an increase in quality as well, not just for taking away a "feature" that customers didn't want in the first place), the announcement was greeted with general acclaim by those who hoped that Apple was moving away from the privacy-invasive techniques of Big Media.

The devil, of course, is in the details. Apple has traded in DRM on its EMI tracks for something even more insidious: a water mark that embeds the name and email address of the user that purchased it in the file, allowing Apple (or anyone else) to identify who the file was originally sold to. Of course, this can be easily circumvented by converting the file to mp3, overwritting the name and email (steve@mac.com, for a good laugh), etc. However, the fact remains that the vast majority of users either do not know, do not care, or do not care to figure out how to eliminate this data from their files. See for yourself:

dannyc@sf:~/Desktop/Music From Laptop/DRM (iTunes)$ strings 01\ Proper\ Education\ \(Radio\ Edit\).m4p | grep "name"
nameDaniel Colligan
name
dannyc@sf:~/Desktop/Music From Laptop/DRM (iTunes)$ strings 01\ Proper\ Education\ \(Radio\ Edit\).m4p | grep ".com"
dannycolligan@gmail.com
"com.
dannyc@sf:~/Desktop/Music From Laptop/DRM (iTunes)$

Apple's actions beg the question, why are they doing this? What possible benefit could Apple reap from putting identifying information in its files? Since they have the iTunes player on virtually every consumer desktop these days, is it so improbable that the next iTunes upgrade will include a spy that informs Apple whenever you have files that do not belong to you and/or deletes them and/or informs someone else (say, those labels that Mr. Jobs has been cozying up to lately)? Ars Technica points out that iTunes already feeds data back to Apple so that the iTunes client can recommend tracks that you might like. Put the dail-home feature with the identifying info feature, however, and you have a recipe for a copyright infringement detector. Just what we all need: now in addition to Big Media watching our every transmission over the network, Apple will be the overlord of our hard drive.

If it's not obvious to you already, avoid using iTunes for your own sake.

Imprisoned for life for "Piracy"?

Embattled Attorney General Alberto Gonzales is pushing a new bill, the Intellectual Property Protection Act of 2007. This bill has a number of ridiculous clauses, such as life imprisonment in certain circumstances for "piracy."

Additionally, it has provisions that would bring a tear of joy to any RIAA prosecutor's eye. These include expanding the rules by which wiretapping is allowed to detect copyright infringement, criminalizing attempting to infringe copyright, generally making punishments harsher for copyright infringement, and even having the department of homeland security notify the RIAA about "pirated" importing of CDs (it's notable that no other copyright holder qualifies for this kind of treatment).

There was a bill before congress like this last year and it didn't go anywhere. Hopefully this bill will suffer the same fate.