DRM actually does have one use

It does a good job of stopping casual copying between people who know each other. If my cousin bought a book on the Kindle, for example, and wants to share it with me, he or she won't be able to email me a copy due to copy protection. Unless that cousin is as savvy as I am and knows how to strip off the DRM (which is much easier than it looks, BTW). For the record, I only strip DRM for archival purposes. I am bloody well not going to pay multiple times for the same ebook just because I decided to move to a different platform. I also want security in case Amazon goes under or some yahoo decides to delete my account on a whim.

DRM does nothing to deter P2P copying since someone somewhere will know how to break the DRM, will upload it, and then the unprotected data will be passed on from torrent to torrent and network to network. And if the album, movie, or book isn't popular enough to spread like that, then it probably would have benefited from being distributed over P2P since it would raise its profile and produce word-of-mouth publicity that might eventually result in more legitimate purchases.

Giganews sued

The lawsuit looks like bull to me (admittedly based on a TorrentFreak article), but this isn't exactly shocking. Giganews, and pretty much all other massive bandwidth Usenet providers, real business is helping users pirate content, though done in a way that still provides them safe harbor cover. Come on, anyone with any plan beyond the $4.99 plan is going to be used for binaries (and I'd be shocked into catatonia if they were getting most of their money from that plan), and what binary files would anyone want to download from Usenet? It's an incredible kludgy way to share files. The answer is: things that would get taken down or get you sued if they were distributed over less complicated and error-prone channels, i.e., pirated material (and porn, but the most of that is pirated too).

Look, any attempt to shut them down or hold them responsible would set a horrible precedent that would have a chilling effect on Internet freedom for years to come, but let's call a spade a spade.

Are they trying to make piracy guilt-free?

They could hardly be doing a better job. On this side of the Atlantic, the RIAA is suing LimeWire for $75 trillion dollars. That's more than five times the national debt of the United States of America (quick, Congress: slap a hefty tax on ridiculous copyright lawsuit awards and settlements and we can pay off the entire debt at once). It's also probably far, far more than the sum total revenues, not just profits, of the record industry since it's inception. On the other side of the pond, the Belgian equivalent is trying to make truck drivers pay to be allowed to listen to the fricken radio in their trucks.

Paywall Whack-a-Mole

Now this is a surprise: lots of folks are trying many different ways to defeat the paywall. The New York Times is just going to have to accept that. Shutting down Twitter accounts for dubious trademark violations won't solve the problem. As long as they allow unlimited Twitter linkthroughs, they will have people providing firehoses one way or another. Tweeting all their stuff themselves only makes it ludicrously easy. Heck, just import this OPML file into Google Reader and you're set. At least until they either stop Tweeting or revise their social media linking policy.

Shocker: New York Times tries to shutter @FreeNYT

They're taking the curious tack of claiming Trademark violation. What happens when an identical account is opened, possibly by the same guy, under a handle that doesn't include NYT in it?

Jammie Thomas case shows how ludicrous copyright law is

$1.5 million for sharing $24 worth of songs? Really? Even the minimum statutory damage of $750, or $18,000 is still severe considering the crime. Going by the IFPI's figures, 40 billion files shared in 2008 (IFPI is the internation equivalent of the RIAA). If every person were to be made to pay the same amount as Jammie Thomas, the amount would be $2,500,000,000,000,000. That 2.5 quadrillion dollars, or 2,500 trillion dollars. It dwarfs the world GDP, which is only 57,843,376,000,000, i.e., 57 trillion dollars. It even dwarfs the entire net wealth of the planet. There is literally not enough money in the world for all the pirates to pay the RIAA at that level.

Obviously the sizes of the verdicts far beyond the minimum weren't based on the offense of sharing 24 songs, but rather on the supposed offense of fighting it in court rather than taking the RIAA's settlement. That is really screwed up too: to be punished for exercising your constitutional rights. The law needs to updated to take into account the individual non-commercial filesharers and have a much more reasonable damage award. $750 should be the top, or near the top, not the bottom, in such cases ($18,000 is a lot of money for normal people).

Security Now has the Scoop on Two Troubling Bills

This is a very important Security Now to watch.



The first bill, COICA, which would allow the justice department to blacklist websites that infringe copyrights, mandating they be removed from DNS by ISPs, can be studied in more depth here. The other hasn't been proposed yet; it's expected to be proposed next year.

Used Computers a Casualty of the 9th Circuit Ruling

The ruling, noted below, that denies first sale doctrine to software could also potentially render older computers worthless, since the software that would run on them cannot be purchased new. Or would if Linux and Open Source weren't available. It would also appear that even the software already on a used computer would legally have to be deleted before sale if the EULA doesn't allow the transfer of the software.

Court Rules that EULAs Trump First Sale Doctrine

The AP and Slashdot have the story. From the AP story:

There are also fears that book publishers, music labels and movie studios will try to come up with their own licensing agreements to restrict the rental or resale of their copyrighted material.

That's what's terrifying about this ruling. It is easy to see how knowledge and art could be lost to the public through this kind of extreme copyright system. If the company holding the rights doesn't feel like making it available anymore, and you're not allowed to sell used copies, that work is essentially banned as effectively as if the government had censored it.

Now, I don't see this as likely applying to books, movies, or music in the too-near-term. What I'm more concerned about is video games, which are just another kind of software after all. Masterpieces could simply be lost. This will also fuel the fires of piracy.

And yes, people resorting to piracy is worse for software and other media vendors than buying used. The copyright holder might not get any more money from the sale of a used program or game than a P2P download, but that person buying a used program or game is far more likely to buy more new items than the pirate. He's playing by the rules, don't rob him of the that avenue.

United States behind ACTA secrecy

I'm not a bit surprised. This is one issue where there really is zero difference between the two parties. Both are on the side of maximum profit for the copyright and other IP holders even if it is to the detriment of the honest consumer. Hence the DMCA being approved by Unanimous Consent in the Senate and a voice vote (i.e., so overwhelming it need not be recorded) in the House (source).

OpenOffice.org to be Oracle's next target?

Oracle, which recently acquired Sun, is shaping up to be the SCO of the 2010s (only worse, since they are a real, powerful company, instead of just a sock-puppet for the competitors of open source), declaring an all-out war on Free and Open Source Software. This PC World article suggests that their next step, after killing OpenSolaris and suing Google over Android, may be to kill off OpenOffice.org. Naturally "kill" here means forcing it to fork. Really trying to kill it would entail suing over potential patent issues, and any intelligent fork would be based in Europe or somewhere else with more liberal software patent laws than the US.

Academic Cheating and Internet File Sharing

This New York Times article describes widespread copying off the web without attribution in colleges across the country. It also makes a link between that and rampant piracy, which Matthew Yglesias takes issue with.

I think that the relationship between the two is highly exaggerated. As one of Yglesias' commenters pointed out, "It’s perfectly legal to submit “Paradise Lost” for your MFA thesis, but that wouldn’t get you anywhere with your committee chair." And it's perfectly legal to buy the copyright to a paper from someone else and submit it as your own, but it's still plagiarism in the academic sense.

I do think that nebulous authorship does have a lot to do with it, though. If the college does not adequately drill in to student's heads that they have to attribute everything, even things written collectively and especially even Wikipedia, it is easy to see yourself as a part of the collective and regard it as unnecessary to attribute. Besides, you might reasonably have some trouble figuring out how to attribute something like Wikipedia if your handbook isn't really good about websites.

Finally, I find this quote from the NYT article to be astonishingly stupid:

She contends that undergraduates are less interested in cultivating a unique and authentic identity — as their 1960s counterparts were — than in trying on many different personas, which the Web enables with social networking.

“If you are not so worried about presenting yourself as absolutely unique, then it’s O.K. if you say other people’s words, it’s O.K. if you say things you don’t believe, it’s O.K. if you write papers you couldn’t care less about because they accomplish the task, which is turning something in and getting a grade,” Ms. Blum said, voicing student attitudes. “And it’s O.K. if you put words out there without getting any credit.”

College itself requires you to put on personas and say things you don't believe. Tell me you've gone to college and never gotten a writing assignment that said, "Take a strong position on x and back it up with facts and arguments." where you still had to do it even if you didn't have a strong position on the chosen topic. Heck, we had to do that in my grade school where we were all split up into two teams to debate whether smoking should be illegal or not.

Oh, and social networking and Internet personas have nothing to do with "writ[ing] papers you couldn't care less about because they accomplish the task, which is turning something in and getting a grade". That also is an essential part of college. Not every assignment is going to be one that you care about for anything other than the grade it gives. That was just as true 100 years ago as it is today.

As for anonymity being a consequence of the alleged lack of uniqueness the Internet age engenders, I think the reason for it is actually tied to uniqueness of identity now as much as back in the era of Publius and the Federalist Papers: you write anonymously because you want to protect your unique identity, i.e., your reputation, and still speak in an unfettered manner.