36 new of 143 responses total.
resp: 106, Russ Cage: The green ink, if it prevented photocopying at all, prevented the making of one photocopy just as efficiently as a hundred. Indeed, it was single photocopying, rather than mass copying, that the notes firm said it was concerned to prevent: if you wanted their notes, you had to buy their copies, individual by individual. That was what they said. A hypothetical person trying to go into business by unethically mass-reproducing the notes was not their concern. He would have a heck of a time recouping expenses, epsecially given the notes' time value. The rhetoric may be different, but the digital anti-copying devices would prevent you from making a copy for your own use just as efficiently as preventing you from putting it on Napster.
Re #33: You mistake the issue, sir. De minimis copying of a course pack printed in uncopyable ink is easy. You can copy lines, paragraphs and even a small number of pages by keying them by hand or even writing them longhand. This is the kind of thing you would do for fair use. Dropping the entire course pack into a hopper-feeder and pressing "copy" is not; it would be infringement if you transferred the copy to another person. (It would not infringe if you kept both copies, of course.) The problem with the DMCA and the like is that even de minimis copying, such as quotes of a few seconds from a film for the purpose of criticism or analysis, require tools which are presumptively illegal under the current interpretation of the law. I can only hope that the appeals court will find that the trial court erred in its interpretation, or declares those sections of the DMCA unconstitutional.
Hmm.... Now I'm starting to put my creative hat on with this. What would be the "copy a few lines longhand" version of taking a film clip? How about re-enacting the scene? I could imagine this taking on a life and a style of its own pretty quickly. :)
(Reminds me of a movie I saw once where a guy did on on-stage reenactment of the crop-dusting scene from "North by Northwest".
resp: 109 - typing or handwriting out something is not easy to do. That's why fair use cases of this kind (as opposed to plagiarism, etc.) essentially didn't exist before the photocopier. By creating uncopyable print, the college notes service made a practical stop to copying of this kind. Hand-copying isn't as difficult as the equivalent work-around for uncopyable sound recordings, which is to play the recording while keeping a microphone up near the speaker. That may sound funny, but I audio-recorded a fair number of tv shows that way before the days of the commercial VCR. I wonder if you could use a camcorder that way too. Of course the quality would be seriously degraded. But not as badly as it was in the days I actually did that; and if you think the quality of hand-copied text doesn't degrade, you'd be mistaken.
More weblog stuff... From many sources: a news report that Napster, Inc, is seeking beta testers for the for-pay secure Napster service which is supposed to debut in July. from http://www.zdnet.com : "No Free Ride for MP3Pro," the upgrade to the MP3 format. The holders of the MP3 patents want more money for the use of the new format, but it has to compete with Windows Media Audio which some say is gaining market share even though it includes copy-prevention stuff. http://www.latimes.com/business/20010516/t000041036.html reports that "the majority of TV makers" are prepared to include the new anti-copying stuff in their digital TVs. "Some manufacturers, including Sony Corp. and Mitsubishi Group, have already begun production of the new sets, which are expected to arrive on store shelves later this year. "The technology, known as IEEE 1394, I.Link or FireWire, is a data networking standard with tough security features... The technology gives program producers, rather than consumers, the power to decide what can and cannot be copied digitally..."
Oh dear oh dear oh dear... http://www.mp3newswire.net/stories/2001/expire.html picks up on a NYTimes report where the new MusicNet pay download service was demonstrated for Congress in the last couple of days. The MP3newswire.net story focuses on the plan to make users pay, and pay, and pay... "When a user downloads a song, it remains available for 30 days at which point the user can decide to renew the license for 30 more days, as long as the monthly fee is paid again... ... a typical $10 monthly subscription might include the ability to download or listen to 75 songs." I smell market rejection, but maybe I'm just too optimistic. :)
This all gets irritating. How long before using terms from TV shows is declared copyright infringment and payments asessed? Drift of a sort. All this DMCA stupidity has my brain making odd conncetions. It occurs to me that if the DMCA is not removed fairly soon, then Microsoft has already won thier battle to illegalize open-source software. If the interface to the device is encrypted, it becomes illegal to reverse-engineer it for writing non-vendor drivers even if you are using the interoperability exception that has been used now and then. Drifting back, the copyguards on new technology present the content producers with an interesting dilemma. If they turn on the copyguards too soon, they risk wholesale rejection of the technologies. Do they have the patience to leave the guards turned off for the number of years that saturation of a new technology takes? Most consumers are not aware of any of the nonsense under discussion in this item. It literally falls outside thier world for now. Most people won't know that a device has use-management built in until it bites them, by which time they've likely no chance of returning the device. If the public can find out about the copyguards ahead of time, the question then becomes who can last longer in somethine like digital TV, the manufacturers, who can coast for a while on accumulated money, or consumers, who can use old technology for old recordings but cannot access new programming when analog broadcasts become illegal? There is no possibility of this actually happening, but I'd like to see a truth-in-labeling applied to devices with use-management systems. On the OUTSIDE of the box. Right now, the only warning most people get about region control on DVDs is buried in the back of the instruction book, after they have opened the box and hooked up the player. Imagine how well a digital recorder would sell if the box had to say "This device contains rights-management technology that may prevent you from recording a program, copying it after recording, or playing it back more than once." Neutronium balloons, anyone?
Hmmm.... Didn't the courts find that shrink-wrap licenses were illegal? How is this different?
Wired.com has a couple of entertaining pieces today. http://www.wired.com/news/mp3/0,1285,43894,00.html is essentially a boring press release from InterTrust about their new copy-prevention stuff which is already in use by some customers. But the killer is the last paragraph, quoting an InterTrust executive vice president: ((The record companies)) "...also have to move away from the CD and into a protected medium with a disk with encrypted music on it. Right now, it's like putting out master recordings that can be immediately copied and traded on the Internet." Exactly how the record companies would survive a drastic phaseout of the CD is not explained. :) http://www.wired.com/news/mp3/0,1285,43898,00.html Essentially, the record companies are telling Congress that if there is going to be music on the Internet, then the record companies have to be able to run over the rights of songwriting copyright holders. The record companies have now taken the place of Napster in arguing for a mechanical rights formula, a solution they opposed when Napster wanted it.
Re #116: I think there's a new law in the works that makes them legally binding. Maybe it's already passed. You'd better start reading them more carefully in case they say something like "you agree to give all your worldly belongings to Yoyodyne Software, Inc. in the event the company suffers financial difficulties." ;>
News item: mp3.com has been bought by Vivendi Universal. mp3.com had been the largest source of legitimate music files from independent artists, and Vivendi Universal is the world's largest music company. News item: On the grounds of trademark infringement, Aimster has lost its URL aimster.com to AOL.
(To crib from another analyst's piece, the mp3.com acquisition means that the biggest Internet music operations are now in the hands of the major labels. Can anyone think of any sizable independents that are left?)
Perhaps it is slightly odd that if something called "Vivendi Universal" is the world's largest music company, I have never heard of it before. Or perhaps not.
((You just haven't been following the mergers. Seagrams, the Canadian liquor company, bought MCA -- was that the mid-1990s? At the time most of the music operations were under the MCA name. Seagrams then bought the music operations of the Dutch firm Philips, which were called Polygram. MCA and Polygram were rolled together to create the Universal Music Group. Then in the last year the French media conglomerate Vivendi bought Seagrams to create Vivendi Universal.))
((David, Vivendi Universal might be of particular interest to you because they control the biggest chunk of major-label classical catalog. London/Decca, Angel, Deutsche Gramophon, Philips are just a few of the brand labels & catalogs which Vivendi Universal has ended up with.))
re #118: You're probably talking about UCITA, which has been adopted in several states and is being heavily lobbied in the rest.
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/22/technology/22MUSI.html analysis: "Vivendi Deal for MP3.com Highlights Trend" "The upshot, industry analysts say, is that the five major record companies could wind up actually consolidating their power in an Internet age that some analysts thought would shake the labels to their core." We mentioned this before; the major music companies now seem to be on the verge of tightening their stranglehold on the distribution of music. ---------- http://www.latimes.com/business/20010521/t000042593.html "Net Music Services in Royal Bind" Best summary I've seen of the controversy between the music publishers and the online music business. In today's world, music publishers get a "performance" royalty when a song is broadcast on the radio, or else they get a "reproduction" royalty when a physical disc or tape is sold. On the net, these neat categories get blurred, and according to this article the music publishers feel they should get both performance and reproduction royalties for music downloads.
Another story about how the big labels now own most of the online
music cards:
http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/may2001/nf20010522_934.htm
quote: "As the dust settles on the online-music landscape, there appears
to be little left that the big labels haven't bought -- or broken.
Napster traffic is plummeting as the court-mandated filtering
systems have made it significantly harder to find
music that consumers want. Among the top-10 music sites only two
don't belong to the big labels, according to traffic measurements
by online-research firm Jupiter Media Metrix."
And according to the article, only one of those two is a true independent,
launch.com; the other unnamed site is owned by a unnamed large corporation.
Here's a very interesting review of what looks to be a very interesting book: DIGITAL COPYRIGHT, by Jessica Litman. http://slashdot.org/books/01/03/28/0121209.shtml
News item from everywhere: the RIAA has sued Aimster, the encrypted file exchange system built on top of AOL Instant Message. Aimster has also lost a contest for their domain name; AOL claims "aimster" is a trademark infringement.
From what I've read, Aimster has nothing to do with AOL Instant Messenger, but rather is named after its creator's daughter. That people (including me, before I read an article about it a week or two ago) are confused by the name and think it has something do with AIM is pretty much the legal test for trademark infringement, if I understand trademark law correctly.
Wasn't AIM a single-board computer kit related to the KIM?
Yes. I used to actually used to have an AIM-65. I even had the BASIC interpreter in ROM.
Two items today from http://www.sfgate.com , the website of the
San Francisco Chronicle:
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/news/archive/2001/06/05/financial1
539EDT0235.DTL
(sorry about the wrapped URL) is an AP story reporting that Napster is
close to concluding licensing deals with the major labels in the
MusicNet coalition, which are AOL Time Warner, Bertelsmann & EMI.
There are caveats that the labels are still not satisfied with Napster's
protections against copyright infringements.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2001/06/05/BU111061.DTL
"Battle over digital music moves to recordable CD drives."
EMI has acquired a partial stake in Roxio. Roxio, the maker of the
software program Easy CD Creator, was recently spun off from Adaptec.
"EMI Music, one of the big five record labels, plans to announce
a deal with Roxio Inc. of Milpitas today to develop technology designed
to control the burning ((of CDs by consumers)). Roxio makes CD-burning
software that is shipped with about 70 percent of the estimated 100
million recordable CD units in the marketplace.
"How that technology will work or exactly what it
will do is unclear, although executives at the two companies
said one example might be to program CD burners to prohibit
copying of a song unless the user pays a fee."
An executive of Roxio says the interest is not in controlling what is
done today with CDs, but what will be done in the future with downloaded
music files.
Analysts suggest that consumers will not put up with restrictions on
what they can do with their CD burners, or with downloaded files they have
paid for.
How lucky that we have analysts to tell us that.. :-p
Here's a more detailed article about the EMI/Roxio proposal to put controls into CD burning software: http://www.siliconvalley.com/docs/news/depth/roxio060501.htm Emi's idea is that the consumer would buy a license to burn the downloaded music file; they think one in four CD sales could be done this way in five years. They say they view this as a new channel for sales. And here are two articles on the shape of the new for-pay Napster service: http://www.inside.com/jcs/Story?article_id=32416&pod_id=13 http://www.wired.com/news/mp3/0,1285,44322,00.html The inside.com article, by Charles C. Mann, is better, but unless Salon picks it up, the link will be broken in a day or three. Napster is going to charge for one level of access for downloading music from independent labels, and for another level of access to get to music from their three major-label partners in the RealNet alliance. The publishers are still a huge stumbling block in Napster's path towards a July re-launch as a centralized downloading service; the technical challenges are also seen as formidable, since no one has ever attempted to stream as much music as Napster is expected to dish out from a few central servers. The description of how the two-tier Napster will work -- with two separate pieces of user software, initially -- sound like another flop in the making.
A Cnet story about how ISP's are being pressured into helping copyright holders hunt down their customers: http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200-6221068.html?tag=st.mu.1652424.ncnet.1 005-200-6221068 ISPs argue that the DMCA covers having the ISP remove infringing material from the ISP's machines, but it does not cover terminating customers who are infringing copyrights from their own machines. The ISPs are worried that they will be found liable for their customers' copyright infringements by courts in Europe; ISPs are generally protected from such liability by US law.
That's like prosecuting telcos for their customers' harassing phone calls.
Telcos have clear protection in the law due to their status as "common carriers," who are obligated to carry the traffic of all comers. ISPs have not generally been recognized as "common carriers" since by Internet custom there are some activities of their users which they are expected to police, such as vandalism of other systems and sending lots of spam e-mail. ISPs had considerable & realistic liability worries until the DMCA granted them protection in the early 1990s. However, the protections of the DMCA cover American courts only, and many jurisdictions are now interested in extending extraterritoriality in Internet cases. My understanding of the trend in Europe is that European courts have been much more willing to bring ISPs into cases; at a minimum there are the two cases where Germany prosecuted CompuServe for transmitting pornography, and where France has pursued action against Yahoo over American-based sales of Nazi memorabilia. So if I ran a Napster clone on my PC and offered up copies of material of European origin, or offered them so they could be downloaded in Europe, the European rights holder would want to take action against my American ISP in European courts. (I'm tired and babbling...)
What jurisdiction would an EU court have over an American ISP? Even the French Nazi/Yahoo Auction thing is being reviewed because of jurisdictional concerns.
Another summary article on recent developments with the big record companies seizing control: http://www.economist.com/business/displayStory.cfm?Story_ID=656204 Note that the Universal/Sony "Duet" vaporware online service has now been renamed "pressplay." Quote on how the legitimate download systems may still produce a substantial revenue squeeze for the labels: "Even at $20-$30 a month, for unlimited downloads, the record companies could expect a steep drop in revenues per track: consumers in America now pay over $1 per track on a CD album, which will often contain songs they would never choose to pay for."
As someone mentioned in party recently, Audiogalaxy is where it's at. Here's a Cnet article summarizing recent developments in the music file trading scene for those of us who are technological Luddites: http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200-6282002.html?tag=tp_pr The quick summary: Napster may be fading away but new services are seeing explosive growth.
Yes, making it easy to download tracks probably causes people to download more of them. That's a deceptive measurement, though, since it's the initial production, not each downloaded copy, that costs the record companies significant amounts of money. It seems to me that the real question in terms of whether the record companies would gain or lose revenue from a $30 per month unlimited subscription service is whether the typical customer of that service would otherwise be spending $30 per month on CDs.
Eric in resp:138, on international jurisdiction over American ISPs: http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,5093109,00.html?chkpt=zdnn_tp_ This ZDnet story is about The Hague Convention on Jurisdiction and Foreign Judgements, a proposed treaty. "'In a nutshell, it will strangle the Internet with a suffocating blanket of overlapping jurisdictional claims, expose every Web page publisher to liabilities for libel, defamation and other speech offenses from virtually any country, (and) effectively strip Internet service providers of protections from litigation over the content they carry," Jamie Love, director of Ralph Nader's Consumer Project on Technology (CPT), wrote in a report after the meeting." ... "The Hague treaty differs... it is much broader, requiring participants to agree to enforce each others' laws on a variety of topics. As it stands, the treaty would require courts to enforce the commercial laws of the convention's 52 member nations, even if they prohibit actions that are legal under local laws." "Delegates did not soften speech laws to provide for countries that value the exchange of information. In addition, they strengthened some intellectual property provisions--over the objections of consumer groups. "'The bottom line is that it didn't go well,' said Barry Steinhardt, associate director of the American Civil Liberties Union... He said that although American delegates listened to free-speech worries, most others did not. "CPT's Love agreed. "We got our ass kicked," he said. 'It was a bad two weeks for us.' "Free-speech advocates fear US citizens could lose many of their rights if all web sites have to ensure they are following the narrowest laws, such as those of, say, China or Morocco."
I have a suspicion there are a lot of communists in China.
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