krj
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The Twenty-fourth "Napsterization" Item
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Mar 29 17:01 UTC 2006 |
The usual canned introduction:
The original Napster corporation has been destroyed, its trademarks
now owned by an authorized music retailer which does not use peer-to-peer
technology. But the Napster paradigm, in which computers and networks
give ordinary people unprecedented control over content, continues.
This is another quarterly installment in a series of weblog and
discussion about the deconstruction of the music industry and other
copyright industries, with side forays into "intellectual property,
freedom of expression, electronic media, corporate control, and evolving
technology," as polygon once phrased it.
Several years of back items are easily found in the music2 and music3
conferences, covering discussions all the way back to the initial
popularity of the MP3 format. These items are linked between
the current Agora conference and the Music conference.
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krj
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response 1 of 46:
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Mar 29 17:09 UTC 2006 |
News from Euroland: France has been moving a bill on digital
copyright issues through its legislature, and keeping up with what
has been happening is hampered by our unfamiliarity with the language,
and our unfamiliarity with the French legislative process.
At one point the draft legislation proposed to legalize peer-to-peer
file swapping through the payment of a small compulsory license fee.
That provision sent the French copyright industry into a panic, and
it was deleted from the legislation. However, the current version
is reported to penalize file sharing at about the same level as
minor traffic violations. The fine for downloading copyrighted
material is set at 38 euros; the fine for uploading is about 100 euros.
Germany, in contrast, has just pushed through a law making unauthorized
downloading a felony punishable with two years in prison. As the EU
countries are supposed to be harmonizing their laws, it will be interesting
to see how this plays out.
The new French legislation has a goal of mandating interoperability
among digital music file sellers and digital music file players.
I think this is proposed to happen by forcing market players to
disclose information necessary to allow competitors to build
interoperable systems. This is widely seen as targeting Apple, who have
a somewhat closed market with the iPod players and iTunes store; their
Digital Restrictions Management system is proprietary, so songs bought
on iTunes will not (easily) work with other systems. But I don't
see why it wouldn't hurt Windows Media just as much; if the WMA guts
have to be disclosed, it should be trivial for programmers to write
open source code to unlock the WMA files.
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