Wired News: File Sharing Goes to High Court
I have my fingers crossed on this one. If these file-sharing services can be held responsible for the actions of their users, what does that mean for any company developing software that allows people to connect via public networks? What about ISP’s and common-carrier laws? What about FTP, IM, Email and so on?
The devil in this one may be that the media companies will renew vigor in lobbying congress for legislation like the INDUCE act.
Category: Copyright
BroadSnatching – Get that Content
HOW-TO: BroadSnatching to a Portable Media Center – Engadget – www.engadget.com
From the article:
Getting video on a Portable Media Center is a fairly complicated task, but not because it’s all that hard, it’s just because no one has ever shown folks how. It’s a lot easier if you have a Media Center PC (MCE), but even if you don’t have an MCE, we showed you how to put DVDs on your Portable Media Center when we reviewed the Creative Zen.
BeyondTV – Keeping my eye on this one!
BeyondTV: BeyondTV – An offline internet TV project
This is an undercurrents project to create a real alternative to the centralization of media by narrow corporate power. Its not an Indymedia project as quality control is too much of an issues- TV with out quality control is not open to normal people to watch. Most activist media is made for a tiny minority of popule and is un-intelligible/un-whatebal outside this minority.
The project will work in a number of stages the first being a functional full screen activist TV channel, based on MPG1 and MPG4 content from the current archive of ruffcuts and euro/US Indymedia newsreal CD‚Äôs (we have over 20 hour of programming encoded and access to at least another 20 hours). Secondly stage we add ‚Äúautomatic functionality‚Ä? and some user input into viewing choices. Third stage a re-write to create a decentralized user rated P2P universal TV network when we have good experiences of the idea working in a practical way. I feel it is paramount that we start at the beginning using simple, thus reliable, tools and techniques.
Open Access Directory Of RSS News Feeds
Open Access Directory Of RSS News Feeds: Who Is For It? – Robin Good’s Latest News
Of course, THIS site is for it and already has a CC license that supports such.
Hillary support’s The INDUCE Act
I was dismayed to learn that Senator Hillary Clinton has come out and in fact co-sponsored Senator Hatch’s Induce Act. What follows is a draft of a letter that I am writing to Sen. Clinton to express my concern. I hope that others will do the same.
Here is some background material:
http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c108:S.2560:
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,64315,00.html
http://techlawadvisor.com/induce/
http://www.corante.com/importance/archives/004563.html
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20040618-3906.html
http://www.futureofmusic.org/articles/INDUCEanalysis.cfm
http://action.eff.org/site/pp.asp?c=esJNJ5OWF&b=164928
Like your iPod, read this:
http://www.eff.org/IP/Apple_Complaint.php
Please comment on the letter as you see fit.
Dear Senator Clinton,
I was dismayed to learn that you have come out in support of Senator Hatch’s Induce Act. I hope that on further consideration of the issues that this bill covers that you change your stance to better reflect the opinions of your constituents and for the betterment of our society.
The Induce act as it currently is written does much to stifle free-speech, artistic and fair uses of media. Imposing legal responsibility on the makers of devices and software for illegal use such device or software will create a burden so great on manufacturers and creators of such programs that they will not develop or offer products that have potential for misuse.
I fear that by trying to curb the theft of copyrighted material you will instead be curbing the ability for individuals and groups with legitimate uses for the technology that enables such to use it. Being thoroughly immersed in an academic and artistic atmosphere, I am witness every day to fair uses of technology that would not exist today were such a law in existence. In fact I feel that the software that I am using to write this letter would not have been developed simply because it includes the ability to cut and paste text from any source into the document.
I believe that should this Bill become law that it will undo much of the progress of free-speech and alternative media creation that has been enabled by the internet, personal electronic devices, computers, tape recorders and so on. Furthermore it will be a giant step backwards and lead to increased power by the media and further relegate citizens to the role of consumer without a voice.
I hope that you will reconsider your position on this matter.
Thank you for your time.
Sincerely,
Shawn Van Every
Helix DRM implements “Broadcast Flag”
Real’s Helix Move
Ok, so, Helix DRM is open source… Broadcast Flag is the broadcast industry’s attempt at making it impossible to make perfect copies of digitally delivered media (DTV).
So my question is, since Helix implements it, meaning that it pays attention and can include the flag in subsequent uses of the media and Helix is open source, why can’t some enterprising coders just modify the Helix DRM to act like it cares but strip the flag out in the final product? I don’t get it… I just don’t get it.
Wow! Japan copyright laws worse than ours..
Japanese website closed after screenshot-related arrest – Ferrago
From the story:
Reports this morning inform us of the rather troubling news from Japan that the owner and Editor of popular online gaming site Gamesonline, one of Japan’s most popular news sites, has been arrested for alleged breach of copyright concerning screenshots used on his website.
Documentating a defense of open source
Welcome to the Grokline Project: Grokline’s UNIX Ownership History Project
From the site:
This is an open, community-based, collaborative research project, a living history, designed to carefully trace the ownership history of UNIX and UNIX-like code with the goal of reducing, or eliminating, the amount of software subject to superficially plausible but ultimately invalid copyright, patent and trade secret claims against Linux or other free and open source software. If there is any code out there that represents a conceivable risk of that kind, we’d like to identify it and mitigate the litigation risk now. If there isn’t any valid claim that can be made, we’d like to be able to prove it.
RIAA: We must not allow any use, let alone fair use
Mindjack – Will Digital Radio Be Napsterized? by J.D. Lasica
From the article:
The Recording Industry Association of America has discovered that digital radio broadcasts can be copied and redistributed over the Internet.
The horror.
And so the RIAA, the music business’s trade and lobbying group, has asked the Federal Communications Commission to step in and impose an “audio broadcast flag” on certain forms of digital radio.
Clear Channel using patent to keep bands from selling concert CDs
“>RollingStone.com
Another example of patent abuse.
From the story:
Artists net about ten dollars for every twenty- to twenty-five-dollar concert CD that’s sold, no matter which company they use. But with Clear Channel pushing to eliminate competition, many fear there will be less money and fewer opportunities to sell live discs. “It’s one more step toward massive control and consolidation of Clear Channel’s corporate agenda,” says String Cheese Incident manager Mike Luba, who feuded with Clear Channel last year after promoters blocked the band from using CD-burning equipment.