Blackmoor Vituperative

Julie Harris-Hulcher has an interesting article about Lovcecraft’s work and how it thrived while eschewing the protections of conventional copyright. It is worthy of serious consideration.

The article itself is part of The Reader’s Guide To The Cthulhu Mythos.

Defective By Design presents ten things you can do today to fight the Digital Rights Mafia.

Microsoft has filed a federal lawsuit against an alleged hacker who broke through its copy protection technology, charging that the mystery developer somehow gained access to its copyrighted source code.

For more than a month, the Redmond, Wash., company has been combating a program released online called FairUse4WM, which successfully stripped anticopying guards from songs downloaded through subscription media services such as Napster or Yahoo Music.

Microsoft has released two successive patches aimed at disabling the tool. The first worked — but the hacker, known only by the pseudonym “Viodentia,” quickly found a way around the update, the company alleges. Now the company says this was because the hacker had apparently gained access to copyrighted source code unavailable to previous generations of would-be crackers.

(from ZDNet, Microsoft sues over source code theft)

I see two possible explanations for this. Either it is inconceivable to Microsoft that anyone could break their Digital Rights Mafia scheme without having inside information, or they are subverting the legal system in order advance their corporate interests (again).

The Free Software Foundation has recently clarified “inaccurate” information about GPLv3. The clarification closely follows the release of a position paper signed by top Linux developers, in which they announce their objections to the proposed GPLv3. Linus Torvalds was a noteworthy exception. He recently explained why he didn’t sign the GPLv3 position statement, but why he still supports the GPLv2 open-source license.

As much as I despise the Digital Rights Mafia, I have to agree with two of the points made by the Linux kernel developers. First, adding anti-Digital Rights Mafia conditions to the GPL imposes something that GPL v2 is justly praised for lacking: end use restrictions. You do not have to agree with anyone’s politics or agenda to work with them on a GPL v2 project — all you have to do is agree to share your work. It’s politically and culturally neutral. I don’t think enough people appreciate how valuable that is. Second, the additional restrictions section is a huge problem. The Linux kernel developers declare that this section “makes GPLv3 a pick and choose soup of possible restrictions which is going to be a nightmare for our distributions to sort out legally and get right. Thus, it represents a significant and unacceptable retrograde step over GPLv2 and its no additional restrictions clause.” That’s about as clear as anyone can put it, I think.

So as much as I sympathize with the goals of the people working on GPL v3, I don’t think I’ll be using it, or working on any projects that do. (Not that I am doing much open source programming — or programming at all — now that I am at Circuit City, but I hope that this is a temporary situation.)

The British Library has called for a “serious updating” of current copyright law to “unambiguously” include digital content and take technological advances into account.

In a manifesto released on Monday at the Labor Party Conference in Manchester, the United Kingdom’s national library warned that the country’s traditional copyright law needs to be extended to fully recognize digital content.

[…]

“DRM is a technical device, but it’s being used in an all-embracing sense. It can’t be circumvented for disabled access or preservation, and the technology doesn’t expire (as traditional copyright does). In effect, it’s overriding exceptions to copyright law,” Brindley said.

[…]

“One of the key problems is that the limitations and exceptions to copyright law are being ignored by business, which is imposing restrictive licenses on digital content,” Suw Charman, executive director of the Open Rights Group, told ZDNet UK.

Charman said DRM restrictions could be particularly damaging for academic research.

“If a library carried a printed journal, academics and students could photocopy it. Digital journals have restrictions on access, which is a dangerous road to go down,” Charman said. “If we allow companies to create their own licenses, we undermine copyright law. If we say contract law is more important than copyright law, it allows publishers to write whatever license they like, which is what is happening now.”

[…]

The British Library also called for the question of “orphan works” — content whose rights holder is hard to find — to be addressed.

(CNET News.com, British Library calls for digital copyright action)

Way to go, British Library!

Controversy has erupted over an initiative by the Open Source Development Labs, known as Open Source as Prior Art, which is designed to improve the quality of software patents and thereby reduce the number of patents that can be used to threaten open-source software developers and users.

The goal of OSAPA is to reduce the number of poor-quality patents that are issued by increasing accessibility to open-source software code and documentation that can be used as prior art during the patent examination process.

(from eWeek, OSDL Patent Project Under Attack)

At the root of it, Stallman objects to this because it implicitly legitimizes software patents and will probably undermine any effort to get rid of them entirely. I can’t say that I disagree with him, in principle, but in reality I think the elimination of software patents is as likely as the election of a libertarian President. Yes, it would be good for practically everyone, and a huge improvement over what we have now, but people are too greedy and short-sighted to ever let it happen. So I think OSDL’s project will do more good than harm.

But I still vote libertarian.

PlaysForSure is essentially the brand name for Microsoft’s DRM and it’s supposed to be the cue. You can’t help but spot the contradiction between the name “PlaysForSure” and what Amazon has written on it’s Web site. On one hand, the phrase “plays for sure” is designed to breed confidence in end users that the content will play for sure. On the other, it doesn’t play on anything Apple makes and it’s not guaranteed to work by Amazon with content acquired through Amazon if the device is PlaysForSure-compliant but not listed on Amazon’s list of tested devices. Furthermore, going back to the statement about the Unbox player not being able to play video content downloaded from other vendors, if I’m to understand that correctly, Unbox can play PlaysForSure-compliant content from Amazon, but no one else (an example of why, just like the way I call Apple’s FairPlay DRM “UnFairPlay,” I call Microsoft’s DRM “PlaysForSuren’t”). Not to mention how, if every Amazon-like source of content decided to take that route, how overly bloated and complex our systems would be with redundant technology that all does the same thing.

All this because of DRM. Perhaps now you understand why I have a different name for DRM: C.R.A.P. (Cancellation, Restriction, And Punishment). Just look at the eggshells Amazon has to walk on when rolling out a potentially cool service and all the crap that customers have to put up with if they want a guarantee from Amazon that what they buy will actually work. Oh, and if it doesn’t work? Again, from the Amazon FAQ:

Can I return an Amazon Unbox video after I purchase it? No. Amazon Unbox products are not returnable once purchased.

But wait. It gets worse.

(from ZDNet, Amazon’s brand new UnBox video download service relies on (recently hacked) Microsoft DRM)

My position on media crippled with DRM aka CRAP is very simple: I do not buy it, and I urge others not to buy it either. Vote with your wallets, people. Don’t reward the media robber barons by giving them your money.

Apple Computer and Creative Technology have agreed to settle their legal dispute over music player patents for $100 million, the companies announced Wednesday.

The $100 million, to be paid by Apple, grants Apple a license to a Creative patent for the hierarchical user interface used in that company’s Zen music players. After months of hinting that it would be coming after rival music player companies, Creative sued Apple in May, claiming the iPod maker was infringing on its patents.

[…]

The patent covers an interface that lets users navigate through a tree of expanding options, such as selecting an artist, then a particular album by that artist, then a specific song from that album, said Phil O’Shaughnessy, a Creative spokesman. The patent applies to portable media players, which includes devices like the iPod or cell phones that have the ability to play music, he said. Creative filed for the patent on Jan. 5, 2001.

(from ZDNet, Apple settles with Creative for $100 million)

The real loser here is the American public, because yet another ridiculous patent has survived. Beyond ridiculous: Creative was granted a patent on hierarchical menus, for crying out loud!

I am too disgusted to even make a snide comment.

There are all sorts of stories whirling around the Internet regarding the pros and cons of desktop Linux as well as its chances of adoption (or track record so far) that I thought I’d try to connect the dots to form a more coherent picture (well, perhaps a confusing picture).

(from ZDNet, The skinny on desktop Linux)

This is a really good article that touches on several issues (Linux, the next version of the GPL, DRM, the crashing of Apple laptops, the evil of iPods, and so forth), with lots of interesting links. You should read it.