Blackmoor Vituperative

In response to the illegal hacking of customers’ computers by Sony, Stewart Baker, recently appointed by President Bush as the Department Of Homeland Security’s assistant secretary for policy, made a comment aimed directly at Sony and others who would illegally hack into their customers’ computers in the name of protecting their “intellectual property”:

In a remark clearly aimed directly at Sony and other labels, Stewart continued: “It’s very important to remember that it’s your intellectual property — it’s not your computer. And in the pursuit of protection of intellectual property, it’s important not to defeat or undermine the security measures that people need to adopt in these days.”

(from The Washington Post, DHS Official Weighs In on Sony)

What I want to know is where are the criminal charges? Why aren’t these people being arrested? This was a premeditated, wide-scale hacking attempt on a huge number of computers — I want to see people put in handcuffs and taken away to pay for their crime. I want to see large men with shaved heads do to Sony executives what Sony has been attempting to do to us.

I’ve been saying that things will get worse before they get better. They just got worse.

On Monday, October 31, alert users discovered that Sony BMG is using copy-protected CDs to surreptitiously install its digital rights management technology onto PCs. You don’t have to be ripping the CD, either–just playing it from your CD-ROM drive triggers the installation. The software installs itself as a root kit, which is a set of tools commonly used to make certain files and processes undetectable, and they’re the favored tool of crackers who are, as Wikipedia puts it, attempting to “maintain access to a system for malicious purposes.” In fact, root kits are often classified alongside Trojan horses. And Mark Russinovich, who created a root-kit detection utility and was one of the first to blog about the Sony intrusion, discovered another little gem when he tried to remove the DRM drivers. It broke his computer — disabling his CD drive.

(from CNet, DRM this, Sony!)

Folks, this is illegal (and I’m reporting it to the FBI). But will anyone at Sony be prosecuted for this crime? Don’t hold your breath.

Here’s a tip from me to Sony, RIAA, and the rest of the media robber barons: if you want to compete with services like AllOfMP3.com, do what they do, do it better, and do it cheaper. If you continue to pin your hopes on DRM, you will fail, you will be reviled, and your stockholders will suffer.

Tom Merritt at CNet provides a pretty good primer for what Creative Commons is, and addresses some of the confusion that people might have about it.

David Wheeler has written a great article on Why OpenDocument Won (and Microsoft Office Open XML Didn’t). I won’t bother excerpting it here: you should go read the whole thing.

The U.S. Patent Office has rejected two Microsoft patents over the FAT file format, but the software maker said Wednesday that it’s not ready to give up its battle to protect its widely used method for storing data.

The patent office delivered its ruling late last month but made it public this week. With one of the patents, the decision is what’s considered a final rejection, while with another it’s considered nonfinal. In both cases, Microsoft has the ability to pursue its claims further.

The rejections come after a re-examination of the patents was sought by the Public Patent Foundation, which argued that they were invalid because there was “prior art,” that is, evidence that others had done similar work before Microsoft’s patent application. A U.S. Patent Office examiner issued a preliminary rejection of one Microsoft patent in September 2004.

(from ZDNet, Microsoft’s Linux-related patents rejected)

Don’t celebrate yet: money is the engine of our legal sytem, and Microsoft has a lot of it. It’s only a matter of time until they buy what they need to shut Linux down within the USA. To be clear, I do not begrudge Microsoft their millions: I believe that they earned most of it. What vexes me is that our legal system and our legislators are open to the highest bidder.

It will get worse before it gets better.

Part of the problem with PCGen, and the core of what has enabled third parties to create patches for PCGen which both violate PCGen’s license and break PCGen itself, is the setting for “PCGen System Files” under “Preferences”.

It was a mistake for PCGen to allow third-parties to override portions of PCGen’s system files — particularly when PCGen itself is a LGPL product, and the third-party system files may not be. A third party who overwrites PCGen’s system files with non-(L)GPL code would be flagrantly violating the license (sections 5 and 6, specifically). It is obviously not in PCGen’s best interests to encourage violation of the license under which PCGen is released. If someone wants to create a derivative work of PCGen, they should fork the project and release their own application, not back-door the LGPL by patching PCGen.

License issues aside, allowing third-parties to override PCGen’s system files will inevitably result in incompatible versions of PCGen running around, some of which have standard system files and some of which don’t, causing user confusion and data set incompatibility. A bad scene, any way you look at it. Bad for PCGen, bad for PCGen’s users, bad for everyone.

(Incidentally, PCGen should be released under the GPL, not the LGPL: the LGPL is not appropriate for a stand-alone application like PCGen. But that’s kind of beside the point.)

Ultimately, it is the responsibility of the PCGen copyright owner(s) to make sure that third parties comply with the license under which PCGen is released. If they choose not to do so (and it appears that they are perfectly happy releasing PCGen under an inappropriate license, and having third parties flagrantly violate PCGen’s license), then there is nothing that anyone else can do about it.

C’est la vie.

The best that users of PCGen can do is be forewarned: do not install any third-party product which requires overriding the PCGen system files. It will cause nothing but problems.

News from the Free Software Foundation is that the next version of the GPL may include penalties against those who patent software or use DRM in their products.

Specifically, the new GNU GPL (General Public License) may contain a patent retaliation clause. …

Other open-source licenses already do, noted Larry Rosen, founding partner of a partner in the law firm Rosenlaw & Einschlag and author of “Open-Source Licensing: Software Freedom and Intellectual Property Law.”

“I’m pleased that FSF is going to add patent defense to its new GPL 3. Many other open-source licenses have such provisions already,” said Rosen.

(from eWeek, New GPL Will Contain Patent Protection

I’m not sure adding penalties will actually accompish anything, though. If anything, I think they might chill the widespread adoption of open source software. Which is a shame, because, in principle, I think they’re a great idea: as Greve said, software patents and DRM are a menace to society.

All OpenOffice.org source code and binaries (executable files) up to and including OpenOffice.org 2 Beta 2 are licensed under both the LGPL and SISSL. Effective 2 September 2005, all code in the 2.0 codeline will be licensed exclusively under the LGPL. All future versions of OpenOffice.org, beyond OpenOffice.org 2 Beta 2, will thus be released under the LGPL only. The change in licensing implicitly affects all languages and platforms in which OpenOffice.org is distributed.

(from OpenOffice.org, License Simplification FAQ)

This goes along with the OSI initiative to trim the ridiculous number of OSI-approved open source licenses down from 50 or so to around 3, which I wrote about back in February. At this rate, it’ll be the year 2026 before they reach their goal. Still, kudos to Sun for taking that scary step of altering their license.

In a spectacular demonstration of amazingly good sense, the commonwealth of Massachusetts has proposed a plan to phase out office productivity applications from Microsoft and other providers in favor of those based on “open” standards, including the recently approved OpenDocument standard.

The state’s move is a boost to the relatively new standard, whose full name is the OASIS Open Document Format for Office Applications. It’s also a blow to Microsoft, which dominates the office application market and has found government customers to be among those most aggressively considering open-source alternatives.

The OpenDocument format, which was ratified as a standard in May, covers office applications, including word processors, spreadsheets and charts.

It is the default format for the OpenOffice open-source suite of applications and is supported in suites by Novell and Sun Microsystems and by IBM in its Workplace products.

(from ZDNet, Massachusetts to adopt ‘open’ desktop)

Microsoft responded with the usual FUD, of course:

Alan Yates, Microsoft’s general manager of Information Worker business strategy, criticized the Massachusetts proposal, saying it was “confusing”. …

Yates reiterated the Microsoft does not intend to natively support the OpenDocument format, which he said was very specific to the OpenOffice 2.0 open-source suite.

He said Microsoft can provide the same data interoperability and archiving that Massachusetts is pursuing because Microsoft publishes the XML schema of its Office applications and makes available through a royalty free license.

(from ZDNet, Massachusetts to adopt ‘open’ desktop)

This is terrific news, I heartily commend the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and I hope that Virginia follows their lead. It kind of reminds me of that poster with the little white mouse and the hawk, though. You know the one: the hawk is swooping down, and the mouse is about to be caught and eaten, but the mouse is giving the hawk the finger. At the top of the poster is the word “DEFIANCE”.

I am not sure I would be this brave, but I’m sure glad that someone is.

Patricia Santangelo is in many ways the embodiment of the suburban mom.

She is the mother of five children, ranging in age from 6 to 19. She is divorced, living in Wappingers Falls after growing up in Yorktown and Putnam County. At 42, she works as a property manager for a real estate company and is trying to get her own business off the ground….

Santangelo was sued by several record companies in U.S. District Court in White Plains in February. The record companies said Santangelo’s home computer and Internet account were used to illegally trade copyrighted song files. The record companies say people like Santangelo are destroying the multibillion-dollar industry….

Record companies have filed about 13,300 similar federal lawsuits against Internet users across the country since September 2003…. None of the cases has gone to trial.

Opponents of the record companies’ lawsuits have said they hoped someone would challenge the companies’ tactics in court rather than settle.

“If this particular woman is willing to go to trial, that’s something new,” said Jason Schultz, a staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights advocacy group that opposes the lawsuits. “The threat is so great that most people don’t even risk it.”…

U.S. District Judge Colleen McMahon will decide the issue.

McMahon already has had a glimpse of the case from a conference May 6, before Santangelo had a lawyer. The judge told Santangelo she should get an attorney….

“I would love to see a mom fighting one of these,” the judge said.

(from The Joural News, Taking on record companies)

Way to go, Patricia.