Blackmoor Vituperative

A Russian headmaster said on May 7 a court has fined him half his monthly wage for using pirated copies of Microsoft software at his school in a case President Vladimir Putin has called “utter nonsense.”

Prosecutors said Alexander Ponosov had violated Microsoft’s property rights by allowing pupils to use 12 computers with unlicensed copies of Microsoft Windows and Office software.

Ponosov, a headmaster in a remote school in the Perm region of the Ural mountains, said he did not know the computers had fake licenses when they were delivered by a sub-contractor.

Russia has been urged to crack down on the widespread availability of cheap pirated software, films and music as it prepares to enter the World Trade Organization.

[…]

“Today the court brought in a guilty verdict — they ordered me to pay a fine of 5,000 roubles ($194.4),” Ponosov told Reuters by telephone from the Perm region.

“I consider myself not guilty and I will file an appeal,” he said, adding that he had not paid the fine. He said he earned about 10,000 roubles a month.

Putin has described the case as “utter nonsense” and former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev even asked Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates to intercede on the teacher’s behalf.

(eWeek, Russian Teacher Fined in Microsoft Piracy Case)

Take heed, true believers: this is exactly what the Digital Rights Mafia (DRM) is all about. You are not a consumer: you are a criminal, and the media robbers barons will twist the legal system into pretzels to make sure you get what they think you deserve.

We are all Alexander Ponosov, and it will get much worse before it gets better. Half your monthly salary is nothing compared to what the Digital Rights Mafia wants from you.

Michael Geist has it right, when speaking of the US bullying of other countries to get them to adopt US-style copyright legislation:

Not only are the policies suspect, but the USTR report should be seen for what it is — a biased analysis of foreign law supported by a well-orchestrated lobby effort.

(from BBC News, Ignore the US copyright bullies)

The Norway Liberal Party (Venstre) which is holding 6% of the seats in parliament has issued a resolution stating that “Copyright law is outdated”.

“A society where culture and knowledge is free and accessible by everyone on equal terms is a common good. Large distributors and copyright owners systematically and widely misuse copyright, and thereby stall artistic development and innovation.”

Here are some changes proposed by the party “to reinstate the balance in copyright law”:

– Free file sharing for personal use “Laws and regulations, both national and international, need to be changed so they only regulate limitations of use and distribution in a commercial for-profit context.”
– Shorter commercial copyright term (the current span in Norway is 70 years).
– Ban on DRM – “…anyone who has bought the right to use a product needs a technologically neutral way of using it. This means that distributors can not control how citizens wish to play back legally bought digital music.”

“It is wrong to make an entire generation of criminals,” said vice chairwoman of the Liberal Party, Trine Skei Grande. “We managed to make compensation models when the photocopier was invented, but we haven’t managed to do anything about modern technology. The law must adapt to the citizens and the impact of technological innovation.”

(from The Register, Norwegian liberals call for relaxation of copyright laws)

Way to go, Norway. Well, 6% of Norway, anyway.

Recent weeks have brought major changes in the music industry as it relates to online digital music distribution. In March over six thousand people signed our open letter to Steve Jobs about DRM. Now Apple and EMI have now committed to distributing without Digital Restrictions Management (DRM), and there have been similar announcements from other online music stores and retailers. Last week brought news that Universal Music may be opening up some of their catalog to DRM free sales too.

One of the most outspoken opponents to ending DRM has been Edgar Bronfman, Jr., the CEO and Chairman of Warner Music Group. On Monday we launched a multi pronged campaign to ?Wake Up Warner? with DefectiveByDesign members calling Warner Music executives and an open letter to Edgar Bronfman, Jr. Take a moment to sign the letter and spread the word (http://www.defectivebydesign.org/actions/open_letter/warner_music). We will be closing the letter on Friday and sending it with your signature to send a wake up call to Bronfman from music fans and customers: DRM is dead and Warner should change its position.

Sign the letter today!
http://www.defectivebydesign.org/actions/open_letter/warner_music

In other news, the encryption for HD DVD DRM has been cracked and the key has been widely circulated in the last few days proving once again the futility of DRM schemes. DefectiveByDesign is planning actions in cities around the world and will be launching an open letter to the MPAA and studio executives urging them to abandon their support for for DRM later this month. Look for more on these actions next week!
In solidarity,

Gregory, Peter, Henri and the DRM Elimination Crew

(from DefectiveByDesign)

Apparently Digg.com has been dealing with the fallout of the HD DVD crack:

Congratulations to the Digg users who revolted against the censorship of a number today. Digg took down stories that featured the DRM encryption key for HD DVD encryption. Digg users then started reposting it until the entire front page of Digg was covered with the story and each one had thousands of Diggs.

After tens of thousands of diggs on multiple stories, Digg has decided to stop fighting it.

The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) has been abusing its power with legal takedown notices to websites publishing this number. They are fighting a losing battle trying to hold on to the power they purchased for their clients pushing bad legislation like that included in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) that has made it illegal to circumvent a DRM scheme.

What happened today is an example of how preposterous DRM is. Every major DRM has been cracked, and once it is, it is useless, and the money invested in it is wasted. Companies are hell bent on locking up their paying customers with DRM, but today’s action shows it wont work. A new day has dawned.

(from DefectiveByDesign)

I don’t know that I’d paint the picture as rosy as that. Just because a few thousand consumers rebel against the Digital Rights Mafia doesn’t mean “a new day has dawned”. Hell, RIAA has sued at least that many of their paying customers (and have bullied tens of thousands more), and Sony knowingly and cheerfully infected hundreds of thousands of their customers’ computers with a rootkit. The Digital Rights Mafia clearly place a higher priority on control than they do on profit, much less customer good will. It’ll probably be another twenty years before they give up on their war against their customers, minimum.

Still, it’s nice to see people stand up and do the right thing. Speaking truth to power, and all that.

Oh, and by the way… Blu-Ray has been cracked, too (although not BD+… yet).

When it comes to technology patents and the effect they have on innovation and the ability to use and create technology, the news is usually on the bad side (for example some company crushing a competitor using a patent, or a troll attacking real innovators with a questionable patent).

But finally the news is good, possibly even very good. Today the U.S. Supreme Court made a ruling (PDF) that will make it much harder to get iffy patents and even harder to attack real innovators with these iffy patents.

In this case, which had some of largest technology companies in the world arguing on both sides, the Supreme Court has removed a very weak test for whether an invention is obvious, making it much harder to get a patent on an obvious technique, such as one that merely combines several other inventions in an obvious way.

This is huge news. Many of the worst and most egregious patents out there simply take a known idea and add an obvious twist to it. With this new decision, the court has made it much harder to get a patent in this way. Even better, it looks as if it will be possible to now use this ruling to go after other existing bad patents that were based on obvious ideas. This one court ruling could possibly lead to the removal of many of the worst patents out there today and finally make some real innovation possible.

So, thank you, U.S. Supreme Court. We don’t always see eye to eye, but today it looks like you got it right. Here’s one of my favorite quotes from the decision:

“We build and create by bringing to the tangible and palpable reality around us new works based on instinct, simple logic, ordinary inferences, extraordinary ideas, and sometimes even genius. These advances, once part of our shared knowledge, define a new threshold from which innovation starts once more. And as progress beginning from higher levels of achievement is expected in the normal course, the results of ordinary innovation are not the subject of exclusive rights under the patent laws. Were it otherwise patents might stifle, rather than promote, the progress of useful arts.”

Couldn’t have said it better myself.

(from eWeek, Big Win in the War Against Patents)

Yay! Hooray! Yippee!

Almost two years ago, the FSF (Free Software Foundation) started work on the first update of the GNU GPL (General Public License) in over a decade. A last-minute hitch, though, is keeping the license from appearing.

The FSF announced at the May 2005 LinuxWorld Expo that the GPLv3 would be out soon . The project has taken a little longer than expected. At last report, the GPLv3 (GNU General Public License 3) was to be out by early 2007.

According to Peter Brown, the FSF’s executive director, “We continue to work on the details of the GPLv3 as it relates to the situation presented by the Novell and Microsoft deal. We are researching issues related to potential unintended consequences of the language we plan to adopt. As soon as we are satisfied with the results of our research we plan to bring forward the next draft.”

As written, the patent clauses in the Novell/Microsoft agreement do not violate the current terms of the GPLv2. The leader of the FSF and chief author of the GPL, Richard Stallman, explained at a GPL meeting in Tokyo in November 2006: “What has happened is, Microsoft has not given Novell a patent license, and thus, section 7 of GPL version 2 does not come into play. Instead, Microsoft offered a patent license that is rather limited to Novell’s customers alone.”

Stallman went on to say that “perhaps it’s a good thing that Microsoft did this now, because we discovered that the text we had written for GPL version 3 would not have blocked this, but it’s not too late and we’re going to make sure that when GPL version 3 really comes out it will block such deals.”

Sources close to the creation of the new version of the GPL believed that correcting this language wouldn’t take long to craft. If so, the GPLv3 would still have appeared by its last scheduled delivery date of January 15, 2007. That did not prove to be the case.

It now appears that there may be one more draft of the GPLv3 before the final version is released. [Sources believe] that the next draft should appear on or immediately before its annual associate member and activist meeting March 27 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass.

(from eWeek, Where, Oh Where, Is the GPLv3?)

This is crazy. It’s like an arms race: companies like Microsoft keep trying to find new ways to screw people over, and the FSF keeps having to come up with new defenses against them. Well, I’m glad at least the FSF is in my corner.

While the US courts recently reaffirmed Microsoft’s FAT patents, the German Patent Federal Court has just dismissed the patent for use in Germany. According to a report in the German news publication Heise Online, the court has denied the protection that the European Patent Office granted to Microsoft under EP 0618540 for a “common namespace for long and short filenames”. This was based on Microsoft’s U.S. Patent No. 5,758,352. The German Patent Court stated that the patent claims Microsoft made are “not based on inventive activity”.

(from OSNews.com, Microsoft Fails to Patent FAT in Germany)

It gives me some small hope for the future when I learn of isolated pockets of good sense out there in the world. Way to go, Germany.

A federal jury in San Diego has ordered Microsoft to pay $1.5 billion to Alcatel-Lucent in a patent dispute over MP3 audio technology used in Windows.

[…]

Microsoft said it believes that it properly licensed MP3 technology from Fraunhofer, paying that company $16 million. Fraunhofer, which helped develop the MP3 compression technology along with Lucent’s Bell Labs, has licensed its intellectual property to companies that want to use the audio format in their products. Fraunhofer has since handed the MP3-licensing duties over to Thomson.

Scores of technology companies, including Apple, Intel and Texas Instruments, license the MP3 technology, according to Thomson’s MP3licensing.com.

(from Tech News on ZDNet, Microsoft hit with $1.5 billion patent verdict)

I am no fan of Microsoft, but this is ridiculous. They licensed the technology from the accepted licensor, Fraunhofer. Maybe if enough cases like this go to court, large software companies like Microsoft will get a ticket to the clue train, and realize that software patents are expensive, absurd, and should be abolished. Maybe if companies like Microsoft start lobbying against software patents, our well-meaning government officials will do something in the public’s interest for once.

While on that track, I read an interesting essay by Paul Graham, who makes the argument that software patents are really no different than hardware patents — that embodying a process in hardware is not intrinsically different than embodying a process in software, and that as time goes on more and more of what “used to be done with levers and cams and gears are now done with loops and trees and closures”. He makes a good point. He has nearly convinced me that all patents should be abolished. But don’t assume that this was his intention. It’s a well-constructed article, with much food for thought. Read it.

The British government has rejected a petition from UK residents to ban DRM. Their response was preposterous in its naivety. The UK government suggests that DRM adds value for the customer!

I mentioned the Julie Amero case the other day — the substitute teacher being sent to prison because the computer in her classroom was infected with malware. Lest you think that small-town America is the only place this sort of thing happens, listen to the case of Russian teacher Alexandr Ponosov:

[…] the police in Russia have arrested a software pirate, prosecuted the malefactor to the full extent of the law and are preparing to send the miscreant to a Siberian prison camp.

[…] the Russian courts have convicted Alexander Ponosov, the principal of a middle school in a remote Ural Mountains village, for unwittingly buying PCs for his students that were loaded with unlicensed copies of Microsoft software.

(from eWeek, Sentenced to the Intellectual Property Gulag)

Just to clarify something here: what Ponosov is accused of is not “piracy”. It is not “theft”. There were no cutlass-wielding brigands or black-masked burglars. The crime of which Posonov has been convicted is copyright infringement: the same offense committed by the MPAA when they copied Kirby Dick’s documentary “This Film Is Not Yet Rated“. For this heinous offense, Ponosov faces a fine of 266,000 rubles, or $10,042, and up to five years in a Siberian prison camp. That’s not a metaphor — that is a literal statement. It is a prison camp in Siberia.

The media robber barons could, in theory, show some mercy to Mr. Ponosov and retract their complaint against him. But sending people like Mr. Ponosov to Siberia is exactly what they want. These are not simply businessmen and women trying to compete in a marketplace — they are monsters.

Mikhail Gorbachev published an open letter on the Web site of his charitable foundation, calling on Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates to intercede on Ponosov’s behalf on the grounds that the teacher wasn’t aware that PCs contained pirated software. The letter describes Ponosov as a teacher “who has devoted his life to educating children and who is getting for his work a meager salary that can in no way compare with the income that your company average executives are paid” at Microsoft.

“But under the circumstances, we are addressing you with a plea of leniency and withdrawal of claim against Alexandr Ponosov,” said Gorbachev’s letter.

Microsoft cares about children, right? Microsoft isn’t evil, right? Certainly they’d do something, right?

The New York Times reported Tuesday that Microsoft’s public relations agency in London released a statement that the company was “sure that the Russian courts will make a fair decision.” The statement also lauded the Russian government’s effort to prosecute software “piracy” cases, according to the Times report. “We do respect the Russian government’s position on the importance of protecting intellectual property rights,” the statement said.

I am sickened. You should be, too.

eWeek reports that the Digital Rights Mafia is still bitching and moaning about how digital music is slowly replacing CDs, even though people still buy 10 times as many CDs as they download. The media robber barons blame so-called “pirates” — which is to say, their customers. They ought to look closer to home.

As long as the Big Four music labels and the Digital Rights Mafia insist on infecting their products with DRM, people aren’t going to buy it. Even Steve Jobs has finally realized what many of us knew back when he was pushing DRM in 2003 — that DRM is a colossal waste of time and money.

Imagine a world where every online store sells DRM-free music encoded in open licensable formats. In such a world, any player can play music purchased from any store, and any store can sell music which is playable on all players. This is clearly the best alternative for consumers, and Apple would embrace it in a heartbeat. If the big four music companies would license Apple their music without the requirement that it be protected with a DRM, we would switch to selling only DRM-free music on our iTunes store. Every iPod ever made will play this DRM-free music.

Why would the big four music companies agree to let Apple and others distribute their music without using DRM systems to protect it? The simplest answer is because DRMs haven’t worked, and may never work, to halt music piracy. Though the big four music companies require that all their music sold online be protected with DRMs, these same music companies continue to sell billions of CDs a year which contain completely unprotected music. That’s right! No DRM system was ever developed for the CD, so all the music distributed on CDs can be easily uploaded to the Internet, then (illegally) downloaded and played on any computer or player.

In 2006, under 2 billion DRM-protected songs were sold worldwide by online stores, while over 20 billion songs were sold completely DRM-free and unprotected on CDs by the music companies themselves. The music companies sell the vast majority of their music DRM-free, and show no signs of changing this behavior, since the overwhelming majority of their revenues depend on selling CDs which must play in CD players that support no DRM system.

So if the music companies are selling over 90 percent of their music DRM-free, what benefits do they get from selling the remaining small percentage of their music encumbered with a DRM system? There appear to be none. If anything, the technical expertise and overhead required to create, operate and update a DRM system has limited the number of participants selling DRM protected music. If such requirements were removed, the music industry might experience an influx of new companies willing to invest in innovative new stores and players. This can only be seen as a positive by the music companies.

(from Apple.com, Thoughts On Music)

When the Digital Rights Mafia gives up on their jihad against their customers, maybe they’ll realize it, too. Then we’ll all win.

Don’t hold your breath.