Duke’s law school recently ran a contest that asked entrants to create short films demonstrating some of the tensions between art and intellectual property law, and the intellectual property issues artists face, focusing on either music or documentary film. Take a look here. Via Cory Doctorow.
Category: Electronic Rights
Opening the Do Not Call List to Phone Spam
The agency overseeing the national Do Not Call Registry is considering opening a loophole to allow companies to deliver ‘pre-recorded message telemarketing.’ The effort is being organized by Allen Hile of the FTC’s division of marketing practice. Be sure to let the FTC know how you feel about it.
Via Slashdot.
Color Laser Printers Add Hidden ID to Prints
Next time you make a printout from your color laser printer, shine an LED flashlight beam on it and examine it closely with a magnifying glass. You might be able to see the small, scattered yellow dots printer there that could be used to trace the document back to you.
According to experts, several printer companies quietly encode the serial number and the manufacturing code of their color laser printers and color copiers on every document those machines produce. Governments, including the United States, already use the hidden markings to track counterfeiters.
The Slippery Slope to Censorship
Scott Simon comments on the 65 ABC stations who decided not to broadcast Saving Private Ryan.
McCain Fights for Our Rights – Are Kohl & Feingold MIA?
I wonder how our Senators (Feingold & Kohl) respond when the MPAA and RIAA lobbyists stop by? Do they think about our fair use rights, like John McCain? McCain put a stop to H.R. 4077 because of valid concerns about whether the freedoms it granted (to enable parents to filter “smut” from films) would be read to deny fair use in other cases (note that the MPAA and RIAA are masters of wrapping their rent taking strategies in the flag). Via Lessig
Gartenberg on DRM
Michael Gartenberg takes a look at Digital Restrictions Management (DRM):
The issue of DRM has been raised again in recent weeks when Apple ?broke? a popular utility that allowed users to bypass the DRM built into the iPod and allowed copying from the iPod to a PC. Consumers, the argument goes, are against any DRM for their media and will not buy protected music.
Wisconsin Senator Herb Kohl on the Induce Legislation
I received a belated response today to an inquiry I made to Senator Kohl’s Washington Office on the Leahy/Hatch Induce Act (Kohl sits on the Senate Judiciary Committee, which held a hearing on the bill this past July).
The Senator’s thin response leaves me disappointed in several ways:
- Kohl uses the term “piracy” which Hollywood has artfully used to try and kill all fair use rights (except, as the Professor says, the right to hire a lawyer). Let’s think about Wisconsin constituents interests. I can’t imagine a vote for the Hollywood Lobby in any way benefits Badger residents.
- He does not take a position on a bill which would outlaw the iPod and similar music players. I find that strange.
- The Copyright Cartel is going for the big score and trying to ram a copyright reform act through the lame duck Congress. I would like to see the Senator take a citizen friendly position on fair use rights. Perhaps he should try some podcasts…
His letter can be read by clicking the link below.
Data Mining & Wal-Mart
Constance L. Hays takes a look at Wal-Marts massive customer/product database.
URRICANE FRANCES was on its way, barreling across the Caribbean, threatening a direct hit on Florida’s Atlantic coast. Residents made for higher ground, but far away, in Bentonville, Ark., executives at Wal-Mart Stores decided that the situation offered a great opportunity for one of their newest data-driven weapons, something that the company calls predictive technology.
A week ahead of the storm’s landfall, Linda M. Dillman, Wal-Mart’s chief information officer, pressed her staff to come up with forecasts based on what had happened when Hurricane Charley struck several weeks earlier. Backed by the trillions of bytes’ worth of shopper history that is stored in Wal-Mart’s computer network, she felt that the company could “start predicting what’s going to happen, instead of waiting for it to happen,” as she put it.
The experts mined the data and found that the stores would indeed need certain products – and not just the usual flashlights. “We didn’t know in the past that strawberry Pop-Tarts increase in sales, like seven times their normal sales rate, ahead of a hurricane,” Ms. Dillman said in a recent interview. “And the pre-hurricane top-selling item was beer.”
Wildstrom responds
Stephen Wildstrom emailed me his comments regarding my post on electronic music distribution formats and proprietary digital rights management tools (ie, limiting our fair use rights):
Actually, WMA/Janus is no more or less proprietary than AAC/FairPlay, except that Microsoft owns both the format and the DRM, while with AAC, Dolby owns the format and Apple owns the DRM. WMA and AAC are both freely licensable, the former from Microsoft, the latter through the MPEG-4 patent pool.
I don’t want to rescue anyone from FairPlay. It’s a perfectly fine DRM as DRMs go. I just think Apple has to open it, in the sense of licensing to all comers, if they really want to compete.
In writing the piece, I had no intention of getting into the virtues of DRM. Mostly that was because I just didn’t have space, but partly it’s because if we want digital content that is, like the overwhelming bulk of stuff that people seem to want, controlled by movie studios and record companies, we’re going to have to put up with DRM. With all respect to Prof. Lessig, his view of fair use seems to be based more on wishful thinking than law. And while there is some attraction to Creative Commons as a concept, I haven’t seen a rush of artists–at least not those who expect to get paid–to it.
INDUCE, by the way, did not pass and is dead for this year. I think it will be a lot tougher next year because the tech industry, which bizarrely let Microsoft take a leadership position on the bill, has woken up. Microsoft claimed that it had the backing of all the companies in the business software alliance, but they seem to have avoided asking Intel, which is staunchly opposed. Even within Microsoft, the company’s backing for INDUCE, which seems to be driven by the legal department, is very controversial. It will be interesting to see if Microsoft joins a flock of tech companies that are filing amicus briefs opposing the MPAA’s petition for a write of certiorari in the Grokster case.
Stephen Wildstrom: Microsoft to the Rescue???
Stephen Wildstrom argues, incorrectly – that Microsoft will ride to the rescue and “save us” from incompatible music formats (Apple uses a format called Fairplay, Microsoft uses a proprietary format called Janus, while RealPlayer’s is Helix and Sony’s is known as ATRAC). All of these formats include DRM (digital restrictions management): software techniques to limit our fair use rights.The very last thing we need is for Microsoft to own the electronic music distribution format. Who can forget their famous statement vis a vis Netscape “Cut off their air supply“. A Microsoft controlled music format means no more MP3’s which are playable on a very wide variety of devices.
Wildstrom should listen to and understand Larry Lessig’s recent Bloggercon session. Microsoft worked with Orrin Hatch (a formerly hostile senator) to push the absurd Induce Act through congress, further eroding our rights (but for, as Lessig says, the right to hire a lawyer). Anyone with a clear understanding of Microsoft’s history with proprietary formats and API’s would not support their controlling electronic music distribution. Make no mistake, there’s a real battle going on and presently Apple is winning (the iPod still plays MP3’s….)