Copyright

What is wrong with DRM?

What is wrong with DRM?

Most people tend to steer clear of three letter acronyms that they donâ??t immediately understand. DRM (Digital Rights Management) began as a vision of using technology to ensure that owners of intellectual property could maintain control over their property.  In other words it would be impossible to do that which was illegal. So far so good. Making it impossible to do that which is illegal is good. Frustrating illegal behaviour is right.

The problem is that DRM can also prevent behaviour that is not illegal.

A current example is the media player â??Zuneâ?? from Microsoft.

To maintain control over the music stored in the media player Zune is designed to limit music sharing. If music is shared between friends it can only be played three times or stored for three days.

The problem occurs when the music shared is either (1) not copyrighted, (2) in the public domain, or (3) shared with permission.

Supposing you create a song. Really. Or maybe a you create a snappy little limerick. You send it wirelessly to a friend. After three days. Or your friend plays it three times â?? it is gone. This is because Zune wraps all music which is sent in this way in DRM nomatter the rights you have as a creator or listener.

Therefore Microsoft Zune limits the legitimate rights of the user in an effort to comply with or control intellectual property. This is bad.

But wait â?? it is worse!

In the book 1984, Orwell introduces a method of control through the language called Newspeak. The idea was that by limiting the meaning of words we the party in power would eventually limit the way in which the citizens think. In the book the example given was that the term free would loose all connections with freedom and only be used with the idea to be rid of something. The example in the book is that a dog will be free of lice. But the concept of freedom as liberty will be lost.

This is the most damaging part of DRM systems. By controlling what is physically possible they create amongst the users an illusion of what can be done. A technical limitation to our use becomes a law of nature. Copying becomes bad not because it is illegal but because it is impossible.

Therefore by controlling the physical reality the manufacturers of DRM are slowly changing the way in which we see what is possible and impossible. In extension this will also limit our ability to envision what could be possible.

Posted on by mklang

Late News From Rome: CC is OK

So I am late, again! But in going through some old mails this was particularly interesting. It is relevant to a post I wrote (4 Sept – Call for Copyright Activists):

Rome, August 7th 2006.

For the first time in Italy, Siae (the Italian collecting society), with a non-expiring resolution active from July 25th 2006, (documento protocollato presso l’Ufficio Multimedialità al nr. 1/290/06/FDP) recognizes the opportunity and right for the public playing of ambient music inside a commercial space, without compensation to be paid, thanks to the adoption of copyleft licensing schemes (like CC, Art Libre, Copyzero x, Clausola Copyleft) or in the public domain.

Inside the ice cream shop Fiordiluna, in the heart of the Trastevere district in Rome, there is a multimedia space (32″ lcd monitor and Bose speaker system) managed by a Linux pc with free software on it, through which audio, video and literary works with copyleft-like licenses or in the public domain are publicly played.

This major historical achievement has been made possible by the work of Ermanno Pandoli (Giapster and Quindicino) who is a member of the Liberius digital window of the FrontiereDigitali network and who has represented the Fiordiluna ice-creamery to Siae.

Those interested in exposing their works inside the ice-creamery may inform the relevant groups inside the FrontiereDigitali network. To obtain more information on the legal and logitical procedures to follow it is also possible to contact the Liberius digital window.

English translation by Luigi Canali De Rossi, Master New Media Association.

This is an excellent way of bringing about change in the present copyright regime. By enabling businesses to avoid paying the collecting societies and (as in the case above) making a name for themselves we can see how creativity can make a difference. And how it can work outside the narrowly defined conventional music models.

Posted on by mklang

Whats Cooking? Norms Based Property Regimes

Somehow, somewhere along the line our society has decided that certain types of intellectual endeavour were worth protecting and encouraging. Not all types. Just some. Through brilliant social positioning and political lobbying these intellectual endeavours have achieved the status of property. (For more on this read No Trespassing â?? Eva Hemmungs Wirtén).

Stop! Think! Property. Property is usually considered amongst the human rights. The focus on property right occasionally risked upsetting the balance of rights and encroaching on other rights. This led Martin Luther King to write:

Property is intended to serve life, and no matter how much we surround it with rights and respect, it has no personal being. It is part of the earth man walks on. It is not man.

Despite the fact that intellectual property protection as we understand it today is not as old as many believe, we have managed to raise it to an eternal value. This is to say we believe that this is the way that it always has been. Implicit with this idea comes the follow-up thought that changing this is not worth the effort.

The interesting thing is that there are many types of knowledge that is not protected by intellectual property. Some of these are not valuable but others are extremely valuable.

A personâ??s honour is something that may be painstakingly built up over a lifetime within the community group. Whether this person is a diamond trader or part of a criminal organisation this is a valuable commodity, which is unprotected. Defamation law attempts to cover certain parts â?? but this protection has nowhere near the far-reaching effects of intellectual property.

A farmerâ??s knowledge over the terrain and weather, a craftsmanâ??s knowledge of tools and materials and a teachers experience are all valuable commodities in the daily life of these people.

My current favourite example comes from an article by Emmanuelle Fauchart and Eric von Hippel (his books are available online free) about the value of the knowledge of French chefs. Especially in their struggle to gain and maintain Michelin stars.

A star in the Michelin Guide is a valuable commodity. It makes and breaks restaurants and the career of chefs. It has also been the source of some scandals (wikipedia).

The question the article poses is why when the commodity is so valuable donâ??t chefs copy each other? Rather than innovate and surpass their competitors why not emulate? There is no law, no intellectual property in food dishes. Despite the fact that they are highly creative. The answer, according to Fauchart and von Hippel lies in â??norms basedâ?? intellectual property systems.

What we see is regulation by advanced group norms that allow the group to:

â?¦specify the nature and extent of rights that a group member can assert to intellectual property. They also include procedures for the claiming of intellectual property rights, and community-accepted types of sanctions for violators.

This is a thought-provoking article. We need more work in this vein to be able to show that the present intellectual property regime is far from being the only game in town.

Posted on by mklang

Outraged by Copyright Law

xkcd Webcomic has elegantly captured a feeling:

Fighting bad copyright laws and attempting to explain why the myth of copyright is harmful to creativity, innovation and individual rights is enough to get anyone down. Relax. Take a deep breath. Remember why it is important. Resume the discussion.

Posted on by mklang

Broadcast & Podcast Rights

This is straight from Cory Doctrow at Boing Boing – not even going to edit it. Copyright is under fire from almost every angle imagineable. This is about the aweful Broadcast Treaty.

The Broadcast Treaty is an attempt to force the world’s governments to give a new right to broadcasters, a right to control the use of works they don’t own. The Broadcast Right will allow broadcasters to stop you from copying or re-using the programs they transmit, even if those programs are in the public domain, Creative Commons licensed or composed of uncopyrightable facts.

Fair use doesn’t apply to the broadcast right. It will have its own rules for fair use, separate from copyright. You’ll have to pay your lawyer twice, once to make sure you’ve got a fair copyright use, and again to make sure you’ve got a fair broadcast right use. And you might get sued twice — once for violating copyright and again for broadcast right violations.

Worse yet, they want this to apply to the Internet. A few US corporations — Microsoft, Yahoo — have hijacked the US position on the Broadcast Treaty and now the US is using every trick in the book to get the world’s governments (who roundly reject the idea) to create a “webcasting right” at the same time as the broadcast right.

This is deadly to podcasters. The webcasting right will break podcasters’ ability to quote and re-use each others’ work (even CC-licensed works), and other video found on the net. It will allow podcast-hosting companies like Yahoo to tell people how they can use your podcasts, even if you want to permit retransmissions. And it will hurt organizations that are tying to find novel ways to use podcasts, like

The webcasting stuff has been “narrowed” to try to make it apply only to “professional” webcasts and not podcasts, but this is a short-sighted view of the future of podcasting. The term podcasting was only coined 20-some months ago. The idea that we can predict what a podcast will look like tomorrow is ridiculous — it’s like designing a copyright for printed books ten seconds before the photocopier comes along and changes everything.

Luckily, the webcasting stuff is on the ropes. Mark Cuban, who founded Yahoo’s Broadcast.com, has signed onto an open letter from 20 technology organizations that reject the webcasting right. Last week, dozens of companies, libraries and public interest groups signed an open letter rejecting the treaty altogether.

Now it’s the podcasters’ turn. EFF has created an open letter on behalf of podcasters everywhere, rejecting the webcasting right. WIPO is supposed to be making treaties that protect creators. We podcasters are the Internet’s native creators. WIPO has no business trying to break the Internet so that it is better-suited to the business-models of yesterday’s broadcasters.

If you are a podcaster — or better yet, a podcasting organization — sign onto this letter now! It will be presented Monday morning to the WIPO committee that’s creating the Broadcast Treaty in Geneva. This is your best-ever chance to be heard. Link

Posted on by mklang

Editable Free Film

The Brazilian film Cafuné has been simultaneously released both in the cinemas and on the Internet. It uses a Creative Commons license which allows users to create different story ends.

There are two versions of Cafuné are available for downloading at the Overmundo website: one 91 minutes long and one 73 minutes long. More info available here.

The license allows users to both watch the film – but wait there is more! With this license you can edit the film on your own. Why not add sub-titles in the langauge of your choice? Or adapt the language to your local dialect. Don’t like the ending – well edit the movie!

This license empowers the movie-watcher to go beyond the passive experience and become part of the creative process. Great work.

Now all I need is a translator…

Posted on by mklang

Copyright kills again

Once again copyright is used in a way to prevent the public from gaining access to material from dead authors. The first reports on this issue that surfaced in June . Joyceâ??s grandson, Stephen Joyce has limited access to material, attempted to prevent publication of scholarly works, demanded access to literary conferences (New Yorker) – his actions are tolerated since he controls the copyright of James Joyce.

James Joyce died in 1941. His work forms an important part of world litterature in general and Irish littarature in particular. It’s interpretation and exploration is part of world culture and heritage. And yet copyright law enables his grandson to limit this exploration. The grandson of Joyce knows about as much about what Joyce would have wanted as my cat does – if I had one. The point is that copyright is granted as an incentive for the writer – as a thanks for the bonus to society. But what happens when copyright is used to limit access? Doesn’t this mean that the bargain fails?

In another example of copyright abuse concerning dead authors we see that the widow of the works of Jorge Luis Borges is actively preventing re-publication:

Here is the story from The Chronicle Herald I quote it in full since it is short and I could only retreive it by using Google cache.

Despite huge demand, a French publishing house says it has been unable to reprint its critically acclaimed edition of the complete works of Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges because of a dispute with his widow.

French editor Gallimard published the two tomes under its prestigious La Pleiade imprint in 1993 and 1999, but they sold out within less than a year each time, said Francoise Issaurat, spokeswoman for the publisherâ??s press office in Paris.

Borgesâ??s widow, Maria Kodama, inherited the sole rights to his estate when the author died in 1986, although the will was contested. Kodama, whom the publisher says does not want the work reprinted, has drawn fire from Borges scholars who accuse her of denying them access to his papers and of trying to shape interpretations of his life and work.

“We never received the authorization of Mrs. Kodama to reprint the Pleiade collections, which were enormously successful,” Issaurat said. “We could have sold 30,000 copies of each, easily.” Kodama and her representatives were not immediately available to explain why she has not authorized the reprinting. However, Franceâ??s Nouvel Observateur magazine cited the publisher as saying that Kodama was concerned the first edition was riddled with errors and that she had demanded they hire a new editor.

Whether or not you can, want or need to read the works of Joyce & Borges is not the point. (But you should try – they are great for a reason). The point here is to question the rationale of granting copyright terms beyond the life of the author.

Take for exampel Borges “The Book of Imaginary Beings“. It was published in 1967. The book was an expanded version of the Spanish edition “El Libro de los Seres Imaginarios” (published 1957). The Imaginary Beings contains descriptions of 120 mythical beasts from folklore and literature. The book is copyrighted on publication. Borges died in 1986 and according to copyright regulation the copyright protection does not elapse until 2056.

The rationale behind such protection is to ensure that the write profits from his/her writing. To ensure this the state offers the opposite of the market ideology – the monopoly. So far so good. The author has a monopoly on his/her work as a thanks for making this work available to the public and therefore enriching it.

But this sitaution/contract/agreement/understanding fails when the heirs of the creator prevent the communication of the work to a wider audience. They have not created anything so why are they being given this position?

(via Errata)

Posted on by mklang

Call for Copyright Activists

Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary define the word Extortion as obtaining (as money) from a person by force, intimidation, or undue or unlawful use of authority or power.

In order for musicians to get paid copyright collectives began to appear in the 19th century. These collecting societies were formed to ensure that those who create copyrighted material are able to collect the money they are due. In its simplest form the member musician hands over control of his/her economic rights to the collecting society. The collecting society then has the mandate to collect the dues. Once collected these funds are dispersed among the members.

In most (at least European) countries the collecting societies have established themselves as a central part of the socio-economic system. They are powerful interest groups which ensure that they (and in extention their members) are catered to by the political-legal system. By entering into agreements with trade organisations the collecting societies now have established the right to collect money from all businesses that play music, show tv etc to their customers.

Rasmus at Copyriot has written an interesting piece on the way in which collecting societies manage to collect money. In Sweden the most active collecting societies are SAMI and STIM which are able to collect money for any music played in places of business where customers gather.

So large everything from: hotels with music in the lifts, small pizzerias whose music annoys you while you wait for your delivery, hairdressers, businesses that play cheesy music while you are on hold and cafés with music nobody listens to. They are all required to pay to the collecting societies.

Rasmus even relates an event where a policeman at a demonstration in Germany wrote down all the songs played and sent the list to the German collecting societies who promptly sent the organiser a bill. Swedish law would work in the same way. The policemanâ??s superior stated that the policeman had gone too far but the bill still has to be paid. (link to story in German).
The Spanish Case

In 2005 the main Spanish collecting society (Sociedad General de Autores y Editores – SGAE) â?? sued Ricardo Andrés Utrera Fernández, the owner of Metropol, a disco bar located in in Badajoz for not paying SGAEâ??s license fee of 4.816,74 â?¬ for the period from November 2002 to August 2005 for the public performance of music.

On February 17th, 2006, the Lower Court number six of Badajoz, a city in Extremadura, Spain, rejected the collecting societyâ??s claims because the owner of the bar proved that the music he was using was not managed by the society. The music performed in the bar was licensed under CC licenses that allows that public display since the authors have already granted those rights. Specifically, the judge said:

â??The author possesses some moral and economic rights on his creation. And the owner of these rights, he can manage them as he considers appropriate, being able to yield the free use, or hand it over partially. “Creative Commons” licenses are different classes of authorizations that the holder of his work gives for a more or less free or no cost use of it. They exist as â?¦ different classes of licenses of this type â?¦ they allow third parties to be able to use music freely and without cost with greater or minor extension; and in some of these licenses, specific uses require the payment of royalties. The defendant proves that he makes use of music that is handled by their authors through these Creative Commons licenses.â?? (quote from CC)

The full text of the decision (in Spanish) is available here. The Spanish case sets a new precedent in that it confirms that the collecting societies can only collect if the music played is made by members of collecting societies.

Copyright Activists Needed
What needs to be done? Hairdressers and café owners are probably not the most tech or Internet savvy. So to help them the basic idea is to set up a website filled with CC licensed music and easy howto instructions on how to use the music either online or by downloading and creating CDâ??s.

Aside from music arranged by genre, technical information on how to use it, the site should include legal information explaining why the users will no longer have to pay money to the collecting societies.

This copyright civil disobedience could potentially become the most important method for affecting change in the copyright system since it attacks the purse of the collecting society. In addition to this the scheme is legal. This last point does not make it less civil disobedience since the organisation of the site is a form of protest against the extortionary powers which the collecting societies have collected.

Posted on by mklang

Steal This Film

Steal This Film is more than a website that seems to scream out its message! It is also the first part of a documentary series on filesharing. This first part focuses on The Pirate Bay and in particular on the raid on their servers. The documentary seems interesting â?? natural bias towards pro-filesharing but the creators are open about this:

In 2006, a group of friends decided to make a film about filesharing that *we* would recognise. There have been a few documentaries by ‘old media’ crews who don’t understand the net and see peer-to-peer organisation as a threat to their livelihoods. They have no reason to represent the filesharing movement positively, and no capacity to represent it lucidly. We wanted to make a film that would explore this huge popular movement in a way that excited us, engaged us, and most importantly, focussed on what we know to be the positive and optimistic vision many filesharers and artists (they are often one) have for the future of creativity.

Posted on by mklang

Wanna make a rock video?

The dream of the 80’s was to make a rock video. Maybe it still is, maybe I am just old. Never mind the wandering mind of an old man. Now it’s time to dust of the camera and create a video…

CC Netherlands held a music contest and had a distinguished panel of judges select 13 tracks of 130 submissions. They want to release a DVD … so they need video. That’s where you come in. Read about the video contest on iCommons.org and creativecommons.nl.

If you can’t or don’t feel like making a video – why not just download the music to the 13 tracks that made the cut?

1: Electric Seaweed (bandsite) – So Far Away (download mp3) (Att-NC-SA)
2: Elstar (bandsite) – Monsters (download mp3) (Att-NC-ND)
3: Hazy Jane (bandsite) – A Birds Eye View (download mp3) (Att-ND)
4: JIVA (bandsite) – Right Now (download mp3) (Attr-NC-ND)
5: Marco Raaphorst ft. Lisa DeBenedictis (bandsite) – Cuckoo (download mp3) (Att-NC-SA)
6: Messier 84 (no site) – Ransack (download mp3) (Att-NC-SA)
7: Monokai (bandsite) – Mier (download mp3) (Att-NC-SA)
8: Pourquoi Me Reveiller (bandsite) – All I Want (download mp3) (Att-NC-SA)
9: Quallofill (bandsite) – Her Private Playground (download mp3) (Att-NC)
10: Sickboys and Lowmen (bandsite) – Sunny Days (download mp3) (Att-NC-ND)
11: Solaire (bandsite) – I am not sad (download mp3) (Att-NC-ND)
12: The Longing (nog geen site) – Forbidden Love (download mp3) (Att-ND)
13: We Vs Death (bandsite) – Thomas Corner And The Valleyhouses.mp3 (download mp3) (Att-NC-SA)

The abreviation at the end of each line is the license terms – click for more detailed information.

Posted on by mklang