Wall Street Journal tech columnist Walt Mossberg has an excellent column in tomorrow’s edition taking the music and movie industries to task for using overly restrictive DRM. Like most reasonable people, Mossberg thinks copyright holders have the right to protect their products online, and doesn’t condone the mass theft of music or films.
On the other hand, some of the more stringent DRM technologies, such as those that don’t allow customers to copy their CDs to PCs or that automatically “expire” programs copied on Tivo without the user’s awareness, are just plain wrong, Mossberg says. “Treating all consumers as potential criminals by using DRM to overly limit their activities is just plain wrong.”
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 11:16 PM | Print | Comments (0)The beauty of digital media is the flexibility, and that flexibility shouldn’t be destroyed for honest consumers just because the companies that sell them have a theft problem caused by a minority of people.
Instead of using DRM to stop some individual from copying a song to give to her brother, the industry should be focusing on ways to use DRM to stop the serious pirates — people who upload massive quantities of music and videos to so-called file-sharing sites, or factories in China that churn out millions of pirate CDs and DVDs.
I believe Congress should rewrite the copyright laws to carve out a broad exemption for personal, noncommercial use by consumers, including sharing small numbers of copies among families.
Until then, I suggest that consumers avoid stealing music and videos, but also boycott products like copy-protected CDs that overly limit usage and treat everyone like a criminal. That would send the industry a message to use DRM more judiciously.
Two well known digital tech mavericks are teaming up to work on a digital music project code named “Oboe,” which one of them, Michael Robertson, claims will bring “digital music into the 21st century.”
As Wired News reports, Norwegian media hacker Jon Lech Johansen, a.k.a. DVD Jon, has been hired by MP3Tunes, Robertson’s online service that sells music in MP3 format with no DRM. As we noted in a post yesterday, Johansen was recently profiled by the WSJ’s Steve Stecklow.
The fact that Johansen would end up working with Robertson is not too surprising. Robertson’s entire career has been based on advocating open standards and consumer choice, and challenging entrenched incumbents. His first such startup, MP3.com, was one of the web’s first digital music sites. After being sued by the record companies and selling the company to one of them for a healthy profit, Robertson founded Linux-OS provider Linspire (formerly Lindows), followed by SIPphone, which provides VoIP and IM service through the open standard Gizmo Project, and most recently MP3Tunes.
On his web site, Robertson describes Johansen as someone who “doesn’t advocate piracy, but does advocate consumers’ rights to manage their own purchased content” and suggests their shared philosophy was a key factor in Johansen’s decision:
Last Saturday, the Wall Street Journal ran a front page story about Jon relocating to the United States. After that, he got plenty of job offers from some of the biggest names in the technology business. I talked to him over lunch today and asked if he wanted to work at those other companies. “Not really,” he replied in a typical minimalist Scandinavian-style reply, forcing me to ask why not. “I want to work on open systems, which is why I came to you.”
Robertson’s web posting had no details about Oboe, except that it is “a significant new project we have underway that will launch before the end of the year” and that “[i]t’s as momentous as anything I’ve ever done in my technical career.”
The Wired piece includes some comments from Johansen:
“I have no idea what I’ll be doing, but I know it will be reverse engineering, and I’m sure it will be interesting,” Johansen told Wired News during a Friday stopover in San Francisco…”I plan to continue my research, but I won’t be writing any tools (while in the United States).”
As for what kind of research he might pursue, Johansen says he’s intrigued by Helix, the DRM system used by RealNetworks, because “it’s the same audio format as Apple’s, but higher quality.” Real’s music store is only open to U.S. customers, which has been frustrating for Johansen. “Basically, if I have no intention of using a service then I won’t bother reverse-engineering it,” he said. “Now that I can get an American credit card and sign up for their store I might look into it.”
Although he dismissed the idea of being arrested with a shrug, Johansen admitted his stop in San Francisco — 800 miles north of San Diego — was planned in part as an opportunity to consult with attorneys at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Wired also summarizes Johansen’s background:
A world-famous reverse engineer by the time he was 16, the soft-spoken tinkerer outraged the motion picture industry in 1999 for his work on DeCSS, a successful project to crack the encryption on DVDs that led to Hollywood’s first lawsuits under the United States’ controversial Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Since then, Johansen’s hacks for Apple Computer’s iTunes software and Microsoft’s Media Player have made headlines, and his blog — titled “So Sue Me” — has become must-see surfing for digital media geeks and, one suspects, entertainment company lawyers.
PyMusique, another tool Johansen and two other engineers released earlier this year, allows people with Linux operating systems to buy music from the iTunes store and save it in an unrestricted format.
“I still haven’t heard anything from Apple about my hacks,” he said with an infectious grin. “There is a tool based on my work reverse-engineering Apple’s FairPlay called jhymn that’s been hosted on a U.S. server for over a year and nothing has happened.”Posted by Mitch Shapiro at 1:54 PM | Print | Comments (0)
Mike Grebb has a good piece in Wired on the growing number of cities that seek to build municipal Wi-Fi networks. (Disclosure: Mike is a contributor to my publication IP Media Monitor.) Because of the cost structure, many cities are partnering with private Wi-Fi providers, but that doesn’t mean that social goals go by the wayside.
Philadelphia’s Neff [Dianah Neff, who heads up the City of Philadelphia’s Wi-Fi initiative] said that the city disqualified many vendors early because they didn’t share her social goals. “Some just saw it as building a network and missed the social aspects,” she said.Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 9:19 AM | Print | Comments (0)
Daniel Fisher has an excellent piece in Forbes on the crusade by Columbia Law School Professor Eben Moglen to knock out the policy underpinnings that justify the existence of the Federal Communications Commission. A genius with both a law degree and Ph.D. in history from Yale, Moglen also serves as Chief Legal Counsel for the Free Software Foundation.
Moglen argues that Open Source Software combined with low-powered mesh networks can create a collaborative model for managing spectrum interference, opening up the airwaves to more users on the same slice of spectrum. The FCC was established for precisely this purpose: to assign spectrum allocations to broadcasters so that they wouldn’t unfairly or even unintentionally drown each other out.
Open source coders can create new intelligent forms of broadcasting today, and according to Moglen, the First Amendment prohibits the FCC from doing anything about it. “Code is speech,” Cindy Cohn, a lawyer at the Electronic Freedom Foundation in San Francisco says in the piece. Meanwhile, the FCC is currently trying to figure out what to do about regulating so-called “cognitive radios” that adjust timing and frequency to avoid spectrum interference.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 8:45 AM | Print | Comments (0)
Courtesy of Declan McCullough at CNET, Senator Norm Coleman (R-MN) has introduced a resolution that would protect the Internet from a U.N takeover. If ratified, the resolution would lend political support to the Bush Administration and Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) during negotiations at a U.N. summit in Tunisia next month.
The dispute centers on the central role the U.S. plays in organizing the Internet. On the table is the idea that a U.N. body, the International Telecommunications Union, take over certain functions now governed by ICANN, an non-profit organization located in Marina Del Ray, CA, and the U.S. Commerce Department. Last month, the EU backed the idea that control over the Internet’s root zone files be removed from the U.S. entities and placed in the hands of the U.N.
Coleman’s resolution endorses the status quo, but goes further in warning that U.N. control could turn the Internet into “an instrument of censorship and political suppression.”
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 7:54 AM | Print | Comments (1)
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