Quotulatiousness

March 31, 2010

Disciplining the customer

Filed under: Law, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:31

In what may yet turn out to be a groundbreaking method of increasing customer satisfaction and loyalty, the US Copyright Group is suing 50,000 of them:

The number of Americans targetted by entertainment industry lawsuits nearly doubled this month, as the the US Copyright Group (“an ad hoc coalition of independent film producers and with the encouragement of the Independent Film & Television Alliance”) brought suit against 20,000 BitTorrent users. 30,000 more lawsuits are pending, bringing the total number of US entertainment industry lawsuit defendants up to 80,000 (when you include the 30,000 victims of the RIAA).

This beatings-will-continue-until-morale-improves gambit is puzzling to me. It seems likely to me that most of these defendants will settle for several thousand dollars (regardless of their guilt) rather than risk everything by hiring a lawyer to defend themselves. But does the “US Copyright Group” really think that Americans will go back to the mall with their credit-cards in hand once their friends’ lives have been ruined by litigation?

You have to wonder how they think this is a useful and creative solution to a problem they’ll be facing for the rest of their corporate existance. Suing your own customers would seem — on the face of it — as an unlikely way of persuading them to remain customers . . .

Some of the folks being sued are, undoubtedly, guilty of deliberate and repeated copyright infringement for purposes of personal gain. In a sample size like this, some of ’em will fit just about any profile you choose. Most of them, however, will almost certainly turn out to be teens and twenty-something students with no particular assets worth taking. It’s like taking a sledgehammer to a cloud of gnats: you’ll mess up a few permanently, but most of ’em will not be touched.

March 19, 2010

QotD: The term “pirate” is too sexy

Filed under: Law, Media, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 23:56

After years of trying to cloud the public mind by calling it “piracy” instead of “unauthorised downloading,” key copyright industry reps are starting to realize that “piracy” actually sounds kind of cool. So now they’re lobbying for the even less intellectually rigorous term “theft,” which describes an entirely different offence, enumerated in an altogether different section of the lawbooks.

This has all the dishonesty of calling everything you don’t like “terrorism” (or as my friend Ian Brown says, it’s like rebranding jaywalking as “road rape”).

Cory Doctorow, “Entertainment industry sours on term ‘pirate’ — too sexy”, BoingBoing, 2010-03-18

March 10, 2010

Some things never change

Filed under: Humour, Law, Politics, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:39

I was looking though some old postings and found this little gem, which is as true as ever:

It is a sad real-world fact that most legislators, when presented with something they do not understand, almost always attempt to ban it. This probably started with the first neolithic fire-tamer . . . who was probably beaten to death with sticks when the tribal shaman saw it. Senator Hatch is showing all the finely nuanced reactions of Ug the caveman here.

This was in reaction to Senator Orrin Hatch introducing a bill to make peer-to-peer file sharing illegal back in 2004.

March 9, 2010

Opening the door to arbitrary punishment

Filed under: Britain, Economics, Law, Liberty, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 07:33

Cory Doctorow talks about why the proposed “three strikes” internet ban is such a stupid idea:

Another anti-piracy scheme that hurts legitimate users

Filed under: Economics, Gaming, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 07:06

French games developer Ubisoft was the target of a DDoS attack over the weekend, which took out their license verification servers. This left thousands of gamers unable to play their games . . . but not all gamers. Only the ones who bought the game legitimately, because the “real” version requires online validation every time you play . . . the cracked versions do not:

PC users started reporting problems accessing some of the French company’s most popular games, including best-seller Assassin’s Creed 2, on Sunday afternoon. It later emerged that attackers had targeted the company’s controversial anti-piracy system, causing it to break down — which in turn left thousands of people unable to play.

The chaos was so widespread because of the way that Ubisoft’s copy protection system — which requires players who have bought the game to log in online and verify that they are not playing a pirated version — is designed. By flooding the anti-piracy servers with web traffic, the unknown attackers forced it to collapse and therefore locked out those players who tried to sign in.

This angered many gamers, who felt that they had been punished for buying legal copies of the company’s games — which cost as much as £50.

“We’ve had to agree to their draconian rules in order to play their game, however Ubisoft haven’t given a single thought to what happens when their servers screw up,” said one disgruntled user on the company’s web forums.

This is far from the only example of companies trying to protect their intellectual property by imposing DRM “solutions” which punish their customers. In the long term, no matter how nice the product may be, it can’t be a good practice to place barriers in the way of the people who’ve paid to use the product.

March 1, 2010

UK Photographers . . . act now, or lose your rights

Filed under: Britain, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 15:52

Philip Dunn has all the bad news, photography-wise:

Photographers to lose copyright protection of their work

This startling and outrageous proposal will become UK law if The Digital Economy Bill currently being pushed through Parliament is passed. This Bill is sponsored by the unelected Government Minister, Lord Mandelson.

Let’s look at the way this law will affect your copyright:

The idea that the author of a photograph has total rights over his or her own work — as laid out in International Law and The Copyright Act of 1988 — will be utterly ignored. If future, if you wish to retain any control over your work, you will have to register that work (and each version of it) with a new agency yet to be set up.

I had wondered where Lord Mandelson had picked up his “of Mordor” sobriquet. Now I know. Oh, and it gets even worse:

Photographers are to lose all effective rights to take photographs in public places.

Not content with taking away photographer’s copyright, another section of this Government is proposing sweeping changes to your freedom to take pictures in public places.

The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has deemed that a photograph taken in a public place may now be considered to contain ‘private data’.

This means that if you take a picture in the street and there is a member of the public in the shot, that person has the right to demand either payment — if you wish to publish the image — or that you do not publish it. In fact, according to the ICO. There does not actually have to be an objection, it is up to the photographer to ‘judge’ whether the subject might object. Now work that one out if you can.

You may think this won’t affect you . . . but if you’ve got a camera in your cell phone or MP3 player, it’s going to have an impact. Contact your MP now and explain that you don’t approve of this drastic change in the law and try to get it tossed out before it becomes law.

February 25, 2010

EMI launches appeal over “Down Under”

Filed under: Australia, Law, Media — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 08:12

Following up from earlier this month, EMI is appealing against the decision that Men at Work plagiarized a popular folk song in their 80’s hit “Down Under”:

Papers filed with the Federal Court in Sydney listed 14 grounds for appeal and stated songwriters Colin Hay and Ron Strykert did not breach copyright.

It said similarities may be noted only by a “highly educated musical ear”.

[. . .]

EMI Music said the inclusion of the melody was, at most, a form of tribute to the tune.

In its appeal, EMI also argued that the Girl Guides Association of Victoria state actually owned the copyright, as they sponsored the 1934 Girl Guides song competition for which the song was written.

The decision seemed odd in another way: lack of proportionality. The “offending” part is a very small section of the song, which would not seem to justify awarding 40-60% of the profits from the work to the plaintiff. Perhaps Australian law allows it, but it seems to be an attempt to “right a wrong” by inflicting a disproportional penalty, rather than an equitable one (that’s not to say I think the decision was correct, just a comment on the initial finding).

February 21, 2010

It sounds like the correct answer to the legal question

Filed under: Law, Railways, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 19:07

It’s surprising that a dispute over the use of open source software in a model railway application would be the one to set the legal precedent, but that is what happened here:

Although some people viewed it as a tempest in a teapot, the long-running legal case Jacobsen v. Katzer stirred up some seminal open source issues. We first reported on the dust-up all the way back in August of 2008, noting that the dispute centered around — of all things — model train software.

Specifically, Jacobsen had developed JMRI, the Java Model Railroad Interface project. When Katzer built the code for the project into proprietary model train software, deleting existing copyright notices within the code, Jacobsen filed suit. Now, settlement documents are available online, and the end of the dispute points to a final victory for open source licenses.

The settlement documents show that Katzer will pay Jacobsen $100,000 over 18 months, cease using the JMRI code, and not attempt to register domains using the JMRI name. Previously, the legal dispute had gone all the way to the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, which is the last legal stop before the Supreme Court. As Lawrence Lessig noted in a post, when the Court of Appeals upheld the Artistic License that governed the use of JMRI, it was “an important victory” for free licenses. Lessig noted that the decision had broad implications for many open source licenses.

Just because someone allows the use of source code freely does not mean you can, in effect, file off the serial numbers and pretend that it’s all your own work . . .

H/T to Craig Zeni for the link.

February 4, 2010

Men at Work lose court battle over plagiarism

Filed under: Australia, Law, Media — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 08:54

Remember the flute part in “Down Under”? Men at Work now probably wish they’d chosen a different way to highlight typical Australian tunes, as they’ve been ordered to pay costs to the estate of Marion Sinclair for using the theme to “Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum Tree” in their song:

Larrikin Music had claimed the flute riff from the 1981 hit was stolen from Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum Tree, written by Marion Sinclair in 1934.

The federal court in Sydney ordered compensation to be paid.

That amount has yet to be determined but Larrikin’s lawyer said it could reach 60% of income from the song.

“It’s a big win for the underdog,” said Larrikin’s lawyer Adam Simpson after the judgment.

Sinclair, who died in 1988, wrote the song for performance at a Girl Guides Jamboree in 1935.

Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum Tree has since been sung by generations of Australian schoolchildren.

Oddly enough, I downloaded this song just last week, prompted by a recent Mark Steyn column.

Men At Work came from a land Down Under and in January 1983 they were on top of the world: “Down Under” was Number One not only in Oz but also in the United Kingdom and in the United States, and to this day Men At Work are the only Australian band to have topped simultaneously both the British and American singles and albums charts. A lot of the pop songs from that period you’ll still hear on the Eighties oldies stations: in America, Men At Work were succeeded at the top of the Hot One Hundred by Toto and “Africa”, which is pleasant enough in a bland sort of way; and in Britain they made way in the Number One slot for Kajagoogoo and “Too Shy”, and gosh, it’s years since my fingers have had cause to type the word “Kajagoogoo” and even then it was as a punchline for a cheap gag. But “Down Under” transcended the passing fancies of the hit parade and has become an Australian anthem. There have been other international Oz hits, of course, notably Rolf Harris’ classic recording of “Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport” – and, as we always have to point out whenever the subject arises, a truly great novelty song like “Tie Me Kangaroo” should never be confused with a truly atrocious one like Charlie Drake’s “My Boomerang Won’t Come Back”.

But “Down Under” has become a kind of musical shorthand for contemporary Australia

February 2, 2010

There’s more than one 3:54 length clip in Downfall?

Filed under: Germany, History, Humour, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 07:43

Elsewhere, the Guardian wonders why the Hitler-in-the-bunker scene from Downfall has become such a popular meme.

December 5, 2009

Speaking of disproportional punishment

Filed under: Law, Media, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:45

BoingBoing reports on yet another vastly disproportional punishment for a victimless crime:

The movie industry has turned into an alcoholic dad who beats up his family at the slightest transgression while ignoring his own gross failures — blaming everything on external forces and refusing to confront its own problems.

Meanwhile, 22-year-old Samantha Tumpach spent two nights in jail for recording her friends singing “Happy Birthday” at a movie theater, for capturing less than four minutes of a feature film. She is charged with a felony and if convicted, could lose the right to vote, to work with children, to hold office, and to partake in full civil life.

And the movie industry’s pitch to us remains, “Please stop pirating our discs, because if you don’t stop, we may be driven out of business and then society would suffer from our absence.”

November 23, 2009

Digital Economy Bill should be called Digital Disenfranchisement Bill

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Law, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:16

The proposed British legislation called the “Digital Economy Bill” is going to be very bad news, says Charles Stross:

I’m a self-employed media professional working in the entertainment industry, who earns his living by creating intellectual property and licensing it to publishers. You might think I’d be one of the beneficiaries of this proposed law: but you’d be dead wrong. This is going to cripple the long tail of the creative sector — it plays entirely to the interests of large corporate media organizations and shits on the plate of us ordinary working artists.

Want to write a casual game for the iPhone and sell it for 99 pence? Good luck with that — first you’ll have to cough up £50,000 to get it certified as child-friendly by the BBFC. (It’s not clear whether this applies to Open Source games projects, but I’m not optimistic that it doesn’t.)

Want to publish a piece of shareware over BitTorrent? You’re fucked, mate: all it takes is a malicious accusation and your ISP (who are required to snitch on p2p users on pain of heavy fines) will be ordered to cut off the internet connection to you and everyone else in your household. (A really draconian punishment in an age where it’s increasingly normal to conduct business correspondence via email and to manage bank accounts and gas or electricity bills or tax returns via the web.) Oh, you don’t get the right to confront your accuser in court, either: this is merely an administrative process, no lawyers involved. It’s unlikely that p2p access will survive this bill in any form — even for innocent purposes (distributing Linux .iso images, for example).

As I’ve said before, we’re rapidly moving to a world where it will be difficult to have a normal life without network access . . . this bill will create a new underclass of non-persons, all to benefit the dinosaurs of the media conglomerates. And introduced by a _Labour_ government, no less.

We are already at the point where it is a reasonable and sensible thing to say that access to the internet is a human right (at least in the west). Mandelson’s three strikes provision will deny innocent people access to the internet (for all it will take is accusations that do not need to have proof), which for more and more people will be the practical equivalent of being exiled from the country. No internet access would mean children can’t get access to school work, parents can’t get access to their bank accounts, and everyone will be cut off from large parts of their social circle (more and more people depend on email, Twitter, Facebook, and other social media to stay in touch).

Due process? That seems to have been lost in the rush. Proportionality? That’s been gone for years.

November 4, 2009

No wonder it had to be kept a secret

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Law — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:10

Cory Doctorow looks at the “too sensitive to expose to public view” Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement and finds it awful:

ISPs have to proactively police copyright on user-contributed material. This means that it will be impossible to run a service like Flickr or YouTube or Blogger, since hiring enough lawyers to ensure that the mountain of material uploaded every second isn’t infringing will exceed any hope of profitability.

ISPs have to cut off the Internet access of accused copyright infringers or face liability. This means that your entire family could be denied to the internet — and hence to civic participation, health information, education, communications, and their means of earning a living — if one member is accused of copyright infringement, without access to a trial or counsel.

Clueless, but powerful . . . meet powerless, but distributed. Combatants, take your corners.

Update: Your kids could go to jail for non-commercial file sharing.

October 30, 2009

Cory Doctorow on Britain’s ill-advised ‘3 strikes’ move

Filed under: Britain, Law, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:39

Cory Doctorow would have the British government do something other than their idiotic ill-advised move to enforce the “three strikes” rule:

Peter Mandelson’s proposal to disconnect the families of internet users who have been accused of file sharing will do great violence to British justice without delivering any reduction in copyright infringement. We’ve had 15 years of dotty entertainment industry proposals designed to make computers worse at copying. It’s time that we stopped listening to big content and started listening to reason.

Since 1995 — the year of the WIPO copyright treaties — the entertainment industry has won extrajudicial powers to enforce its rights without the need to prove a case in court. “Notice and takedown”, as the system was called, was supposed to stop copyright infringement on the web. It gave rights holders the power to compel internet service providers to take down material simply by stating that it infringed their rights, and obliged those providers to act or face liability.

A decade and a half later there is no indication that this has reduced copyright infringement online (certainly there is more today than there was in 1995). And, predictably, a system that allows for legalised censorship without penalties for abuse has itself been abused.

We are already at the point where it is a reasonable and sensible thing to say that access to the internet is a human right (at least in the west). Mandelson’s three strikes provision will deny innocent people access to the internet (for all it will take is accusations that do not need to have proof), which for more and more people will be the practical equivalent of being exiled from the country. No internet access would mean children can’t get access to school work, parents can’t get access to their bank accounts, and everyone will be cut off from large parts of their social circle (more and more people depend on email, Twitter, Facebook, and other social media to stay in touch).

Due process? That seems to have been lost in the rush. Proportionality? That’s been gone for years.

October 22, 2009

Soon, they’ll demand a fee for thinking about the songs

Filed under: Britain, Law — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 07:44

Although this particular case appears to have ended correctly — with an apology from the heavy-handed enforcer — it does still illustrate just how far the copyright police are willing to go:

A shop assistant who was told she could not sing while she stacked shelves without a performance licence has been given an apology.

Sandra Burt, 56, who works at A&T Food store in Clackmannanshire, was warned she could be fined for her singing by the Performing Right Society (PRS).

However the organisation that collects royalties on behalf of the music industry has now reversed its stance.

They have sent Mrs Burt a bouquet of flowers and letter of apology.

Mrs Burt, who describes herself as a Rolling Stones fan, said that despite the initial warning from the PRS, she had been unable to stop herself singing at work.

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