Edward Felten, responding to the news that Hollywood is funding its own lab to cook up a new form of DRM that will finally, finally keep its content safe from infringement on the Internet:

When MovieLabs fails, expect the spinners to emerge again, telling us that MovieLabs has a great technology that it can’t tell us about, or that there’s a great technology that isn’t quite finished, or that the goal all along was not to stop P2P copying but only to reduce some narrow, insignificant form of copying. Expect, most of all, that MovieLabs will go to almost any length to avoid independent evaluation of its technologies.

This is a chance for Hollywood to learn what the rest of us already know -- that cheap and easy copying is an unavoidable side-effect of the digital revolution.

Opines Mike over @ Techdirt: "The industry would be much better off taking that $30 million and spending it on creative new ways to embrace what people are doing with their content."

Yep.

If you're a relative newbie to digital music downloading, you may be growing increasingly impatient with shrill diatribes from Internet pundits who rant about how digital rights management (DRM) is bad without explaining why -- or rather, without explaining why in language you can actually understand.

Enter Derek Slater with EFF's new guide, The Customer Is Always Wrong: A User's Guide to DRM in Online Music. It's just what it sounds like -- a human-readable tour through the specific restrictions the major online music services impose on you via DRM. Here's the plain language translation of the Apple iTunes marketing claims:

Apple iTunes Music Store Says..."Own it Forever and a Day" and "Just 99 Cents, Plus Generous Personal Use Rights"

The Facts: You Bought It, But They Still Own It

Imagine if Tower Records sold you a CD, but then, a few months later, knocked on your door and replaced the CD with one that you can't play in your car. Would you still feel like you "owned" the CD? Not so much, eh?

But Apple reserves the right to change at any time what you can do with the music you purchase at the iTunes Music Store. For instance, in April 2004, Apple decided to modify the DRM so people could burn the same playlist only 7 times, down from 10. How much further will the service restrict your ability to make legal personal copies of your own music? Only Apple knows.

Another hallmark of ownership is the right to give away or sell your property. That's called "first sale," and it's explicitly protected under copyright law. Yet Apple's DRM frustrates first sale—just ask George Hotelling, who had to give away the login and password to his iTunes Music Store account in order to resell a single song.

As the table below shows, there are many other ways that Apple's DRM limits what you can do with a song you "own." Many other a la carte download services choose to impose similar restrictions. How "generous" of them.

The guide also covers RealNetworks, Napster 2.0, and Microsoft's "Plays For Sure" DRM campaign. Check it out and pass the word along.

Is CNET recycling stories? Today's blip from John Borland claims that the latest offensive in the Cartel jihad against its customers is "the first time using peer-to-peer companies' own data to track down individuals accused of trading movies online."

That didn't seem right to me, not least because I've read and blogged stories from Borland in May (MPAA vs. TV Lovers) and February (Sue your customers...) on previous rounds of lawsuits that appeared to have been spawned out of the takedown of the LokiTorrent site, which included a handover of the site's log files. The MPAA sounds like it's being coy (it has no reason I can see to reveal its sources) and Bram Cohen (creator of BitTorrent) continues to warn people not to use the software for swapping since it doesn't contain anonymity features. Sure, but I bet there's a config file option somewhere that lets you set logfilelength = 0.

That's the consensus at EFF after we took a look at Sun Microsystem's plans for an open DRM project perplexingly called "Open Media Commons":

Yesterday, Sun Microsystems announced its new "Open Media Commons," with a goal of "[s]pecify[ing] open, royalty-free digital rights management and codec standards" to "ensur[e] intellectual property protection." The problem with this approach is that making DRM "open" and "royalty-free" doesn't make it any less damaging and counter-productive.

People have the legal right to make fair uses of content. They have the legal right to use materials in the public domain. They have the legal right to use publicly owned works, such as government-gathered facts. Any software system, open or not, that blocks us from making these legal uses of our digital content is bad, especially when the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) makes it illegal for us to circumvent the copyright protection to make these legal uses.

This "Open Media Commons" says a lot about fostering sharing and so forth, but there's precious little to indicate that it will be any less threatening than the Microsoft DRM that it's supposed to challenge.

Using "commons" in the name is unfortunate, because it suggests an online community committed to sharing creative works. DRM systems are about restricting access and use of creative works. We wish that Sun's announcement brought better news for people worried about DRM taking away their rights, but it doesn't.

Here's EFF's official press release. For more on the illogical nature of this kind of project, see Edward Felten's post from April of last year, A Perfectly Compatible Form of Incompatibility.

Back in June I noted that people weren't waiting for Apple to enable listening to podcasts on the iPod device. Now a WIRED story by Mark Baard claims that the Apple Developer Connection preview of Mac OS X for Intel (nicknamed OSx86) has leaked out via BitTorrent and other shares and various hackers are working to get it up and running on various hardware and virtual machines such as VMWare (*).

There's even a semi-public project, the OSx86 Project. The entire affair would appear to be massively illegal, not least because enabling the OS to run has required explicitly bypassing a software module (kernel extension) and associated Infineon hardware chip called TPM that is explicitly designed to stop OS X from running on ordinary PC hardware. If that's not a blatant DMCA violation I don't know what is.

That said, Apple's response to date has been muted. It may be that they're considering their options, or they may calculate that, on balance, this kind of experimentation and publicity is going to help their bottom line more than hurt it. I have no insider info.

(*) Full disclosure: I work for EMC, which also owns VMWare; I have no direct connection with that subsidiary.

You might imagine that copyfighters are exaggerating when they talk about technologists asking Hollywood for permission to innovate. You'd be wrong.

Over at Freedom to Tinker, Edward Felten has posted snippets from a Microsoft white paper on the forthcoming "Windows Vista" operating system. They show Microsoft giving Hollywood explicit veto power over parts of the operating system functionality. For instance:

Content industry acceptance

The evidence must be presented to Hollywood and other content owners, and they must agree that it provides the required level of security. Written proof from at least three of the major Hollywood studios is required.

What are the implications? As Derek Slater writes at Deep Links:

With its entertainment industry accomplices, Microsoft is turning your general-purpose computer into a toaster -- a content-vending appliance that obeys copyright holders, not you. As Felten explains, your PC will cost more and do less.

It will also make criminals out of more and more legitimate technology tinkerers and average users. To modify practically any part of your PC and use the software or hardware of your choice, you'll have to circumvent DRM in ways that may violate the DMCA.

Meanwhile, Microsoft's new DRM will do nothing to prevent widespread infringing distribution of copyrighted content -- the illegal activity that the restrictions are supposed to target.

So why should Microsoft give in to Hollywood's demands? According to Linux guru Don Marti, Microsoft isn't caving. It's just doing what's best for the company:

Isn't it time to drop the polite fiction that MSFT and other incumbent IT and CE vendors are only doing DRM because of big, bad Hollywood? ...[Having] "Hollywood" clamoring for harsh DRM (based on technical facts from the IT industry) actually helps the current market leaders. ...

With DRM, MSFT and Apple can keep their customers from switching back and forth (or maybe to Linux), and CE vendors can't lock out $39 Chinese DVD players, but can at least collect a tax on them.

In other words, this isn't about stopping mass copyright infringement or pleasing Hollywood. It's about keeping "consumers" locked in and people who develop potentially competing products locked out.

Previous relevant Copyfight coverage is here.

Princeton University, intellectual home of Edward Felten and Alex Halderman, has evidently begun to experiment with DRM'd textbooks. According to this post, there are quite a few digital restrictions being managed:

• Textbook is locked to the computer where you downloaded it from;
  
• Copying and burning to CD is prohibited;
  
• Printing is limited to small passages;
  
• Unless otherwise stated, textbook activation expires after 5 months (*gasp*);
  
• Activated textbooks are not returnable;
  
• Buyback is not possible.
  

There an official press release from the publishers for download here. It talks up price discrimination as a feature -- cash-strapped students won't have to pay as much for hobbled textbooks that disappear from their computers and can't be returned or resold to recoup costs. Isn't that nice?

I'm envisioning students taking Internet law and technology classes conducting their own experiment with these textbooks: documenting the ways they block the traditional activities associated with learning and scholarship.

Update: Professor Felten, who has been deluged with requests for comments: "First, a correction. As far as I can tell, Princeton University has no part in this experiment. The Princeton University Store, a bookstore that is located on the edge of the campus but is not affiliated with the University, will be the entity offering DRMed textbooks. ...

In any case, I don't see a reason to object to the U-Store offering these e-books, as long as students are informed about the DRM limitations and can still get the dead-tree version instead. ...

I don't object to other people wasting their money developing products that consumers won’t want. ...The problem with DRM is not that bad products can be offered, but that public policy sometimes protects bad products by thwarting the free market and the free flow of ideas. The market will kill DRM, if the market is allowed to operate."

A friend pointed me toward Rabble, a product from Intercasting Corp, itself founded by three ex-MP3.com execs. Rabble is an application for cell phones and similar handheld devices that is integrated with popular blogging applications. "Sort of like myspace, but for your telephone," he says. It's also got some integrated local search capabilities to give you access to nearby blogs.

The target market is the ever-popular 14- to 25-year olds, for whom cell phones are a far more integrated social device than they are for older cell users.

Bob Frankston has some hard words for Microsoft in the DRM essay linked below (emphasis, mine):

Something is very wrong. While Microsoft may consider itself only helping out by providing facilities to aid and abet such stifling control they are doing damage by thwarting the dynamics of the marketplace. Sadly, both Microsoft and Intel seem to be determined to undermine Moore's law by saddling it with fatal complexity in the hope of insuring their incumbency and the incumbency of other industries that are past their prime. ...

Microsoft is going to prevent what they call "hardware attacks" (as well as "software attacks") on premium content. Such attacks include what others call fair use. My attempt to watch content on my own screen is an example of just such as "hardware attack."

Over @ Deep Links, Seth Schoen, EFF's trusted computing guru, has just completed a four-part series on Microsoft's security and lockware strategy. His latest post, Microsoft Sells Out the Public on CGMS-A, explores how the company is collaborating with Hollywood to keep "attackers" from exercising their fair-use rights (emphasis, mine):

For years, Hollywood has responded to criticism of the effects of digital rights management (DRM) on fair use by suggesting that the public can still use analog outputs to make (possibly lower-quality) copies of works for fair use purposes. Because of the prospect of using analog outputs in this way, say studios, lawful personal copying is not completely eliminated by DRM. Even as they made this argument, however, the studios pursued a campaign to restrict such recording by characterizing it as a "loophole" -- the so-called "analog hole" or "analog reconversation problem." The same recording techniques that movie studios hailed as the protection for fair use were also stigmatized as an intolerable escape from the supposedly perfectly controlled world of DRM. ...

CGMS-A compliance is one of Hollywood's top priorities. A lack of transparency in the copyright industry's negotiations with technology companies makes it unclear precisely what sorts of threats and incentives are winning the technologists over. Yet these negotiations appear to be accomplishing what Congress declined to do: making devices that obey CGMS-A ubiquitous, arranging for recording equipment to comply with the studios' and broadcasters' copying policy preferences, even to the point of refusing to record certain programming at all. Once again, this outcome is not the law; it is simply the technologists' decision to side with the studios against end users.

For a more comprehensive view of what it really means for Microsoft to forge an "alliance" with Hollywood, check out Seth's previous three posts:

• Microsoft Trusted Computing Updates: "Microsoft's NGSCB project, although delayed, remains troubling because of its ability to strengthen DRM-like applications and facilitate software lock-in."
  
• The Dangers of Device Authentication: "Major hardware vendors are now taking giant steps toward several sorts of device authentication. These steps ultimately threaten...PC users' interests.... Why would hardware vendors do this? One major source of motivation for device authentication is Microsoft's Protected Media Path (PMP) project, a successor to the Secure Audio Path (SAP)."
  
• Protected Media Path, Component Revocation, Windows Driver Lockdown: "In the near future, when you try to install software to time-shift your favorite Real Audio webcast, your PC might disable all media player applications. Until you remove the software, your PC will remain crippled. Or perhaps you want to watch a downloaded movie on a wide-screen TV, but your PC might turn off its video card's analog output. Welcome to the world of Windows Longhorn (now known as Vista) and the Protected Media Path, where Microsoft, copyright holders, and DRM licensors may grant or revoke permission to use your own computer and digital media."
  

Via Dave Farber's IP list comes Bob Frankston's excellent essay on "why DRM can be problematic rather than simply annoying." Explains Frankston to the list (emphasis, mine):

The juxtaposition of Microsoft's effort to build the control of content into basic hardware and the comments on the Discovery Institute's Intelligent Design agenda gives insight to the problem -- if you believe you can design the future then why not lock in the incumbent's control?

One reason "why not": you risk sacrificing future economic dividends. From the piece itself:

DRM is a way of assuring that the "content owner" can maintain control. That seems innocuous in itself but it has the effect of limiting the marketplaces' ability to change. This makes sense in limited cases as it allows investors to recoup the cost of their investment and make a profit but if DRM works too well it prevents growth. A marketplace is a dynamic system that keeps changing. Why doesn't the marketplace simply devolve into chaos? The reason is that it is an evolutionary process -- one that provides opportunity for creating new results. We can think of this opportunity in terms of Chris Anderson's long tail -- it represents the value to be discovered rather than what is obvious.

Read the whole thing.

Ars Technica is reporting that the next version of the marginally popular Opera Web browser will come with built-in support for torrent file uploading and downloading. Interesting to note in this article that game company Blizzard is using BitTorrent to distribute game patches (a nearly weekly occurrence) to its millions of subscribers.

A little bit of informal Web surfing tells me that there's no official torrent plug-in for Mozilla yet, but that several are in development. Of course the browser itself has been distributed as a torrent for some time but given the rapid rise in Mozilla's popularity, a torrent plug-in there would be significant.

Well, they're not outraged yet, but believe me they will be. Calling their device "Slingbox" a California company (Sling Media) is offering consumers the freedom to route their incoming television signal anywhere they want. Despite the device's (to me) hefty pricetag of $250, many Best Buy and CompUSA stores report being sold out of units.

Sling are stepping into an extremely gray legal area. They claim that "place shifting" ought to be protected by the same legal doctrine that protected time shifting. But as we learned last year, when TiVo introduced features to permit sending programs from one TiVo to another, the Cartel got up in arms as did other business that depend on breaking "proximity control," such as major league sports and local TV stations. On the flip side, cable operators can easily see the extra revenue potential for something like a Slingbox in getting more subcribers to hook up to new channels and services. Like DVR functionality, it's easy to see how this kind of capability could be built into a set-top box.

For now Sling are trying to play nice with the Cartel and have limited their device to only transmitting to one other device at a time. But that's a hacker-snipped resistor away from being a rebroadcast device and then it's Grokster all over again. Jason Schultz called these things "me2me" applications and that's what the manufacturer's seem to want (no inducement here, nope!). But I'm quite sure the street will find its own uses for the Slingbox, too.

UPDATE: A creative reader suggested that it's not necessary to break the 1:1 feature of these devices, if the receving "1" is a BitTorrent site somewhere "offshore" (from the US perspective). The result would be a fairly fast worldwide distribution of any broadcast content. The Cartel still has at least three avenues of attack against such a system, but it's an interesting intellectual exercise. Nothing in the preceding should be construed as an attempt to induce anyone to actually do this or any other copyright-violating activity.

set RECENTCLEVERHACK 'Enable seamless access to podcasts'
set DEVICENAME iTunes

John Borland writes for CNET about a software plug-in called BadApple that lets iTunes users get easy access to podcasts. Apple promised this feature in the next version of iTunes but the mysterious company calling itself BadFruit has decided not to wait. Borland does a little sleuthing and tentatively connects BadFruit back to MP3Tunes.com.

There's a sense that podcasting may soon break into the mainstream world as big media companies like Clear Channel seem willing to invest money in the distribution channel. If iTunes turns out to also be the place that big media companies want to direct people for their podcasts, it's going to place additional pressure on companies that are lining up behind deliberately iTunes-incompatible DRM.

Want to watch the street find its own uses for things? Start at this story about CVS selling "one time use" digital camcorders. The gist is you buy it, record video on it, preview on a tiny on-camera screen, then bring it back to them and for another fee they'll put your video on DVD. This is a very typical "how people who value control above all else" think business model.

Now go to this page of the I-Appliance BBS to see how fast people dissect this beast.

It's important to remember that no matter who you are - CVS, Microsoft, the Cartel, whoever - most of the smart people in the world don't work for you. It really would be better all around if more people would keep that in mind.

Princeton computer science professor/freedom fighter Ed Felten and trusted computing expert/freedom fighter Seth Schoen each weigh in on Apple's switch to Intel, which has everyone wondering whether we'll see more DRM in future Macintosh computers:

Ed says no: "Though they’re not talking much about it, savvy people in the computer industry have already figured out that hardware DRM support is a non-starter on general-purpose computers. ...If DRM is any part of Apple’s motivation — which I very much doubt — the reason can only be as a symbolic gesture of submission to Hollywood."

...but Seth isn't so sure: "We don't know yet. Using Intel platform features for DRM requires software support; since Apple appears set to continue its strategy of close control over both Macintosh hardware and the MacOS operating system, it has a lot of choices to make. Apple's current position on DRM in iTunes doesn't offer a lot of encouragement."

Some enterprising students at Carnegie Mellon's Human Computer Interaction Institute have put together an interesting project called Roadcasting, which appears to allow people to broadcast XML-defined playlists over Wifi from their car-based MP3 players.

While supposedly backed by "[t]he research and development arm of a major automaker," it will be interesting to see how such innovations are received. Our current copyright system has nothing to accommodate such personal retransmission capabilities. Are these reproductions, distributions, or public performances? Are they fair use? Is this essentially the same as turning up your car stereo super-loud with the windows down, or is it like running your own radio station?

Interestingly, the system is currently limited to streaming, which makes it almost identical to Apple iTunes' "sharing" feature. It will be interesting to see the RIAA's reaction. Monitoring P2P networks is one thing; spying on us in our cars and on our daily commutes would be something quite different.

Oxford University researchers claim to be able to use an infra-red technology to finally read the Oxyrhynchus Papyri. If you, like me, had no idea what the heck these were, they're a potential treasure trove of Greek plays, writings by Sophocles, Euripides, and Hesiod, as well as possible Christian gospels written around the time of the earliest parts of the New Testament. Obviously this storehouse would be of tremendous value to scholars and theologians.

The original papyri were found, literally in a garbage dump, over 100 years ago. They've been stored in boxes in Oxford's Sackler Library. Apparently they're completely illegible to the naked eye, but someone had the foresight to save them in hopes they could later be read.

Reading the text is only the first step. Since most of the "documents" are actually fragments there's another task of putting together pieces of a jigsaw puzzle to rebuild actual wholes, estimated to run to about five million words in five or six languages.

The project has been sponsored by by the London-based Egypt Exploration Society whose Web site doesn't appear to contain any information on plans for the recovered material. I also checked around Oxford's site but didn't see anything relevant. The papyri themselves have their own Web site.

Interesting report out of Beki Grinter's lab at Georgia Tech showing that co-workers sharing digital music in the workplace form impressions based on others' musical libraries. What's interesting is not just that this happens, but there's an awareness of this process. People are consciously shaping what they share in an effort to build a favorable portrait of themselves, even with coworkers they don't know and don't interact with that much. As part of a conscious process, music-sharing is acting as part of the community-building practice in the workplace.

Once again, this is an example of user repurposing devices. Apple built in the sharing features so that people in a home setting - a family - could share music off an iPod. I doubt they intended people to set up image-building jukeboxes in the workplace.

The street really does find its own uses for things. MIT's Tech Review carries a nice piece by Eric Hellweg noting that the PSP (Sony's new PlayStation Portable) has been put to some interesting uses by its early owners. These apparently include Web browsing, IMs, and TiVo-recording playbacks. Dear MGM, could you possibly explain how Sony could have predicted its innovation would be used for these purposes? No, of course you can't. It's absurd on the face of it and we can only hope that the Supremes will see that.

Hellweg's article focuses more on what response Sony may have to these hacks. The PSP is selling well and Sony doesn't want to lose sales by engendering negative publicity. On the other hand, they didn't respond well to Aibo hacking.

Mark Cuban is fast approaching alpha-geek status. Check out his recent post on why he can't and won't buy CDs anymore:

MP3 players are changing peoples listening habits. We don’t carry folders filled with CDs anymore. We carry our library in our MP3 players. We don’t listen to CDs. We listen to playlists that we adjust all the time. We don’t burn CDs anymore, it’s too time consuming. We copy all our music to our MP3 players so it’s all available at our fingertips.

The Maker Fair at ETECH (and its parent, Make Magazine) captured my imagination on lots of levels. As a self-confessed geek, I love hardware hacks like Bunny Huang's DIY persistence-of-vision LEDs and Billy Hoffman's magstripe readers; as an activist, I love Natalie Jeremijenko's robot dogs modded to sniff out environmental toxins.

As a copyfighting lawyer, I loved the spirit of tinkering in the air. The whole event was brimming with the spirit of exploration, interoperation, and user-driven innovation. The more people who catch that excitement, the more people we'll have fighting laws that restrict our ability to open boxes and re-use the contents.

I rarely agree with the intentionally sloppy Andrew Orlowski, but he's right about what's happening to Apple's iTunes. Any "upgrade" to the service likely means paying more (and more) for less (and less).

Jon Johansen (yes, that Jon Johansen) is doing something about it. He's been working on what he calls PyMusique, the "fair" interface to the iTunes Music Store. Explains Jon (via email):

PyMusique is an interface to the iTunes Music Store that lets you preview songs, sign up for an account and buy songs. It is somewhat interesting from a DMCA/EUCD perspective. The iTunes Music Store actually sells songs without DRM. While iTunes adds DRM to your purchases, PyMusique does not. Another difference is that signing up for an account using PyMusique does not require you to sign/click away any of your rights.

But here's the question: How "interesting" is it? Does it stay in the free and clear, or does it brush up against the DMCA or EUCD? This is a tough one.

To learn more, a tech-savvy friend of mine is examining how PyMusique works -- you might want to do the same before this tool becomes yet another Endangered Gizmo.

Taking a page from Microsoft's playbook, RIM (Research in Motion) has decided to pay up and make it go away. According to thestreet.com, it's going to cost them $450 million, a pretty trivial sum considering that they were already on the losing end of a patent violation judgement and were looking at a total shutdown order.

I had been guessing that a settlement was in the air, given the splash that RIM made at CTIA with its introduction of instant messaging-branded versions of the Blackberry (jokes about YIM on RIM hereby elided).

User Interface Engineering (UIE) is a Boston-area usability consultancy that teaches classes and publishes articles helping people in my profession build better user experiences. One of their latest publications is titled Home Alone? How Content Aggregators Change Navigation and Control of Content by Joshua Porter.

The target audience is still designers but the article gives some good insights for the general reader into how content aggregators (including blogs) change our experience of information particularly on the Web. Also has some practical tips for those who want to design to accommodate this behavior rather than fighting it. Are you listening, New York Times Company?

(Disclosure: the founder and principal of UIE is a friend and professional colleague of mine. I don't know Joshua Porter and am not blogging this for any benefit of my own.)

A virtual who's-who of Free/Open Source software (FOSS) names have signed a letter and called for a boycott of the OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards) standards, on account of their promotion of RAND (reasonable and nondiscriminatory) licensing terms for patents.

The signatories assert that this is sour grapes from the IP hoarders who lost the battle at W3C. When that organization went for RF (royalty-free) licensing, the argument goes, some companies picked up their marbles and walked, starting a new organization that didn't have meddling hackers at its helm and which would be compliant on such matters.

I'm a big fan of RF, having worked at more than one startup that would have died a painful death in a RAND world. However, it's really unclear to me why these big guns have chosen to take on OASIS, particularly at this point. For one thing (as OASIS CEO Patrick Gannon has pointed out) OASIS has revised its IP terms to permit RAND, RF, or RAND-but-free.

Second, the last time I looked, IETF was also promoting RAND and nobody was calling for a boycott of them. What gives, guys?