Here we'll explore the nexus of legal rulings, Capitol Hill
policy-making, technical standards development, and technological
innovation that creates -- and will recreate -- the networked world as we
know it. Among the topics we'll touch on: intellectual property
conflicts, technical architecture and innovation, the evolution of
copyright, private vs. public interests in Net policy-making, lobbying
and the law, and more.
Disclaimer: the opinions expressed in this weblog are those of the authors and not of their respective institutions.
'Tis the season for miracles, and it looks like Diebold, the company that tried to gag college kids with specious copyright claims for revealing potential flaws in its voting machine technology, is the happy beneficiary. In less than 24 hours, the North Carolina Board of Elections inspected and chose to certify Diebold equipment for use in real elections. That's after the Electronic Frontier Foundation, my beloved former employer, dragged the company, kicking and screaming and grabbing desperately onto door frames, into the courtroom. Where company lawyers insisted, repeatedly, that Diebold could not possibly meet the basic requirements for such an inspection.
Explains e-voting superhero Matt Zimmerman at Deep Links:
Diebold pleaded with the court for an exemption from the statute's requirement to escrow "all software that is relevant to functionality, setup, configuration, and operation of the voting system" and to release a list of all programmers who worked on the code because... well... it simply couldn't do it. It would likely be impossible, said Diebold, to escrow all of the third-party software that its system relied on (including Windows).
What a difference a few days make.
Despite Diebold's asserted inability to meet the requirements of state law, the North Carolina Board of Elections today happily certified Diebold without condition. Never mind all of that third-party software. Never mind the impossibility of obtaining a list of programmers who had contributed to that code.
And never mind the Board of Election's obligation to subject all candidate voting systems to rigorous review before certification...
It's not sexy these days to talk about the battle over transparency and accountability in voting technology. It's the wrong November, and there's no "rootkit" in e-voting. But this kind of outrage continues to happen. If you value hearing about things Diebold and other companies really wish you wouldn't, pass the word along and join EFF today.
For years, the entertainment industry's DRM strategy has seemed to follow the old story about how to boil a frog: Start it going in a pan of cold water and gradually turn up the heat.
So it is with digital rights management: Start consumers off with restrictions only the techiest edge-cases among them will notice, then quietly increase control. Apple's iTunes, for example, has downgraded the behavior of already-purchased music files. One day you could burn a playlist 10 times, the next day only seven.
Once you've accepted that "your" music comes with only a set of pre-defined uses -- and not any personal use you can invent -- you might not notice as you lose the ability to do your own format-shifting. Just as fans once re-purchased music as it moved from 45 to LP to CD, perhaps they could be conditioned not to complain if they were made to re-license when they replaced computers and stereo components. Instead of selling CDs, then, marketers will then be able to slice up the "music experience" and license pieces back to the fans whose rights they've taken, ideally for more than the one-time profit on a CD.
Given that Sony has taken to installing spyware to protect their music, you may be wondering why this episode in the DRM struggle has been good for the consumer. Simple: consumer awareness. For the past several years, much has been made of viruses and spyware and their adverse effects on our computers. The industry designed to stop these threats brings in tens of millions of dollars every year to stop these vicious pieces of software. The average consumer understands what a virus or spyware is. However, stop most consumers and ask them to explain DRM and you'll probably get a blank stare. Up until now, the consumer has been uneducated on what DRM is and how it will affect their daily lives. The major music and movie studios have been fine with this; and now that awareness is changing.
The average fan, who may never have been blocked from playing music from the (new) Napster music store on an iPod; who may never have tried to create her own version of the Daily Show from a TiVo-to-Go'd evening news program but been stymied by copy controls; suddenly has a vivid example of how DRM takes your music -- and your computer -- away from you. CERT, the US Computer Emergency Response Team, is advising
users, "Do not install software from sources that you do not expect to contain software, such as an audio CD."
In the wake of an explicit warning from the United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT) never to install "software from sources that you do not expect to contain software, such as an audio CD," Princeton's Alex Halderman and Jeff Dwoskin have developed a vaccine for those of us already infected by Sony-BMG rootkit DRM:
To install the tool, download this file to a temporary location, then double click on the file's icon in Windows. (Windows may ask you to confirm that you wish to add the information in the file to the system registry -- choose "Yes.") After the tool has been applied, you may delete the file. The tool will take effect as soon as you close and restart Internet Explorer.
Bonus: Bruce Schneier asks where the big security companies were while Sony was busy infecting our computers: "Microsoft I can understand. The company is a fan of invasive copy protection -- it's being built into the next version of Windows. Microsoft is trying to work with media companies like Sony, hoping Windows becomes the media-distribution channel of choice. And Microsoft is known for watching out for its business interests at the expense of those of its customers.
What happens when the creators of malware collude with the very companies we hire to protect us from that malware?"
"Stewart Baker, recently appointed by President Bush as the Department of Homeland Security's assistant secretary for policy, made a comment that suggested that some anti-piracy efforts introduced by the industry could have profound and unexpected effects on the security of the nation's critical infrastructures. ...
'I wanted to raise one point of caution as we go forward, because we are also responsible for maintaining the security of the information infrastructure of the United States and making sure peoples' [and] businesses' computers are secure. ...There's been a lot of publicity recently about tactics used in pursuing protection for music and DVD CDs in which questions have been raised about whether the protection measures install hidden files on peoples' computers that even the system administrators can’t find.'...
'It's very important to remember that it's your intellectual property -- it's not your computer. And in the pursuit of protection of intellectual property, it's important not to defeat or undermine the security measures that people need to adopt in these days.'"
Edward Felten has decided that in the battle to save innocent victims from Sony's reckless, self-destructive DRM bender, the time has come to start calling a spyware a spyware: "In all the discussion of the SonyBMG software, I’ve been avoiding the S-word. But now it’s clear that this software crosses the line. It's spyware."
He also suggests that Sony now recognizes how badly it has stumbled, but continues to publicly defend itself for strategic reasons. In other words, it's gathering the tatters of respectablity tightly around its shoulders as the winds of public disgust grow stronger, hoping that someone, somewhere, still believes it's doing the right thing. Because sometime soon, it's got to shave the beard, tuck in the shirt, and appear before a court of law.
Are You Infected by Sony-BMG's Rootkit? helps you find the XCP bug. It includes a handy list of CDs that EFF has confirmed are infected, plus photos to help you identify signs of infection in other CDs.
Now the Legalese Rootkit: Sony-BMG's EULA helps you understand what Sony-BMG will no doubt claim you "agreed" to when you bought, opened, and inserted the CD into your computer. Example: "Sony-BMG can install and use backdoors in the copy protection software or media player to 'enforce their rights' against you, at any time, without notice. And Sony-BMG disclaims any liability if this 'self help' crashes your computer, exposes you to security risks, or any other harm."
Finally, Sony-BMG Rootkit: EFF Collecting Stories, Considering Litigation speaks for itself. If you're fed up and believe that Sony won't treat its customers right until someone in a black robe says it must, take a look and see if you can help make that happen.
Ed Felten, tracking Sony/BMG's attempts to get back on the security wagon in the wake of the rootkit DRM scandal [emphasis, mine]:
Yesterday, the companies released a software update that they say “removes the cloaking technology component that has been recently discussed in a number of articles”. Reading that statement, and the press statements by company representitives, you might think that that’s all the update does. It’s not.
The update is more than 3.5 megabytes in size, and it appears to contain new versions of almost all the files included in the initial installation of the entire DRM system, as well as creating some new files. In short, they’re not just taking away the rootkit-like function — they’re almost certainly adding things to the system as well. And once again, they’re not disclosing what they’re doing.
Speaking of disclosure, Felten also responds to law professor Eric Goldman, who argues that regardless of how people feel about DRM, Sony/BMG's EULA appears to cross all the t's and dot the i's. Writes Felten [emphasis, mine]:
While the legal question is beyond my expertise, it’s awfully hard to see how, from a common-sense viewpoint, SonyBMG could be said to have disclosed that they might be installing rootkit-like software. Surely the user’s consent to installing “a small proprietary software program … intended to protect the audio files embodied on the CD” does not give SonyBMG free rein to do absolutely anything they like to the user’s computer.
Surely not. And that's where (much of) the anger and outrage is coming from.
(1) Admit that there is a problem. The companies can admit that the software uses rootkit-like methods and may expose some consumers to increased security risk.
Step two? Admit to the Higher Power, to yourself, and to other human beings the exact nature of your wrongs.
(2) Modify product packaging, company websites, and EULA language to disclose what the software actually does.
Three? Make a list of all persons you have harmed, and become willing to make amends to them all.
(3) Release a patch or uninstaller that lets any consumer easily remove or disable the rootkit-like functions of the software. Having caused security problems for their users, the least the companies can do is to help users protect themselves.
Finally, come to believe that a Power greater than yourself can restore you to sanity. Computer security experts can expose you to ridicule by the entire Internet community -- or help you climb out of the gutter and start anew in the world of respectable, trustworthy computing.
(4) Make clear that the companies support, and give permission for, research into the security implications of their products. Saying “trust us” won’t cut it anymore. Having betrayed that trust once, the companies should publicly welcome the Mark Russinoviches of the world to keep studying their software and publishing what they find. If you act like you have something to hide -- and you have had something to hide in the past -- the public will be smart enough to conclude that you’re probably still hiding something. This is especially true if you announce that you are trying to find new ways to do the thing that you were just caught doing!
This is a picture of interoperability. It was on the nightstand when I checked into a hotel recently: a clock-radio with a headphone plug and a button on top labeled "MP3." Simple, but clever. Travelers can plug into their own music players or computers and hear music through the radio's speakers; they can set the clock to wake to tunes from their iPods.
Open standards mean they can do this without telling the hotel in advance all the brands of music devices they might be bringing. Standardization and uncontrolled outputs let any music player interoperate with any pair of headphones -- including a clock-radio plug shaped like a pair of headphones -- with only an adapter to make them fit.
This is one face of what technology mandates like the broadcast flag will kill.
While I can bring my music collection to any pair of headphones or speakers, a broadcast flag would prevent me from doing the same with my collection of recorded television. Why shouldn't the hotel's HDTV have a similar universally interoperable plug on the front? Because instead of one open standard, there will be multiple proprietary and non-interoperable standards for HDTV under a broadcast flag. It won't stop the pirates, but it's bound to frustrate lawful users.
Welcome to the Hotel FCC, home to the latest in HDTV. Of course you'd like to watch your recorded programs.
Did your digital video recorder produce WMV files? I'm sorry, our only TV capable of displaying that is in room 1201, which is already occupied.
TiVo-to-go? Sorry again, the gentleman last staying in room 512 reported that TV broken but we haven't been able to get a certified technician in to repair it.
Yes, you're welcome to down-rez your videos, room 230, but I'm afraid guests have reported that the pixellation just doesn't meet their quality expectations. We do have some old movies on pay-per-view...
Jennifer Granick's story in Wired about a cell phone company using copyright law and technology to lock customers into their service:
Last week, I was contacted by a small company that I'll call Unlocko. Unlocko sells software that "unlocks" mobile phones so owners can select different cellular providers on the same handset. The company had received a cease-and-desist letter from a large mobile phone provider, which I'll call CellPhoneCo.
Like most U.S. cellular providers, CellPhoneCo electronically locks the handsets it sells so the phones can only be used with CellPhoneCo's service. CellPhoneCo claims that the sale of unlocking software is illegal.
The financial motive behind this claim is obvious. Companies have been using the razor blade business model to guarantee a steady stream of revenue ever since, well, the razor blade.
...with this article in which the Trusted Computing Group (TCG), a group developing specifications for cell phone-lockdown, implies people have nothing to fear because these "security" features will be optional, whilst a TCG-friendly analyst calls concerns about its anti-consumer applications "extremely paranoid."
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Google's Auto-Link adds links to certain kinds of content that appears on web pages (like a link to Google Maps for addresses, or Amazon for ISBNs).
Some people (like Dan Gillmor) are viewing this with suspicion. (The Trademark Blog has collected the commentary.) They shouldn't. The issue is simple: Who owns your desktop? You, or the owner of whatever webpage you happen to be browsing?
A meatspace analogy should make this clear: Imagine I have a butler whom I task with going through what drops into my mail slot each morning. His job? To annotate my snail mail. He goes through the advertising circulars and researches whether better prices are available anywhere else. He gets me a map of every return address. Maybe I ask him to anticipate needs I don't even know I have yet. If he does something I don't like, I replace him.
When I visit your website, and you send me a page in response, I should be able to do whatever I like to manipulate it on my end. Display it in purple, suppress images, block pop-ups, compare prices from other vendors, whatever. In the words of my colleague, Cory Doctorow, "it's my screen, and I should be able to control it; companies like Google and individuals should be able to provide tools and services to let me control it."
Let's leave aside whether time-shifting television with an off-brand counterpart to TiVo is "stealing." A more important problem with the article is that it gives a false impression of the normal user experience of BitTorrent. [According to the article,...] "On the kind of peer-to-peer site that gave the music industry night sweats, an episode of 'Desperate Housewives' that some fan copied and posted on the Internet can take hours to download; on BitTorrent, it arrives in minutes."
That hasn't been my experience of BitTorrent, and I doubt many other ordinary users routinely experience the downloading of TV programs in "minutes." On the off chance that BitTorrent speeds had suddenly improved since I had last used the application, I conducted an experiment...downloading Episode 13 of "Huff"...took six hours...An HDTV version of the episode, in full resolution, might have taken ten times longer.
Don't get me wrong: BitTorrent is a significant advance over last-generation file-sharing programs, especially in terms of maximizing use of bandwidth. What it doesn't do, at least for ordinary broadband users, is enable the kind of rapid downloading of TV content that the Motion Picture Association of America believes it must attack.
We've had quite a few dicussions in the space about Hollywood's attempts to rob you of your fair use rights in order to sell them back to you (see here, here, and here). Today Fred von Lohmann has published a review of Elgato's EyeTV -- a Mac product that allows people to make fair uses of high-definition digital television broadcasts. One such fair use might be recording a clip of a movie like "The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring" to use in the context of discussion/review -- and that's precisely what Fred has done [500 MB+ Bit Torrent download].
In only seven months, the FCC's "broadcast flag" regulatory regime will go into effect -- and the regime does not recognize the right to fair uses like this one. But if you make like Fred and purchase devices that aren't hobbled now, you'll be able to keep making perfectly legal uses of recorded broadcasts despite the flag.
For more about EyeTV and the issues surrounding the flag, check out this post @ Deep Links.
What benefits does "competition" in the digital video recorder (DVR) market bring consumers in the post-ReplayTV litigation world? If the details in this USA Today piece on DirecTV's DVR-in-planning are any indication, not many.
We knew we couldn't expect to see a major breakthrough in functionality; after all, the copyright cartel has stuck a fork in the DVR, and it wouldn't take very kindly to anyone daring to innovate "outside the TiVo." Here's what we get instead:
identical functionality (surprise!);
except not really, because you won't be able to jump over commercials entirely using the 30-second hack;
video-on-demand included as part of the service; and
it'll be cheaper to get video-on-demand + "TiVo" -- nice if you're already purchasing both separately.
And finally, the most exciting new feature of all (at least according to Abe Peled, the CEO in charge): you get to pay for your pay-per-view movie when you watch it, rather than when you first select it for purchase. So you can, you know, change your mind and stuff.
For comparison's sake, check out the list of features you could have if you decided to make your own DVR from scratch -- including the "feature" companies like HBO take away in order to sell back to you: the ability to make fair use of recorded programs and movies.
News.com reports the comments of a founder of the MP3 standard, saying what we've all known all along: the number one roadblock to growth in the online music biz is not piracy, but DRM.
"It has slowed the download business for sure, and it's doing the same for the gadget makers," said Karlheinz Brandenburg, director of electronic media technologies at the Fraunhofer Institute in Ilemenau, Germany.
Consumers nowadays can store thousands of songs in a pocket-size device, play music and videos on their mobile phones, and buy albums at the click of a button.
But to their chagrin, a bewildering number of competing playback compression technologies and antipiracy software options determine which songs play on which devices.
Apple Computer, RealNetworks and Sony each have developed proprietary playback and DRM (digital rights management) antipiracy technologies. Songs bought on Apple's iTunes music store can play only on Apple iPods. Ditto for Sony.
The alphabet soup of technologies is meant to prevent fans from rampantly duplicating and transferring songs to others.
Via Ren Bucholz @ miniLinks, a fascinating article on the UK's digital radio market and the products that will let listeners copy/pause/replay anything they can tune:
More than 20 years after MTV aired "Video Killed the Radio Star," the original broadcast medium is moving to reclaim the cutting edge of technology with music downloads over the radio.
...A digital radio already on the market, the 'Bug' from the UK's Pure Digital, lets users record programs -- including songs that would be flawless except for DJ chatter -- and export them to a computer, where they can be loaded onto a portable music player like Apple's iPod or burned to a disc.
Says Ren, "these are exactly the kinds of devices that would be affected by the digital radio broadcast flag (PDF) currently being considered by the FCC."
The debate on DRM technology Audible Magic's CopySense continues, with Ed Felten adding his thoughts to Chris Palmer's and Ernest's. Felten wonders if it isn't even possible to defeat CopySense without resorting to encryption. "It may turn out -- and I suspect it would, if independent experts were able to study Audible Magic's technology -- that copyrighted music files could be tweaked in a way that made them undetectable to Audible Magic's algorithms, while still sounding fine to typical human listeners." Ah, the hand is quicker than the eye.
The RIAA has been touting technologies offered by Audible Magic as the cure for peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing on university campuses. The company has also been making the rounds of congressional offices in Washington, DC, talking up its technologies as a silver bullet for P2P infringement.
It's critical that universities take steps to educate staff and students about copyright law, as well as to control excessive bandwidth usage. At the same time, it's important that universities are not sold expensive, ineffective solutions simply to appease the public relations needs of the RIAA. My EFF colleague Chris Palmertook a close look at how Audible Magic's "filtering" technology works and argues that it's no silver bullet.
"Session encryption for file transfers based on ephemeral keys represents a cheap, easily implemented countermeasure that would effectively frustrate Audible Magic's filtering technology," writes Palmer. "Based on publicly available information, it does not appear that this vulnerability can be easily remedied. Should Audible Magic's technology be widely adopted, it is likely that P2P file-sharing applications would be revised to implement encryption. Accordingly, network administrators will want to ask Audible Magic tough questions before investing in the company's technology, lest the investment be rendered worthless by the next P2P 'upgrade.'"
This is a picture of interoperability. It was on the nightstand when I checked into a hotel recently: a clock-radio with a headphone plug and a button on top labeled "MP3." Simple, but clever. Travelers can plug into their own music players or computers and hear music through the radio's speakers; they can set the clock to wake to tunes from their iPods.
