Toluu

The Culture of Ownership

Thoughts on technology and intellectual property. AND KITTIES!!!

The next culture of ownership demon: the DTV transition?June 19

Tom Yager at Infoworld has an excellent read on how easy–and likely–it will be to lock down content post-digital TV switch. Plus, a good refresher on just how convoluted and downright bad the HDCP over HDMI is for consumers. In essence, his column winds up as a call to arms to the electronics and software industry, who have thus far laid right down for the entertainment industry (hello, Microsoft and your broadcast-flag-embracing copy-protection schemes!).

I agree that the consumer electronics industry should fight harder against Big Entertainment, and certainly the Consumer Electronics Association has been a major advocate for user-friendly gadgets that aren’t crippled with overzealous attempts at DRM. (I was on a panel a couple of years ago, and others since, with Michael Petricone, senior VP for government affairs for CEA, and he can mix it up with the MPAA better than almost anyone I’ve seen.)

But at this point, almost all consumer electronics are becoming part and parcel of the entertainment-delivery machine: Media Center, media players, multimedia-friendly cell phones, media extenders, you get the idea. And access to media means playing ball with Big Media. Is the tech industry at the mercy of the entertainment industry? And if

By far the saddest thing I’ve read todayJune 15

From the New York Times’s Nicholas Kristof today:

“Painfully slowly, the United Nations and its member states seem to be recognizing the fact that systematic mass rape is at least as much an international outrage as, say, pirated DVDs.”

Makes me wonder not only about their priorities, but maybe mine a bit, as well.

The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement: what you need to knowMay 31

I’ve been at this all backwards. See, first I read this story, which seemed to suggest that Canada was working on an agreement that would turn its border cops into copyright cops, lead to searching of iPods and computers for infringing material like ripped CDs and DVDs, and force their ISPs to turn over information on customers who were merely suspected of pirating copyrighted material. Then I realized the story was the same as the “Pirate Bay Killer” trade agreement story that was making the rounds last week, and I had sort of dismissed it as hysterical pro-Pirate Bay FUD. But then I realized that both stories are about a semi-secret international trade agreement with the potential to export some of the worst parts of the DMCA to the entire world, and I figured it was probably time to do some actual research and explaining. So, here goes.

On May 22, Wikileaks posted a leaked discussion paper that, for the first time, offered details into the proposed Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) that’s under negotiation in multiple countries. It pointed out that most of ACTA’s provisions are being negotiated in secret, and that trade representatives would like

It’s time to put MediaDefender out of businessMay 29

Over the past weekend, the online video network Revision3 fell victim to a distributed denial of service attack that took down their entire site and even crippled their internal email servers. And upon investigating the source of the attack, they discovered it had originated from MediaDefender, an antipiracy “defense” firm (owned by digital media entertainment company ARTISTdirect) that claims to use “non-invasive technological countermeasures employed on P2P networks to frustrate users’ attempts to steal/trade copyrighted content.”

What they really do is poison peer-to-peer networks with blank files, decoy files, and use what amount to targeted denial-of-service attacks to prevent users from accessing, uploading, or downloading files that Media Defender has been hired to protect. And what they did in the case of Revision3 was inject a bunch of torrents into a Rev3 p2p server that the company uses to legally distribute its own video files. And the way they injected these torrents was by exploiting a vulnerability in Rev3’s server configuration. And when Rev3 stopped its servers from pointing to MediaDefender’s faux torrents, the MediaDefender servers went DDoS nuclear. So, first they hacked Revision3, and then they trashed the place, all in the name of copyright

Why “safe harbor” may already be historyMay 27

YouTube is taking a bold approach in its defense against Viacom’s massive copyright infringement lawsuit. In a nutshell, YouTube’s official reply to Viacom’s $1 billion complaint (submitted Friday) is that if Viacom wins, the DMCA’s safe harbor provisions will be invalidated, and that “threatens the way hundreds of millions of people legitimately exchange information, news, entertainment, and political and artistic expression.”

Now if that isn’t some ridiculously hyberbolic … or, wait. Let’s see, here. There’s no question YouTube is using an extreme model (The Slipperiest of Slopes Projection?) to predict that all online contribution and information-sharing would be threatened by a Viacom victory, but that doesn’t mean the prediction is untrue or even unlikely. But the whole thing got me wondering whether the concept of safe harbor itself would have made it into a DMCA written today, and, frankly, whether it’s going to last much longer no matter what happens with YouTube/Viacom.

Here’s the deal with safe harbor provisions. Per the Chilling Effects description, safe harbor “exempts on-line service providers that meet the criteria set forth in the safe harbor provisions from claims of copyright infringement made against them that result from the