Serial Console - Credit: jmcar on Flickr (CC BY)

Matthew Crippen, a 27 year old student from California, was arrested for hacking video game consoles in violation of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act.

“Matthew Crippen was arrested yesterday for hacking game consoles (for profit) in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. He was released on a $5,000 bond, but faces up to 10 years in prison. This is terribly disturbing to me; a man could lose 10 years of his freedom for providing the service of altering hardware. He could well lose much of his freedom for providing a modicum of it to others. There is no piracy going on, necessarily — the games a modified console could run may simply not be signed by the vendor. It’s much like jailbreaking an iPhone. But it seems because he is disabling a ‘circumvention device’ it is a criminal issue. Guess it’s time to kick a few dollars over to the EFF.”

We are now one step closer of turning our world into the dystopian future found in Richard Stallman’s The Right to Read.

• Slashdot

United States Court House - Credit: jamidwyer on Flickr (CC BY SA)

Many newspapers are having a really difficult time these days. Also they are now facing competition from many online news sources and their classifieds business has been crippled by websites like craigslist.com. A judge makes a controversial suggestion on how to save them:

“Expanding copyright law to bar online access to copyrighted materials without the copyright holder’s consent, or to bar linking to or paraphrasing copyrighted materials without the copyright holder’s consent, might be necessary to keep free riding on content financed by online newspapers from so impairing the incentive to create costly news-gathering operations that news services like Reuters and the Associated Press would become the only professional, nongovernmental sources of news and opinion.”

I think this idea is completely ridiculous. davester666, a commenter from Slashdot, couldn’t have put it better…

“This sounds like a “new methods are making an old business model obsolete, so we should outlaw the new methods type thing.”"

• Slashdot

The UK Intellectual Property Office has drafted proposals for dealing with “persistent” copyright infringers, particularly filesharers, as part of a discussion of the scope of a proposed UK Digital Rights Agency. The guidelines involve ISPs restricting the access of repeat infringers:

The new discussion piece, while not going into much detail, has proposed two potential example solutions to the problem. UK ISPs could employ protocol blocking or bandwidth restrictions, in relation to persistent infringers. In other words, P2P services could be blocked or users might find their service speeds seriously restricted[...]

One particularly interesting aspect of the new proposals is that it would not be limited to tackling unlawful peer to peer activity. Instead the DRA would be geared towards finding effective ways of reducing the overall levels of online copyright infringement over time, allowing for changing behaviours and technologies (i.e. it might tackle Newsgroups, FTP and other services where illegal usage takes place on a users account).

[...]

Typically all of these proposals rest on ISPs being able to reach some kind of agreement with the creative industry. Should that fail then the “less attractive” option would be for tougher measures to be introduced through legislation. “This would be necessary if there were little prospect of an effective rights agency,” says the paper.

So, essentially, the UK IPO wants to impose a kind of “three strikes lite” on their citizens. Never mind, of course, that a filesharer may want to download (or seed) a new version of Linux or talk with friends over Ekiga or something. She’s a *gasp* filthy filesharer! She’s not fit to interact with others online!

Imposing social rules through legislation rarely works out well.

• ISPreview article
• Link to paper (PDF, 448 kB)

LA County Courthouse. Credit: "courthouse wide angle" by maveric2003 on Flickr (CC-BY)

US Federal Prosecutors are seeking a 6-month prison term for Kevin Cogill, the owner of a music website who pleaded guilty to uploading pre-release tracks of the Guns N’ Roses album Chinese Democracy:

The sentence being sought — including the calculation of damages based on the illegal activity of as many as 1,310 websites that disseminated the music after Cogill released it — underscores how serious the government is about punishing those for uploading pre-release material.

[...]

The government claimed the amount of infringement equaled $371,622. The higher the number the larger the potential prison term. The government said it produced a “reasonable estimate” and gave the defendant the “benefit of the doubt” in its calculations, which were based on each infringement being worth 99 cents on iTunes.

The Recording Industry Association of America, however, told the judge overseeing the case that the defendant’s conduct resulted in more than a $2.2 million loss based on a “$6.39 legitimate wholesale value” for the nine tracks the RIAA claims (.pdf) were downloaded about 350,000 times.

Regardless of the phantom figures, the numbers floated by the government and the RIAA assume that the music would have been purchased had it not been downloaded for free.

This illustrates the problem with the concept of “intellectual property theft”; they have no real way to determine what the value of what was “stolen”, and so they are forced to make assumptions, like everyone would have bought an album if they wanted the one song, or that people all shop at iTunes.  Putting people in prison based on these half-fantasy models don’t make much sense either.

• Wired article

"The White House" by ktylerconk on Flickr (CC-BY)

On January 31st, Jamie Love, director of Knowledge Ecology International, filed a US Freedom of Information Act request to the White House for documents relating to the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. Last Thursday, the request was denied, citing national security reasons:

Love had written in his original request on January 31–submitted soon after Obama’s inauguration–that the documents “are being widely circulated to corporate lobbyists in Europe, Japan, and the U.S. There is no reason for them to be secret from the American public.”

The White House appears to be continuing the secretive policy of the Bush administration, which wrote to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (PDF) on January 16 that out of 806 pages related to the treaty, all but 10 were “classified in the interest of national security pursuant to Executive Order 12958.”

In one of his first acts as president, Obama signed a memo saying FOIA “should be administered with a clear presumption: In the face of doubt, openness prevails. The government should not keep information confidential merely because public officials might be embarrassed by disclosure.”

Apparently, lobbyists have more of a right to know what their government is doing than their own people, even when  the treaty would have dramatic impacts domestically. Love will have to sue to get the documents, and by the time it makes it out of trial it may be too late.

So much for change we can believe in.

• CNet article

Union pour un Mouvement Populaire (UMP), the political party to which French President Nicholas Sarkozy belongs, is being accused of copyright infringement by US indie band MGMT over using one of their songs:

The Union pour un Mouvement Populaire party paid a standard €53 fee ($75.54 Cdn.) to France’s music licensing body, but MGMT’s lawyer Isabelle Wekstein says that this was not enough to cover subsequent uses of the song, particularly on the Web.

The party has admitted to using the popular track, Kids, at its national congress in January, in two online videos and in political advertisements. But it claims this was an unintentional mistake and offered the band a symbolic €1 ($1.43 Cdn.) for copyright infringement.

Wekstein has rejected the offer, calling it insulting.

This is especially ironic, considering that UMP — and Sarkozy in particular — has been pushing for 3-strikes copyright legislation, railroading it through France’s legislature. I’m somewhat surprised that this issue was allowed to explode; one would think a large political party would have the resources to pay whatever licensing fees they needed.

• CBC story
• ZeroPaid’s take on the story

Green Tech -- Credit: jurvetson on Flickr (CC BY)

Two weeks ago, Representative John Conyers (D-MI14), along with 4 other Democrats in the US House of Representatives, introduced a bill that would bar federal agencies funding research from making open access a condition of federal funding, like has been done at the NIH:

If passed, the bill would essentially bar agencies of the federal government from requiring the transfer of copyright, whole or in part, as a condition for receiving public funding. That would prohibit measures like the recently enacted NIH public access policy, which requires investigators who accept taxpayer funds to deposit their final papers in the PubMed Central repository and give the agency a non-exclusive right to offer free access within a year.

HR 801, the Fair Copyright in Research Works Act, is a reintroduction of a House bill from last year, which was left to expire after committee hearings in Congress. The argument for that bill — which has changed little since last year — goes like this:

In his testimony, former Register of Copyrights Ralph Oman, said he didn’t “have a dog in this fight,” but clearly had a favorite breed: Oman bluntly told lawmakers that in his opinion, the NIH mandate would “destroy the market” for commercial scientific journals, and cause a “dilution” of copyright. Oman said that Congress directed the NIH to provide access “consistent with copyright law,” a phrase lobbied for and added to the NIH mandate by publishers, which the current policy does not do. Perhaps Zerhouni “misunderstood,” Oman said, noting that Congress directed him to address “public access” not “free public access.” In written testimony worthy of a presidential campaign TV commercial, Oman suggested that “the hairy snout” of government be kept out of science publishing, drawing a good-natured rebuke from Rep. John Conyers (D-MI).

Open access policies benefit everyone, and the American taxpayer should have the right to see the fruits of their investment in the scientific community. The argument saying that this bill would bring open access policies into harmony with copyright law is nonsense; if the policy was violating copyright law, why didn’t the publishing companies sue for a remedy? This is a gimme for the publishing companies, and the people involved in sponsoring this bill should be ashamed of themselves. Why is it, with things like this, that the argument is always about the damage to business and never the damage to the public?

• Open Access News
• LibraryJournal.com
• LibraryJournal.com on last year’s hearings
• Bill Status at OpenCongress.org

Music - Credit: rossinabossio on Flickr (CC BY)

European copyright on music has been extended from 50 to 95 years.

Ensuring that copyright extension benefits performers

The approved report, drafted by Brian Crowley (UEN, IE), amends existing legislation to increase the copyright protection for music compositions to 95 years.

To ensure that performers fully enjoy the additional royalties deriving from copyright extension, the  committee amended the original text so as to prevent the use of previous contractual agreements to deduct money from the additional royalties.

A fund for session musicians

A dedicated fund for session musicians was also approved by the committee. This fund would be financed by contributions from producers, who would be obliged to set aside for this purpose, at least once a year, at least 20% of the revenues gained from the proposed extension of copyright term.

Committee members also amended a provision relating to this fund so as to give collecting societies, which represent performers’ and producers’ interests, the right to administer the annual supplementary remuneration.

Copyright extension for audiovisual works, too?

The committee also asked the Commission to launch an impact assessment of the situation in the European audiovisual sector by January 2010, with a view to deciding whether a similar copyright extension would benefit the audiovisual world.

Review legislation after three years

Finally, MEPs ask the Commission to submit three years after the entry into force of the new legislation, and every four years thereafter, an assessment of whether the copyright extension has in fact improved the social situation of performers.

Everyone will benefit so much from this.  By everyone I mean lawyers.

• European Parliament

Federal Judge David G. Campbell issued his final ruling Wednesday in a case brought by Blizzard Entertainment last March, stating that the popular WoW bot Glider can be classified as a circumvention device and thus violates the DMCA:

Judge Campbell has distinguished between the actual bits stored on the World of Warcraft disk (which he called the “literal elements” of the game) and the interface elements the user encounters as he’s actually playing the game (which he dubbed “non-literal elements”). In his ruling last summer, Judge Campbell ruled that Glider did not violate the DMCA with respect to the “literal elements” because Warden did not “effectively control” access to those elements: they are stored, unencrypted, on the World of Warcraft disk. But he deferred until this month’s trial the question of whether Glider violated the DMCA with respect to the “non-literal elements.”

In Wednesday’s ruling, Judge Campbell found that [Blizzard's anti-bot program] Warden did effectively control access to the “non-literal elements.” That is, while Warden does not prevent users from accessing the individual elements of the game separately, it does effectively bar users from accessing all of the elements together while playing the game. Therefore, Judge Campbell concluded, [Glider creator] MDY violated the DMCA when it evaded warden’s checks.

In addition, Judge Campbell affirmed Blizzard’s theory that violating an EULA is indeed copyright infringement:

Blizzard argued, and Judge Campbell agreed, that when users violated the World of Warcraft EULA, they no longer had a license to play the game and were therefore guilty of copyright infringement. As Siy noted in a blog post last year, Blizzard’s theory, if taken literally, would mean that violating any of the rules in the EULA and Terms of Service, such as choosing a screen name that didn’t meet Blizzard’s guidelines, would be an act of copyright infringement. And distributing software that helps users infringe copyright itself constitutes secondary copyright infringement, which could expose MDY to copyright law’s draconian “statutory damages” of $150,000 per act of infringement. The law gives aggrieved parties to contract disputes much less potent powers.

This is horrible. True, Glider is a big way for people to cheat, and some would argue that’s against the spirit of the game, but hauling every EULA violator into court for copyright infringement is nuts. Not only would it clog the courts, but it gives large corporations another big stick to use against people who might do something innovative with their products outside the sphere of approved uses.

• Ars Technica

Sorry! - Credit: myguitarzz on Flickr (CC BY)

Toyota has apologized to DesktopNexus, and has claimed that the ordeal was a result of internal miscommunication.

From: Scott DeYager
Date: Wed, Nov 19, 2008 at 12:52 AM
Subject: Desktopnexus Toyota Wallpapers
To: tips@torrentfreak.com

Dear Torrentfreak.com,

The recent request Toyota made to have certain photos of Toyota vehicles removed from the public wallpaper site, DesktopNexus, was the result of an internal miscommunication.

To protect the legal rights and agreements we have with the photographers we hire, we ask that the photographs not be used for direct consumer advertising, sales brochures and the like.

If people wish to post their own photos of one of their own vehicles, that’s their right. In fact, we’re pleased that people would want to show their Toyota vehicles to the world. So have at it. Consider the wallpapers on DesktopNexus to be fair game for personal use.

Please let your readers know that we offer a sincere apology to the DesktopNexus site and its users for any inconvenience or disruption this miscommunication may have caused.

Thanks for your understanding,

Scott DeYager
Toyota Motor Sales, U.S.A., Inc.
Corporate Communications

Yay!  I’m glad I was able to help out with this.  Here’s a post on the DesktopNexus blog that talks about the internet responce.

• TorrentFreak