A Copyfighter’s Musings

…but, apparently, a music service for Mac users is coming.  It’s only for Mac users, will use DRM, and does not use MP3.

Filed by Derek Slater at 6:32 pm under General news
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On the digital media front:

Has anyone else used ESPN Motion?  It’s not streaming ESPN – it downloads incredibly high quality video clips in the background, takes hardly any RAM.  Every few hours, I get these awesome highlight reels or interviews from ESPN.  No more crappy, choppy, blurry, skipping streaming.  Crystal clear picture.

Would other news sites do this?  Will it take too much away from their profit-making bread-and-butter (that is, actual tv broadcasts)?  Or, will this help shift people even more to the web?

Filed by Derek Slater at 2:50 pm under General news
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I’m going to agree with Frank  regarding this article.  The arguments about impairing fair use, reducing privacy, and chilling legal uses – those all make sense. I also like what Ms. Hilden has to say about carving out exemptions for educational uses.

Once Ms. Hilden started talking about the “seriousness’ of piracy as a crime and how the university should handle it as en loco parentis, then she lost me.

To me, it’s this simple: All I would ask a university to do is follow the law.  Follow notice and takedown and, when legally compelled, block access to people misusing the network.  If you want to disobey the law as some form of civil disobediance, that’s up to you.  But don’t police your network any more than the law forces you to.  Don’t actively monitor students, but respond to copyright owners’ requests. 

This does not mean I agree that notice-and-takedown is a fair process.  I think there’s far too much burden right now on the file traders and their ISPs. 

Still,  I don’t see any reason for the university to think of itself any different from an ISP in this circumstance.  I don’t see why they should be dealing with these issues internally, by penalizing file swappers. And I don’t see how/why universities should shield their students from legal liabilty. Students are responsible for what they do on the network.  Why should the university be responsible?  Why should they act as parents for these adults?

The only thing universities should actively do is try to keep Congress from draconian regulations of universites’ networks. To the extent that universites already suffer because of the DMCA, universities should lobby against it.

Filed by Derek Slater at 2:19 pm under General news
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Ok, really, it was called the DRM-related legal and policy initiatives in the US panel.  But it was mostly about the broadcast flag.  Here are some of my favorite parts:

Richard Epstein… To think that you would want to do in order to preserve fair use is to decimate an entire industry, or two industries as the case may be, strikes me as being an extremely kind of odd conclusion to reach. I don’t see where the intermediate fix is, and once there is one pristine copy gets out, then there are billion pristine copies out there, and one has to realize that there is this precipice, which I think determines the shape of the entire debate.

Ed Felten holding his head in a painful way)”

Richard goes on to clarify, but, his point stays basically the same.

First, can somebody please do a study on what happens when just one copy gets out?  I’d really like to know how fast a single file would travel around KaZaA.  Second, we do need to start thinking about “intermediate” DRM models.  That is, can we have control without complete control?  Though we don’t like talking about fair use as a set of rules, should we completely turn away from DRM that allows for most of what we currently consider fair use?

Third, what about the tech industry?  Don’t you think they’ll be “decimated” by selling crippled devices?  Don’t you think people will try to import more non-crippled hardware and software? 

More importantly, can we please stop taking about “decimated” industries?  Business models are being decimated, but industries – well, I think they have some money laying around to adjust. It is important that when we talk about the broadcast flag and other government mandated DRM, we’re not talking about protecting an industry – we’re talking about protecting business models.

Protecting an industry means protecting what gets produced; this is what copyright is about – we protect art (and the artist) to ensure it gets produced.  Protecting a business model means protecting how that art is distributed.  To say that protecting the former is impossible without protecting the latter is a joke.

Now, to say that protecting the former never requires protecting the latter – that might be a little too far.  That is, if artists really had no means of digital distribution without the aid of the government, maybe then I’d listen. But we’re not at that point.

And that’s the thing about the broadcast flag.  It’s completely preemptive. At least with the music industry, there’s significant piracy going on right now.  But, with digital TV, the MPAA doesn’t even know if piracy would increase; they think that digital transmissions will lead to perfect copies moving around the world, but they have no evidence that that’s going to be the case.

Some might say that the broadcast flag isn’t primarily about piracy – it’s a way of taking advantage of digital TV to ensure the control of personal use that the MPAA always wanted.  But the MPAA probably wouldn’t make that argument –  look at their rhetoric in the FCC documents.

Still, you might be correct if you said the flag is not completely about copyright.  Check out this part:

“Pam [Samuelson].. the Hollings bill hasn’t been reintroduced in this congress, and it seems unlikely that it will be, but it does seem like the broadcast flag issue is a very similar kind of proposal….

Fritz Attaway… I have to take issue with you, it is not at all a similar proposal to the Hollings bill. It certainly has copyright implications, but at its core, it is a communications issue. Cable and satellite delivery systems, because they have a conditional access system, have the ability to protect content, including preventing content from being redistributed over the Internet. Over the air broadcasters do not have the ability, and the question before the FCC is should they give off air broadcasters a level playing field where they can offer program suppliers some security against the redistribution over the Internet.Without that security, content providers will naturally migrate away from off air broadcast television to cable and satellite. So the issue is maintenance of free television. We support that because free television is a major customer of ours, and we want free television to continual to exist in the marketplace, however if it doesn’t we will market our content through conditional access systems, and bypass free television. I don’t think that is in the best interests of consumers, but if one wants to argue, I suppose one can.”

This is about communications and not copyright? Isn’t it interesting that Fritz must have said that this right as the spectrum conference was starting?

In some ways, the broadcast flag really is part of the bigger picture of how we treat the sprectrum.  Let’s say we actually do want to protect over the air television.  If the spectrum isn’t scarce, what does it mean to protect over the air television? Who should we be protecting?  If the spectrum were shared, would everyone want the broadcast flag?

The EFF did a great job of revealing the BPDG as a closed process.  But now that I think about it, it wasn’t just consumers and some tech companies who were shut out.  It’s all the broadcasters who would exist if we had shared spectrum.

If the flag is truly a solution to a “communications issue”, shouldn’t we try to settle on spectrum first? Isn’t that an even greater reason to be patient with the flag?

Filed by Derek Slater at 10:25 am under General news
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