Tag Archive for 'copyright'

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Why do copyright holders and US legislators assume people are guilty until proven innocent?

Yet another bill making copyright violations incrementally more serious hit the news today.

Entertainment industry lackeys Senators Feinstein and Graham have introduced a new bill that would effectively ban devices that record streamed digital music, primarily through satellite radio.

Then there’s the new super-DMCA introduced by Conressman Lamar Smith, someone who is so completely in the pocket of the entertainment industry that he probably doesn’t even fart without asking them if he is allowed to do that. This bill is something else. Among other things it would make posting copyrighted material on the net exceeding a value of $1,000 punishable by a 10 – 20 year prison sentence. You gotta be fucking kidding me! I can kill someone and get a lower sentence. Be sure to check the working draft of this bill that reveals the kind of edits done to it before its introduction. It’s amazing.

When the fuck did the US legislators start assuming every US citizen is a criminal and therefore not to be trusted with such awful gadgets as satellite radio receivers with recording capability? And I’m not even going to go into the way copyrights have been extended so that the original work is basically covered until hell freezes over.

Why is the tech industry sitting with their thumbs up their ass and basically letting the entertainment industry dictate the direction of technological innovation? (Update: read below…)

With the introduction of such concepts as the Broadcast Flag it’s clear the entertainment industry doesn’t want the consumers to record anything digital. Not even if you legally own it. They don’t want you to back it up or transfer it to another device so that you can listen to it while jogging. And the reason for it is not so that you’d have to buy it sevral times (although that’s a consequence), but because if they allow it, then all of us criminals will be distributing digital content wholesale. And there’s where the assumption of guilt until proven innocent comes in. Why are the US legislators buying into this sort of thinking? It goes against everything this country is supposed to stand for.

Why are organizations such as the EFF the only ones that keep making any noise about these issues?

Just north of the border, there’s a revolution going on in the music industry. Six leading Canadian record labels left CRIA, The Canadian Recording Industry Association, over disagreements on how CRIA handles copyright issues. It has left some wondering just how Canadian the CRIA is, as it seems it’s more interested in protecting the “rights” of their southern comrades than advancing Canadian artists’ interests.

Fuck’em. Just fuck all of them. Simple as that.

Update: Right on cue, CEA (Consumer Electronics Association) has upped the ante:


Please also read the press release associated with CEA’s campaign against RIAA/MPAA. Awesome!

-TPP

RIAA says the US President is a criminal

I can hardly wait till RIAA sues George Bush.

Pitting George Bush against the RIAA Settlement Support Center folks would be very entertaining.

-TPP

EFF has published a paper on the unintended consequences of DMCA

The EFF paper is a great collection of DMCA horror stories.

I’m pretty sure the copyright owners see the list as a collection of their greatest moments though.

-TPP

MPAA sues Google – well, not quite, but they might as well

MPAA is sueing a number of search engines that link to copyrighted content. What’s interesting is that they’re sueing search engines that comply with DMCA takedown requests.

-TPP

The Recording Industry vs The People

I just found a very interesting blog about the RIAA lawsuits. It’s run by two lawyers, who apparently think RIAA is abusing the law.

The blog documents and comments on active cases RIAA is litigating in the courts as well as other background information into the RIAA’s war on P2P downloads.

-TPP

Couldn’t have said it better myself

Rosa Merilainen, a Finnish Member of Parliament, maintains a blog she updates every week.

She was recently involved with voting for a new copyright law in Finland, one which was opposed by 98% of Finnish citizens, but promoted heavily by the entertainment industry lobbyists. The bill caused an unprecedented uproar in Finland before it was passed, and the controversy has not lessened since. Ms. Merilainen was one of the many MPs who voted for the law, and has been critized severely by her constituents ever since.

The entry for week 45 on her blog has an interesting confessional from Ms. Merilainen. While having a rather unsuccessful attempt of doing any work during Thursday of that week, she was nevertheless in a happy mood, because she was heading to the Christmas season opening event of Gramex. Gramex is an organization protecting the interests of performing artists and publishers and also collects copyright related renumerations in behalf of them.

Turns out Ms. Merilainen was looking forward to the event, because she had had such a rough time with the new copyright law, she was trolling for praise from the “wonderful men” (her words) of Gramex.

It’s good to know Ms. Merilainen is working hard to please her constituents, or at least 2% of them.

-TPP

Sony pirating software

Apparently Sony’s rootkit DRM software contains a statically linked version of the lame mp3 decoder. Lame is licensed under the LGPL license, which would typically only allow this sort of reuse if the application using lame would also be released under LGPL, or Sony bought a non-LGPL license from the authors of lame.

It’s highly unlikely Sony did either.

So here we have a company trying to protect their products from being pirated using pirated software. Oh the irony!

-TPP

allofmp3.com is legal…no illegal…no, wait, legal….oh crap, let’s make it illegal

So, allofmp3.com, a Russian music download site, claims they’re legit and are paying royalties to what they say is the Russian authority that collects royalty payments for musicians.

Well, looks like Russian IFPI (International Federation of the Phonographic Industry) thought otherwise and asked the Moscow City Police Computer Crimes Division to investigate allofmp3.com. The police concluded their investigation earlier this month and are recommending the prosecutors charge allofmp3.com for criminal copyright infringement.

Let’s see what happens next. Will the operators pack their bags and skip town, will they just shut it down and play quiet or will they fight it.

It’s also interesting to see what the copyright stormtroopers in other countries will want to do with the customer list. I’m 100% sure the Russian IFPI will politely ask the Moscow City Police to confiscate the customer list and forget it at IFPI’s mailbox.

-TPP

It’s not about copyright, it’s about control of the medium

Looks like the movie studios don’t want DVDs copied, at all. Not for personal use, not for backups, no copies whatsoever, even though making personal copies is perfectly legal.

DVD Copy Control Association (DVD CCA) sued a company that produces a DVD jukebox that copies DVDs into its harddrive then allows users to play the DVDs from the hard drive. Sounds like a great device, but one that will probably be unavailable sometime soon. The manufacturer will go bankrupt fighting this frivolous lawsuit.

I wonder what’s the point when the general public goes “enough is enough”. We’re fast moving towards an era where nothing you buy is yours, but licensed with terms that allow the owner of the merchandise to dictate everything you can or can not do with the merchandise. You can’t resell or give it to anyone (charity, relative, friend), because it is not yours. You can’t transport it to another location, because the license terms prohibit it. You can’t augment the capabilities with a third party add-on, because the license terms prohibit it. Want to move to another content/network provider, too bad, gotta buy THE SAME device again, because the license terms prohibit you from moving it to another provider. You can’t use it aboard, because the license terms prohibit it.

End result: you have to buy or pay more to do what the merchandise was already capable of doing, but was articifially restricted from doing.

Great for businesses. Really bad for consumers. If only the legislators would understand this.

-TPP

Has the entertainment industry completely bought out the government?

The entertainment industry is big, and it’s powerful, but I never thought they ran the United States. Even when the DMCA was passed I didn’t think so. But today I read two news stories that make me wonder.

The first one is so absurd you really have to read it twice to believe it. It seems the FCC is claiming it has authority to regulate all instrumentalities, facilities, and apparatus “associated with the overall circuit of messages sent and received” via all interstate radio and wire communication. That, btw, includes personal computers, PVRs, and any other device that could receive digital TV signals now or in the future. FCC’s basis for this argument is that they have to do it to make HDTV adoption happen. This is why the FCC now thinks they can dictate what you can or, rather, can not do with your audiovisual gadgetry.

The second item comes straight from the lobbying arm of the RIAA and MPAA via your friendly entertainment industry representatives in the US Senate. It seems like there’s a new copyright bill in the books every week. This time it’s something called the Intellectual Property Protection Act (HR2391). Now, it has all the usual “share music or movies online and go to prison for the rest of your life” stuff all the other bills have, but this bill goes even further. It actually has the audacity to prohibit skipping commercials or other promotional announcements when recording movies for home viewing. At least they let you skip the commercials when viewing the recording though, for now.

-TPP