Monthly Archives: August 2004

Decision in MGM v. Grokster

The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled, and found that Grokster is not liable for copyright infringement of its users. You can read the decision here in PDF. The basics of the decision were roughly that Grokster did demonstrate that there was a substantial, non-infringing use for their software and that they had no timely knowledge of any uses of their software to infringe at a time when they could prevent such infringement from occurring.

The opinion of the court also spoke directly to the wisdom of new legislation such as Orin Hatch’s INDUCE act:

As to the issue at hand, the district court’s grant of partial summary judgment … is clearly dictated by applicable precedent. The Copyright Owners urge a re-examination of the law in light of what they believe to be proper public policy, expanding exponentially the reach of the doctrines of contributory and vicarious copyright infringement. Not only would such a renovation conflict with binding precedent, it would be unwise. Doubtless, taking that step would satisfy the Copyright Owners’ immediate economic aims. However, it would also alter general copyright law in profound ways with unknown ultimate consequences outside the present context.

Further, as we have observed, we live in a quicksilver technological environment with courts ill-suited to fix the flow of internet innovation. The introduction of new technology is always disruptive to old markets, and particularly to those copyright owners whose works are sold through well-established distribution mechanisms. Yet, history has shown that time and market forces often provide equilibrium in balancing interests, whether the new technology be a player piano, a copier, a tape recorder, a video recorder, a personal computer, a karaoke machine, or an MP3 player. Thus, it is prudent for courts to exercise caution before restructuring liability theories for the purpose of addressing specific market abuses, despite their apparent present magnitude.

Are you paying attention, Congress?

Addendum: You can listen to an MP3 of EFF attorney Fred von Lohmann’s oral arguments in the case. I haven’t had a chance to yet, but will this evening. (Thanks to Boing-Boing and Cory Doctorow for the pointer!)

Talking Boards Patents and Trademarks

Ouija Board PatentFor some reason, I found a reference to an early patent on Ouija boards, and with a bit of digging, came up with this page of Talking Boards Patents and Trademarks. Most of these early patents declare it a game, rather than a legitimate way to contact the dead.

Using pat2pdf, I extracted a few of these patents as PDF files:

Becker, 1880
Patent 233,198
Bond, 1891
Patent 446,054, the first patent to mention the term “Ouija”
Fuld, 1892
Patent 479,266, makers of Ouija boards until the bottom fell out of the market in the 1970s

It appears that patent examiners of the past were every bit as diligent as those we have today.

Collateral

I had a rare “middle of the week” movie attack last night (there was nothing on television) so the wife and I trundled off to see Michael Mann’s latest noir-ish creation Collateral.

An aside: I’ve got a pet theory that 50% of a movie’s gross is determined by it’s choice of title. By my estimation, Collateral is the worst title to appear from Hollywood since the ill-fated Gigli experiment. With a better title, this film might have had a shot at opening at #1.

Tom Cruise stars as Vincent, an assassin sent to Los Angeles to kill five people in a single night. Jamie Foxx stars is Max, a knowledgeable cabbie who dreams of opening his own limosine company. Vincent hires Max to drive him on his rounds, and when the first hit goes wrong, Max is forced to continue to drive Vincent around.

This is classic Michael Mann material, and it is quite well done. I’m not a huge fan of Los Angeles, and just seeing the backdrop reminded me of just how little I like the city. It’s a dark, morose film with some good acting performances by both Cruise (in a slightly less heroic role than is usual, and better done than his usual performance) and by Foxx. I must admit that I think that Jamie Foxx is turning out to be a very good actor, despite my initial impressions of him from In Living Color. I’m struck by the same sort of surprise that made me realize that Tom Hanks could rise above Bosom Buddies and Bachelor Party.

Ultimately I didn’t find the movie that entertaining, and as such it isn’t really he kind of movie I like. It also (if I may borrow a comment from my wife) tends to look like The Terminator in spots. Still, it is a well done glimpse into the world of L.A. crime after dark, and I think it is quite successful. I’ll give it 8 out of 10.

Bloggercon

Despite the fact that I’ve been blogging for over two years, I have as yet really developed a sense of the impact of weblogs on society at large or how others view them. To help better educate myself on the nature of the blogging universe, I thought I might attend BloggerCon III, which is coming up in November. I’m not sure what to expect, but if it helps expand my thinking about the role that blogs can play in the future, it will be worth the commute down to Stanford.

Perhaps I will see some of you there.

On Audio Blogging

I’ve begun to become interested in the idea of audio blogging, or more generally, multimedia blogging. Ideally, I want to have a way to compose and post new entries to a weblog from a mobile location which might include sound, pictures, video and just plain old text.

Ideally, this could all be done with a single gadget. I’ve been researching PDAs for the last couple of weeks, and trying to find a reasonably inexpensive but useful gadget which can serve this purpose, and yet not cost as much as a full laptop. Unfortunately, the $300-$400 price limit I’ve placed upon this project yield only devices which are compromises. The two most promising devices appear to be:

The Dell Axim X30
This PDA costs $314 currently, includes a 624Mhz processor and has both 802.11b and Bluetooth wireless. If it had a camera, it would be terrific, as it is, it’s tempting.
Palm Zire 72
This one sells for $260 or so from amazon.com, includes a 1.3 megapixel camera, can shoot both still pictures and video, but sadly includes only Bluetooth. I’d really like to be able to take advantage of open wireless connections to send email and the like. Supposedly a WiFi card is coming, but that will consume the expansion slot, and it’s unclear if the WiFi card will include some extra flash memory.

If I expand the allowable price range to $600 (ouch), then some other possibilities arise, with some other unique capabilities. Most notably, I rather like:

Asus MyPal A730
As yet unreleased, this PDA appears to be nearly ideal. Not only does it include Bluetooth, 802.11b and IR connections, it has a VGA resolution screen, a one megapixel camera and both SD and CompactFlash memory slots. Very nice.

Okay, so let’s imagine I’ve got one of these devices. I can use it to compose audio files, snap pictures, or compose text entries. I can then send these using ordinary email to my server, and they will automatically be converted into weblog postings. That seems pretty cool, as these devices are small and convenient, and will lend themselves well to increased impromptu blogging.

But what else can we do? Adam Curry has made a plea for some software that allows him to act as a DJ: you can talk, insert bumper music and songs, and record the result as a high quality mp3 file for later streaming. This immediately reminded me of a similar program that Tom Duff wrote several years ago. Tom was nominated to be the sound engineer for a theater production, and spent three weeks coding up a nice little application that allowed you to preload a bunch of sound effects and “perform” them by hitting keys on a control console. The application handled all the scheduling and mixing internally. It shouldn’t be too difficult to do that on a modest PDA these days. Curry suggests that the Studio365 interface is nearly ideal, and staring at it, it does seem like a good starting point.

There are lots of remaining questions though. While modern PDAs are capable of decoding mp3 files in real time without great difficulty, it appears that they aren’t really up to encoding in real time (I’d love to be wrong about this, if anyone knows more about this, let me know) which means that we would have to store the resulting sound files and then compress them as a post process. Assuming that we want to keep such posts short (limited to say 15 minutes) and that the highest quality isn’t required (say 22050hz audio, 16 bit, mono) that cranks up to 40Mb, which is doable, but not ideal, particularly if you have to do the final encoding on a desktop, since sending the 40Mb of audio files over wireless or Bluetooth isn’t all that fast. Some more headscratching and research is clearly needed here.

Perhaps the greatest problem of audio blogs is one of indexing: it’s very difficult to provide searchable content when given only an audio stream. Currently my idea is simply tag audio posts with some searchable keywords, and also to limit the total length of posts to modest 5-15 minute lengths. I’ve thought about trying to do automated speech recognition to provide a searchable transcript, but given that I want to post from remote locations with the possibility of considerable ambient noise, I doubt that would be entirely successful. It won’t help to have a huge number of audio blog entries with no ability to find one that you found particularly compelling.

This is as far as my thinking takes me this morning. Feel free to comment below.

Political Cartoons of the Past

From Punch, March 14, 1891Project Gutenberg has been digitizing various periodicals from the 19th century, and some of them have included some very nice line art which I thought might be recycled. While scanning a recently completed issue of Punch, I encountered the political cartoon at the right. It carried the caption:

AMERICAN “COPYRIGHT BILL” IN A NEW PART

“DIE VILLAIN!”

“The extinction of literary piracy in America has been decreed.”—Times Leader, March 5.

Decreed perhaps, but not achieved. If one were to adapt this cartoon to modern times, the “pirate” in black on the right could be relabelled “the public domain”.

AMD K8 has reprogrammable microcode

Real World Technologies lists an interesting article about the AMD K8 processor and its previously unnoticed ability to patch its own microcode. Apparently AMD has used this to repair a couple of bugs in the processor in the past, but nobody really noticed it before.

A couple of quotes from the article:

The ability to fundamentally alter instruction decoding and execution on AMD K8 processors is sure to interest hardware hackers everywhere.

…

For instance, by patching the appropriate microcode lines, it may be possible to catch an opcode that would normally be illegal, and instead handle it by tricking the TLB into thinking we’re in kernel mode when in fact the attacker has only compromised a userspace process. From there, the attacker could control the entire machine, all without altering a single bit of “software”.

That sounds scary. But wait: there is more!

There may also be a hidden danger to altering K8 microcode without complete information. It is possible (though very unlikely) that the microcode could electrically reconfigure signal routing in a fashion similar to FPGAs, for instance to cut off defective logic and reroute signals to redundant arrays. This approach has been used in the past and the AMD patents even suggest it.

If this were the case, there is a very remote chance the CPU itself could be permanently damaged, for instance, by tri-stating pass transistors into a high current draw state or adjusting the K8’s voltage and frequency scaling controls out of spec. This is not meant to discourage potential hackers; I have just seen programmable logic literally destroyed by buggy “software” bitstreams.

Gee, that doesn’t sound very good.

Experiments in video capture

Example Frame From Jurassic ParkI recently reinstalled my Hauppauge Win-TV card in my server box, and have been working a bit at getting my webcam software up and running. But rather than just play with occasional image capture, I was wondering what the possibilities would be for recording live video for later playback. So, I embarked on a bit of experimentation using tidbits of software that I had lying around.

Note: My server is a 1ghz VIA Nehemiah chip, which isn’t fast enough to do software encoding of full video frames, so all experiments were performed at resolutions of 352×288 or 320×240. This is more directly comparable to ordinary VideoCD: watchable, but not archival quality. You can see an example frame on the right, at the size I normally use for video capture. Modern PDA’s can actually play back mpeg4 streams of this quality, so this might be comparable to what you’d get on one of these.

First of all, I installed ffmpeg. It has a video capture mode that works with the FreeBSD brooktree driver, so it seemed like it was a promising start. I ended up with the following script: Continue reading →

Alien vs. Predator

Alien vs. PredatorWarning: This may contain something you will view as a spoiler. You’ve been warned.

It was with some mixed feelings that I decided to go see Alien vs. Predator this weekend. After all, if you average out all four Alien movies and both Predator movies, you end up with a grade of C. In each case, half of the franchise was good to excellent, and the second half was, well, terrible. Really bad. Highlander 2 bad.

So I was expecting nothing at all from Alien vs. Predator. Actually, I was expecting it to really actively suck. But sometimes you just have to pay your $8.50 and hope for the best.

And, sometimes, you are pleasantly surprised.

Mind you, not that surprised. It certainly doesn’t compare to the first movie of either franchise, both of which I consider to be excellent, but neither do they make you cringe much. You won’t find any remarkable characters in this movie. You won’t remember any of their names, be able to tell your friends what jobs they had, or anything about them. The humans exist solely as punching (or should I say puncturing) bags for the two alien species, and true to form of both series, only one will survive to tell the tale.

The basic outline: a mysterious pyramid is found underneath the ice of Antartica. Science team led by ailing robotics expert decide to go check it out. It’s an alien pyramid, built by the Predators as sort of a rite of passage for their warriors: they enter to battle Aliens. If they win, they are branded as victors and get pay raises. If they fail, an explosion kills all remaining Aliens, ala the self destruct of Predator.

Okay, there is one cringe-worthy part: the whole “archaelogy” aspect of it. The pyramid shows signs of “Aztec, Egyptian and Cambodian” influences, and in fact the Predators were known to all three civilizations, or so the story goes. Wince. That’s not even remotely possible to anyone who doesn’t wear a tinfoil hat.

But let’s move on. The vast majority of the humans (be they archaelogists, soldiers, or… whatever) exist only as empty place holders until folded, spindled, mutilated or impregnated by alien face huggers. The real stars are the Aliens and Predators, and they are pretty cool. The battle sequences are pretty damned nifty. They’ve really got that “dripping Alien, quivering lips, double-rack of teeth” thing working in this one. Cool stuff.

I’d rate it a good B-. Above average, but not memorable. Fun Saturday matinee fare, and shouldn’t totally make you tear up your ticket in disgust.

Weekend of Fun

Well, I’ve been busy this weekend helping my son repaint his room. It’s now a lovely sky blue, with faux-finished images of clouds painted all around. It’s really quite restful, but it took the better part of both days to finish. I’ve had precious little time for anything else, and I’m too tired to write up what little I have thought about.

Still I managed to go out and catch the new Alien vs. Predator movie, and experimented a bit with writing scripts for capturing video with my Brooktree card. I’ll write these up tomorrow: consider this a tease.

DRM is doubleplus good for business, Congress advised | The Register

Your rightsThe Register reports that the CBO is advising Congressmen that Digital Rights Management is good for America. Well, for American business anyway.

It is surprising (well, maybe not surprising, perhaps just disappointing) that the CBO completely ignores the central questions at the core of current discussions about copyright and instead lodges their heads firmly in the… pockets of current large media consumers. Nothing in this report does anything to discuss what I think are the core issues behind current copyright discussions:

  1. First, copyright terms have been extended retroactively for all works. While some works have continuing value, the vast majority are not being exploited in the marketplace. These works were simply kidnapped to provide companies like Disney an additional extension, and the public foots the bills for this governmental largesss.
  2. Even for works which retained some commercial value, the intention of the Framers was clearly that such works would eventually be put into the public domain. This is part of the balance between trying to encourage creativity and yet keeping our collective culture free.
  3. Regulations surrounding copyrights have increased dramatically, as have the protections offered to copyrighted material. This makes the potential inclusion of any material which you did not author yourself incredibly perilous: you simply can’t be sure that you have really aquired all the rights to the work you are deriving from. To secure these rights is expensive and fraught with peril, and pushes many creative works out of any realm of possibility.

The CBO report addresses none of these issues. It doesn’t address the possible economic boom that could occur if large numbers of creative works entered the public domain. Given the frequency that studios like Disney derive stories from works in the public domain, there is some reason to believe that the effect could be large. The CBO report does not address (as is admitted by the source listed in the Register article) that their report does not consider the costs of enforcement in their estimates.

What the CBO echos is precisely what the content industry really wants: new market opportunities to sell their works under the umbrella of a government sponsored and continuously extended monopoly. They hypothesize that there exists some markets which are currently not exploitable (perhaps in the form of single use DVDs or CDs) which will provide consumers with new products. The problem is, of course, that nobody wants single use CDs.

Like it or not, if you are a member of the traditional content industry, change is coming, and you better be ready for it. The more you work to outlaw the actions of your consumers, the more quickly you will hasten your own demise. You can continue to expand the already Draconian penalties for “piracy”, you can introduce new technologies which interfere with fair and unregulated uses of your copyrighted works, and you can continue to loot the public domain by paying off Congress to expand copyright terms indefinitely. The result isn’t good for America, and ultimately, it won’t be good for your companies. Ultimately people with a bit more vision than yourselves will start listening to consumers, and will be able to exploit the new market efficiencies that you only shake your heads at.

You can read the CBO’s report Copyright Issues in the Digital Media and decide for yourselves.

Yahoo! News – Powerful Charley Pounds Florida’s West Coast

Ouch! It looks like hurricane Charley is coming ashore south of its earlier predicted course, and wth winds that are topping out at 145 mph. This makes Charley a category 4 storm, and predicted damages are now expected to be $15 billion dollars. Best wishes to all caught in front of it, and do all you can to stay safe!

Yahoo! News – Powerful Charley Pounds Florida’s West Coast

And people used to ask me how I could stand living in Oregon when there were so much bad weather. Riiiight….