The National Endowment for the Humanities is teaming with the Library of Congress to make 30 million newpaper pages from 1836 to 1922 available for free download over the net.
Interestingly:
The span of the joint project is limited because type faces of printers used before 1836 are too difficult for optical scanners to read, and copyright restrictions are in force on papers published after 1923.
Over the weekend I heard a talk by Mike Godwin of Public Knowledge about the state of intellectual property law. The lame duck Senate is currently poised to consider Public Knowledge – The Intellectual Property Protection Act (H.R. 2391), a draconian mix of copyright legislation which would abolish many fair use protections and extend criminal penalties to the mere careless or accidental offering of copyrighted files even if no infringing activies actually occurred. Consider writing your Senators, and keep an eye on this one.
Cory Doctorow gives a nice talk to a bunch of librarians, and somebody was kind enough to record. transcribe and post the Quicktime.
This morning Neda Ulaby of NPR reported on Political Speeches and the Public Domain, which covers a dilemma. Public speeches by politicians are normally considered to be in the public domain, but news networks recording such events often copyright their own recordings of these events, causing enormous difficulties for historians, students, and independent film makers to use these materials. They often require written permission before they can even examine this footage, and negotiate the circumstances under which material can be used. Arguing fair use can be problematic and expensive at best, requiring deeper pockets than many independent organizations can muster.
Thought provoking.
Wired is running this interview with a lawyer for Tivo regarding their new changes to respect broadcast flags for pay-per-view content. While it’s bad news for consumers, I think it is refreshing to hear a lawyer speak this candidly.
Best exchange:
WIRED: TiVo has always been about empowering the viewer. Why change now?
ZINN: Macrovision changed its policy. So the question was, Do we want to have a Macrovision license with certain restrictions, or none at all? We decided that as long as the restrictions were limited to pay-per-view and video-on-demand, consumers would still have the choice. If they don’t like a narrower window in which to view programming, they won’t purchase it. That’ll send a message to the content owners.
Awesome! Undeadart.org (a division of FreeCulture) is having a contest to remix clips from classic zombie flicks! What an awesome idea! Since the public domain includes the classic Night of the Living Dead, one imagines that you could do a fairly good job of it. They also include a link to the movie Amid the Dead, which I will have to watch when I get home tonight.
Just in time for Halloween!
Materials licensed under Creative Commons licenses are becoming more and more popular, and more and more mainstream. As reported on BoingBoing, Knitty is a web-published knitting magazine, and for a special breast-cancer awareness issue, they decided to publish their patterns under a Creative Commons license, specifically the Attribution-NoCommercial-NoDerivs license. Check out the patterns: I’m more of a crochet guy myself, but can knit in a pinch. The socks look comfy.
In the realm of patents being issued for the obvious, Phillip Torrone of the Edgadget website mentioned in his podcast that photomosaics had been patented in 2000. Sigh. Surely there must be tons of prior art to this idea?
In a brutal act of defiance, I present my own photomosaic of myself. Take that, evil stifling software patents!
Where your ascerbic host tears tears Steve Ballmer a new one over DRM, reports on his attempt to make AB’s Beefy Broth, and also mentions the terrific thttpd, a throttling http server by Jef Poskanzer.
Some patents are just too much fun, and the pat2pdf script allows you to look them up and get a look at them. Today’s fun patent is for the Slinky. The real invention was the machine that can take 80 feet of steel wire and coil it into a Slinky in 10 seconds. Now that’s an invention.
In the modern era, these things are made of plastic, which just seems too wimpy for me. Give me the classic, brittle spring steel version every time. They are also really good at teaching kids about transverse waves or experimenting with odd sounds generated by suspending them like this one.
Fred von Lohmann has published an interesting article on the intricacies of law surrounding the development of P2P software entitled: What Peer-to-Peer Developers Need to Know about Copyright Law. It is a good article which tries to clearly describe what direct, contributory and vicarious liability means, and how developers can potentially avoid legal pitfalls in the development of these kinds of P2P software. Given the findings in the Grokster case, it would behoove potential authors of P2P software to read and understand each of the points raised. In particular, he believes that the Betamax defense (that it is enough to show that there are substantial non-infringing uses) is under concerted attack (like the INDUCE act) and in his words:
In short, the law surrounding the Betamax defense remains in flux, putting P2P developers (and all technologists) on unpredictable legal ground.
In the end, the article concludes with 10 bits of advice for potential P2P developers.
These are steps you can take that may: (1) reduce the chance that your project will be an easy, inviting target for copyright owners; and (2) minimize the chances that your case will become the next legal precedent that content owners can use to threaten future innovators.
Worth reading, especially if you are interested in developing P2P applications.
Wherein your host is stirred (but barely shaken) by an earthquake and then goes on to ponder baseball, copyrights and other miscellaneous topics o’ the day.
Addendum: It appears the earthquake did relatively little damage.
Apprently Microsoft can occasionally dimly see the light ahead: witness Yahoo! News – Microsoft Sings a New Tune With Windows Media Player 10. After years of dragging their feet about including MP3 ripping in their Media Player product, they have finally caved and made an encoder freely available. Of course it doesn’t rip variable bitrate MP3s (sigh) and includes only four quality settings (double sigh), so it appears that they are being drug kicking and screaming into the future.
Hey Microsoft, what are you guys thinking? Do you really want to get to the point where everyone looks at your competition at Apple and says “You know, we’d be better off with them?” Apple and ITunes are kicking the stuffing out of you, and it is time to stop trying to appease your media slavemasters and give the consumers what they want. People want to be able to RIP mp3 cds, so they can play them on the largest variety of devices. If you don’t give them that capability, they will adopt products that will.
Slashdot had a link to Intellectual Property, and Free Riding by Mark Lemley. The abstract reads:
Courts and scholars have increasingly assumed that intellectual property is a form of property, and have applied the economic insights of Harold Demsetz and other property theorists to condemn the use of intellectual property by others as free riding. In this article, I argue that this represents a fundamental misapplication of the economic theory of property. The economics of property is concerned with internalizing negative externalities – harms that one person’s use of land does to another’s interest to it, as in the familiar tragedy of the commons. But the externalities in intellectual property are positive, not negative, and property theory offers little or no justification for internalizing positive externalities. Indeed, doing so is at odds with the logic and functioning of the market. From this core insight, I proceed to explain why free riding is desirable in intellectual property cases except in limited circumstances where curbing it is necessary to encourage creativity. I explain why economic theory demonstrates that too much protection is just as bad as not enough protection, and therefore why intellectual property law must search for balance, not free riders. Finally, I consider whether we would be better served by another metaphor than the misused notion of intellectual property as a form of tangible property.
I’ve lately tried to amend my own mental sloppiness in referring to illegal music downloading as a form of theft. In fact, stealing a CD from a store is a vastly less serious crime than downloading the same CD in the your own home. One is theft, the other is copyright infringement. It behooves one to keep the differences in mind, especially considering their relative penalties.
During one of my many explorations of the net, I found mention of a program called TimeTrax, a program which converts songs broadcast over XM Satellite Radio into mp3 files that you can play on your computer. This is especially nifty since XM radio doesn’t have DJ’s or the like, and you end up with nice, clean MP3 files.
Not surprisingly, the RIAA is a bit upset about this. Quoting:
A spokesman for the Recording Industry Association of America said his organization had not reviewed the software, but said that in principle it was disturbed by the idea. “We remain concerned about any devices or software that permit listeners to transform a broadcast into a music library,” RIAA spokesman Jonathan Lamy said.
Not surprising, but just what do they expect to be able to do about?
The program matches digital information including the artist name and then takes the analog music and encodes them into a properly named and tagged mp3 file. This is another instance of time shifting: a type of fair use established in the case Sony Corporation v. Universal Studio Productions, 1984. This Supreme Court decision (5-4) held that non-commercial home use recording is fair use. If I want to record every episode of a show, I can do so, for my own personal home use.
It’s also completely unclear that this program represents any kind of DMCA violation, since you are required to purchase service from XM radio. No copy protection is being circumvented: you are merely re-encoding the analog stream produced by the XM PCR radio.
The most damning thing against XM PCR is the XM Radio service agreement, which includes the following:
b) Use Limitations.
You may not reproduce, rebroadcast, or otherwise transmit the programming, create unauthorized recordings of the programming, charge admission specifically for the purpose of listening to the programming, or distribute play lists of the Service. Notwithstanding the provisions of Section 9, we or any of our programming partners may prosecute violations of the foregoing against you and other responsible parties in any court of competent jurisdiction, under the rules and regulations of the FCC, and other applicable laws. Subscription to the Service does not grant you the right to use any of our or our partners’ trademarks.
In other words, they can claim that you aren’t allowed to timeshift. But can they really have any legal standing upon which to base this restriction? HBO thinks they can enforce similar restrictions. It’s vaguely possible that XM could sue their customers for their unauthorized home recordings which are in violation of their service agreements, but I (and I am not speaking as a lawyer, so my opinion is worth zilch) fail to see how the RIAA can involve themselves in essentially a licensing dispute. If my understanding of the law is correct (again, caveat reader), they can’t even deny XM radio access to their material, as such licensing and its cost are set by statute, not by negotiation.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out.
