Category: Copyright Reform

Day 1: Louisville

April 2, 2008 /

You have to read “Mallory,” Leonard’s newly published short story: not because it’s good (it’s very good) but because that way you can understand all the “Mallory” references I’ve been making in the over-a-year since I got to beta read it. As someone on a road trip to California that includes visiting some of my role models, I find the story perhaps a little too pat in its publication timing. I smell retcon, Richardson.

Speaking of which, The War on Clarity has been updated, due mostly to people wanting their names put on or taken off the “Lasersharking” entry. If only that could have been posted on some kind of user-editable repository.

A Better Way Backward

March 13, 2008 /

Hey, remember QTrax? There were plenty of other sources reporting on its old-school dotcom launch party, as well as the subsequent Apollo 1-level launch disaster, which featured even their putative deal with EMI vanishing like a booth babe at midnight; I honestly felt too bad (well, apathetic) for them to join in the kicking when they were so clearly down. Today Sumana pointed out that the service is now in the annals of vaporware, just below Duke Nukem Forever. According to that article, the few songs they did try to offer were skimmed off Limewire and then DRMed. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone try to start a service so completely benefit-free.

It’s 2008 now, guys. Last year half of the future’s audience didn’t buy a single CD; does anyone really think that audio media featuring any kind of encumbrance are still going to turn a profit? It’s time we started treating music delivery as a resource, not a service, and that means you have to get a lot better at it before you can make a living on the gouge.

Do Re Mi

August 17, 2007 /

I’m sure it will be corrected by tomorrow, but right now, the IMDB newswire–not usually a subversive source–has a blurb expanding “DRM” as “Digital Restrictions Management.” Interesting.

Yes, I read the IMDB newswire.

Sumana, is this the party that bored you?

June 8, 2006 /

Hey, look guys! Guys, look! A major label is sponsoring a P2P service! It’s KillAweCellent! Let’s look at all you have to gain by switching from your current P2P network:

  • Download one of literally hundreds of songs, in just hours, from another QTrax user!
  • That means hours of fun avoiding “rollover to annoy” Flash ads for the Motorola BoxKuttr!
  • Then listen to your music a certain number of times!
  • And every time you listen, there’s a flashing ad on the screen telling you how to pay more money to listen to it again, or pay a monthly subscription fee!
  • And you can’t put it on your iPod!
  • Or listen to it in Winamp, iTunes, Windows Media or MusicMatch!
  • L-Linux? Gnrt! Mpf! GnaHA HA HA HA! That was pretty funny. You’re funny!
  • Our poor, hungry artists get compensated! Where by “compensated” we mean “a fraction of the profit we make off the ad displayed while you’re downloading, which was already less than one cent!”
  • Now, if you have ever used any other P2P network, you will be aware that certain software tools will break the DRM on QTrax songs and allow you to listen to them as long as you want. The tool for QTrax files, called “mpq2mp3,” will be available roughly ten days before the service launches!
  • Don’t get it or use it!
  • Because we’ll still try to sue you!

So what have we got here? A service that offloads bandwidth and hosting costs onto you, that allows you to do what you were already doing, only with broken legs and a leaky gut wound, and you can watch ads or pay to do it. Sounds like a BitTorrent killer, guys! WHOO HOO! Champagne enemas all around!

No one outside of EMI will ever use QTrax.

It is fun to make pictures

April 28, 2006 /

Third monochrome image post in a row! This one actually serves a purpose: it’s a very rough (and lazily photoshopped) mockup of what I have in mind for the cover of the Anacrusis book.

Brendan Adkins: Ommatidia

Image credits: the human eye came from a really nice BY-SA macro shot called fóvea, and the bug eye from a BY-ND shot called drosoph. The latter makes me unhappy, because I’m clearly deriving from a NoDerivs work, but I can’t find the photographer’s contact info to ask permission. If you are the photographer, please write me! Oh, and also write if you have a strong opinion about the cover.

Brendan’s pet issues: Not just for Usians anymore

January 18, 2006 /

“As I’ve said to friends, we can’t expect to tell our fans ‘see you in court’ and then ‘see you at Massey Hall next fall’–we have to choose one, and I choose the latter. This current litigious atmosphere is simply a product of the record business trying to prop up a dying, obsolete business model.”

It’s so great to know that BNL gets it.

Straight out the 402

December 14, 2005 /

I was disappointed to notice My Morning Jacket, Louisville band turned critical darling and national success, on the list of Sony CDs carrying MediaMax DRM software, which has recently shown to cause vulnerabilities as badly as the infamous XCP rootkit. I knew the band probably had little input in whether their CD would be DRMed, but it was still bad news. Then the EFF blog brought to my attention that MMJ is offering their own recall–a more ethical, more friendly and more business-sensible path to their audience than the one their own label has taken. I am positively flush with Louisville pride.

The second time I’ve ever linked Slashdot. Via Downhill Battle.

November 17, 2005 /

Okay, so DC beat me to posting about Sony’s big fat recall, but now I’m scooping him: the rootkit contained GPLed de-DRMS code by DVD Jon! I know that makes no sense. Give me a second.

“DVD” Jon Johansen is a Norwegian hacker who likes to take things like DVD encryption and Apple’s iTunes digital rights management (DRM) software and meet them in a steel cage (and win). He releases the software he writes under an open-source license called the GPL, a legally binding agreement that says “hey, you can freely look at and reuse this source code, but only if you release code derived from it under the same license.” Like the Creative Commons license I use, the GPL is just working within existing copyright law.

Now, the XCP software that’s causing such a fuss–because it installs itself on your computer without your consent when you pop in a Sony music CD, is very difficult to find or remove, deprives you of your fair use rights and makes you vulnerable to a whole new brand of virus–needs a way to interact with the CD-ripping functionality of Apple’s iTunes. iTunes creates AAC files when it rips a CD, which are locked to specific authorized computers (although some of those restrictions may be lifted for ripping–I’m not sure, as I haven’t used it to rip CDs myself). XCP doesn’t want you to authorize any other computers to use the copies you make, though. It doesn’t want those copies to leave the ripping computer ever, at all. So the people who wrote it used DVD Jon’s open-source code for messing with iTunes DRM to make that happen.

In doing so, they created derivative software and kept it closed-source. They did not release it under GPL, violating the terms of the license under which they obtained the code. And they sold it millions of times over.

Here’s the point: this is a massive act of copyright infringement and piracy, on the same scale as the giant duplication rings of Southeast Asia that record labels and movie studios have been trying to stomp out for decades. First4Internet Software, which developed the technology to “stop piracy,” is one of the single biggest software pirates on the planet. Sony BMG paid them millions to be so, and distributed the results.

The Slashdot post I linked above says this comes from the “when-will-it-end dept.” This story is amazing. If we had plotted a fantasy scenario to bring down a record label, we probably couldn’t have come up with anything this good.