Compare And Contrast: How GPL Enforces Violations vs. How RIAA/MPAA/BSA Enforce Violations

from the it's-a-bit-different dept

While we've discussed how extreme views in the open source community can, at times, rival the way the entertainment industry acts towards those who violate licenses, reader Nick Coghlan writes in to point to an article that highlights how different they are in many cases, with Bradley Kuhn, the technical director of the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC), putting forth new guidelines that encourage people not to jump to conclusions when they see potential violations, and to give the benefit of the doubt to anyone they suspect of violating the license. Compare that to the tens of thousands of threat letters sent out by the RIAA, at times with little real evidence.

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WSJ Defies NFL's Restriction On Live Blogging

from the whatcha-gonna-do-about-it? dept

Remember how the NFL told the press that they weren't allowed to live blog or live Tweet games, as it would be a violation of the league's broadcast rights? I noted that I couldn't see how that was enforceable by the league, other than by kicking reporters out of the stadium. Of course, even that would backfire, because a reporter could just watch the game on TV and live blog. And... in fact... that's exactly what the WSJ just did, apparently thumbing its collective nose at the NFL's restrictions. Ben alerts us to the news that a WSJ reporter, safely on his couch at home, live blogged a recent football game between the NY Jets and the Tennessee Titans. Your move, NFL...

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Digiprotect Admits It Shares Files Just To Find People To Demand Settlement Money From

from the well,-look-at-that dept

Last week we wrote about claims that copyright holders were purposely putting their own content online to see who downloaded it, and then suing them. In that post, we mentioned a post from last year, about one of the companies that's been hired to track down file sharers, DigiProtect, and how its contract seems to suggest this is exactly what the company does. After that came out, there was some talk about how that contract clause really was only used to make sure the company had the right to investigate infringement. However, the company now appears to be quite forward in admitting that it puts files online specifically to catch downloaders:

"We get the legal rights from the companies to distribute these movies to stores, and with these rights we can sue illegal downloaders. Then we take legal action in every country possible, concentrating on the places where such action will be profitable."

Of course, this seems questionable on a variety of levels. First, if it's getting the distribution rights to the content, then the distribution is authorized, and not infringing. Second, DigiProtect makes it quite clear that its focus is on figuring out the most profitable way to do this -- not the best way to cut down on infringement. The company apparently doesn't pay anyone on a fixed salary, but everyone shares in a cut of whatever is "collected." In other words, the program is not at all about stopping unauthorized file sharing, but figuring out the best way to profit from sending threat letters to people. The company even admits that the numbers it demands from people, and the numbers used in lawsuits have nothing to do with actual damages, but are entirely about what they think is mostly likely to get them paid. That sounds an awful lot like the what most people call extortion.

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Wisconsin Sports League Sends Newspapers Invoices For Live Blogging

from the just-try-to-charge dept

The NY Times checked in with its own version of the story about sports leagues restricting what fans can do in the stands to share their experience -- a story that we've already covered. However, Romenesko points us to a little tidbit down at the bottom of the NYT article, talking about other leagues that have tried to do something similar, mentioning that a sports league in Wisconsin went so far as to send invoices to newspapers it felt were "live blogging" its events. We had written about this dispute a few months ago, but I hadn't heard about the invoices before.

Every newspaper who received an invoice smartly ignored it, but the whole concept is ridiculous. The league is claiming that such a live blogging of what's happening at the sports event counts as a "broadcast" and thus should be required to pay the same fees that, say, local radio stations pay to broadcast the events. But the idea that you can stop people from, or charge people for, telling the world what's happening in a sporting venue is preposterous, not just from a legal or technological standpoint, but because these events depend on news coverage for advertising. Attempting to charge newspapers (or fans) for trying to keep others informed seems incredibly self-defeating.

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AP Will Sell You A License To Words It Has No Right To Sell

from the why-not? dept

Last year, you may recall, we pointed out that the Associated Press had a laughable sliding scale price if you wanted to copy and use more than 4 words (the first 4 free!). After that, it cost $12.50 for 5 to 25 words. This, of course, ignores fair use, which (and, yes, it does depend on the circumstances) almost certainly would let most people quote more than 4 words without having to pay. But, of course, it gets worse. Boing Boing points us to a little experiment by James Grimmelmann, testing out the AP's text licensing system, where he discovers that you can put any text you want into the calculator, and the AP will gladly sell you a license. So, just for fun, Grimmelmann paid $12 for a license to a (public domain) quote from Thomas Jefferson, culled not from the AP, but from Jefferson's famous letter to Isaac McPherson, where he warns of the excesses of intellectual monopolies:

Grimmelmann also points out the ridiculousness of the terms associated with licensing the content, including that it must be used exactly as written, and requires the exact attribution footer the AP's system generates (which never bothers to check to see if the content is actually from the article in question). Oh yeah, it also doesn't let you quote for "political Content," however that's defined. It makes you wonder if the same folks who build this little anti-fair use licensing system are the same folks who are building their DRM for news.

And, of course, there are similarly ridiculous situations, such as Dave Zatz finding out that it will cost himself $25 to quote himself (thanks johnjac). The AP keeps making a mockery of itself.

Of course, the AP has put out a statement, basically mimicking the one it put out last year, saying that the icopyright stuff is not intended for bloggers. But then who is it intended for? Considering that the AP has threatened bloggers in the past for quoting its words, the whole thing seems bizarre. So you can rely on fair use if you're a blogger, but not... if you're something else? How does that make sense? I've read through our copyright laws more than a few times, and I don't recall the clause that says "fair use applies to bloggers, but not others."

Update: As a few people have pointed out, after all the media attention, the AP "revoked" the license. Note the language. They didn't apologize. They didn't admit error. They didn't admit awful technology and a silly policies. They "revoked" a license they had no right to sell in the first place. At least they gave him his money back.

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Law Firm Twisting Open Source License Ruling To Mislead About Open Source Software

from the that's-not-what-it-says-at-all dept

When CAFC ruled last summer about the legality of open source licenses and their connection to copyright in the Jacobsen case, we were a little worried that the ruling appeared to conflict with some other copyright rulings, in a way that could eventually cause problems. However, on the whole, it was a good ruling, putting weight behind the core concept behind open source/Creative Commons-style license, which mostly rely on copyright to backstop what those licenses require. However, a law firm has been running around trying to push the idea that the ruling means using any open source software increases your copyright infringement liability. Of course, that's only true if you don't abide by the terms of the license. In other words, the risks are no different than if you're using proprietary code: if you obey the terms of the license, there's no problem. If you don't, there is. All the ruling really stated was that there could be greater damages to those who don't abide by the license. So, really, the law firm's advice seems to be directed entirely to firms who plan to not live up to the requirements of an open source license. That's hardly an increased liability for those who comply.

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Blame Game Continues: Now It's Online Streaming That's Killing Music

from the oh-come-on dept

Every new entertainment innovation has resulted in hand-wringing by the existing industry about how it's going to kill the business. Player pianos? Evil. Would destroy the sheet music industry. Recorded music? Would send musicians to the poorhouse and end live music. Radio? Would destroy the recorded music business. Home taping? Killing music. The VCR? The "Boston Strangler" to the movie industry. Notice a pattern? Every single one of them, in actuality, helped grow a market much bigger than that which preceded it. Yet, for some reason, no one in the industry (or, all too often, among the press who repeat their complaints) seems to notice this.

So here we have Business Week -- usually less susceptible to these sorts of claims -- repeating totally unsubstantiated arguments from music industry insiders that it's now legal online streaming services that are killing the music business. The fact that most of these services are really little different than traditional radio (which helped build up the massive recorded music industry) seems to zip right by without mention.

The problem is that the author of the article, and most of those quoted in the article, incorrectly seem to think that the only way the music industry makes money is in the direct sale of music. Thus, the fact that people listen to streams for free (or small royalties) is somehow seen as "bad." The fact that radio works on basically the same principle isn't even touched. The fact that there are tons of other ways for musicians to make money -- and for many of them it helps to have more people listening to their music via these services isn't even the same area code as the article.

Instead, the entire article seems to be based on a complaint from the guy who heads the National Music Publishers' Association , whose business has always been predicated on the house of cards of music licensing. Every time a new technology comes along, the publishers demand a new level of licensing. Right now they're pushing hard for yet another duct tape solution: adding another license for such online streaming services, and Business Week played right into their hands with a non-critical piece describing the "issue" in the exact terms they want people to be thinking about.

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Jailtime Seems A Bit Harsh For Online Music Store Owners Who Didn't Get All The Right Licenses

from the why-not-just-make-them-pay-up? dept

Most readers here probably know the story of Allofmp3.com -- a Russian website that signed a licensing deal with a Russian music licensing group ROMS. The site was immensely popular because (a) it sold un-DRM'd files (back before that was common) and (b) sold music incredibly cheaply. The recording industry should have taken this as a lesson in how to create a super popular online music store -- but instead it freaked out, and nearly created an international diplomatic incident in threatening Russia with economic sanctions unless it shut the site down. The problem was that since it had the ROMS license, it was legal in Russia. In fact, Allofmp3.com even tried to pay the record labels some money -- which they refused. The record labels, of course, insisted that the ROMS license wasn't sufficient, but no Russian court ever agreed. Eventually the site was shut down, though it lives on at MP3Sparks. However, it's lost a lot of steam because the site has been blocked from accepting most common forms of payment.

Law Professor Michael Scott points us to the news of what appears to be a similar offering in Italy -- except that, in this case, the operators of the site have been sent to jail. The only news that I can find on this is from the IFPI site -- which is obviously a bit biased, but it does look like the owners of the site did get a license from the Italian Authors' Society (SIAE), which they believed was sufficient. A lower court agreed, but the appeals court has sided with the record labels.

But here's the kicker: the operators of the site have now been sent to jail for criminal copyright infringement. Already I have problems with most criminal copyright infringement cases -- because, by any reasonable standard, copyright is a civil dispute -- it's an issue between two businesses. In this case, it's even more egregious because it seems clear that the site wasn't just some random guy selling MP3s he had no right to, but had clearly tried to obtain the correct licenses. However, these days, when to do just about anything with music you need to get numerous different licenses (Peter Jenner, back at MidemNet, claimed that you needed 33 different permissions to do pretty much anything with music in Europe, though others disagreed), it seems fairly ridiculous to throw someone in jail for not being able to figure out every single party that has to sign off on something -- especially when you were lead to believe that you had what you needed via the Authors' Society.

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Wrongfully Blaming Hackers For Rainforest Deforestation

from the blame-the-actual-logging-companies dept

Here's an odd one. Apparently the folks at Greenpeace are claiming that a move to computerize the permit system for logging companies in the Amazon rainforest allowed hackers employed by the logging companies to issue fake permits allowing them to log well beyond their quota. However, it's difficult to really see how the hackers or computerization really had much to do with this at all. Prior to that, the system was based entirely on paper, where it would seem much easier to forge a piece of paper. By moving it to a computerized system, if anything, it would seem to create a much better system for tracking and catching those that forge the permits. After all, any decent computer system should recognize if extra permits are being issued, or if they're forged completely, then a quick check via the computer should show that the permits being used are faked. An entirely paper-based system would allow for no such simple check.

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Spectacularly Bad Ideas In Response To The Financial Crisis

from the wow dept

The financial crisis is certainly the result of a series of rather complex situations, and with many people rushing to try to understand what happened, plenty of totally incorrect, but very simplified, explanations are being proffered: it was the Republicans fault! It was the Democrats fault! Free market economics doesn't work! Poor people are to blame! None of these are even close to accurate, but it leads people to come up with positively nutty suggestions for how we should react -- and what's more troubling is that some of these suggestions come from well-respected individuals who should know better. In the past few days, we've seen two absolutely ridiculous suggestions, which would make problems much, much worse, but are apparently suggested in all seriousness.

The first is apparently in the latest issue of the Harvard Business Review, where two business school professors suggest that business managers should be licensed, similar to doctors and lawyers. That's a fantastic idea if you want to basically destroy business growth. In fact, we've already examined how these sorts of "professional unions" often are really designed to simply inflate prices for services by limiting the supply of service providers. These sorts of licensing systems often do little to actually "protect" consumers, but do plenty to make them pay more. If you added the same situation to business managers, you'd make running any kind of business significantly more expensive, while removing from the pool of potential managers plenty of people who would excel at the job. While you can at least understand some of the reasoning for licensing some professions, management is one where it's hard to see any rationale, as creativity and out-of-the-box thinking is often what managers need the most.

The second also seems to come from the medical profession, and it would be to purposely slow down innovation by forcing all new financial instruments to go through a complex approval process similar to what it takes for drugs to be approved. I can't think of a better way to kill the economy than that. I've been meaning to dig into some of the problems with the health care system for a few months (though, the whole financial crisis has pushed that back), and one of the biggest problems with it right now is the process for approving drugs, which often does more harm than good. Extending that broken process to other businesses, such as the financial industry, would basically ensure that money would quickly flow out of the US and into other countries that have more reasonable financial systems.

I can understand the desire to come up with big solutions to "fix" the problems that created this financial mess, but suggestions like these are simply scary overreactions by people who don't seem to understand what really caused the problems. Both of these suggestions would make things significantly worse, based on the false belief that you can somehow have some body (government or licensing body) that can decide what's "good" and what's "bad" for business.

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Repair A Computer In Texas Without A License And Face A Year In Jail

from the ridiculous-laws dept

Here's a bizarre one sent in by Syborg1404. It turns out that it's against the law in Texas to repair a computer without a private investigator's license. Specifically, the law requires anyone who is repairing a customer's computer by analyzing data on the computer to have a private eye's license -- which only takes three years as an apprentice or to earn a criminal justice degree. This isn't just an out-of-date law still on the books either. It was passed last year, though it's now being contested as unconstitutional. While it does not appear that anyone's been charged under the law, computer repair technicians used to cleaning spyware and viruses off of computers in Texas are reasonably worried.

To be honest, this whole thing sounds like garden variety protectionism, similar to state laws that required people selling goods on eBay to spend a year or more to get an auctioneer's license. These laws aren't about protecting consumers, but about limiting the number of competitors in the market itself. Hopefully Texas gets rid of it before someone is fined and tossed in jail for cleaning spyware out of someone's computer.

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Skype Concedes In GPL Dispute

from the don't-mess-with-the-GPL dept

Tom wrote about the Skype/GPL case yesterday, and it's worth noting (as many in the comments did) that partway through the hearing, Skype gave in and agreed to drop the appeal and abide by the lower court ruling. That's a good thing. However, from the comments on Tom's post, it appears that many seemed to have misunderstood what he wrote, believing he was (a) supporting Skype or (b) disparaging GPL. It appears to be neither. He pretty clearly states that it's a "desperation" play by Skype, and so it's not at all surprising that Skype gave in after the court indicated that Skype's arguments were not convincing. Tom also does not appear to be disparaging the GPL -- he notes how it helped encourage much more openness in software development.

His actual point, which got less attention, was whether the power of the GPL specifically is waning as other licenses gain prominence -- and, specifically, whether it would be so horrible if the GPL somehow went away. He's not suggesting that's a likely or ideal scenario -- just questioning what would happen. And, the point he makes is that while the GPL paved a very important path, we're seeing other options now appearing, and that's a good thing for open source. Developers now have a much bigger choice among licenses they can choose to adopt, and that competition can lead to interesting innovations. It's not an anti-GPL post -- but recognition that the hopes and dreams of open source software development are no longer tied to the success or failure of the GPL. And that's a good thing for both the GPL and open source.

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Does The GPL Still Matter?

from the expired-license? dept

The GNU General Public License heads to court again today, as Skype attempts to defend its distribution of Linux-enabled SMC hardware handsets that appear to be in violation of the operating system's open source license. It's easy to guess why Skype is fighting the suit, which was brought by GPL activists: the company relies on a proprietary protocol, and releasing the code could give competitors an advantage. You can't blame them for trying. Although in the past few years the GPL has made important strides in establishing its legal enforceability, it's still conceivable that a court could find something wrong with its unusual, viral nature.

Few think that this will be the court case that makes or breaks the GPL. Skype's already lost early rounds of this fight, and the claims it's now making seem so broad as to imply desperation. Besides, the case is being tried in the German legal system, which to date has proven friendly to the GPL.

But even if the license was invalidated, either in this case or another, there's an argument to be made that the GPL has already served its purpose. Its impact on the world of open source software is undeniable: by ensuring that an open project would remain open, the license encouraged programmers to contribute to projects without fear of their work being coopted by commercial interests. And by making it difficult, if not impossible, for a project derived from a GPLed project to go closed-source, it encouraged many programmers to license their efforts under open terms when they otherwise might not have.

But today, with open source firmly established as a cultural and commercial force, the GPL's relevance may be waning. The transition to the third version of the license left many in the open source community upset and intent on sticking with its earlier incarnations. And an increasing number of very high profile projects, like Mozilla, Apache and Open Office, have seen fit to create their own licenses or employ the less restrictive LGPL. The raw numbers bear out the idea of a slight decline in the GPL's prominence, too: Wikipedia lists the percentage of GPLed projects on Sourceforge.net and Freshmeat.net, two large open source software repositories, as 68% and 65%, respectively, as of November '03 and January '06. Today, the most recently available numbers show that Sourceforge's share has fallen to 65%, and Freshmeat's share has fallen to to 62%.

This is, of course, a small decline, and the GPL remains the world's most popular open source license by a considerable margin. But it does seem as though there may be a slowly decreasing appetite for the license's militant approach to copyleft ideals. I certainly don't wish Skype well in its probably-quixotic tilt at the GPL, but if they were to somehow get lucky at least they'd be doing so at a point in the open source movement's history when the GPL is decreasingly essential.

Tom Lee is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Tom Lee and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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Creative Labs Stops Guy From Making Its Technology Work Better

from the how-dare-you-help-people! dept

It appears that Creative Labs is the latest company to shoot itself in the foot over "intellectual property" issues. Apparently, many users have been upset that Creative has failed to support certain systems, and a user in the Creative Labs' forums started releasing drivers to make things actually work or work better. Creative struck back and has removed the various threads in their forums discussing these drivers (thanks to Joe for sending in the link). Basically, this user, Daniel_K was making Creative products work better, and Creative has forced him to stop, claiming that it's violating their intellectual property rights. From a legal standpoint, Creative is probably absolutely right. But from a business perspective, the move seems suicidal. Just read a few of the comments in the long thread following the announcement from Creative. Many people were buying Creative products because of Daniel's mods, and will now look elsewhere. This seems like yet another case of IP laws being used to hold back innovation, rather than encourage it.

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