Techdirt writes a lot about the problems with DRM, and how inefficient and inconvenient it is. But for millions of visually-impaired people, those "inconveniences" represent something much deeper, and much worse. Somebody who has started writing eloquently about this issue is Rupert Goodwins. He is one of the UK's most respected technology journalists and also, sadly, is losing his sight. As he points out in a powerful new piece, things ought to be getting better for the visually impaired in the Internet age:

there's never been a better time to go blind: we are busy converting the world to digital, and digital is supremely easy to convert.

Of course, it hasn't worked out like that, thanks to the widespread use of DRM on ebooks:

With DRM, the commercial model of the provider goes beyond an application or a service. It is designed to constrain the customer to using something in only the way approved by the content provider, and it has legal backing.

If I can't use a particular word processor, I can find another. But if I can't read a particular book because it is only readable on a particular platform and that platform isn't readable to me, I'm stuck.

He goes on to describe his attempts to get an ebook he had bought into a form that he could read. After half an hour of fruitless efforts -- which included receiving some rather ironic marketing messages telling him to "enjoy the experience" and "enjoy your book" -- he did what most people would have done at the start: he cracked the DRM. As he points out:

I dare say this is against the terms and conditions of one or more of the many impossible-to-read EULAs I clicked on in the process of trying to be a responsible digital consumer. But the author got paid and nobody lost out -- except for me, in terms of time lost and mental misery endured.

He also mentions something important that everyone working at companies employing DRM might like to consider:

This is the reward you get for being disabled and wanting to do the right thing. This is how the world's most splendid machine for freeing our minds from our physical shackles is itself being shackled. This is what will happen to all of you reading this as you get old. I know this, I've done the research: most of you will start to go blind before you die.

Ultimately, then, DRM is a problem for all of us. Maybe we should fix it sooner, rather than later, so that people like Goodwins can read the books they have bought without resorting to methods that are illegal, and we can read texts when we're old and increasingly blind ourselves.

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I know two things about Bob Dylan. First, my father loves him and thinks he's the kind of lyrical mastermind that makes puppies weep or something. Second, man does that guy like to contradict himself. Mike recently wrote up a more general piece about how copyright law goes against how we as a people create and mentioned in passing how Bob Dylan is often cited as a gift bestowed upon the masses by copyright, despite his appropriation of others' work in his lyrics. Well guess what, Mike? Bob Dylan thinks you're a pussy!

Yes, reader redrum writes in about a wonderful story in which Bob Dylan flatly states that those who have accused him of plagiarism are "wussies and pussies."
"Meow I would not feeeeel, so all alooooone!"
Image source: CC BY 2.0 No, not like that. He meant it in the demeaning ignorant way, proving his power over prose with such eloquence I haven't seen since college, when a stoned fraternity brother explained to me how awesome hazing is. In any case, the interview apparently went much deeper than simple misogyny.

In an interview with Rolling Stone magazine for its Friday edition, the influential singer-songwriter made his first public comments on the accusations, saying that in folk and jazz music "quotation is a rich and enriching tradition."

"Everyone else can do it but not me," he complained. "There are different rules for me."

It's a fair point by Dylan, I think. I mean, so what if he appropriated lyrics like "I'm not quite as cool or forgiving as I sound" almost verbatim from the biography of a Japanese mobster? That seriously isn't a big deal. And, yes, perhaps it seemed kind of strange when Dylan offered the world a painting exhibit he said was from scenes of his travels, when they were actually scenes from other people's photographs. But big deal. That's often how culture works. No harm, no foul.

The problem, of course, is that there are some people who think this kind of appropriation isn't okay. That it takes away from culture, rather than adding to it. That words have the right to be owned and art should be protected. One such person, who would disagree with Bob Dylan in this case, is Bob Dylan. As we've previously discussed:

He didn't just filch songs from other people's repertoires; he stole their arrangements. (As late as 1992, he lifted Nic Jones's arrangement of Canadee-I-O, wholesale and without acknowledgment.) He did this on both sides of the Atlantic. The great Martin Carthy, who has also just turned 70, taught him Scarborough Fair, which Dylan then recycled as Girl from the North Country. 

But he treated his own songs as private property: what's yours is mine and what's mine is my own. The assertion of his individualism involved in "going electric" was in part a way of defining Dylan entirely as an individual artist and therefore as the sole owner of his own songs. 

And that's the Bob Dylan we disagree with. Of course appropriating words, or photographs, or whatever as pieces to a larger cultural output is the way folk music works. And art. And writing. And film. We all stand on the shoulders, to some degree, of those that came before us. It's a good thing. As much as Dylan is contradicting himself, he's correct to push back on those accusing him of plagiarism. But he might also have to revisit his own views on the way people use his work as well.

With the simultaneous efforts to both assert fair use as a right of the public and the government's aim to limit its application, I always find it interesting to watch creators' attitudes and reactions to the complicated navigation of using copyrighted material in their own works. One might say it's like trying to get through a bush maze in the dead of winter. Often times the threat of legal action simply kills off a film that would have otherwise been made, or dulls it considerably because relevant source material is omitted.

But more interesting is when a creator simply goes for the gusto, so to speak. Justin Levine writes in about a documentary film producer and his feature length film about supposed hidden messages in Stanley Kubrick's The Shining. The article discusses Rodney Ascher's plan to release the film, which is rife with clips from the original movie, without even attempting to contact Warner Brothers, the company which holds the copyright for Kubrick's film.

The 102-minute documentary deconstructs hidden meanings in Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 adaptation of Stephen King’s horror novel “The Shining” — mostly by showing sequences from the actual film, a copyrighted work owned by Warner Bros. Since its Sundance debut in January, Ascher’s film has been acquired for distribution by IFC Midnight and snagged slots in the Cannes Film Festival’s Directors’ Fortnight and Toronto film festival’s Vanguard sidebars. It will have an awards-qualifying run at the end of the year followed by a March release.

For this one, Ascher has no choice but to go down the rabbit hole of proving that the footage he’s used falls under fair use, which would prevent him from having to pay hefty licensing fees to WB or being sued for showing the film in theaters.

The use of the film in this instance should certainly be covered by fair use, but one of the problems with fair use is you never really know until a court says so. In fact, the article appears to be slightly misleading in stating that Ascher has to "prove fair" use or risk being sued. The only opportunity he would really have to officially "prove" his use is covered would be after being sued, which is a big part of the problem in all this. The scenes are utilized as needed and context is clearly added. That said, Ascher's decision to simply rely on fair use entirely to pay zero licensing fees to Warner Brothers is a break from how other documentarians have utilized it in the past. It's unfortunately far more common for film producers to try to use fair use claims to merely negotiate license fees down, rather than to avoid paying the unnecessary fees at all. Entertainment lawyer Michael C. Donaldson serves as one example in the article.

According to Donaldson, clearing the rights for a mere 30-second clip from a studio film can cost between $6,000 and $8,000, an astronomical figure for an independently produced film. He often gets the studio to lower its fee after sending a package complete with a DVD on fair use and examples of litigation over the years. In one instance with a studio last year, he got the fee dropped from $45,000 to $15,000.

This negotiating of fees has been a contentious subject for copyright holders who feel they are being exploited. “This is where I take [Donaldson] to task,” says Cathy Carapella, who handles rights and clearances for Global ImageWorks and speaks on fair-use issues for the nonprofit Association of Commercial Stock Image Licensors. “If it’s fair use, why offer to pay for anything?”

This is how the weakness of fair use has resulted in a broken system that stifles culture. With such ill-defined parameters for what is only a defense, fair use becomes less about the right of creators to add to our cultural output and more about negotiation over the fees to do so. Carapella's culminating question is obviously ridiculous. The reason to pay despite content being fair use is because the type of fair use we have lacks the teeth required to satiate insurers of films. The fear is that even clear fair use instances will be litigated against, because the rules are so ambiguous. That's what makes the actions of Ascher so important: it's a clear line in the sand. No fees, all fair use. We'll just have to see how Warner Brothers reacts.

Another day, another crazy patent. DomainNameWire has the story that GoDaddy has successfully received a patent on "Announcing a domain name registration on a social website." The patent, 8,276,057, was filed back in September of 2009. Take a look at the claims for yourself to understand exactly what's being claimed, but reading through them, I'm at a complete loss as to how this is considered worthy of a patent. It has been common practice that after you do something online that options be presented to allow that action to be posted to a social networking site. It's done so often that I actually find it kind of annoying these days. But basically any programmer could implement variations on that, and nothing in what GoDaddy describes appears to be anything unique or special or out of the ordinary. Thankfully, with StackExchange's new prior art crowdsourcing effort, folks are already finding prior art. Unfortunately, that effort is supposed to be for patent applications... and this patent has already been approved for reasons that defy any logic.

While the feds absolutely hate to reveal this kind of info, due to successful legal action by the ACLU, the Justice Department was forced to reveal information on how often they monitor electronic communications of Americans without a warrant -- using what's known as "pen register" and "trap and trace." This kind of surveillance isn't over the actual communications (that's left up to the NSA, apparently), but rather just the info on who contacted whom. For various reasons, such information is considered obtainable without needing a warrant. Not surprisingly, the data shows a rather massive increase in such surveillance by the Justice Department. The numbers are quite incredible:

In fact, more people were subjected to pen register and trap and trace surveillance in the past two years than in the entire previous decade.

And yet, whenever anyone suggests that maybe, just maybe, there should be a little bit of oversight on these kinds of things to prevent abuse, law enforcement freaks out. Perhaps that's really because they know they're widely abusing the ability to spy on communications, and they don't want to have to admit it. The fact that it took a lawsuit just to get this information (which is required by law) to be released really says something about the state of surveillance by the federal government. And what it says is not good at all.

There's been a whole lot of talk about openness in government, but so far, very little action. Many vague statements and unkept promises have raised the public's expectation of actually being involved, but when push comes to shove, legislators seem much more comfortable doing things the old, closed-door way.

The public has been pushing back against this lack of transparency. The Texas Open Meetings Act requires that most government meetings be open to the general public. There are a few exceptions, but generally speaking, all qualifying meetings must be be announced at least 72 hours in advance and any final actions, decisions or votes must be made in these open meetings. If the Act is violated, the official(s) are subject to fines up to $500 or up to six months in prison.

In response, Texas municipal officials did what most officials do when faced with mandatory transparency: they tried to get the law thrown out as a violation of their First Amendment rights.

Fifteen city council members from across Texas, including Mel Leblanc from Arlington and Henry Wilson from Hurst, sued the state in Midland Federal Court, arguing the law requiring public government meetings criminalizes political speech based on content, is unconstitutionally vague and overbroad.

Specifically, the officials claimed that the law is "content-based" as it applies only to "public policy over which the governmental body has supervision or control." They also expressed their concern that the Act was too vague and had the potential to "criminalize all private speech among a quorum of a governing body that is about public policy," helpfully stating that "most" of this sort of private policy-related speech "does not lead to corruption." Not only was the Act too vague in these officials' opinion, but it was simultaneously "too complex," requiring an "educational course to comply with it." (This last part is true -- an Open Meetings Training section exists in the Act -- but it hardly makes the law overly complex.)

The 5th Circuit Court shot every argument down, reminding officials that the goal of the Act is to bring about more openness and transparency, rather than to be used a blunt-force weapon for constituents to punitively punish government officials.

Referring to the argument that the law is "content-based," the court declared:

"Here, government is not made less transparent because of the message of private speech about public policy: Transparency is furthered by allowing the public to have access to government decision-making," the opinion states. "This is true whether those decisions are made by cogent empirical arguments or coin-flips. The private speech itself makes the government less transparent regardless of its message. The statute is therefore content-neutral."

The arguments that the act is unconstitutionally overbroad and vague were dismissed as well:

"The plaintiffs' argument fails, because it ignores the other purposes of TOMA, such as increasing transparency, fostering trust in government, and ensuring that all members of a governing body may take part in the discussion of public business," the opinion states. "With respect to these other goals, TOMA is not overbroad."

"Neither of the issues plaintiffs point to implicates the underlying purpose of the vagueness doctrine: preventing government from chilling substantial amounts of speech and facilitating discriminatory and arbitrary enforcement," the opinion states. "The concern underlying the vagueness doctrine is that citizens will not be able to predict which actions fall within the statute, leading to arbitrary and discriminatory enforcement."

The Circuit Court found that increasing transparency and trust in government legitimized the inclusion of criminal penalties in the Act, as the overall point of the law was to foster governmental openness rather than curtail any official's First Amendment rights.

It's a great first step and one that will probably be cited if other states follow suit. (Illinois has its own Open Meetings Act.) Of course, this particular battle is far from over. The municipal officials are planning an appeal to the US Supreme Court, which seems like a ton of effort and expense to go through simply to lock the public out of discussions on policies that affect them.