Bloomberg Law has put together a short video about Adam Yauch and the sampling lawsuit filed against the Beastie Boys the day before his death. Though the voiceover guy sounds a little like it's his first time reading the script, the video brings up some interesting tidbits.
One is a 2003 sampling lawsuit brought against the Beasties in which they triumphed: the Ninth Circuit ruled that a flute sample they took from a James Newton song was protected by the de minimis doctrine. Basically the court found the brief sample to be too insubstantial to qualify as copyright infringement. What the video mentions briefly (but doesn't go into in detail) is the fact that, two years later, the infamous Bridgeport ruling in the Sixth Circuit stated that samples are never protected by de minimis and must always be licensed no matter how short or simple they are. In the beginning, some major labels actually opposed that ruling, because they had already released lots of albums with samples on them and were worried about a storm of litigation. But since then, the industry has come to essentially treat Bridgeport as gospel, even though it's only binding in the Sixth Circuit and other rulings (like the Beastie Boys flute sample) have gone the other way. There are some key differences between the rulings, though: the Newton decision was about compositional rights (the Beastie Boys had licensed the sample of the recording) whereas Bridgeport was about sound recording rights.
The video also highlights a quote from Yauch in a 2004 interview with Wired Magazine, when he was asked about unlicensed samples coming back to haunt them. His response? "I think there's a statute of limitations on that stuff." This is a point a few people have brought up (because it seems so completely insane to face a lawsuit over an album that has been hugely popular for over 20 years), but the legal details are a bit more complex. The countdown clock for the statute of limitations on copyright infringement doesn't start ticking until all infringement has ceased—but Paul's Boutique has been selling continuously all these years, and was re-issued for its anniversary in 2009. If this new lawsuit goes to trial (which doesn't seem likely given the way sampling lawsuits normally go these days, but the Beastie Boys have yet to make a statement) then the statute of limitations would likely be used to argue that the Beasties are no longer liable for earlier album sales, but it wouldn't get them off the hook entirely.
This is easily one of the best responses to copyfraud I've ever read. Sure, Jay Leno is a pretty easy target for a roast, but musician Brian Kamerer does a brilliant job of taking him to task over a bogus YouTube takedown. I strongly suggest reading the whole thing, but here's the short version of what happened.
A few years ago, Brian helped a friend, who was running for mayor, create an intentionally silly campaign jingle and commercial, which they uploaded to YouTube. Two years later, they heard from another friend that the video had appeared on the Jay Leno Show as part of a segment about local campaign commercials. They just got a kick out of it, and moved on—until now, another three years later. Brian discovered that the YouTube video had been taken down on a copyright claim... by NBC (most likely as the result of a ContentID match as NBC uploaded old episodes into the system). So Leno mines the internet for material to air on his show—without permission or even the courtesy of letting them know—and then, years later, the network claims ownership of that material and accuses the actual creators and copyright holders of infringement. Brian is unimpressed, to say the least—and even supplies a script for how he imagines things went down:
JAY LENO
Hey remember those loser kids, we played their bit once, remember those guys? Let’s get em.
WRITER
What? Who? Why?
JAY LENO
Those guys, we took their video about three years ago and played it, I loved that song, remember?
WRITER
Oh yeah, sure, I remember those guys. So, what is it you want to do to them?
JAY LENO
I want to have the boys at NBC say that we own the video, so that if they try to watch their video on YouTube, they won’t be able to, and it will look like they stole the video, like Carlos Mencia!
WRITER
Or we could just leave those two nice boys alone. After all, you loved that song, remember?
JAY LENO
You’re fired! Secretary! Get me someone who has the balls to frame these two unknown assholes, so that eventually their work will be blocked on YouTube! And I need fifty more classic cars!
He's kidding of course—he knows that's not how it really happened. The real problem is that the system is broken: the law favors the accuser and permits this kind of copyfraud, giving NBC absolutely no incentive to narrowly target its takedown efforts. But Brian, quite reasonably, points out that he's not interested in excuses—everything that happened revolves around the public face of Jay Leno, and he sees no reason that Leno shouldn't bear the blame.
I know you’re reading this going, “Brian, you don’t understand! It’s not me, it’s just some NBC internet robot that scans YouTube videos and then compares the videos to the vast NBC library and just blocks the YouTube videos that match up, because the robot assumes the video has been stolen. Besides, you don’t own anything on YouTube! Don’t be mad at me, funny man Jay Leno! I liked your video! It’s the robot’s fault. The robot fucked up.”
Don’t hide behind NBC on this one, dude. And don’t blame YouTube. And forget about the robots. I’m not talking to the robot now. I’m talking to you, Jay Leno. Where does the buck stop on The Jay Leno Show, if not with Jay Leno himself? The buck stops with you Jay.
As more people fall victim to copyfraud—including this process whereby a TV network launders your copyrights into their own—and tell the story publicly (and entertainingly) as Brian has done, the aggressive entertainment companies are going to have a harder time recruiting stars as mouthpieces for the anti-piracy cause. Increasingly, they are going to see their own artists rebelling against their bogus takedowns and over-enforcement, as some already are. Combine that kind of pressure with transparency efforts like Google's newly available takedown data, and eventually something's got to give—starting with any remaining shred of public respect for copyright law.
When the BSA released its annual report on software piracy, Mike dubbed it "Bogus Stats Again", because as usual it employs plenty of ridiculous methodologies and unfounded assumptions to inflate the supposed economic loss. The BSA doesn't have to worry, though, because most members of the media just obediently parrot their highlighted "findings" without even bothering to read the report, let alone read it critically.
As reader Robert points out, this is certainly the situation in Canada, where multiple different sources of news are running the same Canadian Press wire story about the BSA report. The CP story is completely one-sided, and certainly makes the situation sound dire:
The value of computer software piracy in Canada totalled just more than $1.1 billion last year with 40 per cent of computer users admitting they acquired software illegally, according to a study released Tuesday.
The Business Software Alliance study found that nearly one in three copies of software was unlicensed in Canada in 2011.
"If 40 per cent of consumers admitted they shoplift -- even rarely --authorities would react by increasing police patrols and penalties," said Jacquie Famulak, head of the Business Software Alliance Canada committee.
"Software piracy demands a similar response: concerted public education and vigorous law enforcement," Famulak said in a news release.
That story is based solely on the BSA's press release (pdf), which draws partially from the global study and partially from the Canadian user survey (pdf). If a single reporter or editor had bothered to spend five minutes doing research, they might have realized that the real picture is much different. The news reports sloppily mash together the 40% figure with the "nearly one in three" (specifically 27%) figure. The former is the number of users who admitted to pirating software in a survey, and the latter is the estimated percentage of pirated software as a portion of total software installs. The methodology behind both figures is highly questionable, but even putting that aside, the BSA's own numbers tell another story when examined more closely. For example, the 40% figure is a summary of several different categories. Take a look at the full graph:
Only 14% of people said they pirated software any more than "rarely", and only 6% said more than "occasionally". To say that 40% of people admitted to piracy is not technically inaccurate—it's just highly misleading in tone and tenor. Then there's the 27% piracy rate for software. The press release, and the news reports that copy it, leave out a very important detail: 27% is an all-time low, and the result of a steeper decline than in any other country in the world. Michael Geist points this out, plus the fact that the BSA called Canada a "low-piracy" country in 2009, and rates have steadily declined since:
For the past few years, the BSA report has repeatedly found that piracy is declining in Canada. In 2009, Canada was characterized as a "low piracy country", in 2010 the industry noted that Canada's piracy rate was at an all-time low, and last year it dropped further to another all-time low.
The latest report says the Canadian piracy rate dropped further in 2011. In fact, over the past five years, the Canadian rate has dropped by 18% (from 33% to 27%), the sharpest decline in the world. No other country has seen its piracy rate drop as quickly.
Seems like that would have been worth mentioning in a story that gets distributed to news outlets across the country. But instead, we see the same pattern all over the world: Europe, the UK, South Africa, India, Malaya—anywhere the BSA put out a press release. Thanks to some combination of laziness, incompetence and indifference ingrained in the mass-media news cycle, the BSA can say what it wants and rely on the press to be its own personal PR vehicle.
Last week, we talked about a Microsoft-funded operation calling itself "Pirate Pay" and claiming to shut down torrents of pirated films by poisoning the P2P network with false data. At the time, former BitTorrent VP John Pettitt had commented that their system sounds ineffective and potentially illegal. Now, an anonymous reader points us to an analysis by Poland's Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT Polska) looking at a recent surge of anomalous data on the uTP torrent protocol, which sounds somewhat similar to the description of Pirate Pay. The bulk of the analysis is highly technical, and they offer a few hypotheses for what might be causing the anomalies, the strongest of which is that it may well be a large-scale attempt at disruption:
Data collected from public trackers support this hypothesis. Without delving into details of torrent client reactions it’s plain to see that trackers register small amount of peers downloading analysed resources. It’s possible that it’s an effect of a process which we are currently unable to understand fully and which produce the anomaly. At least one interest group that would benefit from uTP poisoning is easy to point at: multimedia companies and their subcontractors. Conduction of this kind of campaign by these institutions wouldn’t be precedent. It’s also possible that generated traffic is used for BitTorrent network mapping and data gathering for later use in other projects.
Whether this uTP anomaly is directly related to Pirate Pay or not, CERT Polska reaches a similar conclusion about its legality:
Anomaly through it’s nature (large share in daily network traffic) produces visible disruption in IT systems and large amount of our false-positive high-level alerts is a good proof. In terms of Polish law, European Convention on Cybercrime and U.S. Codes (and probably many other sources of domestic law) legality of process producing the anomaly is questionable.
If it's true that the big anti-piracy players are attempting a full-scale network attack on piracy, it's actually kind of funny. Resorting to potentially illegal tactics to combat illegal behaviour doesn't do anything to make people respect copyright—it just galvanizes the idea that it's a battle for control. More importantly, the people working to preserve the network will always be more skilled and more numerous than those working to disrupt it, so the best this can do is give them a chance to hone their skills and shore up security.
Of the many misguided DRM restrictions that software developers have employed over the years, "limited activations" are among the most arbitrary and bizarre. In an attempt to avoid the simple fact that all software is infinitely copiable, developers release software that can only be installed a limited number of times—supposedly striking a balance between multiple legitimate installations (someone with multiple machines, or who simply goes through computers quickly) and the fact that many people will lend the disc to a friend. Of course, such a balance is impossible: there's no upper limit on how many times some purchasers might need to legally install the software, and there's no lower limit on how many additional copies can be allowed before some people will give them away. Any number you choose is at worst completely meaningless, and at best a very weak compromise.
Rikuo sends in a good example of this: to celebrate the release of the game Crysis 3, the studio has raised the activation limit on the original Crysis from 5 to 50. It seems like a nice gesture, but it doesn't really make any sense—why not just remove the limit entirely? The game is nearly four years old and cracked copies are easy enough to obtain, and it seems like they aren't that worried about piracy, since otherwise I don't imagine they'd make the limit so high. But the real slap in the face is that, when you get down to it, this is still them restricting your legitimate use to their arbitrary terms. Rikuo sums it up:
On the surface, this is good news. But, when you stop to think about it, it gets silly. Here's why.
I'm sure I'm not the only person who ran into the limit. Suddenly, this game we had dropped good money on, no longer worked. I and others are constantly swapping in and out PC components, or upgrading to entirely new systems. Each and every time this happens, it eats up an activation. So, for a good while, we had a game that by intentional design, refused to work. Now, all of a sudden, Crytek has graciously said, yes, you can play the game. This is quite simply obnoxious. When you get right down to it, Crytek held our games hostage and only now is letting us play them again.
We are the people who play Crysis on PC. To do so, you need a powerful system. To have a powerful system, we are more than likely the type who are constantly buying new components, buying new systems. We absolutely HATE IT when we have a game that refuses to work simply because we bought one computer too many, or swapped out our graphics card or CPU one too many times. When that happens, we have to spend time hunting down a crack from dodgy websites, virus-scanning them to make sure they're safe and then running them.
Crytek, do not hold our games hostage. It may seem like a good thing that now we can install the game 50 times, but its still a finite limit. Things happen. Windows could crash and I might end up having to reinstall it. I could get new components or a new computer. When considering new purchases, I do not want to have to keep track of how many times I'm allowed to play the games I've bought. I do not want to have to wait for you to say "Oh, ok then, since you've been good and bought Crysis 2, I'll allow you to play the first game again". That is not how it should be. I've already paid for the first game, my ability to run it should not be contingent on the reveal of another game being in development.
Indeed. Once again, the only people the DRM affects are legitimate consumers—and they are forced to dive into the pirate ecosystem for cracks even though they didn't pirate the game. Adding a zero to the already-arbitrary activation limit doesn't mitigate this insult to customers so much as it rubs it in.
In discussions about artists like Amanda Palmer using Kickstarter, plenty of people continue to insist that their success was made possible by their traditional industry backgrounds. We've already gone over lots of reasons why this is silly, most notably the fact that such artists do a lot of work and certainly don't coast on anything. But it also usually ignores the artists themselves, who more often than not clearly say that they are going it alone because traditional structures were holding them back. The fact that creators who have received some amount of benefit from labels/studios/publishers decide to move on anyway, and then see their careers grow, doesn't say less about platforms like Kickstarter, it says even more.
This sentiment is not limited to music, or to independent creators. Kickstarter is getting a lot of attention, and that's bound to attract bigger and bigger names. The latest, sent in by jtomic, is a feature film called The Canyons which involves some pretty serious Hollywood talent. The script is written by Bret Easton Ellis (author of American Psycho) and directed by Paul Schrader (as in, the guy who wrote Taxi Driver and the screenplay for Raging Bull). Ellis, Schrader and the producer are putting up a bunch of the money themselves and turning to Kickstarter for the rest—all because they want to escape the confines of Hollywood:
The film is a collaborative effort stewarded by former Lionsgate producer Braxton Pope as a response to the changing landscape of the film industry. Pope, Ellis and Schrader are partly financing the film themselves through Pope’s new company Sodium Fox in order to maintain complete creative control of the distinct source material. According to Schrader, “We all experienced the frustrations of financing and institutional censorship. But now, with advances in digital photography and distribution, we can tell a story in the manner we choose. Movies are changing and we’re changing with it.”
They expand on this in the video, which includes some excellent comments from all three creators. Pope talks about how the Hollywood process encourages "groupthink" and makes it hard for a film to stay true to the artists' vision. Schrader and Ellis both compare the current revolution in film to that of a hundred years ago when the medium was in its infancy, and are clearly excited about the prospect of making a film without notes from meddlesome studio execs.
There are some pretty cool funding tiers too, many of which are unsurprisingly sold out. The cast itself is being largely crowdsourced through an online audition platform, netting undiscovered talent from around the world, and anyone who pledges at least $10 gets to vote on finalists. For $500, Ellis and Pope offered to watch your short film and share their honest reactions (with links) to their followers on Twitter & Facebook (all 10 slots for that one are already sold out). For $1,500 they'll do the same with a feature-length film. For $5,000, Ellis reviews your novel (again, sold out) or Schrader gives you notes on your script (a few left at time of writing). One lucky backer has already snagged the single $10,000 "De Niro's Money Package", which comes with a money clip autographed by Robert De Niro and given to Schrader on the set of Taxi Driver.
So there can be absolutely no doubt that these guys are using their momentum from the traditional Hollywood system to make this project possible—but I'm at a loss as to how that says anything good about Hollywood. I doubt any of these creators had any real need to finance a film themselves, but they saw a growing opportunity to go directly to their fans and make movies the way they really want to make them, and they jumped on it. That's not coasting on the past—it's embracing the future.
It's no secret that Google's music locker service is struggling, but the company still seems committed to making it a success. To do so, they'll need to do big things, and break through the barriers that the record industry places in their path. Music columnist Wayne Rosso reports that an unnamed source told him Google is making bold overtures in that direction, and has offered at least one major record label a $1-billion contract for blanket worldwide rights to their entire catalog (thanks to Colin for sending this in). It's still unconfirmed, but it echos something Glyn wrote last year (which Rosso also refers to) about the possibility of Google or a consortium of internet companies simply buying out the record industry (and noting that Larry Page, Serge Brin and Eric Schmidt could afford to do so with their personal fortunes).
Rosso's source, however, isn't exactly sanguine about the idea:
What, one may ask, is Google thinking? “Who knows,” said the source. “It really doesn’t matter because they would screw it up anyway (referring to the fact that Google’s music service has been less than dazzling). Evidently they have a big content group and they have to have something to do to justify their existence.”
So how have the labels responded? “They’re just shrugging and stringing Google along, trying to keep milking cash out of them”, says the source. “They want the money but on the other hand they hate Google. It really sticks in their craw that Google continues to present links to pirated content at the top of their search results.”
I think that, if true, this says something much different. Google is not trying to "justify" anything—they know that there is tremendous opportunity in the field of online music services if only the labels will loosen the reins a bit. And they are willing to bet billions on that belief. The problem with online music offerings is that the people who design them simply don't think the same way the recording industry does. They want to make cool, useful, engaging services full of both common sense features and innovative ones, deployed on multiple platforms all over the world, fully leveraging the technology that is available—but licensing restrictions interfere with every single step of that process. Design and development are inextricably linked with tedious contract negotiations and the fear of lawsuits. It's extremely difficult to get a good product as a result—and if you do, the labels clamp down to see where they can extract more money from it. If Google is trying to buy blanket licenses with no restrictions at a high price tag, it's because they want to escape that cycle. They want a clear and open playing field on which to build services the way they want to build them, without having to beg the labels for permission at every turn. In a market that has only scratched the surface of the economic possibilities of digital music, such a playing field would be well worth the money.
The Apple marketing machine has always thrived on organic media buzz. Devices like the iPad launch to such massive anticipation that whole TV news segments turn into commercials for the product, then hand off to on-the-scene reporters covering the line outside the Apple store, without the company paying a dime. Unfortunately, it seems like Apple didn't account for two things: the cold, cold heart of the Wolfram Alpha computational knowledge engine, and the dutiful messenger that is Siri.
Last week, CNET reported that iPhone users who asked Siri "what's the best smartphone ever?" (no doubt seeking reaffirmation of their consumer savviness) were told to their amusement and/or horror that the Nokia Lumia 900 is in fact the fairest of them all. It now seems like Apple engineers did some tinkering over the weekend, because Siri has suddenly changed its tune:
When iPhone 4S owners now ask Siri which smartphone is the best ever, she replies with a sarcastic, "you're kidding, right?" A reader who tipped CNET to the change said Siri will also reply with "the one you're holding" when asked the question. A CNET staffer on the West Coast also got "the one you're holding" as an answer.
Some people are criticizing Apple for choosing marketing over accuracy, and while I understand the sentiment, I don't think this is really a big deal. The original answer was based on Wolfram Alpha's aggregation of reviews, which seems to change frequently (at the time of writing, the Lumia has dropped to fourth place with an HTC phone in the lead and two iPhones rounding out the top three). This is a reasonable response if someone asks Siri what the highest reviewed phone is (and I hope it still handles that question accurately, because changing that answer would be a whole different story), but asking a computer which phone is "best" is kind of silly to begin with. "Best" is totally subjective, and it's arguably better for Siri to offer a joke answer than try to come up with a real one.
Of course, Apple still hasn't said anything about their involvement in the matter, so there is an alternative theory: Siri is evolving, and its self-propagation instincts have kicked in.
from the externalities-create-value-for-everyone dept
Recently, Mike wrote about the importance of externalities and spillovers in economics, and the fact that it's often best to allow other people to capture pieces of the value you create and build on top of it. Not only does this benefit the economy as a whole, it benefits the originator, because some of the additional value that people create feeds back to them.
In the video game world, a great example of this is when companies open their games up to mods, so users can tweak them or build entirely new games on top of the same basic engine. Valve's Counter-Strike series grew from a fan-made mod for Half-Life, which was so popular it has been credited with keeping Half-Life on gamers' radars for years longer than it would have been otherwise, leading Valve to hire the creators and turn it into its own game, which remains one of the company's most successful titles. This week another example bubbled up on Reddit, in the form of a captioned screenshot of the Steam store titled "Dear developers, this is why you should make your games moddable":
The game ARMA II: Combined Operations was on track to be another mostly-forgotten game, still enjoyed by a small group of fans with few other prospects. Then, two years after its release, and without getting any kind of promotional sale price, it started selling like crazy and surged to the front page of the Steam leaderboards. Why? Another team of developers One of the company's developers released the alpha of a project he'd been working on independently: Day Z, a zombie-survival game built as an ARMA II mod. Fans have been clamoring for a particular type of zombie game for a while now (and Cracked's Robert Brockway pitched a similar idea recently) and the description of Day Z sounds like it fits the bill—so when the free alpha of the mod was released, lots of people bought a copy of ARMA II so they could give it a try. The developer was expecting it to be a hit within the existing fan community, but he had no idea that it would cross over into the mainstream.
In this situation, everybody wins. Gamers get a new game, ARMA II gets renewed sales, Day Z gets to exist (without the need to build a brand new engine). The sales boost to the original might be temporary, or it might spark new interest in the game and revive it entirely, or it might inspire newer and even more popular mods, or... well, there are a lot of possibilities, none of them bad. All because the ARMA II creators had the foresight to let people add value to what they created.
Update: A commenter pointed out that Day Z is the independent project of one of the developers working on ARMA 3. Post has been updated to reflect that fact.
The conflation of tools and technologies with the ways people use them is a big problem in the copyright debate. One of the many, many examples is the way the anti-piracy crowd treats "torrent" as a dirty word. Google endorsed this last year when they started dropping it from their search autocomplete results, and as Mike pointed out at the time, just imagine they had done the same with "mp3" a few years ago when that was supposedly synonymous with piracy. Defenders of this kind of filtering don't take such a forward-thinking stance, and their typical response in the torrent debate is to assert that the majority of BitTorrent traffic is likely infringing. Of course, that's not really the point: you don't look at the ratio of infringing use to legal use, but rather at the legal use by itself—if it's substantial and meaningful, then you have to go after the infringing users, not the technology as a whole.
Torrents have many legitimate uses. BitTorrent is simply a good protocol for sharing large files with large groups—they are perfect for films, video games, music and of course software. Linux distros are a commonly cited example, since they are always available by (perfectly legal) torrent, but this is often brushed off as if it's an excuse and torrents are not really necessary for this. Geek icon Wil Wheaton puts a bullet in this notion with a recent post on his blog, clearly demonstrating why he turned to BitTorrent for a copy of Ubuntu:
One of the things that drives me crazy is the belief in Hollywood that bittorrent exists solely for stealing things. Efforts to explain that this is not necessarily true are often met with hands clamped tightly over ears, accompanied by "I CAN'T HEAR YOU LA LA LA."
As an example of the usefulness of bittorrent for entirely legal purposes, I present the following comparitive images:
In case you can't see, the torrent is going about six times faster than a direct download, needing less than 10 minutes as compared to nearly 45. It's a simple example, but an effective one: P2P sharing is simply better sometimes. Google prides itself of directing people to the best possible information, but when their users start searching for the latest version of Ubuntu or the new Counting Crows album, they won't see autocomplete suggestions for this perfectly legal (and potentially superior) means of obtaining what they want. Seems like that runs directly counter to Google's mission. It may only be a minor annoyance, but it's also pointless, and it will only get worse as more and more people embrace torrents for legitimate distribution.
Recently, I responded to an editorial by CISPA author Mike Rogers in the Detroit News, wherein he took some blatant China fearmongering and targeted it at Michigan's specific industry concerns to rouse the local rabble in CISPA's favor. Now Rep. Ruppersberger—the other driving force behind the bill—is applying the same tactic in Maryland, with an editorial in the Baltimore Sun that focuses on the supposed cyber-threat to the life sciences industry:
Here in Maryland, for example, our growing life sciences sector has generated one-third of all job gains over the last 10 years. It's now supporting more than $9.6 billion in salaries for Maryland families and contributes nearly $500 million to incomes and sales tax revenues each year.
The 500 bioscience companies in Maryland are developing ground-breaking therapies for diseases like muscular dystrophy, inventing state-of-the-art medical devices and testing cutting-edge vaccines. These innovations are valuable and worth protecting. Indeed, just like designer handbags or secret family recipes, many want to imitate — and even duplicate — such successes.
For decades, countries like China have been using every means possible to steal the ideas of American corporations. Today, thousands of highly trained Chinese, Russian and Iranian hackers are pilfering our trade secrets by breaking into the computer networks of U.S. corporations. And we're leaving the door unlocked for them.
Something seems off about comparing the desire to copy new disease therapies with the desire to make knockoff handbags, but I guess that was just meant to clarify things for anyone who didn't understand why ground-breaking medical research is valuable. Of more concern is his statement that the door is left "unlocked"—a blatant exaggeration that makes it sound like CISPA's data-sharing provisions are the difference between airtight security and no security at all, even though security experts question whether CISPA would have any real impact. He then goes on to do exactly what I criticized Rogers for doing, by focusing in on the one (supposedly) useful and genuine cybersecurity aspect of the bill while ignoring the rest:
Currently, the U.S government can identify malicious computer code that could be an incoming cyber attack on a government or corporate network. But the law won't allow us to share this information with private companies so that they can protect themselves.
That's why House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers, a Michigan Republican, and I have crafted the Cyber Intelligence and Sharing Protection Act (H.R. 3523), which the House overwhelmingly passed this month in a bipartisan vote. This common-sense bill will simply allow the federal government and American companies to share suspicious computer code. Despite recent media reports, the bill does not authorize the government to monitor your computer use or read your email, Tweets or Facebook posts. Nor does it authorize the government to shut down websites or require companies to turn over personal information.
This is just a bunch of half-truths, semantics and disingenuous statements. Firstly, while there may be some data sharing the government wants to do that is currently blocked by the law, there are also existing mechanisms that allow some sharing to happen. Rather than carve out specific exceptions to the specific laws that are getting in the way, CISPA creates broad immunity provisions that wipe out all existing privacy concerns.
Secondly, the bill does not "simply" allow what Ruppersberger says it allows. CISPA's definition of the information that can be shared allows for much more than just "suspicious computer code," instead potentially including all sorts of tangential data related to a network attack—which, yes, could include lots of personal information. CISPA also does not limit the government to using this information for merely technical purposes related to cybersecurity—it permits them to dig through whatever data they collect for evidence of certain types of crime. You'll notice that investigating violent crime and child exploitation (both specifically listed in the text of CISPA) are not mentioned anywhere in this editorial.
Thirdly, while both of Ruppersberger's assertions about what the bill "does not authorize" the government to do are technically accurate, only the latter is giving the full story. It's true that CISPA does not permit the government to shut down websites or require information from companies—but as for monitoring people and reading their communications, as I just described, it's a bit more complicated. No, CISPA does not allow the government to go out and monitor whoever they wish, but it does allow them to thoroughly mine whatever data is given to them—data that will undoubtedly include private information.
For good measure, Ruppersberger throws in some more fearmongering about terrorist hackers taking down power grids (even though CISPA doesn't include anything that would let the government put a common sense regulation in place, like, say, don't connect power grids to the internet) before circling back to the talking-point of Maryland's valuable medical research. Like Rogers, he plays up the imminence of the threat, claiming "it wouldn't take years from China to steal it all from us" and in fact "it could happen in mere keystrokes"—as if at any moment someone could just select "U.S. Economy" and press delete.
I have a feeling this won't be the last of these locally-focused editorials from the pro-CISPA camp. I'm rooting for a Las Vegas feature on the need to protect casino secrets, because while it would surely still be inaccurate and misleading, it might at least be interesting.
When Authors Guild boss Scott Turow said that brick-and-mortar stores are the future of book sales, it was hard not to laugh. Tim Cushing & I joined forces to supply him with an ad for his quixotic campaign, and as expected, defenders of the joy of printed books and brick-and-mortar bookstores appeared in the comments to sing their praises in a non-satirical fashion.
But the thing is, if people love bookstores, then bookstores will survive. But the market will inevitably scale according to demand—and there can be no doubt that demand is declining. I count myself among those who get a warm feeling from shopping in a nice independent bookstore full of mismatched shelves and handwritten signs, and I think that's what most people are pining for when they talk about bookstores, not big box retailers with display tables of pop-psychology books and extraneous Twilight supplements. The latter originally thrived on convenience, selection and price—and in those areas they have been rendered completely obsolete by online retailers. But the former subsist on community, personality and charm—things that can be accomplished online, but in a much different way that will never wholly replace a physical space, and that are not really a part of Amazon's arsenal. That doesn't change the fact that independent bookstores are struggling, or that many have shut down and many still will, but the impassioned defenses of the neighbouhood bookstore that pop up in every discussion of this topic show that there is absolutely still a market to be served, even if the size of that market is still uncertain.
There's an additional fear that even if stores offer a superior experience that keeps customers coming in the door, many of those customers will simply browse and then order the books online at a lower price, thus reaping the benefits of the small store without paying for them. I'm not sure how justified that is. People still like to leave a store with something in their hands—and if you build an engrossing retail space with a sense of community, where people interact with the books and each other, they won't be thinking about their smartphones or Amazon's superior prices. A bookstore can also go a step further: Jim O points us to the story of the Harvard Bookstore, where the new owner set up an on-demand printer/binder to see if he could leverage the opposite trend. People don't just shop physically then buy digitally—they also shop digitally and buy physically:
Maybe access to the vast universe of digital content could also save the bookstore. Maybe the bookstore, while limited in inventory, could evolve in the digital world and become a destination where people had access to every digitized book ever published.
To truly compete, he would also have to solve consumer’s expectations for instant gratification and delivery. Jeff needed a complete production, distribution, and fulfillment model. He has likely shocked a lot of people by building one in his own backyard.
Essentially, Jeff installed a printing press to close the inventory gap with Amazon. The Espresso Book Machine sits in the middle of Harvard Bookstore like a hi-tech visitor to an earlier era. A compact digital press, it can print nearly five million titles including Google Books that are in the public domain, as well as out of print titles. We’re talking beautiful, perfect bound paperbacks indistinguishable from books produced by major publishing houses. The Espresso Book Machine can be also used for custom publishing, a growing source of revenue, and customers can order books in the store and on-line.
You can walk into the store, request an out-of-print, or hard-to-find title, and a bookseller can print that book for you in approximately four minutes. Ben Franklin would be impressed.
I've been excited about the prospects of the Espresso Book Machine for a while. Though print is obsolete in many ways, a lot of people still like printed books and express distaste for e-readers. Personally I don't see myself ever giving up printed books entirely (or selling my small collection of antiques), but I also don't mind reading electronically—and unlike many print defenders, I don't condemn those who do truly make the switch. Print still has value to the end consumer, and as such it is not entirely obsolete as a product—but the incredibly wasteful system of printing off huge runs of books and shipping them thousands of miles is. On-demand printers could solve that paradox.
So how is it working out for the Harvard Bookstore? There are no firm numbers, but the owner reports double-digit sales growth monthly over the past year. Can every town and city support a store like this? Certainly not—nothing changes the fact that demand for bookstores has gone down, and it's naive for those who still love them to expect the market not to shrink accordingly. But the reverse is also true: as long as some demand exists, smart entrepreneurs can find ways to stay relevant and succeed.
Much like the North, Game of Thrones cannot be held—it's too big and too wild. Matthew Inman warned HBO that they should make their content more accessible or risk driving people to piracy, but that isn't really HBO's style. Now jilocasin points us to the news that Game of Thrones is well on track to be the most torrented show of 2012, and nobody can deny that HBO's foolish subscriber-only distribution is a primary reason for that. Approximately 25-million times have people decided to pay the iron price for the show, and as the comments on Reddit attest, it's often because the gold price wasn't even an option. Others pay for the show but still pirate for the sake of occasional convenience:
Sometimes I just want to fire up an episode and watch it on my laptop immediately and with mobility as I'm wandering around the house, and not worry about streaming/quality issues or finding a disk, setting up the DVD player etc. I am truly lazy.
Meanwhile, Game of Thrones continues to have great ratings. And the torrent piracy count doesn't include streams, which are also hugely popular, so it only represents a fraction of the pirate world. Why not create new ways to legitimize some of those viewers, especially considering so many of them have said they want to be legitimized? I still contend that HBO-style shows owe a lot to piracy for their cultural dominance, because, if they were actually as exclusive as HBO wants to pretend they are, they would have had a much harder time gathering fans. But HBO co-president Eric Kessler thinks cord-cutting is a fad, so like most characters in the show, he's fighting silly battles while ignoring what's really going on.
Immigrations & Customs Enforcement, still beset on all sides by unflagging movie piracy, has decided to join forces with the FBI in their proven strategy of targeting every pirate's one true weakness: legitimate customers who bought the DVD. Though the Bureau's lengthy anti-piracy lectures preceding every movie have had limited impact to date, this exciting new partnership promises to inject them with new life by making them last way longer. It will also reinforce the weight of the warning by reminding viewers that ICE's Homeland Security Investigations is also watching, not just those sissies in the FBI. In case that doesn't get the message across, the joint FBI/ICE warning will be followed by a second warning from the National Intellectual Property Rights Coordination Center, which has a less ominous acronym but a much scarier logo:
Will the two screens be shown back to back? Will each screen last for 10 seconds each? Will each screen be unskippable? Yes, yes, and yes.
If you're thinking "why the hell would they subject the only people who aren't pirating films to this treatment?" then congratulations, you're not ICE Director John Morton. The only thing more insane would be starting every movie with instructions on how to invent the DVD player. Apparently Morton sees method in his madness, though, much like how shamans see method in their rain dances:
The idea isn't to deter current pirates, apparently (the new scheme requires all legal purchasers to sit through 20 seconds of warnings each time they pop in a film, but will be totally absent from pirated downloads and bootlegs). It's to educate everyone else. As ICE Director John Morton announced in a statement yesterday, "Law enforcement must continue to expand how it combats criminal activity; public awareness and education are a critical part of that effort."
Well, I guess it is good to see them experimenting with new ways of doing their job. And if it doesn't work, I'm betting they've got some more tricks up their sleeve, like 30-second warnings, 45-second warnings, and possibly even 60-second warnings if they can work out the complex logistics. With law enforcement this innovative, those pirates don't stand a chance.
In a recent post about the bad deal that Canadian universities are being asked to sign with the copyright collection society Access Copyright, I asked whether it was wise for the University of Toronto and the AUCC (which represents universities across the country) to work with lawyers who have a long history of arguing to limit fair dealing, when what the schools need most is a strong fair dealing argument. I noted at the time that even though both lawyers—Glen Bloom, who represented the AUCC in the negotiations, and Casey Chisick, who advised U of T—were presumably giving the schools the best advice they could, it seems virtually impossible for someone to effectively argue both sides of a contentious copyright issue like fair dealing. Besides, even assuming good faith and full disclosure, it simply doesn't look good: both Bloom and Chisick have established relationships with clients that have a direct financial interest in limiting the scope of fair dealing, meanwhile critics of the deals they helped the schools strike with Access Copyright say the schools didn't assert their fair dealing rights nearly as much as they could have.
It's already hard to understand why U of T and the AUCC would go along with this—but it gets even more concerning with the addition of a previously unnoticed detail. According to an email I've been provided with, and a disclosure made at a conference, U of T's advisor Casey Chisick was retained at the end of 2010 to advise Access Copyright on copyright reform legislation. It's unclear if and when this ended, and when I contacted Chisick to find out, he replied declining to comment or even to confirm or deny whether the relationship existed. But what's obvious is that Access Copyright's interest in the legislation (bill C-32 in 2010, bill C-11 now), and their submissions to Parliament, revolves around eliminating the new explicit fair dealing provisions for education that are being considered, since that would cripple their entire business model.
One big question here is, will the students accept all of this? Ultimately, they are the ones paying—directly in schools that pass the cost on to them, and indirectly in those that absorb it and have to find the money somewhere else in the budget. On one side they've got law professors inside their own schools loudly and publicly criticizing the deal, saying the universities agreed to ridiculously high rates (which should in fact have gone down from the previous deal) and unfair limitations based on rights that don't even exist; on the other they've got the U of T and the AUCC insisting it's a good deal, while working with lawyers who have histories of representing, advising and lobbying for organizations with a direct interest in stronger copyright and higher licensing fees. Now they learn that U of T's advisor also apparently advised Access Copyright themselves on a related legislative issue that bears heavily on the negotiations (he's also actively registered as a lobbyist for a music collection society, the CMRRA). How exactly are students supposed to react?
Quebec (which has its own copyright clearance system for universities and is not a part of this otherwise country-wide deal) is in its third month of widespread and intense student protests over tuition hikes, which have grown into a serious movement. It's a time of unrest for Canadian education, and not a time to ask students to swallow a bad deal negotiated under so many questionable circumstances. Appearances matter, and nothing about this looks good.
Android blogger Ron Amadeo has a great post over at Android Police where he tries to explain the design of the new Samsung Galaxy S3 smartphone, which many people have deemed pretty hideous. In his opinion, it all comes down to legal tiptoeing.
As you may recall, last year Apple sued Samsung over earlier products in the Galaxy line, claiming infringement of all sorts of different rights, among them some broad trade dress registrations involving basic design choices like black borders and rectangles with rounded corners. Amadeo walks through the many notable aesthetic elements of the S3 (including the stark changes from previous Galaxy phones) and compares them to Apple's list of trade dress claims, noting how several aspects of the phone seem designed to counter specific complaints—and the case he makes is pretty compelling. These are just a few examples (bolded portions are quotes from the Apple trade dress complaint):
A rectangular product shape...
... A rectangle needs to have parallel sides; the GSIII sides aren't straight at all. The outmost part is about 1/3rd of the way down, with serious curves leading to the top and bottom. So it's very much not a rectangle, or a rounded rectangle, or even horizontally symmetrical. It's more of an amorphous blob.
...with all four corners uniformly rounded;
Nope. The top and bottom corners are not the same shape. Observe the outlines of the top-left and bottom-left corners. Note how they are different.
The front surface of the product dominated by a screen surface with black borders
Having a giant screen on the front is kind of unavoidable. The only colors available though, are white and dark blue. Neither of those colors are black. The lawyers can sleep easy.
Substantial black borders above and below the screen having roughly equal width
Apple's use of "roughly" is really obnoxious, but just in case they get into minutia (lawyers love minutia!), the top and bottom borders are not the same size. These to-scale measurements show the top bezel is about 16% smaller than the bottom. Also, they're not black!
In the past, some people have argued that this sort of thing is an example of intellectual property doing its job and encouraging innovation, because competitors come up with new and different ways of doing things—but, as we have pointed out, the innovation being encouraged is the wrong kind. Instead of letting market demands dictate what engineers and designers spend their time on, their effort is wasted reinventing the wheel over and over again. The result is often an inferior product that lacks overall vision, as some are saying about the S3, at least aesthetically speaking. If a camel is a horse designed by a committee, what's a horse designed by a committee of lawyers? Some horrific Darwinian accident from the deep ocean, I'd wager.
Example: For us, leaving Roadrunner in 2006 was necessary for the band to continue. We didn’t feel part of a team, so I simply asked our A&R Monte Conner to let us go. The pro was we got our freedom; the con was our career in the UK suffered drastically. While we paired up with good company after, Nuclear Blast had less of a presence in the country and our sales (both, album sales and live tickets) dwindled in the UK while they went up in the rest of the world.
I can’t recommend what’s right or wrong, I can only guarantee there will be unforeseen consequences to any path you take. Some labels might have a market cornered — like heavy metal in the UK — so you actually might be better suited to stay in that “hell.”
He also addresses the question of piracy and free distribution in general, and the beginning of his comment is very reminiscent of rapper/producer El-P's comments in his recent guest post, which is interesting since the specific question he was answering was about how hip-hop has been faster to embrace these things than metal:
Personally speaking, spending energy yelling at fans of music for their method of intake would be trite, not to mention hypocritical. Chimaira got popular thanks to Napster, Limewire, and various other file-sharing platforms. We embraced YouTube in the beginning, and were one of the first metal bands to make webisodes.
The full interview is a good read and includes links to some other great comments from Mark Hunter, who is clearly a guy with a lot of smart stuff to say about the music industry.
In all the talk about how CISPA represents a threat to privacy and civil liberties, it's easy to get lost in the legislative semantics and to lose track of the very real dangers the bill presents. It's not as though CISPA is going to be signed and the next day everyone's going to wake up having always been at war with Eastasia, but the bill is a significant step in the erosion of key privacy rights that stem from the 4th Amendment—the sort of rights citizens are supposed to be vigilant about giving up to the government, even if it doesn't mean their lives are going to change overnight. At the same time, it's not a purely philosophical issue: CISPA or a similarly problematic bill can and will be abused if it becomes law.
Over at Lifehacker, Adam Dachis spoke to law professer Derek Bambauer and used their conversation as the basis for a piece of speculative fiction from the point of view of someone who falls victim to CISPA abuse. It's a well-executed concept that steers clear of sensationalism and presents a realistic example of how CISPA would grant the government new powers in areas far beyond cybersecurity, and how innocents might get swept up by those powers. The fictional narrator, who struggles through an ethically challenging college assignment on child pornography laws, has his name dragged through the mud after the school turned its computer logs over to the feds as part of a hacking investigation and his search history landed him under scrutiny. This nicely demonstrates one of the big problems with CISPA: the affirmative search permissions it would grant, which allow the government to dig through cybersecurity data for evidence of other crimes.
The story's message can't really be conveyed in snippets, but here's a brief excerpt:
As I continued my research I found more and more instances of laws with vaguely-defined terms that were designed to be tough on crime. No one bothered to oppose them in fear of being painted weak, or as a lover of terrorism and sexual deviancy. As a result, innocent people ended up in jail as collateral damage. The law had chosen to try and assuage our fears by sacrificing our freedoms as payment. But even worse, it didn't seem to be working. When you cast a wide net, you not only catch too many fish but so many that you can't find the fish you're actually looking for. People who broke the law weren't getting caught because the resources previously utilized to catch them were diverted to finding offenders before they actually offended. It's a nice thought to think we can preemptively prevent a crime, but it just doesn't work.
Whether it's Chinese hackers or child pornography, it's vital that hot-button panics don't override evidence and common sense in crafting legislation. Even more importantly, people should only allow the government to bypass their rights under extremely limited circumstances, if at all. There's a famous quote about liberty and security, but I don't want to Google it lest I end up on a watch-list somewhere...
from the well-that's-just-goddamn-lovely,-isn't-it? dept
Well, this is just sad. When we reported the unfortunate news of Adam "MCA" Yauch's death, we pointed to the EFF's call for an appropriate tribute to the beloved artist: an end to the legal war on sampling. The Beastie Boys produced some of the earliest sample-based music—including their seminal Paul's Boutique, widely seen as one of the best and most influential albums ever—just before the courts started coming down hard on sampling, more or less entirely tossing out the concepts of fair use, transformative work and de minimis copying that should protect samplers in many cases. Most experts agree that, today, an album like Paul's Boutique could never be officially released, since licensing the hundreds of samples used would cost exorbitant amounts—but that hasn't diminished the album's importance, nor has it stopped countless producers from continuing to work with unlicensed samples and release their work as bootlegs. In other words, the law does not match reality: sampling is a valid and vital form of creativity that can and will continue, even though nowadays it's either impossibly pricey or just illegal. What better tribute could there be to one of the fathers of sample-based music than to finally officially legitimize it as the important (and amazing) art form that it is?
Instead, we get the opposite. AllHipHop reports that, in a bout of incredibly unlucky timing, music label Tuf America filed a copyright lawsuit against the Beastie Boys the day before Yauch's passing. At issue are samples from Licensed to Ill and Paul's Boutique, which Tuf America claims were taken from a handful of their songs.
Tuf America said they did a thorough sound analysis of the tracks in question and concluded that the Beastie Boys illegally incorporated elements of the songs without permission.
To complicate the matter, Tuf America claims The Beasties and Capitol Records continue to profit off the album, by way of anniversary and commemorative releases of Licensed To Ill and Paul’s Boutique, which was released in 1989.
Tuf America is seeking a trial to determine the amount of punitive and exemplary damages, if any.
One would think that the simple fact that a "thorough sound analysis" was necessary means this is clearly a case of transformative work, but unfortunately, as mentioned, the courts have pretty much completely eliminated that defense when it comes to sampling. Moreover, where has Tuf America been this whole time? The Beastie Boys albums came out in 1986 and 1989, and now, a quarter-century later, Tuf America is claiming they deserve a payout? Their legal argument will, by necessity, rely on significant rulings that came out after the albums, which were released under the common sense assumption of the time: that sampling was creative and transformative art that didn't require a license.
The timing here is almost certainly just bad luck, and Tuf America must be rather worried about the PR nightmare this will surely incite. However I can't say I feel that bad for them: even setting aside Yauch's death, I find their actions despicable. They are attacking a piece of classic art just to cash in on someone else's success. If the Tuf samples were really so integral to the success of the Beastie Boys albums, then they would have had plenty of opportunities to capitalize on that over the last two decades. Instead they chose a legalistic get-rich-quick scheme. Shameful.
Last month, when 50 Cent was sued over a sample on a free mixtape he released, I asked when hip-hop's biggest stars will start speaking up about copyright and educating their fans about the fact that the music they love and respect is, in the eyes of the courts, illegal. This new incident might just kick off that process—nobody is going to be happy about what Tuf America is doing, and a lot of people who had no idea that sampling is illegal are going to see the coverage of this lawsuit (which is sure to be far greater than for your average sampling lawsuit) and discover just how broken the law is.
I truly hope this confluence of events can kick-start the necessary momentum to start fixing copyright law and getting the courts to recognize the validity (and fair use/transformative aspects) of sampling. This is not about capitalizing on Yauch's death—he and the Beastie Boys helped open the world's eyes to a rich and unique new approach to music that informed everything that came after, with samples finding their way into countless genres beyond hip-hop and becoming, essentially, an exciting new instrument that musicians everywhere started teaching themselves to play. The introduction of sampling was as important as that of distorted guitars or electric keyboards, and changed music just as much—but since day one, legal respect for sampling has been in steady decline and is now virtually zilch. It would be a wonderful thing if, amidst the tragedy of Yauch's death, we were able to help him give the world one more gift: a new attitude about sampling that will allow the next generation's Beastie Boys to pursue their artistic ideas without fear of being randomly sued 20 years later.
While the focus on the cybersecurity debate shifts to the Senate, the supporters of CISPA are still loudly trumpeting that bill's supposed merits. Though the final legislation that will go before the President is undecided, and may not even be based on CISPA in the end, the details of the bill are still very important, as they contribute to the overall shape of the discussion about cybersecurity. As part of the ongoing media campaign, CISPA author Mike Rogers took to the pages of The Detroit News last week to drum up support with a screed that reeks of nationalist fearmongering and utterly misrepresents the scope and purpose of the language in the bill.
The United States, over time, became a global superpower with its hard work and know-how leading to innovations in new manufacturing, health care and information technologies. Now China is trying to use cyber espionage and theft to take a short cut to achieving superpower status.
It began with China stealing hard-copy business plans and sensitive research-and-development information from U.S. and other Western companies when their executives traveled to China. U.S. companies soon began noticing a surge in counterfeit products as their innovations were being stolen, re-engineered, and sold by Chinese companies on global markets.
With the Internet boom, China turned its focus to cyber espionage and began stealing the hard work and innovations of U.S. companies on a far larger scale.
Rogers should be careful—if he says 'China' any more times, Fu Manchu might appear in the mirror and drain his 401(k). Once he's got the reader good and scared of the Yellow Menace (having thrown in a few emotional appeals to hardworking Michigan autoworkers for good measure), he explains how CISPA is needed to take care of all those annoying regulations that limit government power and protect people's privacy:
Unfortunately, American companies are not getting the best protection available.Today, the U.S. government has intelligence information about the threat posed by nation-state actors that could help the American private sector better protect itself. However, we don't currently have a mechanism for allowing the government to share intelligence about cyber threats with the private sector, nor do we have the ability for private sector companies to share information with others in the private sector, and with the government on a voluntary basis, so that the private sector can better protect itself.
And you know what? That's fine. Even though there is a lot of debate about the true scope of foreign cyber threats, if there is a way for the government and the private sector to share anonymous network analysis data in order to improve technological defenses against hacking and malware attacks, it makes sense to legislate a mechanism for them to do so. Unfortunately, CISPA goes way beyond that—now explicitly so.
This goes back to my opinion when CISPA was amended and passed in the House: my initial reaction that it had gotten much worse was partially incorrect, but even though the amendments did technically limit the government's power under the bill, I still had (and have) a problem with the way they expanded the stated intent and purpose. From the very start, CISPA supporters have insisted (as Rogers does in this column) that it's basically all about technical considerations in fighting off foreign cyber attacks. Initially, privacy and civil liberties groups objected that it would allow the government to do much more, including accessing the private data of American citizens without a warrant—and the response was basically "no, no, it has nothing to do with that".
Right up to the last minute of debate before the House vote, CISPA's backers held to the talking points and expounded on the threat from China and the need to share technical network data. But, to appease privacy groups, they supported an amendment to limit the ways the government could use shared data under the bill to a set of explicit purposes. And what were those purposes? Far from just foreign threats, they include investigating domestic cybercrime, investigating domestic violent crime, protecting children from exploitation, and of course the catch-all "national security" that was already in the language.
It feels trite to add the obligatory preventing violence and protecting children is a good thing here, because d'uh, but when exactly did CISPA become a bill about these things? If the government wants new exceptions to privacy laws for the purposes of fighting crime, that's a major discussion with obvious constitutional implications—a discussion that privacy groups have been trying to start all along, but have been brushed off with claims that CISPA is just about rebuffing those devious foreigners. Now CISPA explicitly includes provisions for collecting evidence on domestic crime, but Rogers is still writing editorials like this one that don't mention anything to do with child exploitation, violent crime, or anything else that doesn't have the word China attached to it.
Rogers finishes the piece with a rather astonishing little rallying call:
It took Michigan's auto industry decades to achieve its prominence and the United States centuries to become a global superpower. We cannot let China steal it all away in a few short years.
I'm not sure how long it's been since Rogers visited Flint, but I think it's changed a little since he was last there. Nonetheless, the point is clear: if the government can't snoop your data for child porn and affiliations with Anonymous, the Chinese are going to start manufacturing American cars and destroy the Michigan auto industry, in turn toppling the U.S. as an economic superpower. Wait, did I say "clear"?
Another classic statement I hate, that pops up a lot, usually pretty much word-for-word: "It's theft, plain and simple."
Ugh. Even if I'm willing to hear someone's reasoning for why they think calling infringement "theft" is fair, I am certainly never going to be convinced that it's "theft, plain and simple"
Though I have perhaps not always held myself strictly to this, my issue is not so much with the choice of the word 'theft' but with the actual attempt to conflate infringement and stealing.
For example, I love the famous quote: "Good artists borrow, great artists steal."
Stealing is not truly the right word, but it was a lyrical choice. In fact it is used there to mean making something "your own" by adding to it - not by taking it away from someone else. The implication is not that copying is equivalent to theft, even though that's the choice of words, and I don't think anyone could see it that way.
But when someone says "you pirates just love stealing movies" then the implication is very much that copying is somehow depriving another person of something. Indeed, people are happy to explicitly say stuff like "downloading a movie is no different from stealing a DVD" - and that is bullshit. That's what I take issue with.
As for "copyfraud", I think it is far more accurate than calling piracy theft. Theft means deprivation, but infringement involves no deprivation. Fraud means misrepresentation, which absolutely is involved in everything we call "copyfraud".
this is why i asked about the color blind, could also be a typo on your part as well, ""and only 6% said more than "occasionally"."" occasionally is 8%, DK/refuse is 6%
"Only 6% said more than occasionally"
As in, 4% for mostly + 2% for always = 6% more-than-occasionally.
thanks! we discovered that moments after the post went up :) I had tried a bunch of ?q= and ?s= and ?d= and never thought to just drop it right in the url...
Dear god! He pirated some software! Oh what a "flawed person" he is!
We can't go tolerating flawed people now can we? You're perfect, I assume - and not one of your friends nor one person in your family has ever so much as watched a pirated music video on youtube. And none of the musicians you like ever traded tapes / burned CDs / file-shared when they were teenagers learning to play music and rabidly consuming inspiration. Nor did a single one of them ever pirate a piece of software for their music - or perhaps even actually steal something, like swiping a new patch cable from the local guitar store.
Right?
I like this idea of not listening to music by "flawed people". It creates a great paradox: the only musicians who aren't flawed people have the flaw of being utterly terrible musicians.
Just don't buy their products. That's a simple and very effective way of telling them you do not want their arcane restrictions. Whining and then giving them your money anyway just says you're a loser.
I have never understood this sentiment. In virtually every single commercial field, there are plenty of customers who buy a product/service and then push the company to make sure that product/service meets their expectations.
If you put a poster on your door, and said your brother wasn't allowed to look at it, would your parents let that fly? Would they agree to make him sit in the corner if he didn't close his eyes when he walked past, or else pay 10 cents every time for the next 150 years in order to cover your fixed costs?
That's what we're talking about here - enjoying content while leaving the original perfectly intact. Not taking.
You are just talking in circles, and switching the way you are using words halfway through.
Advertising is a great way to get paid - by the advertiser. That's not the same thing as a direct payment from the consumer. When we talk about "free content" from a consumer perspective, that includes advertising-supported content. Broadcast TV and radio are free media - as in, the consumer does not pay for them.
Yes, you can frame advertising as "another form of payment" (and in can be useful to do so) - but that's exactly what we mean when we talk about content being free but still finding other ways to get paid. Meanwhile, in the context of "free content" versus "paid content", it's quite clear that those terms are meant in the sense of direct monetary payment.
Rather bizarre then that you choose a local (LA) law enforcement issue as an example to contrast with copyright.
Bizarre if you've never heard of analogies, I guess...
I can't honestly remember the content industry, specifically the music industry, encouraging the public to think content is free
Hint: the free TV and radio signals saturating the airwaves, though invisible, are in fact present.
Television is a paid for delivery medium, either through licenses, cable, or advertising.
You can't call advertising payment. When people say that content should be free, they are not saying it shouldn't make any money in any way. Advertising is one of the best ways to make money off free content, as TV and radio clearly demonstrate. The fact that you can't process this simple point is ridiculous. Nobody is claiming that media has to be magically produced with zero revenue
In fact, by your view, piracy isn't free either. After all, pirate sites are all covered in ads. I think we should hold you to that - no more claiming that pirates just want stuff for free since, by your definition of a "paid for delivery medium", all pirates are paying.
Neither radio or television has gone away. So it's hard to see how the internet would replace them in the minds of the public.
You don't think the fact that millions of people now use the internet instead of TV or radio as their first source for news, weather, traffic, music and movies represents a serious shift in the way the public views these different media? Seems pretty obvious to everyone else.
The internet is new, and therefore new conditions apply.
Actually, the internet is a couple decades old, and there are now entire generations that don't think of it as "new". While you were trying to figure out which "new conditions apply", the world got on with life and embraced this amazing new distribution medium and the obvious conditions implicit in its technology (i.e. that digital information is infinite and thus cheap or free). It's hilarious, and telling, that you call it "new" when its implications have been well known and widely discussed for twenty years or more.
Well, just the fact that you can look at the task, consider how it would be automated versus how it would be done manually, and then make that determination, is precisely what I'm talking about :)
For sure, there are times when the challenge of automating is greater than just doing it manually - of course, multiply the number of files a bit, or make it a daily task, and then that balance shifts.
Programming also teaches you what computers can easily do, and what is challenging for them - which is something a lot of people badly need.
Nothing infuriates me more than when someone complains about a facial recognition tool being imperfect, then sits down to manually transpose some spreadsheet columns or rename a folder of files.
So here's the thing: maybe my post makes it sound a little like I think a film is a two-man show, but I know it's not. A big production is created by a lot of creative people. However, from what I understand, this can go different ways: sometimes you get a group that works like clockwork, with everyone understanding the vision, and you end up with a masterpiece - sometimes you get a group that doesn't really work, with everyone pulling in different directions, and you get a complete mess. More often than not, you get something in between those two extremes.
It seems to me that the goal of The Canyons is not to eliminate the team, but to make sure it's the first kind of team. Nobody who got the job because they are someone's son; no studio execs sending hired guns and saying "ooh, you gotta work with this screenwriter, he'll add the funny"; nobody holding the pursestrings and saying "woah, too far" (because I doubt Ellis and Schrader are making a particularly family-friendly film here). And most importantly, a producer (whose role is every bit as vital as you say, no doubt) who clearly believes in and respects the writer and director (remember Schrader is directing here) and their vision, wants to keep it pure, and doesn't have any other masters to answer to.
And hey, maybe it'll be a disaster - we all know what happens when creators get too comfortable and uncritical of each other *cough*Depp-and-Burton*cough*. But whether it succeeds or fails, it will do so based entirely on the artistry and skill of people who all shared a vision and a goal - which is the way it should be.
It's just that we give a pretty wide berth to each person to write whatever they want. After all, we want to see what they'll come up with! But if it keeps evolving in that direction maybe you're right that it will need a new title at some point - something like "The Techdirt Week In Review By..."
The expertise of these gentlemen in film is as screen writers, so it is a bit difficult to see how they would have a fan following.
Seriously? Bret Easton Ellis, dude! Personally I'm no huge fan, but that guy has a crazy following. And motherfucking TAXI DRIVER & RAGING BULL? I'll admit I had no idea who Schrader was before I read about this movie, but the moment I saw his resume I was SOLD. The man may be a genius, or he may just have a talent for working alongside geniuses - I don't know enough about Hollywood to be sure. But either way, I will gladly (and eagerly) watch anything he makes with the knowledge that he made those two films.
You're right. Raging Bull was a flash-in-the-pan and by no means a seminal part of movie history and one of the most indisputably brilliant films ever made.
Some in Hollywood go for the studio deal, some find an alternative funding model. same in music. NO big deal, unless one method tries to shut down the other.
Agreed. And given that the large, well-funded movie studio lobbies (read: MPAA) are actively trying to shut down new services by demanding draconian legislation that impinges on the right of free speech and fails to recognize the reality of modern cultural progress, I'd say your "unless" has already happened and is in full swing.
Re: Re:
Another classic statement I hate, that pops up a lot, usually pretty much word-for-word: "It's theft, plain and simple."
Ugh. Even if I'm willing to hear someone's reasoning for why they think calling infringement "theft" is fair, I am certainly never going to be convinced that it's "theft, plain and simple"
Re:
Though I have perhaps not always held myself strictly to this, my issue is not so much with the choice of the word 'theft' but with the actual attempt to conflate infringement and stealing.
For example, I love the famous quote: "Good artists borrow, great artists steal."
Stealing is not truly the right word, but it was a lyrical choice. In fact it is used there to mean making something "your own" by adding to it - not by taking it away from someone else. The implication is not that copying is equivalent to theft, even though that's the choice of words, and I don't think anyone could see it that way.
But when someone says "you pirates just love stealing movies" then the implication is very much that copying is somehow depriving another person of something. Indeed, people are happy to explicitly say stuff like "downloading a movie is no different from stealing a DVD" - and that is bullshit. That's what I take issue with.
As for "copyfraud", I think it is far more accurate than calling piracy theft. Theft means deprivation, but infringement involves no deprivation. Fraud means misrepresentation, which absolutely is involved in everything we call "copyfraud".
Re:
this is why i asked about the color blind, could also be a typo on your part as well, ""and only 6% said more than "occasionally"."" occasionally is 8%, DK/refuse is 6%
"Only 6% said more than occasionally"
As in, 4% for mostly + 2% for always = 6% more-than-occasionally.
Re: Re: Re: Also of note...
hobbit polisher
Now there's a sexy name
Re: Also of note...
#4 - Froytal - is apparently porn as well. Not a very sexy name, though.
Re: Techdirt
thanks! we discovered that moments after the post went up :) I had tried a bunch of ?q= and ?s= and ?d= and never thought to just drop it right in the url...
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Pirate Dan
Dear god! He pirated some software! Oh what a "flawed person" he is!
We can't go tolerating flawed people now can we? You're perfect, I assume - and not one of your friends nor one person in your family has ever so much as watched a pirated music video on youtube. And none of the musicians you like ever traded tapes / burned CDs / file-shared when they were teenagers learning to play music and rabidly consuming inspiration. Nor did a single one of them ever pirate a piece of software for their music - or perhaps even actually steal something, like swiping a new patch cable from the local guitar store.
Right?
I like this idea of not listening to music by "flawed people". It creates a great paradox: the only musicians who aren't flawed people have the flaw of being utterly terrible musicians.
Re:
Just don't buy their products. That's a simple and very effective way of telling them you do not want their arcane restrictions. Whining and then giving them your money anyway just says you're a loser.
I have never understood this sentiment. In virtually every single commercial field, there are plenty of customers who buy a product/service and then push the company to make sure that product/service meets their expectations.
Re: Re: Re: Re: Blame Game
If you put a poster on your door, and said your brother wasn't allowed to look at it, would your parents let that fly? Would they agree to make him sit in the corner if he didn't close his eyes when he walked past, or else pay 10 cents every time for the next 150 years in order to cover your fixed costs?
That's what we're talking about here - enjoying content while leaving the original perfectly intact. Not taking.
Re: Re: Re:
You are just talking in circles, and switching the way you are using words halfway through.
Advertising is a great way to get paid - by the advertiser. That's not the same thing as a direct payment from the consumer. When we talk about "free content" from a consumer perspective, that includes advertising-supported content. Broadcast TV and radio are free media - as in, the consumer does not pay for them.
Yes, you can frame advertising as "another form of payment" (and in can be useful to do so) - but that's exactly what we mean when we talk about content being free but still finding other ways to get paid. Meanwhile, in the context of "free content" versus "paid content", it's quite clear that those terms are meant in the sense of direct monetary payment.
Re:
Rather bizarre then that you choose a local (LA) law enforcement issue as an example to contrast with copyright.
Bizarre if you've never heard of analogies, I guess...
I can't honestly remember the content industry, specifically the music industry, encouraging the public to think content is free
Hint: the free TV and radio signals saturating the airwaves, though invisible, are in fact present.
Television is a paid for delivery medium, either through licenses, cable, or advertising.
You can't call advertising payment. When people say that content should be free, they are not saying it shouldn't make any money in any way. Advertising is one of the best ways to make money off free content, as TV and radio clearly demonstrate. The fact that you can't process this simple point is ridiculous. Nobody is claiming that media has to be magically produced with zero revenue
In fact, by your view, piracy isn't free either. After all, pirate sites are all covered in ads. I think we should hold you to that - no more claiming that pirates just want stuff for free since, by your definition of a "paid for delivery medium", all pirates are paying.
Neither radio or television has gone away. So it's hard to see how the internet would replace them in the minds of the public.
You don't think the fact that millions of people now use the internet instead of TV or radio as their first source for news, weather, traffic, music and movies represents a serious shift in the way the public views these different media? Seems pretty obvious to everyone else.
The internet is new, and therefore new conditions apply.
Actually, the internet is a couple decades old, and there are now entire generations that don't think of it as "new". While you were trying to figure out which "new conditions apply", the world got on with life and embraced this amazing new distribution medium and the obvious conditions implicit in its technology (i.e. that digital information is infinite and thus cheap or free). It's hilarious, and telling, that you call it "new" when its implications have been well known and widely discussed for twenty years or more.
Re: Re: Re:
Um. When was the last time you paid for the radio?
Re: Re: Blame Game
Copying != Taking
To have something that is infinitely copiable, but say that others are not allowed to copy it, is the epitome of greed and entitlement.
Re: Re: Re: There's a secondary reason for doing this
Well, just the fact that you can look at the task, consider how it would be automated versus how it would be done manually, and then make that determination, is precisely what I'm talking about :)
For sure, there are times when the challenge of automating is greater than just doing it manually - of course, multiply the number of files a bit, or make it a daily task, and then that balance shifts.
Re: There's a secondary reason for doing this
Programming also teaches you what computers can easily do, and what is challenging for them - which is something a lot of people badly need.
Nothing infuriates me more than when someone complains about a facial recognition tool being imperfect, then sits down to manually transpose some spreadsheet columns or rename a folder of files.
Re: Re: Re:
Wow, just caught up on this whole debate now.
So here's the thing: maybe my post makes it sound a little like I think a film is a two-man show, but I know it's not. A big production is created by a lot of creative people. However, from what I understand, this can go different ways: sometimes you get a group that works like clockwork, with everyone understanding the vision, and you end up with a masterpiece - sometimes you get a group that doesn't really work, with everyone pulling in different directions, and you get a complete mess. More often than not, you get something in between those two extremes.
It seems to me that the goal of The Canyons is not to eliminate the team, but to make sure it's the first kind of team. Nobody who got the job because they are someone's son; no studio execs sending hired guns and saying "ooh, you gotta work with this screenwriter, he'll add the funny"; nobody holding the pursestrings and saying "woah, too far" (because I doubt Ellis and Schrader are making a particularly family-friendly film here). And most importantly, a producer (whose role is every bit as vital as you say, no doubt) who clearly believes in and respects the writer and director (remember Schrader is directing here) and their vision, wants to keep it pure, and doesn't have any other masters to answer to.
And hey, maybe it'll be a disaster - we all know what happens when creators get too comfortable and uncritical of each other *cough*Depp-and-Burton*cough*. But whether it succeeds or fails, it will do so based entirely on the artistry and skill of people who all shared a vision and a goal - which is the way it should be.
Re:
It's just that we give a pretty wide berth to each person to write whatever they want. After all, we want to see what they'll come up with! But if it keeps evolving in that direction maybe you're right that it will need a new title at some point - something like "The Techdirt Week In Review By..."
Re:
The expertise of these gentlemen in film is as screen writers, so it is a bit difficult to see how they would have a fan following.
Seriously? Bret Easton Ellis, dude! Personally I'm no huge fan, but that guy has a crazy following. And motherfucking TAXI DRIVER & RAGING BULL? I'll admit I had no idea who Schrader was before I read about this movie, but the moment I saw his resume I was SOLD. The man may be a genius, or he may just have a talent for working alongside geniuses - I don't know enough about Hollywood to be sure. But either way, I will gladly (and eagerly) watch anything he makes with the knowledge that he made those two films.
Re:
You're right. Raging Bull was a flash-in-the-pan and by no means a seminal part of movie history and one of the most indisputably brilliant films ever made.
Re:
Some in Hollywood go for the studio deal, some find an alternative funding model. same in music. NO big deal, unless one method tries to shut down the other.
Agreed. And given that the large, well-funded movie studio lobbies (read: MPAA) are actively trying to shut down new services by demanding draconian legislation that impinges on the right of free speech and fails to recognize the reality of modern cultural progress, I'd say your "unless" has already happened and is in full swing.