Eideard

To paraphrase our last president, Hollywood hates your freedom. There, I said it. Hollywood is the Al Qaeda of content. It clings to an antediluvian notion of how media should be created and distributed. The SOPA and PIPA acts — which Congress is continuing to consider, despite today’s mass protest against them — are its paternalistic, anti-Enlightenment attempt to suicide bomb the Internet’s ability to disrupt its pre-modern, rapidly deteriorating business model…

Maybe that sounds like crazy talk. But think about it: Hollywood would use SOPA to make it possible for anyone to single-handedly take down any site on the Internet, without the action of a court, just because anyone with access to that site (say, a commenter) used it to link to copyrighted content. What does Hollywood think? That if they win this level of power, the Internet will stop happening in the rest of the world?

That’s why today two of the smartest, most successful guys in America — Larry Page and Sergey Brin, co-founders of Google, blacked out the logo on the most iconic homepage on the Internet. But don’t take their word for it — dozens of other sites have followed suit…including many of us on the wordpress.com network.

Hollywood still has an awful lot of our money, and the ignorance of our Congress…is vast. SOPA and PIPA, in other words, are the Internet’s version of the war on terror or the war on drugs. A new reality, a Forever War, which we’ll all be fighting for the rest of our lives — or at least until the end of the protection racket that modern copyright has become.

I spent much of my life as a performing artist, a creative artist. As a geek, I have been a contributing artist to blogs, large and small, for the last eight years. Cripes – I’ve been online since 1983. It’s natural and normal for me to come down on the side of those who are content creators. This fight is with content owners – rarely those who actually create a work of art or communications or thoughts or commentary.

If I must choose a side – it is to oppose censorship.

The Obama administration said over the weekend that it would not support legislation mandating changes to Internet infrastructure to fight online copyright and trademark infringement.

“Proposed laws must not tamper with the technical architecture of the Internet through manipulation of the Domain Name System (DNS), a foundation of Internet security,” the administration said in a statement on Saturday. “Our analysis of the DNS filtering provisions in some proposed legislation suggests that they pose a real risk to cybersecurity and yet leave contraband goods and services accessible online. We must avoid legislation that drives users to dangerous, unreliable DNS servers and puts next-generation security policies, such as the deployment of DNSSEC, at risk…”

The DNS-redirecting provisions in both bills were designed to prevent American citizens from visiting sites the attorney general maintains are dedicated to infringing activities…without having to prove a damned thing in a court of law!

The Obama administration’s announcement appears to have conceded to opposition from security experts who say the plan would sabotage U.S. government-approved efforts to secure DNS against hackers and break the Internet’s unified naming system by introducing lies into infrastructure. The government is agreeing with experts who maintain that the SOPA and PIPA and the Senate’s Protect IP Act would break the Internet’s universal character and hamper U.S. government-supported efforts to roll out DNSSEC, which is intended to prevent hackers from hijacking the net through fake DNS entries.

Victoria Espinel [L] with some other folks from work

The White House announcement was penned by Victoria Espinel…Aneesh Chopra…and Howard Schmidt…

The usual creeps – ranging from RIAA and MPAA to individual Congress-critters beholden to lobbyist bucks – made the usual excuses and ready themselves to fall back on revisions which still mean operating outside constitutional law.

How large is small enough?

It’s that most depressing time of year for any tech pundit: the time just after Apple’s autumn iOS event. That’s it for new products for the rest of the year; it’s a drought that won’t break until January at the earliest…

Fortunately, we have a savior in the form of newly-credible rumors about an Apple-branded HDTV. For years, it’s been just something that sort of made sense. But it got kicked into the bigs with the publication of Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs, in which he’s quoted as talking about his desire for an integrated television set. “It will have the simplest user interface you could imagine. I finally cracked it,” he was quoted as saying…

Me? I’m still more than slightly baffled. I’d still be dismissing the Apple HDTV as nothing more than a trial balloon in some Apple lab if not for these words from the man himself…It’s an indication that this can’t really be chuckled aside as an idle thought.

The Apple TV makes perfect sense. It’s a tiny $99 box that turns any HDTV into an IR-controlled iOS device. It increases the value of everything else you buy from Apple, which is Feature One of any addition to the company’s product line. The media you buy from iTunes gets to play on the big screen and the good speakers. Your iOS and MacOS devices get a huge wireless display; your iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch virtually become console gaming systems.

Read the rest of this entry »

 
Many internet users in the United States have watched with horror as countries like France and Britain have proposed or instituted so-called “three strikes” laws, which cut off internet access to those accused of repeated acts of copyright infringement. Now the U.S. has its own version of this kind of law, and it is arguably much worse: the Stop Online Piracy Act, introduced in the House this week, would give governments and private corporations unprecedented powers to remove websites from the internet on the flimsiest of grounds, and would force internet service providers to play the role of copyright police.

As the Electronic Frontier Foundation notes in a post on the proposed legislation, the law would not only require ISPs to remove websites from the global network at the request of the government or the courts (by blocking any requests to the central domain-name system that directs internet traffic), but would also be forced to monitor their users’ behavior in order to police acts of copyright infringement. Providers who do not comply with these requests and requirements would be subject to sanctions. And in many cases, legal hearings would not be required…

In addition to using what some are calling the “internet death penalty” of removing infringing websites from the DNS system so they can’t be found, the proposed bill would also allow copyright holders to push for websites and services to be removed from search engine results and to have their supply of advertising cut off — and would require that payment companies like PayPal and ad networks comply with these orders. If you liked what PayPal and others did when they shut off donations to WikiLeaks, you’re going to love the new Stop Online Piracy Act…

The bottom line is that if it passes and becomes law, the new act would give the government and copyright holders a giant stick — if not an automatic weapon — with which to pursue websites and services they believe are infringing on their content. With little or no requirement for a court hearing, they could remove websites from the internet and shut down their ability to be found by search engines or to process payments from users. DMCA takedown notices would effectively be replaced by this nuclear option, and innocent websites would have to fight to prove that they deserved to be restored to the internet — a reversal of the traditional American judicial approach of being assumed innocent until proven guilty — at which point any business they had would be destroyed.

Just as our Congress has become the kind of legislative body that would make any corporation happy and content, this bill would make for the kind of internet that would increase smiles and profits for media conglomerates — regardless of the stifling blanket dropped on the whole Web.

A Comfort photographer is suing the state over roughly 4.5 million vehicle inspection stickers that appear to incorporate, without his authorization, an image of a saddle-toting cowboy he created in 1984.

Plaintiff David K. Langford wants the court to block the Department of Public Safety from further use or issuance of the stickers, the design of which he says is based on his copyrighted photo, “Days End 2.”

The stickers were produced by state prison inmates under a Texas Department of Criminal Justice contract with the DPS. Both agencies, which are named as defendants, declined comment Friday…

Langford, who said he was surprised to learn of the sticker from a friend’s tip in June, described the litigation as a last resort.

“We’ve tried everything we can to settle this in a businesslike, professional manner between photographer and client, but we can’t hardly get them to return a phone call,” said Langford…

“If they’re going to get the images from incarcerated folks, they need to pay particularly close attention to the genesis of that intellectual property,” said Langford’s lawyer, Jimmy Carter.

He wants the court to award damages and attorney fees over what he says is an unlawful taking of an image that has generated income for Langford for 25 years.

Most often, I look somewhat askance at similar suits. This seems more than a bit different, a solid violation of long-standing copyrighted work.

Chief Farcical Officer
Daylife/Getty Images used by permission

Facebook, which has gone after sites with the word “book” in their names, is also trying to trademark the word “face,” according to court documents.

But the social networking site has met with a familiar foe. As TechCrunch first reported, Aaron Greenspan has asked for an extension of time to file an opposition to Facebook’s attempt. Greenspan is the president and CEO of Think Computer, the developer of a mobile payments app called FaceCash.

“I’d bet against ‘face’ being awarded to Facebook,” said Henry Sneath, a patent and trademark lawyer based in Pittsburgh. “You cannot overtake the use of a generic word people use in everyday speech…”

Facebook’s separate fight over “book,” on the other hand, has been more of a David vs. Goliath saga.

As CNNMoney reported Thursday, Facebook is suing start-up site Teachbook.com — which claims it is merely a teacher’s community. The social networking giant also forced the travel site PlaceBook to change its name to TripTrace earlier this month.

In the case of Teachbook, Facebook would have to prove the site caused “a likelihood of confusion,” said Sneath, the trademark lawyer. That’s a steep burden, he said, but Facebook could succeed.

I thoroughly understand the need for existing copyright-holders to press to defend their mark against every interloper no matter how small. No matter how laughable.

In this case, I think “egregious,” greedy and grasping might be a better fit.

John Young is a brave and tenacious man, an architect based in New York whose website, cryptome.org, has been a safe online repository for documents that someone, somewhere does not want published…

Thanks to a robust policy on the part of his current internet service provider, his site has remained online despite the best efforts of those who are embarrassed by its contents.

Until last month, that is, when cryptome.org disappeared from the internet after Network Solutions disabled access to the site’s domain.

Mr Young had not revealed military secrets that put the lives of soldiers at risk, or published the finer details of Britain’s nuclear deterrent capability. The document that got the site kicked offline was not a detailed map of the presidential escape route from the White House, or a list of the lobbyists who have visited Downing Street in the last year, but a 22-page document written by Microsoft.

It details how US government agencies can request access to customer data stored on Microsoft servers, like your Hotmail messages, and Microsoft used copyright law to achieve what the US government could not.

It seems that copyright, a legal framework developed over 300 years to ensure a balance between the interests of the wider community and those of the creative artist has become so tipped towards those of the “rights holder” that few of us can go through a day without breaking the law in one way or another…

This has got to stop. We have to say “enough is enough” to those who hold copyrights in songs and images and words and videos. We must refuse to remake the digital world in order to serve only their interests…

It would be a tragedy if the network the people of East Africa found, now that they have fast fibre links to the rest of the internet, was locked-down, limited and restricted by laws passed to placate fearful Western rights holders and they decided, as a result, that it wasn’t worth joining.

I’ve been online since 1983. RTFA.

Timorous, reactionary cowards that characterize the world of Anglophone bureaucracy have always been a risk. The newer autocracy of beancounters and their lawyers that grows and envelops the Internet from twin centers of greed in Washington, DC and Hollywood is at least as threatening.

Isa Dick Hackett, daughter of the paranoid science fiction genius Philip K Dick, isn’t happy about the new Googlephone. The still unofficial handset may or may not be called the Nexus One, but Isa is already “shocked and dismayed” about intellectual property infringement: Roy Baty and his replicant cohorts in Dock’s novella Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep were all Nexus-6 models.

This is utter nonsense, of course, but the fact that PKD’s daughter is taking legal counsel about the naming of a still non-existent product certainly has a fitting irony. The word “nexus” existed before the Voight-Kampff test was even imagined. Here is the definition from the New Oxford American dictionary: “a connection or series of connections linking two or more things.” The origin of the word the 17th century. It is also a Dark Horse comic book.

We wouldn’t be surprised if Hackett did actually manage to make a case, though, and further leech money from her father’s legacy. Motorola licensed the name “droid” from Lucasfilm to avoid legal troubles, although in that case the shortening of the word “android” could actually originate in Star Wars. Hackett is rather more sure of things than her father ever was. “In my mind, there is a very obvious connection to my father’s novel” she told the New York Times.

What can we take away from this? First, clearly, that copyright lengths should be reduced (PKD died in 1982, 27 years ago). And second, that the Googlephone will almost certainly be called the Nexus One. The name has been used by Google in a United States Patent and Trademark Office filing, and by the handset’s manufacturer, HTC, in an FCC filing.

One of the few categories of almost-human being that I hate with a passion is sleazy, opportunist lawyers. Even those who don’t become politicians.

The only thing worse are the creeps who keep them in business.

The word “tweet” may have entered the international lexicon thanks to an explosion in 140-word microblogging messages, but an attempt by Twitter’s founders to trademark it has been rejected.

Twitter applied to the US patent and trademark office last month for ownership of the word but the request was provisionally denied on the grounds that other companies had filed for trademarks of very similar words…

The ruling is a setback to Twitter’s co-founder Biz Stone, who is keen to protect the rapidly growing language surrounding the service…

“We have applied to trademark tweet because it is clearly attached to Twitter from a brand perspective but we have no intention of ‘going after’ the wonderful applications and services that use the word in their name when associated with Twitter,” he said.

Uh, sorry about that. There is little else I can say about something I find terminally boring.

Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission

The billionaire media mogul Rupert Murdoch suffered the indignity of seeing his global empire make a huge financial loss yesterday and promptly pledged to shake up the newspaper industry by introducing charges for access to all his news websites, including the Times, the Sun and the News of the World, by next summer.

Stung by a collapse in advertising revenue as the recession shredded Fleet Street’s traditional business model, Murdoch declared that the era of a free-for-all in online news was over.

“Quality journalism is not cheap,” said Murdoch. “The digital revolution has opened many new and inexpensive distribution channels but it has not made content free. We intend to charge for all our news websites.”

What does “quality journalism” have to do with Murdoch’s tabloids?

The Australian-born press and television baron was speaking as his News Corporation holding company slumped to a $3.4 billion net loss for the financial year to June, hit by huge writedowns in the value of its assets, restructuring charges and a dive in commercial revenue…

At present, only the Wall Street Journal charges a fee for online access and until recently, received wisdom in the publishing industry was that readers would not pay to read newspapers on the internet…

He accepted that there could be a need for furious litigation to prevent stories and photographs being copied elsewhere: “We’ll be asserting our copyright at every point…”

The group’s television division, including its Fox stations in the US and Star networks in Asia, saw profits fall from $1.12bn to $174m.

Should be an interesting couple of years. The few pundits in the world of tech that I consider worth reading on this topic – pretty much agree Murdoch’s plan stinks on ice.

His plan to sue everyone should deliver about as much of a return as it did for the RIAA.