The superb NPR program This American Life turns their attention this week to the patent troll industry and specifically Intellectual Ventures, one of the more successful trolls out there. I highly recommend TAL and I'm sure the program will do an excellent job of exploring all aspects of this issue.
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Having solved all other critical issues in the state, Tennessee lawmakers have now made it a crime to share login accounts for entertainment services such as Netflix and Rhapsody.
One seedy aspect of doing business in the digital age is the rise of the patent troll. Large companies unfortunately encourage patent trolling by paying licensing fees to these trolls because it is far easier to throw money at the situation to make it go away rather than stand on principle and enter into a long lititigation process.
The recording industry is suing Limewire for copyright infringement, and briefs have been submitted to the court in advance of the trial beginning May 2.
An interesting item in the briefs is the chart above, which attempts to make the point of how much the industry has allegedly lost due to piracy.
Occasional food writer and blogger Monica Gaudio was contacted by a friend who spotted her byline in a magazine called Cooks Source (not linked for reasons you will soon understand) and called to congratulate her. The only thing was, Monica had never heard of the magazine nor had given permission for her work to be used. After contacting the editor of the magazine, and Monica asking for a printed apology and $130 to be donated to the Columbia School of Journalism, she received a rather snarky response from the magazine's editor:
"Yes Monica, I have been doing this for 3 decades, having been an editor at The Voice, Housitonic Home and Connecticut Woman Magazine. I do know about copyright laws. It was "my bad" indeed, and, as the magazine is put together in long sessions, tired eyes and minds somethings forget to do these things.
But honestly Monica, the web is considered "public domain" and you should be happy we just didn't "lift" your whole article and put someone else's name on it! It happens a lot, clearly more than you are aware of, especially on college campuses, and the workplace. If you took offence and are unhappy, I am sorry, but you as a professional should know that the article we used written by you was in very bad need of editing, and is much better now than was originally. Now it will work well for your portfolio. For that reason, I have a bit of a difficult time with your requests for monetary gain, albeit for such a fine (and very wealthy!) institution. We put some time into rewrites, you should compensate me! I never charge young writers for advice or rewriting poorly written pieces, and have many who write for me... ALWAYS for free!"
Slashdot posted a story today about ZenMagnets' legal wranglings with the much larger Buckyballs company. (Note - I will not be posting links to anything Buckyballs related for reasons which will soon become clear.
Both companies make strong micro-magnets that can formed into all sorts of cool shapes. ZenMagnets posted an eBay listing that offered sort of a Pepsi Challenge approach - get both sets of magnets and figure out which was better. Buckyballs CEO Jack Bronstein then responded with a voicemail threatening legal action. ZenMagnets posted the voicemail in a video, as well as running both Buckyballs and ZenMagnets through a series of quality and strength tests. Bronstein countered with a DMCA takedown notice on the video. Thanks to the internet, the video has been mirrored and resurfaced on YouTube.
This is an example of the DMCA being used, not to protect copyright, but as a blunt instrument to silence discussion of a product. The only grey area in the video as far as I am concerned is the posting of the actual audio of Bronstein's amateurish threatening phone call - posting a transcript of the message would have sufficed. Nevertheless it really irritates me when a company responds to competition not through building a better product or demonstrating the value of the product, but by trying to silence criticism of the product through legal gymnastics.
I hope ZenMagnets prevails in this case.
As part of the arms race involving digital media and copy protection, the High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP) protocol was developed. The aim of the protocol was to prevent the copying of high definition digital content, but like many other DRM schemes, punished legitimate users as much as pirates.
It has now been confirmed by Intel that the HDCP protocol has been hacked and the master key for HDCP has been leaked to the internet. This essentially renders HDCP encryption useless as a master key can be developed on any device.
Ars Technica points out that Intel is still claiming that their HDCP scheme is successful:
In other words, Intel and the media companies don't care that their encryption systems offer only token protection and consumer inconvenience; all that matters is that the encryption systems are sufficient to meet the DMCA threshold for a content protection system: the threat of legal action, rather than cryptography, is their real tool against unapproved uses of digital content.
One can only hope that eventually media companies accept that there will always be a certain amount of piracy and that their DRM systems usually end up negatively impacting legitimate users far more than pirates.
One of the provisions of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) is that content carriers (such as YouTube, Facebook, or ISP's) are not required to verify distribution rights on media before allowing their users to post content, but to take down material when a rights-holder issues a DMCA takedown notice (known as "Safe Harbor"). This enables YouTube for example, to allow its users to immediately upload video without the need for human review, as the labor involved in such an activity would be astronomical.
In an interview with Rolling Stone, Eagles drummer/vocalist Don Henley complains that the DMCA's Safe Harbor provision creates an onerous burden on rights-holders. He would rather Congress amend the DMCA to make ISP's liable for carrying infringing content.
Via Slashdot, I came across some interesting statistics regarding the music industry's attempts to stop music piracy through litigation.
In 1995 the mp3 codec was made public. In 1999 Napster was released, and the era of peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing began.