Future of Digital Music Senate Meeting
Personal Commentary
8/23/2000; 4:48:10 PM It's 5:52 EST, and on C-SPAN 2 is the Senate Judiciary Committee meeting on the Future of Digital Music, with Lars Ulrich, the Napster CEO, and the RIAA that took place on September 11, 2000. It's out of date in lawsuit terms, but hey, get it straight from the horse's mouth(es).
U-WIRE Today-Sony exec: We will beat Napster Music & MP38/23/2000; 4:42:26 PM '"Sony is going to take aggressive steps to stop [Napster]," Heckler told the Summer Forty-Niner. "We will develop technology that transcends the individual user. We will firewall Napster at source -- we will block it at your cable company, we will block it at your phone company, we will block it at your [Internet-service provider]. We will firewall it at your PC.'It is not possible to firewall Napster and leave the rest of your network connectivity intact, esp. after Napster (and Gnutella, and Freenet, and ...) start trying to actively bypass the firewall. This will degrade your network connection, period, so the media companies can think they are protecting themselves.Let's hope this wouldn't fly legally; this would piss a lot of people off (remember the computer industry is about 10 times the size of the music industry), and you are not allowed to use your copyrights as an excuse to hurt anything else. Let's hope this was an ignorant blowhard who hasn't yet talked to his techs to learn that what he proposes is absurd.
Censorware Blocking Methods Using Akamai
Censorship
8/23/2000; 9:59:32 AM 'Peacefire has discovered a way to block censorware using Akamai's servers.'
This is just funny. The article has a lot of links. Yahoo had a follow-up where it seems Akamai will indeed do something after all.
Only News That's Fit to Link Free Speech8/23/2000; 9:04:30 AM 'Kaplan's ruling, legal experts say, appears to be an unprecedented expansion of traditional copyright law. No longer is it merely illegal to distribute a potentially infringing computer program -- but now even linking to someone else's copy could be verboten.'This article provides a good overview and connects this with the past year or two of history.'For its part, 2600 simply removed the links to copies of DeCSS. But they left the non-HTML versions of the addresses intact, so visitors can simply copy and paste them into a browser window.'Good; this will help highlight the absurdity.Court: "Stop linking to DeCSS."2600: "OK... here's non-linked URL's."Court: "Stop providing non-linked URL's."2600: "OK, here's obfuscated URLs: aicth tee tee pee colon slash slash..."Court: "Stop that!"2600: "OK, if you search google for "DeCSS", you can find 20 sites providing the code...What do you do after that? Order 2600 to pretend there's no such thing as DeCSS? "Never mention" it? ("Click here to download a program to deactivate encryption on DVDs.") This just can't fly, it's a restraint on First Amendment rights, and there's no line in this case to draw that can make this somehow make sense without destroying too much other stuff too.
Sony exec: We Own Your Computer
Music & MP38/23/2000; 8:49:15 AM '"Sony is going to take aggressive steps to stop [Napster]," Heckler told the Summer Forty-Niner. "We will develop technology that transcends the individual user. We will firewall Napster at source -- we will block it at your cable company, we will block it at your phone company, we will block it at your [Internet-service provider]. We will firewall it at your PC.'It is not possible to firewall Napster and leave the rest of your network connectivity intact, esp. after Napster (and Gnutella, and Freenet, and ...) start trying to actively bypass the firewall. This will degrade your network connection, period, so the media companies can think they are protecting themselves.Let's hope this wouldn't fly legally; this would piss a lot of people off (remember the computer industry is about 10 times the size of the music industry), and you are not allowed to use your copyrights as an excuse to hurt anything else. Let's hope this was an ignorant blowhard who hasn't yet talked to his techs to learn that what he proposes is absurd....Especially that last point! Firewall it at my PC? Touch my PC and I'll haul your ass into court! Mine! 
Seriously, though, do they think they own my computer? If they think they can firewall Napster on my PC (a nearly meaningless phrase, BTW... he really means "block Napster"), which would involve forcing me to install a program and always have it active (do they have it for Linux?), then this guy obviously would answer yes.What a bozo. It's sad these people are making the law.
What the Internet cannot do
Technology & Sociology
8/22/2000; 2:30:15 PM '“IT IS impossible that old prejudices and hostilities should longer exist, while such an instrument has been created for the exchange of thought between all the nations of the earth.” Thus Victorian enthusiasts, acclaiming the arrival in 1858 of the first transatlantic telegraph cable. People say that sort of thing about new technologies, even today. Biotechnology is said to be the cure for world hunger. The sequencing of the human genome will supposedly eradicate cancer and other diseases. The wildest optimism, though, has greeted the Internet. A whole industry of cybergurus has enthralled audiences (and made a fine living) with exuberant claims that the Internet will prevent wars, reduce pollution, and combat various forms of inequality. However, although the Internet is still young enough to inspire idealism, it has also been around long enough to test whether the prophets can be right.'
It seems undeniable that the Internet is causing more problems then it solves. Still, the benefits are immense. It's all a matter of balance.
MP3 suit blames AOL for music piracy
Music & MP3
8/22/2000; 2:07:10 PM 'An online music service, under legal fire for helping consumers locate copyrighted music files for free download, launched its own volley late Monday by suing America Online and its would-be merger mate Time Warner for assisting in the development of the currently raging free-music-download phenomenon.'
What next?
emmanuel golstein's Comments On the DeCSS Ruling
DVD & DeCSS
8/21/2000; 2:18:17 PM 'What too many people don't seem to realize is that the rules have changed overnight and it WILL affect them. Imagine not being allowed to lend a book to a friend. Imagine not being able to play music that you bought in another country. Imagine only being able to watch "approved" content on your DVD player. And just wait until HDTV comes around and makes it impossible to record anything unless you pay. These are all natural extensions of the existing restrictions and they are all now perfectly legal. You've lost the right of "fair use" with copyrighted material that you think you own. In actuality, you've just bought a license to do what they tell you. '
Vital reading.
TheStandard.com: Napster to Court: The Judge Screwed Up Music & MP38/21/2000; 9:18:18 AM 'If Napster thought Judge Marilyn Hall Patel disapproved of the file-sharing service when she ruled against it last month, wait till she gets a load of the company's new legal filing. 'Late Friday, Napster's lawyers filed a brief that spells out Judge Patel's "errors" in her preliminary injunction ruling, which was temporarily stayed by an appeals court just hours before the injunction would have effectively shut Napster down. While the software company is allowed to continue operations pending a hearing, the brief filed Friday in appeals court is part of Napster's attempt to remove any question of the legal validity of its service – namely noncommercial peer-to-peer file sharing.'The brief is online. Insert rant about not linking to the primary sources here, including the bit about it being the most convincing evidence that the gatekeepers do not want you to think for yourself.It's 92 pages long and I don't have time to read it now. However, what I have read is very interesting, do at least skim some of it.IMHO, by far the most importent argument is Napster's favor, which should be an immediate win for them, is that if you rule Napster as being in violation of copyright law, then nearly the entire Internet as we know it will need to be shut down. It is vital to understand this is not exaggeration... it's the simple truth.Any service that allows users to publicly post content must be shut down, as the users might post copyrighted content, there's no way to tell. You won't be able to obtain server software anymore, as it might be used to post illegal content, thus making anyone who ever touched the server software partially liable. Goodbye IRC, FTP, HTTP, even TCP.The key to this is that in Judge Patel's zeal to nail the vile, evil, horrid, theiving music pirates to the wall, she disregarded every balancing point the law makes. The law, as it stands, is reasonably balanced... there are standards for what Napster is being charged with, such as there not being any substantially non-infringing uses. This same balance was protecting a lot of people, mostly without those people recognizing it. Does Microsoft seriously worry about whether IIS (their web server) will be found as a contributory copyright infringer if somebody, somewhere uses it to server illegal copies of DeCSS? No, because the balance of the law has ensured they won't be found responsible for such activities of their users. Now that Judge Patel has ruled that balance is not relevant, the door is opened for numerous other lawsuits, that must be ruled in favor of the copyright holders in light of this precendent (if it is allowed to stand).Granted, Microsoft is big and can protect itself, and it's in no real danger. But I choose that merely to illustrate the point clearly. There are other people in great danger, who are very similar to Napster, yet should not be held responsible either. The most obvious example is IRC. This is the most popular way to exchange software, it's the next most popular way to exchange MP3s after Napster, but it's a chatting service. There's no way to stop the users short of shutting the whole server network down, anymore then Napster can magically divine whether or not Meta11ikA.mp3 points to a Metallica song, or is a perfectly legal song being shared by the author that happens to have that name. If Napster is illegal under the logic that Judge Patel uses, then so is IRC. By bandwidth consumed, it is quite likely that IRC's 'primary use' is 'piracy' of one sort or another. (By most other measures IRC's primary use is most likely chatting, as it was designed for, but you can always find a measure to do what you want it to do.)
Consumers' Views Split on Internet Privacy Privacy from Companies8/21/2000; 8:47:09 AM 'In the continuing battle between Internet companies that want to use customers' personal information to deliver tailored advertisements and services and privacy advocates who want stricter controls over how this information is used, consumers themselves appear to be of two minds. 'At least that is the finding of a survey whose results were released last night by the Pew Research Center for People and the Press, a nonprofit group. While many consumers surveyed expressed concern about their privacy, many also said they were willing to share personal information with the Web sites they used.'The Pew Research Center for People and the Press is online, but I don't see this report yet. As the most recent report on the site dates from April, one can guess that that either they put stuff up on the web in a delayed fashion, or they have stopped updating the site.I want to know more. I think the percentages for the answers would very strongly depend on the wording of the questions.
- Do you feel it is acceptable to give an online merchant personal information?
- Do you feel it is acceptable to give an online merchant personal information, as long as they can't share it with others without your permission?
- Do you feel that the current policy of most internet merchants, which is that your personal data is theirs to do with as they please, and that they can and do sell it to anybody, is acceptable?