Puck

This just in from Defective by Design:

Yesterday, Viviane Reding, European Union commissioner for information society and media, issued a report sanctioning a “transparent” DRM framework for the EU. This irresponsible and senseless report comes just a day before Sony BMG announced that they would join Warner Music Group, EMI, and Vivendi’s Universal Music Group in selling DRM-free music downloads in the United States.

Help us take action now by reading and signing our open letter. Our signed letter will be sent to the commission’s office, and will add weight to the dozens of phone calls that will be made next week to her office demanding that she retract her statement and letting her know that we oppose any attempt by the EU to sanction, promote, or endorse DRM technology platforms.

And this heartbreak from Kathy at Olympic Cellars. Readers from away should know that a certain micro-continent some millions of years ago slammed into the bulk of what is now Washington state to form what we call the Olympic Peninsula. Beautiful place, and I can’t wait to get over there to sample some wine from Olympic Cellars. Continue Reading »

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I think the general public, that gang of knavish sprites, is finally catching on to the hell that is digital rights management. The issue appears to be slowing creeping into the mainstream press. (Other than news about kids and single moms being sued by the RIAA, I mean.)

I could be wrong. Easily. Have sales of iPods really declined? No. And if jah people were really concerned about the creative commons (and DRM is the anti-cruise of creativity), they’d stop buying iPods. (I just bought a Sansa; it’s OK; at least as good as any generation of iPod I’ve tried.) In any case, I blame DRM Hell on the Beatles breaking up and the “Sue Me, Sue You Blues.” (Copyright is an old bane, by any measure. Victor Hugo, the modern inventor, was clear that ownership should only extend through the lifetime of the creator; screw the blood-sucking heirs.) Continue Reading »

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You can type your own message into the placards from Pennebroker’s famous 1966 film of Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues.” You can read Puck’s message or make your own. This is — obviously, I guess — a marketing thang, so let me help out by suggesting you buy six or seven Bob Dylan CDs. Puck could use the lunch money.

Since this Dylan thing plays on the edge of the Creative Commons (in a strictly controlled way, of course — there’s really nothing being placed in the Commons there), let me point you to the pirates over at Torrentfreak, who have leaked something like 700 megs of email from MediaDefender, a group that is playing the BitTorrent field like undercover cops. Are they collaborators, hitmen, or what for the record and movie industry? In any case, one way to keep the Commons open is to make like a hydra and propagate.

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Defective By Design writes:

The BBC should have chosen free and open standards that work well and are available today—software that you can install on every major operating system including Microsoft’s. Free software.

Instead, they have given Microsoft complete control.This deal isn’t about supporting Microsoft Windows users. It’s about excluding everyone who doesn’t use Microsoft Windows. It says that everyone who does not agree to use DRM and proprietary software made by Microsoft cannot view BBC TV programs over the Internet. Read more.

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review by Brian Charles Clark

Freedom of Expression
by Kembrew McLeod
Publisher: Doubleday, 2005

Novelist Michael Chabon, in a recent review of a new edition of Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, concluded by stating “Every novel is a sequel. Influence is bliss.” Those lines could have been an epigraph for Kembrew McLeod’s Freedom of Expression. McLeod is a sociology professor and an expert in the study of popular culture—just the sort of academic over which right-wingers love to excoriate “liberal” universities. But Freedom of Expression justifies society’s investment in scholars like McLeod: his book is learned, ranges widely over key areas of the copyright and intellectual property wars, and (here’s something you don’t hear everyday in regard to a scholarly work) is damn funny. Continue Reading »

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A draft of the new Creative Commons license has just been published. According to bOING bOING, in its first 3.5 years, 160,000,000 works were released under the license.

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A follow up to my previous post: Fred Wilhelms reports in CounterPunch that “if SoundExchange had exploited [the] sense of community that music creates, I doubt there would be more than a handful of artists left on the list, and those would be ones who, for whatever reason, didn’t want to be found.” Wilhelms has been receiving reports from folks all over the planet: they’ve been googling “lost” musicians, calling friends of friends and, by goddess, the unpaid musicians are signing up with SoundExchange in order to be paid. | In addition to the What is DRM? faq, there’s the Set-Top Cop blog created by Cory Doctorow’s USC students that is chock full of interesting news, opinions and links. | Along these same lines–that is, the open source and creative commons lines–Odiyya, over at the David Suzuki Foundation (O, Canada!), writes, “For the reckless capitalists and right wing pundits of our culture, nothing is more fearsome than confronting the fact that we as people are indeed a part of the natural systems of this planet, and in the long run, our society will ultimately be accountable to the measure of its sustainability. To them I say, get ready for the reckoning. There’s a lot more to come.” The occasion for this comment was the “theft” (as some would view it) of research published by the Foundation. Problem is, as David Suzuki says, the Foundation wants its research used in any way, shape or fashion people see fit. Scientists (and others) jockeying for academic or corporate position, take heed: if you don’t share it, we’ll steal it. And if we don’t steal it, it wasn’t worth shit to begin with.

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“Unbounded Freedom by Rosemary Bechler is a new publication from Counterpoint to be launched in partnership with the London Book Fair on 29 September 2006.” The report is free, of course, because it’s under a Creative Commons license. Cool. Meanwhile, the British Library has published a Manifesto calling for the simplification of copyright and IP law in the digital age, as well as for reasonable and restrained statutory limitations.

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Fight the power on October 3, which Defective By Design has named Digital Rights Management Day. In a nutshell, DRM is evil. DRM is what made Sony think it was OK to sell CDs that install spyware on your computer. DRM is what makes Apple think it’s OK to be a monopoly, and to have iTunes downloads only compatible with iPods. DRM is what make both Blu-Ray and HD-DVD suck big time. DRM is part of the on-going campaign to close down the creative commons and make us all pay every time we surf the web, click the remote, or rip a CD. As the RIAA likes to ask, “Think you own this music? Think again.” Gonna say it again: DRM is evil. Defective By Design wants your suggestions on how to make people aware that DRM is (once more, with feeling) evil and how to shake up the media conglomerates so they quit acting like power-mad behemoths and let the world be filled with art and information. Continue Reading »

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review by Brian Charles Clark

The Anarchist in the Library is Vaidhyanathan’s second book on copyright and intellectual property (IP) after his 2003 Copyrights and Copywrongs. Where the earlier book was a straightforward and lively history of this area of law and culture, in The Anarchist in the Library Vaidhyanathan tries to put a socio-philosophical spin on the same material to achieve an apocalyptic excitement. For a number of reasons, it doesn’t work.

Vaidhyanathan tries to cram all the complex issues surrounding copyright and IP, which include those of music downloading and sampling, software and media “piracy,” print publishing, control of libraries (as in the Patriot Act), control of computer networks as well as the little publicized area of IP in science (genomics, pharmaceuticals, and so on), inside two buckets: the totalitarian “controllers” and the free-for-all “anarchists.” The alleged “clash” between the two buckets, Vaidhyanathan claims, is “crashing the system” and “hacking the real world.” Continue Reading »

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