Karsten on Free Software

Use restrictions management (DRM) at your own risk. According to The Register, the distributors for Steven Spielberg’s latest film Munich have managed to fsck up the movie’s application for the British Bafta awards:

Steven Spielberg’s Munich has effectively been knocked out of the running for next month’s Bafta awards after a batch of DVDs sent to voters eligible to judge the UK award were coded incorrectly for European viewing. Copies of the film were earlier held up for a month in UK Customs. When they finally made it out of cold storage British Academy of Film and Television Arts voters found they were encoded as Region 1 DVDs. That meant they would only be playable on multi-region DVD players. But the DVDs was encrypted so that they’d only play on proprietary DVD players supplied by Dolby-subsidiary Cinea so even that approach was doomed. A spokeswoman for Munich’s distributors blamed a “lab error” for the SNAFU. She said UK screenings of the film would be arranged to make sure voters saw the film but it’s unlikely there’s enough time to arrange this properly before the second round of voting, which ends on Thursday.

Congratulations, ladies and gentlemen.

Nart Villeneuve of the Internet Censorship Explorer has published an article on Internet filtering on First Monday: “The filtering matrix: Integrated mechanisms of information control and the demarcation of borders in cyberspace”.

As non–transparent filtering practices meld into forms of censorship the effect on democratic practices and the open character of the Internet are discernible. States are increasingly using Internet filtering to control the environment of political speech in fundamental opposition to civil liberties, freedom of speech, and free expression. The consequences of political filtering directly impact democratic practices and can be considered a violation of human rights.

While none of this is revolutionarily new, it makes interesting reading. He comes to important conclusions:

Filtering is not a communications disruption tool. It does not disrupt terrorists’ use of the Internet. It does not protect against cyberterrorism. National filtering is implemented to impose information control on populations within a given geographic space. There are significant transparency and accountability concerns regarding the decision to implement Internet filtering and the selection of targeted content. Often, those implementing filtering are unaware of the consequences that the mechanism of filtering can have. While easily circumvented, Internet filtering inflicts “collateral damage” that represents a significant threat to transparent and democratic practices.

Though some days have passed since, I cannot resist writing about a piece of good news. Since January 1st, the works of German writer Kurt Tucholsky are in the public domain. The author died on Dec. 21, 1935, in his Swedish exile. German copyright protection lasts 70 years after the author’s year of death.

Tucholsky (1890-1935) excelled in pointed, satirical descriptions of people and events in Germany’s Weimar Republic. I love his style of writing, though I suffered a slight overdose of his works in university.

If you read German, go ahead and download his works from the German Project Gutenberg site.

via netzpolitik.org

This weekend, I stumbled upon the site decodeunicode.org. It lists all unicode characters and has a wiki where you can provide an explanatory entry for each one, in English and German.

While some characters are already explained, others are still waiting for you to contribute historical or cultural factoids. Nice one!

Progressive copyright thinker James Boyle has published a comment in the Financial Times about the European Union’s recent study on the impact of its Database Directive. This directive creates a sort-of-copyright for databases.

Now, the EU has evaluated if this protection of databases is doing the industry any good. The criteria are really quite simple: Are there more and/or bigger databases now than there were before the directive? This is relatively easy to control, as the EU is the only place in the world granting such a right. Yep, not even the monopoly-happy US know such a thing.

And, surprise: The directive has not done any good. Quite to the contrary:

In fact, their study showed that the production of databases had fallen to pre-Directive levels and that the US database industry, which has no such intellectual property right, was growing faster than the EU’s. The gap appears to be widening.

The study proposes several roads to take now. Amazingly, after proving it’s no good, “leave things as they are” is among them, mainly because the database industry’s political influence is considered a “political reality”.

Imagine applying these arguments to a drug trial. The patients in the control group have done better than those given the drug, and there is evidence that the drug might be harmful. But the drug companies like their profits, and want to keep the drug on the market. Though “somewhat at odds” with the evidence, this is a “political reality.”

Tom Owad on Applefritter has looked into Data Mining 101: Finding Subversives with Amazon Wishlists. It’s a pretty impressive project: He shows how far information that is available publicly and gratis can go in tying ideas to the people that harbour them.

It used to be you had to get a warrant to monitor a person or a group of people. Today, it is increasingly easy to monitor ideas. And then track them back to people. Most of us don’t have access to the databases, software, or computing power of the NSA, FBI, and other government agencies. But an individual with access to the internet can still develop a fairly sophisticated profile of hundreds of thousands of U.S. citizens using free and publicly available resources. Here’s an example.

This is what’s possible with publicly available information, but imagine if one had access to Amazon’s entire database – which still contains every sale dating back to 1999 by the way. Under Section 251 of the Patriot Act, the FBI can require Amazon to turn over its records, without probable cause, for an “authorized investigation . . . to protect against international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities.” Amazon is forbidden to disclose that they have turned over any records, so that you would never know that the government is keeping records of your book purchases. And obviously it is quite simple to crossreference this info with data available in other databases.

Whew. Scary.

via BoingBoing

Freedom To Tinker has a bit of discussion about Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) on CDs.

Now I’m not arguing here that the current copyright deal is perfect or even close to perfect. The copyright deal is under stress and we need to keep thinking about how we might improve it or how we might renegotiate it to work better in the digital world. I’m not certain what the best deal would look like, but I’m pretty sure that it won’t try to lock in any kind of DRM.

While the entry leaves out the principal concern about restrictions management – that it is a cultural catastrophy -, it nicely points to the fact that the copyright system needs to be retooled instead of foisting its most restrictive interpretation upon people.

As we are going to run into this argument more frequently in the future, I found reading this very helpful.

German weekly Die Zeit has an article on the Chaos Communications Congress. It’s the best I’ve read so far in the mainstream press, if only out of a pretty poor lot.

The threat to freedom that is Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) is up on the agenda at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting at Davos, Switzerland, sez DRMwatch.

This being a meeting place of high-level politicians and managers, with the public and the media comfortably locked out, it looks like a perfect opportunity to promote far-reaching restrictions on culture, technology and communications, as promoted by the people who expand “DRM” to “Digital Rights Management”.

Don’t be surprised to see this trend gather more speed soon.

The music industry majors have done their very best to scare away their customers in 2005. This included taking computer illiterates to court for filesharing and willfully exposing customer’s computers to attacks (no, I’m not linking to any Sony Rootkit stories now. You can hardly go outside these days without one flying in your face.) Another measure taken to get rid of buyers was downgrading the value of the CDs on sale by riddling them with Digital Restrictions Management.

Still, the industry greats act surprised at a drop in sales for 2005. There is a nice opinion piece on The Register that points to a few corners where the problem might be hiding.

As it had me nodding my head after almost every paragraph, I’ll quote a few:

Well, there aren’t many sites left to shut down. In fact, without major media hubs to go after, the music publishers are now reaching to examine sites that post lyrics to songs. (We’ve bought many a song after lyric hunting, but that’s surely because we’re odd, totally unique, not mainstream creatures.) Along with the evil lyric mongers, consumers will likely be targeted by another 10,000 or so lawsuits in 2006. Then the RIAA can wait for the year-end data and say either that its war on piracy really boosted sales or that piracy continues to undermine the very fabric of the creative process, and this pattern will continue until the music industry enjoys a protracted boom. Sadly, the RIAA’s current line of thinking and method of operation prohibits such a boom. Without question, the lawsuits against children, parents and grandparents don’t help the music industry’s public relations campaign. Nor do advertisements portraying download-happy consumers as criminals. It is wrong to grab this music without compensating artists. That’s clear. What isn’t clear is if suing thousands of people a year to prove a point is a punishment that fits the crime or a strategy worth pursuing.

The obvious motivation behind the music industry’s fight against music trading on the internet is that it hoped to cash in on the new online music formats just as it had done with the move from records to tapes and then CDs. The pigopolists wanted you to buy entire music collections once again. The labels, however, didn’t come up with online stores quick enough and have spent the last few years trying to stop companies that did create such stores.

It won’t happen in 2006, but eventually the music labels will realize how wrong they’ve been. This cycle has run its course before, dating all the way back to the player piano and the first recordings of live performances. One day, a smarter than average pigopolist will realize that DRM-laced downloads, gimpy online services and lawsuits aren’t the best means for winning consumers’ hearts. That’s when music sales will rise again.

Enjoy.