Because my neighbor downloading an episode of "Bones" via Bittorrent is just as bad as running a crack house (this is in LA):

In an ordinance just adopted, the five-member board is declaring that piracy "substantially interferes with the interest of the public in the quality of life and community peace, lawful commerce in the county, property values, and is detrimental to the public health, safety, and welfare of the county's citizens, its businesses and its visitors."

Can someone send the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors a thesaurus, with the phrase "sense of proportion" underlined?

Technorati Tags: stupidity

Mathew Ingram notes the stupidity behind calls to have ISPs monitor the net for copyrighted works:

There are a couple of obvious problems with this idea. For one thing, it isn’t likely to stop serious downloaders at all. As Stan Schroeder suggests in his post at Mashable, there are any number of ways around the filters that ISPs might use to detect such illegal activity -- including anonymous proxies, steganography and so on. Would all of those things become illegal as well? And how many illegal files would you have to share before you got the warning from your provider -- one, 10, a thousand?

Simple encryption would stop this kind of filtering. This is the kind of "arms race" that the copyright holders can't win, and should not engage in. If they want to continue to be able to sell their wares, they need to make it easy and inexpensive to do so. You can't beat Torrents with legislation, but you should be able to build a better experience. Maybe if they spent some time pondering the iTunes interface they would learn something...

Technorati Tags: law

Mathew Ingram has a fascinating example of how the interests of authors don't always overlap with the perceived interests of publishers:

Torrentfreak has the fascinating tale of an author — Brazilian-born “magical realist” novelist Paulo Coelho — who has been busily “pirating” his own books, including setting up a dedicated website to point potential readers to BitTorrented copies of his various novels. Coelho says in a video at the Digital, Life and Design conference in Munich (which I’ve embedded below) that when he uploaded Russian versions of his books to P2P networks, his sales started to skyrocket in Russia.

I can imagine that Coelho's publisher is not amused by the "self piracy" thing - but it points out how deep the disconnect is between artists and the businesses that promote their wares. It's getting much easier for artists to "go direct" and not deal with a media company at all, and that's a large part of the reason we are seeing so much desperation from those corners.

This has to be the dumbest idea I've heard of yet: filtering for copyright violations at the network layer:

At a small panel discussion about digital piracy here at NBC’s booth on the Consumer Electronics Show floor, representatives from NBC, Microsoft, several digital filtering companies and telecom giant AT&T said the time was right to start filtering for copyrighted content at the network level.

How would they even tell whether content being passed is being passed in a legitimate fashion? Network level DRM? What about the false positives that are guaranteed to pop up? What about an even simpler question - given the way safe harbor works in the DMCA, aren't the network providers jumping hip deep into the alligator ridden swamp if they try this?

Now that the music labels have given up on DRM, are we about to see "Wanton Stupidity, the Sequel"?

Technorati Tags: stupidity

It looks like I'm nothing more than a dirty, rotten thief. Which is probably ok, because odds are, so are you - at least in the eyes of the RIAA. Reversing their testimony in the Grokster case, the RIAA now says that copying songs from a CD is a violation of copyright:

The RIAA has lodged documents in the ongoing case of the Record Industry vs Jeffrey Howell that argues that ripping music from legally purchased CD’s is illegal.

This is a pretty bold claim - if they get away with it (and, Grokster notwithstanding, you never know with court cases), then anyone with an iPod is at risk.

The funny thing is, even as the RIAA makes these arguments, we have Warner moving to DRM-free downloads. Some parts of the industry seem to have figured out that repeatedly slapping their customers around is a bad thing - but the major trade group is still filled with people desperately trying to preserve a dead business model (CD sales dropped again in 2007).

In the end, I think Mathew Ingram has this right - the music industry as it currently exists is doomed. It's in the process of being taken out by digital distribution, and even these legal maneuvers are nothing more than desperate - but ultimately doomed - rear-guard actions. Sometime soon, the seat warmers at the RIAA are going to have to find real jobs, and stop subtracting value from the world.

Update: I like Robert Scoble's take :)

Technorati Tags: DRM, music

I was skeptical about this David Pogue piece when I started reading it, because he started here:

It was early in 2005, and a little hackware program called PyMusique was making the rounds of the Internet. PyMusique was written for one reason only: to strip the copy protection off of songs from the iTunes music store.

The program's existence had triggered an online controversy about the pros, cons and implications of copy protection. But to me, there wasn't much gray area. "To me, it's obvious that PyMusique is designed to facilitate illegal song-swapping online," I wrote. And therefore, it's wrong to use it.

His readers set him straight on that, and I would have as well (heck, I should go through my archives - maybe I did :) ).

However, it got a lot more interesting as he sketched out talks he did in front of various audiences, asking whether X was wrong, where X is some kind of file copying - ranging from the reasonable (backup, damaged original, etc) to the clearly illegal. The interesting bit was this: most audiences, people's reactions vary. However:

Recently, however, I spoke at a college. It was the first time I'd ever addressed an audience of 100 percent young people. And the demonstration bombed.

In an auditorium of 500, no matter how far my questions went down that garden path, maybe two hands went up. I just could not find a spot on the spectrum that would trigger these kids' morality alarm. They listened to each example, looking at me like I was nuts.

Finally, with mock exasperation, I said, "O.K., let's try one that's a little less complicated: You want a movie or an album. You don't want to pay for it. So you download it."

There it was: the bald-faced, worst-case example, without any nuance or mitigating factors whatsoever.

"Who thinks that might be wrong?"

Two hands out of 500.

Now, never mind what you think of that - just consider what it means in terms of the legal regime: if that opinion is widespread amongst the 20 and under set, just how much longer do you think copyright as it's currently understood is sustainable? At some point, as this generation attains political power, things are going to change, period.

If your business depends in any way on current copyright law, it's time to start looking at a different model - because your old one is going to get killed off. It's already happening at the margins, in ways that are not legally sanctioned. Over the next 2 decades (at worst), it's going to start going legitimate. The time to think about the implications are now - and I really don't think trying to preserve the status quo is going to work out. It doesn't really matter what you or I think...

Technorati Tags: law, DRM

Just how stupid is the RIAA? Pretty stupid, since they are still claiming that ripping your own CDs is unauthorized:

Those MP3 and AAC files that you've ripped from your CD collection are still "unauthorized copies" in the eyes of the recording industry. In a brief filed late last week, the RIAA said that the MP3 files on a PC owned by a file-sharing defendant who had admitted to ripping them himself were "unauthorized copies."

Clue acquisition in that business is really, really slow. Maybe they should just file a class action suit against all residents of the planet?

Technorati Tags: stupidity, RIAA, music

PCWorld quotes the EFF on the real problem with the RIAA's "fight the future" theory of operations:

Von Lohmann also thinks the suits may hurt legitimate companies while leaving the real content pirates untouched. "I think it's fair to say that copyright threats from entertainment industries are exerting a serious chilling effect on several companies that are trying to do the right thing, while having little impact on offshore companies that are more adventurous," von Lohmann says. "In other words, the innovation that should be fueling our economy is now fueling someone else's."

The RIAA (and the MPAA, for that matter) are fighting a war they can't win. They are busily irritating their real and potential customers - either suing them, or making life difficult for them - while the real pirates sail along unimpaired. The amount of inertia in that business is astonishing - the good times for all the do-nothing middle-men are over, and it's time for the labels to accept that fact and get on with their lives. They can't (or won't) do that though, and are simply making things suck for the rest of us on their way down.

Think about it - when you legally purchase a DVD, you have the devil's own time trying to copy that content to arbitrary devices on which you might want to watch it - your laptop's hard drive, your iPod (etc, etc). As you curse, the overseas pirate operations are busy churning out copies of the same DVD for sale though. The content owners have made war on the mice, while the lions are busy roaming the savannah. If it didn't impact me directly, it would be hilarious.

Technorati Tags: music, DRM