the body of a very slow loop
Microsoft has donated $25,000 to the Creative Commons, according to Larry Lessig, CEO of the non-profit organization.
Microsoft deserve serious kudos for this. It’s this type of Slashdot-head-exploding action that can save them from their current reputation. For an encore they should open-source something.
Are guitar tabs illegal? The Music Publishers’ Association thinks so:
MPA president Lauren Keiser said he wanted site owners to be jailed. He said unlicensed guitar tabs and song scores were widely available on the Internet but were “completely illegal”.
(Source: BBC News)
OK here’s the thing: I could argue that fan-contributed tabs are legal under US copyright law, but it would be moot. The only two facts that matter are:
End of discussion. Seriously. Don’t empty your lobbyist piggy-bank for this one, Keiser. Its a lost cause. There’s a reason why your quote has spread like Internet wildfire: it betrays a point of view so jaw-droppingly out-of-sync with the rest of us, it’s laughable.
I fantasize that, once upon a time, publishers helped to find talented musicians, distribute their art, and get them paid. These days, they manufacture marketable acts, engage in rampant payola to get air play, and then screw the artists out of every penny.
Now they’re installing viruses on your computer and calling it DRM.
I guess this is what happens when the Internet obsoletes you.
I bought an HDTV years ago, before DVI or HDMI were around, so I’ve got it hooked up thru some quality component interconnects. Recently my old Toshiba DVD player died, so I needed to find a replacement. I started poking around to see what, if anything, had happened to DVD player technology in the last 3 years. The short answer is: not much.
One minor improvement is that many DVD players can now upsample the DVD video to HD resolution (720p or 1080i). Just to be clear, a DVD only contains 480 lines of pixels, so this is interpolation. A decoder chip looks at neighboring source pixels and more-or-less guesses the additional pixels. You might ask why anyone would do this, and it would be a fair question. There are a handful of reasons, but lets just take it for granted that some people would prefer 480i upsampled to 1080i, over regular 480i.
Getting to the point, the DVD Forum decided that they needed to make some rules to protect their copywritten works. One rule they made was that any digital output at HD resolution should be encrypted with HDCP. Of course, their evil customers might just grab the analog signal, so they made another rule: analog outputs should be capped at 480 lines of resolution.
So lets recap:
I want to upsample to 1080i, but…
It’s worth repeating, here, that the original source resolution is 480i. No matter how you interpolate, a DVD is not an HD source. This detail was apparently lost on the DVD Forum who weighed the utility of my expensive TV against the cost of movie piracy, and — not surprisingly — decided my needs were less important then theirs.
There’s a punchline to this whole thing:
After about 20 minutes of Googling, I discovered that some Samsung DVD players have a (not-so-secret) secret code that both disables HDCP, and enables high resolution output over the analog outputs.
I bought one.
As I used to say back in my gaming days: owned.
My local library has many good books and CDs, which I can borrow for free. All I have to do is go down there, find that what I want is out, get on the waiting list, come back a few weeks later to pick it up, and remember to return it on time. This is not convenient at all, but it’s free and totally 100% legal.
Similarly I could borrow a DVD from a friend. Yes I’d probably be imposing somewhat on my friend, and if I forgot to return the DVD, perhaps this person would cease to be my friend. But, the point is, I could do this legally and for free.
Ok so what if, during one of the above scenarios, I decide just to make a quick copy for myself. Look, I’m never going to buy the thing. I buy things I want to own. If I just want the option to read a book twice, maybe once a year, it doesn’t make sense to own it 24/7/365. Besides, at any given time I could “re-borrow” the thing anyway — it would just be more convenient to have a copy readily available.
Of course, this is illegal.
The MPAA and the RIAA and many publishers don’t get this. They want you to see black and white here. Unfortunately, the reality is a whole lot of grey. The convenient method is illegal. If you want convenient access to a work, you must pay for it. Otherwise, if you’re satisfied with the inconvenient methods, they are — at least currently — resigned to the fact that those methods are legal.
(Don’t be fooled, though. If they could make libraries and friends illegal, they would.)
In a nutshell, this is why the MPAA and the RIAA are doomed to lose the copyfight. Convenience is not theft. Convenient things are not wrong. If you get between people and convenience, you’re going to lose every time.
Marketeers call it “mindshare.” Google says “don’t be evil.” I call it, “being cool.”
Cool: Apple, AMD, Google, Linux
Not Cool: Intel, Microsoft, SCO
Whatever you call it, it pays the bills. Here’s a business plan for you:
This, my friends, is the numero uno reason for businesses to stay the hell away from DRM. There is nothing more uncool than DRM. DRM is like kryptonite to your profits.
There is no market demand for DRM. Your customers don’t understand it, because it does nothing for them. They will not forgive you when it gets in their way.
Screw that DRM crap and just be cool already.
Copyright exists to provide an economic incentive for creation. Very often the argument is made that without this incentive, there would be no reason for artists to create anything, and thus the arts would suffer.
The people who make the aforementioned argument are invariably the same people who are profiting from the status quo. These are folks who once created something commercially-successful, and are now milking the copyright for all it’s worth.
These folks are not representative of the “world of creators”. As a matter of fact, I’m quite sure they are the minority. Everyone has heard the phrase “starving artist.” This is not an accidental colloquialism. People will create in spite of the fact that they have no economic incentive whatsoever. Many of them could probably make better money doing something completely different, but still they choose to be musicians, painters, authors and –wait for it– open-source software developers.
But I digress. Back to your regularly-scheduled rant.
The established for-profit creators sometimes threaten to take their ball and go home. You can almost hear them whining, “Well fine then. I’ll stop making stuff. See how you like that!”
So the money has actually become a disincentive.
Allow me to illustrate by way of analogy: lots of children play sports for fun. They play in community organized leagues, or perhaps on school teams. All of this is done, not just without economic incentive, but generally at some expense. Hockey gear costs money. So does ice time, the hiring of referees, etc. Yet the kids still play, and everyone understands why. They play for the love of the game.
Now fast-forward a few years, add some talent and a healthy dose of good luck, and maybe you’ve got a professional athlete. If the sport was indeed hockey, you’ve got a pro athlete who isn’t currently playing, because the NHL is currently deadlocked in a labor dispute. Economic disincentive strikes again.
I bet that if we’d never paid those guys one red cent to play the sport, they’d be playing for free right now. They’d be working the graveyard shift and sustaining themselves on a strict diet of ramen noodles. But once you start giving them 5M a year to play, they simply cannot accept 4.9.
Money is funny this way. You’ll do quite a bit to get it, but once you have it, you don’t need it, although you still want more.
When lawmakers consider copyright, they should remember that money, even tons of money, can be a pretty weak incentive. In fact, it can actually be a disincentive.
I mean, who wants to play hockey anymore anyway? I’m already rich as hell.
I was reading DVD Jon’s blog the other day and stumbled across some really great video of Cory Doctorow speaking in Norway.
The broadcast flag is dead. The US Court of Appeals finds that the FCC has no authority “…to regulate apparatus that can receive television broadcasts when those apparatus are not engaged in the process of receiving a broadcast transmission.”
If you are interested, check out the full text of the official decision
Or, for non-legalese-speakers, the News.com.com story, in actual English.
Imagine you’re in a restaurant enjoying dinner. “Hey! Hey! Hey!” Your conversation is suddenly interrupted by a chorus of half-hearted voices, and poorly coordinated claps. You don’t recognize the song they are singing, but it sucks. Sound familiar?
At the moment, I can’t think of a more depressing spectacle than the alternate birthday song.
Why do restaurants do this? Blame the US government. The real “Happy Birthday” song, which was copywritten in 1935, might have entered the public domain in 1991. However, before that tragedy could occur Congress extended copyright terms twice. Retroactively. By the current standard, you’ll be suffering through crappy faux-birthday songs until at least 2030.
Apparently an author’s right to milk their creation for all it’s worth trumps your right to develop any semblence of a culture. Or eat in peace.
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