taint.org: Justin Mason’s Weblog

Wow. The IFPI’s strategy of “divide and conquer” by taking individual ISPs to court to force them to institute a 3 strikes policy, as successfully deployed against Eircom this week, is possibly marginally better than this insane obsolete-business-model handout proposed by the UK government in their Digital Britain report:

Lord Carter of Barnes, the Communications Minister, will propose the creation of a quango, paid for by a charge that could amount to £20 a year per broadband connection.

The agency would act as a broker between music and film companies and internet service providers (ISPs). It would provide data about serial copyright-breakers to music and film companies if they obtained a court order. It would be paid for by a levy on ISPs, who inevitably would pass the cost on to consumers.

Jeremy Hunt, the Shadow Culture Secretary, said: “A new quango and additional taxes seem a bizarre way to stimulate investment in the digital economy. We have a communications regulator; why, when times are tough, should business have to fund another one?”

Well said. An incredibly bad idea.

By the way, I’ve noticed some misconceptions about the Eircom settlement. Telcos selling Eircom bitstream DSL (ie. the 2MB or 3MB DSL packages) are immune right now.

They are, however, next on the music industry’s hit-list, reportedly…

Tags: copyright, filesharing, ifpi, labour, piracy, quangos, uk

• Dabble DB : looks like a web-based version of good old Filemaker
  (tags: dabble-db databases web db spreadsheets analytics groupware)

• retrocomputing hackers reminisce about the 1541 diskette drive : skip to the comment thread, it’s fantastic. I used to know lots of this stuff (via Donncha)
  (tags: via:donncha commodore-64 hacks 1541 disks copy-protection drm hardware hacking history retro c64)

• MPLC racketeering Irish playschools : the ‘Motion Picture Licensing Company’ sent a letter to 2,500 Irish playschools, demanding a fee of EUR3 per child to cover license fees for the kids watching DVDs. However, it seems they themselves hadn’t registered as required by law, so were acting illegally in issuing demands… oh the irony
  (tags: mplc racketeering law ireland dvds movies mpaa licensing copyright legal children kindergarten playschools)

• Komplett’s new Dublin pick-up point is open : routing around the Irish couriers and An Post’s brokenness by allowing customers to pick up their items directly. a shame this is necessary
  (tags: an-post delivery couriers dublin ireland komplett components pc hardware)

Tags: 1541, an-post, analytics, c64, children, commodore-64, components, copy-protection, copyright, couriers, dabble-db, databases, db, delivery, disks, drm, dublin, dvds, groupware, hacking, hacks, hardware, history, ireland, kindergarten, komplett, law, legal, licensing, movies, mpaa, mplc, pc, playschools, racketeering, retro, spreadsheets, via:donncha, web

Oh, the irony. According to The Sunday Times, a body called the Motion Picture Licensing Company sent letters to 2,500 Irish playschools (aka kindergartens), demanding payment for children watching DVDs on their premises — a fee of EUR 3, plus 17.5% VAT, per child per year:

Playschools have been given an unexpected lesson on copyright law after a company representing Hollywood studios demanded that each child pay a fee of €3 plus 17.5% VAT per year to watch DVDs in their playgroup.

The Motion Picture Licensing Company (MPLC), which collects royalties on behalf of companies such as Walt Disney, Universal and 20th Century Fox, wrote to 2,500 playschools last month warning that it is illegal to show copyrighted DVDs in public without the correct license.

The letter was sent with the approval of the Irish Preschool Play Association (IPPA), which represents the schools and their 50,000 children. The MPLC had wanted €10 plus VAT per year for each child, but the IPPA negotiated for the lower fee.

Unsurprisingly, playschool owners are freaking out:

“To be honest, when I got the letter with the IPPA newsletter I laughed and binned it,” said Paula Doran, manager of Kiddies Korner, a community playschool in Shankill, south Dublin. “If we brought in something like that the parents would have to pick up the costs. But I don’t like the way they went about it — once you signed up they’d automatically take money out of your account every year.”

“I don’t think too many judges would come down hard on a playschool over this,” she said. “We would rarely show DVDs anyway because it’s frowned upon — kids get enough TV at home. The odd time we would pretend to go to the cinema. We give the children tickets and they watch 20 minutes of Snow White, Fireman Sam or SpongeBob.”

Here’s the funny part — it appears the MPLC failed to take note of its own legal requirements, and is not legally licensed to issue shakedown demands for fees in Ireland:

The MPLC had failed to register with the Irish Patent Office as a copyright licensing body. Under the 2000 Copyright Act, royalty collectors such as the Irish Music Rights Organisation (IMRO) and Phonographic Performance Ireland (PPI) are required to register before they can collect fees. A spokesman for the Patent Office said that if an organisation collects money but hasn’t registered it may be fined or staff may be jailed if a complaint is made and it is found guilty.

Crazily, it sounds like the IPPA didn’t find this out from their own legal advisors:

Irene Gunning, IPPA’s chief executive, said she was disappointed with the MPLC. “We acted in good faith with this organisation and felt we were doing our members good by negotiating them down from €10 per child,” said Gunning. “I feel misled by them now. It is only through an alert mother that we became aware that they need to be registered.”

oh dear. Let’s hear it for alert mothers, I guess. Anyway, expect more similar shakedowns once the MPLC get their little licensing oopsie sorted out:

The MPLC only began operating in Ireland in recent months, after setting up in Britain in 2003. It is also targeting other sectors such as coach operators, which occasionally show movies in public.

More coverage at Techdirt, Ars Technica, and TorrentFreak.

(Image credit: smithco on Flickr. thanks!)

Tags: copyright, kindergarten, licensing, mpaa, mplc, playschools

(Updated since original posting; see end of post for details)

Paging boogah!

Interesting situation playing out at Threadless — I think this may be the first time a stolen design made it through voting and so on, onto cotton, without being spotted. Here’s the design, supposedly by someone called ‘rocketrobyn’:

And here’s the (apparently original) stencil art by miso and ghostpatrol:

BTW, note the perspective being copied from the photo’s odd angle, to the shirt design…

The Threadless design’s submission page has some classic comments:

• Boney_King_of_Nowhere: Wow. Are you by any chance a fan of Bansky? Because this is almost a rip off. Almost. Awsome though.
• rocketrobyn (this is my design): Thank you for the positive comments. I really like this shirt too! [...] I’m not sure who Bansky [jm:sic] is, but I’ll check it out!

Heh.

I heard about this via You Thought We Wouldn’t Notice, a street-design plagiarism blog, where ghostpatrol (one of the stencil artists) posted a blog post about the situation. In the comments there, Jake from Threadless pipes up:

jake n on 12 Dec 2006 at 4:30 am

hey, jake here from threadless. i was just made aware of this situation and want to give you all my assurance that we will handle this properly.

the designer will not be paid and the design will either be removed or licensed from the original designer if they are willing.

give us a couple days to sort the details.

Not to appear whingy, 2 hours later “n.” posts:

The original owners are not willing to license this design to Threadless, and want it removed from the site. Neither artist has yet been contacted by Threadless.

Bit of patience there ;)

More links:

• StencilRevolution forum thread, pretty much down due to load
• Threadless blog thread: ‘So it’s stolen… but can we keep the design?’: ‘I personally really like the design, and feel it should stay within the ranking of Threadless shirts. It would be a shame to see it on the retired page just because someone was a thief.’
• Another blog thread: ‘I want it now that it’s a rarity!’: uh, no.
• ‘i will not be purchasing this. and am reconsidering anymore purchases from this website’, OH TEH DRAMA
• Lots more Threadless blog reactions

It’s an interesting situation, and so far Threadless is handling it very well as far as I can see — the only people who aren’t are some other graf and stencil artists in the reaction threads, vituperating about Threadless not using psychic powers to detect plagiarism:

i tell you, you aren’t printing any of my subs, i know it as they score way too low to get noticed. but on the off chance that someone rips off a design i’ve done, as blatantly as this…i would definitely seek reparations from threadless and the offending subber. do a background check with the subbers available websites etc.

Background checks?! wtf.

Good reaction from miso though:

Once again, we own automatic copyright on these images,…

To clarify — we are not blaming Threadless. They didn’t take the design knowing that it was stolen [if they had done so witch such knowledge, we would be approaching this very differently].

This is the fault of the “designer”, and hopefully this will sort itself out in the next few days. [Who, by the way, has claimed to have done these designs -- "This is a t-shirt I designed for Threadless."]

As yet, either GP nor I have yet been contacted by either the company or “designer” to fix this, but Jake from Threadless has left a very nice comment for us on “You Thought We Wouldn’t Notice”.

The Threadless blog reactions are worth watching if you want to follow the ongoing drama.

Update: reposted to preshrunk. In the comments there, someone notes that it’s not the first Threadless tee to make it to production before plagiarism was spotted — The Killing Tree was first. There are some oblique references to this in this blog post’s comments.

Tags: apparel, clothing, copyright, graffiti, ip, plagiarism, stencils, tee-shirts, threadless

Mapping: NASA’s Earth Observatory has put up a 4 MB high-res topographical image of Ireland. A rough calculation indicates that each pixel is under 0.1 of a mile on a side. It’s fantastic. ;)

Best of all, since NASA operate under the US’ enlightened copyright and licensing policies for government-funded data, it’s free — the masthead notes ‘Any and all materials published on the Earth Observatory are freely available for re-publication or re-use, except where copyright is indicated. We ask that NASA’s Earth Observatory be given credit for its original materials.’ Copyright is not indicated on this image as far as I can see. So go ahead and save a copy for future use, too.

(via EirePreneur in turn via Irish Typepad)

Tags: calculation, copyright, earth, image, licensing, mapping, mile, nasa, observatory, pixel, side

Security: Ross Anderson, crypto and security guru extraordinaire, moonlights as – wait for it — a street bagpipe player:

I play the pipes (the Great Highland Bagpipe and the Scottish smallpipes). I played competitively as a teenager, and thereafter paid my way through university by working as a street musician in Germany, France, the Netherlands and Denmark.

NOOOOOO! ANYTHING BUT THE BAGPIPES!!!

Only joking. But yes, he really does play the bagpipes. And that submission to the EU’s consultation on the management of copyright and related rights is worth a read, to get an idea of how the new increased enforcement of music copyright has had chilling effects on the viability of the UK’s folk music scene. (found via Karl-Friedrich Lenz.)

Tags: bagpipe, copyright, crypto, extraordinaire, great, guru, music, player, security, street

Copyright: Cory Doctorow’s DRM talk presented to MS research yesterday. This is a fantastic introduction to the issues regarding DRM; if you know someone who isn’t convinced that DRM is A Bad Thing, this is the argument they need to read.

OSes: /.: France Considers Open Source. The usual arguments are going on in the comments, but some people still insist that they get better support from MS than from Linux vendors.

What planet are they on? Because it would have been handy for me to live there, on the occasions in the past where I’ve had to develop code on MS platforms, and administer networks of Windows PCs. In my experience, you do not get support from Microsoft. Instead, you do what you do with Linux — go searching on Google, read MSDN, or post in the MSDN forums.

As far as I can see, there’s zero difference between doing that with Windows, and doing exactly the same thing with Red Hat — except in the latter case, you can turn up debug logging through a documented API or switch, use the source and fix it yourself, find the original developers and post a message to their core -dev list, or even ask them personally.

Where’s this amazing support? Maybe the companies I’ve worked for just weren’t paying enough, and therefore weren’t significant blue-chip customers. Or maybe it’s because we weren’t based in the US, and so got support from less-skilled, less high-priority staff in a regional office. But I’ve certainly never experienced the support these advocates claim MS offers, which makes me think it’s FUD as usual.

Tags: copyright, cory, doctorow, drm, linux, msdn, source, support, talk, thing, windows

Literature: Happy Bloomsday Centenary! Google agrees:

You can have a read of Joyce’s masterpiece online at online-literature.com, although this is certainly one text that works better on paper, to be pored over and parsed slowly. But regardless of whether it’s readable on-screen or not, the legality of that copy is dubious, anyway.

As this Telegraph article notes, the copyright situation on Ulysses is, sadly, a total mess. Even 84 years after it was written, and promptly banned in the US, UK and Ireland for ‘obscenity’, Ulysses remains a thorny legal subject.

The novel was first published in 1922, and as such, fell into public domain in the UK in 1992, but was apparently ‘pulled back’ in 1996. According to this mail, due to recent copyright term extensions, the 1922 text will now remain in copyright in the EU until the end of 2011, and may not expire until 2032 in the US. And this Irish Times article notes that in Ireland, ‘copyright on Joyce’s works ran out on December 31st, 1991, 50 years after his death. However, EU regulations revived copyright from July 1995 when it extended the lifetime of copyright to 70 years.’

Reportedly, the Dail even had to pass emergency legislation last week to prevent an exhibition at Dublin’s National Library from being sued by the Joyce Estate:

The threat to the exhibition has been caused by the 2000 Copyright Act which creates a doubt about its ability to display manuscripts bought by the State because the Joyce estate still holds copyright.

Hilarious. Recent overzealous copyright extension legislation snares governments too! But they get to rewrite the laws in emergency session to fix it ;)

All very ironic, considering Ulysses’ structure was deliberately derived from The Odyssey in the first place.

Tags: bloomsday, copyfight, copyright, google, ireland, joyce, joyce-estate

Patents: The pro-software-patent lobby has frequently stated that TRIPS — the Treaty on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPs), signed on 1993-12-15 as a constituting document of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) — requires that software be patentable. For example, here’s one from the International Chamber of Commerce:

ICC believes that the directive should follow current practice in the EPO and a number of EU member states and make it clear that computer program products can be claimed. To disallow such claims in the directive would create great legal uncertainty for holders of such patents already granted. Prohibiting product claims would also render enforcement of patents difficult and raise questions with respect to TRIPS compliance. TRIPS requires patents not only to be available, but also to be ‘enjoyable’ in all areas of technology.

Well, it actually appears that the treaty may state exactly the opposite! Christian Beauprez, a UK-based consultant, has taken a closer look at the details, and come up with this:

TRIPS Article 10.1, ‘Computer programs, whether in source or object code, shall be protected as literary works under the Berne Convention (1971).’

WIPO Copyright Treaty Article 4, ‘Computer programs are protected as literary works within the meaning of Article 2 of the Berne Convention. Such protection applies to computer programs, whatever may be the mode or form of their expression’.

This includes the execution or processing of a program, as demonstrated in the EEC software copyright Directive 1991, ‘the permanent or temporary reproduction of a computer program by any means and in any form, in part or in whole. Insofar as loading, displaying, running, transmission or storage’

They also stipulate that exceptions to exclusive rights of authors are to be limited to ’special cases’ which do not conflict with a normal exploitation of the work and cannot be prejudicial to the author’s rights. (e.g. the rights to sell,rent,broadcast,give away,translate, and generally enjoy.).

… Authors cannot own underlying ideas, but inventors can as part of their ‘invention’. When the field of software (aka data processing) is opened up to ‘inventors’, they can block authors from exploiting their works on the grounds that they own the ‘underlying ideas’. Therefore this is prejudicial to the rights of authors and illegal under all these Treaties.

There’s lots more at Christian’s site. FFII, one of the main anti-software-patenting players in Europe, have agreed that this is a key point in their TRIPS analysis:

In summary it can be said that the European patent establishment is 1. refusing to clarify and concretise the meaning of the TRIPs treaty; 2. wrongly equating the TRIPs treaty with ‘US practise’, using threats of alleged TRIPs-incompatibility for purposes of fostering Fear, Uncertainty and Distrust (FUD); 3. trying to impose a sui generis software patent regime on Europe which is incompatible with the TRIPs treaty.

Tags: article, berne, computer, copyright, directive, patents, program, software, trade, treaty, trips

Spam: The Reg reports that a Belkin Router software upgrade hijacks HTTP connections to spam the browser with ads. Here’s a screenshot of the ad page. Here’s a USENET post bemoaning the situation, and the followup from a Belkin PM.

This is amazing; a working piece of network infrastructure has been effectively modified to:

• replace the expected HTTP responses with spam ‘for your convenience’
• do this once every 8 hours until told to stop
• report serial numbers, IP addresses and software revisions back ‘home’ as part of this

And, of course, web browsing is not the only thing that runs over port 80.

So, it’s a router that inserts spam into your packets, whether you want it or not, due to a software upgrade; and if you want the bugfixes in that upgrade, you get the spam whether you want it or not. And, that spam could break quite a bit of legitimate port 80 traffic, such as automated download tools that aren’t a full web browser, for example. And the spam is unannounced on the download page, or in the change log. I’d hope that’s pretty serious under consumer-protection law… it certainly should be.

Copyright: In case there was any doubt that Sonny Bono and Jack Valenti wanted to remove the legal concept of the public domain, check this quote from the Congressional record:

(Mary Bono): Actually, Sonny wanted the term of copyright protection to last forever. I am informed by staff that such a change would violate the Constitution. I invite all of you to work with me to strengthen our copyright laws in all of the ways available to us. As you know, there is also Jack Valenti’s proposal for term to last forever less one day. Perhaps the Committee may look at that next Congress.

Wow. More via an Eldred-related site.

Tags: belkin, browser, copyright, http, port, router, software, spam, upgrade, web

Patents: One thing that gets pretty confusing when one investigates the whole patents/open-source/copyright protection field, is the nature of the term Intellectual Property.

What’s called ‘IP’ consists of three parts: copyright, patents, and trademarks. This extract from Harvard’s ‘Intellectual Property in Cyberspace’ series notes:

In the eighteenth century, lawyers and politicians were more likely to refer to patents and copyrights as ‘monopolies’ than they were to refer to them as forms of ‘property.’ … Thomas Jefferson was the most prominent adherent of this view, but many others shared his attitude to varying degrees. ….

Another, more general manifestation of the same trend has been the growing power of the phrase ‘intellectual property.’ Before the Second World War, use of the phrase as shorthand for copyrights, patents, trademarks, and related entitlements was rare. Since that time, it has become steadily more common. n105 Today, it is the standard way for lawyers and law teachers to refer to the field.

Why does the popularity of the term matter? The answer … is that legal discourse has power. Specifically, the use of the term ‘property’ to describe copyrights, patents, trademarks, etc. conveys the impression that they are fundamentally ‘like’ interests in land or tangible personal property — and should be protected with the same generous panoply of remedies. ….

Regrettably, the pleas by Cohen and a few others that judges jettison the concept of ‘property’ and frankly confront the public policy implications of protecting certain kinds of information fell largely on deaf ears. The ‘propertization’ of the field continued — and is now well-nigh complete.

It’s common to read commentary by outsiders — journalists especially – who conflate all three forms of ‘IP’, and therefore assuming that all three should be considered as ‘equal’ to physical property. In other words, they fall into this trap.

In reality, a trademark should have much more protection than a patent; copyright over ‘bits’ is not the same thing as physical ownership of atoms; the concept of the public domain is a whole lot different between ‘things’ and ‘bits’; there’s a difference.

To this end, this disclaimer from the UN World Summit on the Information Society is very significant; they’ve recognised these issues.

This working group has come to recognize that the term ‘intellectual property rights’ carries bias and encourages simplistic overgeneralization. Therefore this working group does not carry the name IPR. In particular, this group does not endorse the legal school of thought, which advocates that productions of the mind shall be treated in a similar way as real estate property. This legal doctrine implicitly backs the concept that copyrights should last for ever.

Nice work! (thanks to Russell McOrmond and Seth Johnson for noting it.)

Tags: copyright, field, intellectual, patents, phrase, power, property, protection, term, thing, use

(of the phone variety). I’ve been driven mad by telemarketers; one of the more irritating local innovations (thankfully ’sales cold calls’ are pretty hard to operate with European privacy laws, so it wasn’t a problem back home).

Well, Congress over here recently passed a ‘do not call’ list, so you could ring up the maintainers and ask for your number to be added, and hey presto, no more phone spam. Well, CalPundit writes:

The federal law doesn’t cover banks, airlines or phone companies or calls made within a state.

Wow. That’s like saying ‘the law doesn’t cover calls made on a day ending in ‘y’.’ In my experience, those companies make 95% of the calls. Great.

Think I’ll stick with the tried-and-trusted ‘ring through to answerphone during the afternoon and early evening’ filter…

DMCA: IP: Using treaties to lock in DMCA enforcement:

On May 6, President Bush and Prime Minister Goh of Singapore signed the U.S.-Singapore Free Trade Agreement (the ‘FTA’). President Bush has termed the FTA ‘the first of its kind’ – apparently meaning that it is the first free trade agreement between the United States and an Asian nation.

But the FTA is also the first of its kind in another sense, as well. It is the first international trade agreement to demand that the signatories implement anti-circumvention provisions similar to those of the hotly controversial Digital Millennium Copyright Act (’DMCA’).

It’s Naomi Klein meets Slashdot ;) Hopefully it’ll be blocked though, since it has serious domestic results too:

This step will have international, as well as domestic consequences: If Congress approves the FTA, it will not able to alter the DMCA without violating its obligations to Singapore.

Of course, according to some correspondents, Ireland’s copyright regime (reformed in 2000) quietly inserted its own DMCA provisions. Of course, nobody noticed, except for the legal lobbyists who were hoping this would happen. Doh. Is nowhere safe for freedom-to-tinker these days?

Tags: agreement, congress, copyright, course, dmca, fta, kind, law, phone, trade

Yahoo!: Deadline Passes for European Digital Copyright Law. ‘A deadline for adopting a new EU law on copyright protection has passed with just two member countries signing up, dealing a blow to media and software companies beset by unauthorized duplication of their works across the Internet.’ The two countries are Greece and Denmark, which is odd, considering I thought Ireland had do so too.

Other actors in the private sector, such as Internet service providers, have weighed in heavily on the issue, opposing laws that could ultimately hurt consumer rights.

Yay ISPs!

Tags: copyright, deadline, digital, european, internet, law, member, passes, protection, yahoo

If you’re wondering what happens to non-US-resident programmers when they run afoul of the US’s ludicrous copyright laws (namely the DMCA), take a look at Danny O’Brien’s blog entry from the Elcomsoft trial, covering Dmitry Sklyarov’s evidence.

Tags: afoul, blog, copyright, dmca, elcomsoft, entry, look, non, trial, us-resident