Nick "Gawker" Denton cuffs Battelle.
John "Federated Media" Battelle smacks Denton.
Bloggers sit back and watch. Rest of world ignores whole sad thing.
Tags: John Battelle, Nick Denton, slapfight
RIAA supremo Cary Sherman has a blood-boiling Op-Ed on CNET News right now called "The Farce Behind 'Digital Freedom.'"
Even I didn't think the RIAA was cynical enough to put ironic quotes around the word "freedom."
The target of Big Content's pitbull? The Consumer Electronics Association's CEO, Gary Shapiro. The CEA is one of many organizations (including the EFF) behind the Digital Freedom campaign, which was launched to check Big Content's desire to change copyright laws in the US in ways that restrict people's freedom to enjoy the stuff they buy in ways that are most convenient to them.
Remember how Jack Valenti (now there was a Big Content shill with some flair) claimed "the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone?" Well, the same thing seems to happen periodically in the world of digital content, and this is one of those flare-ups.
Like a trademark that becomes generic, the fair use doctrine is in danger of losing its meaning and value if CEA's self-serving claims are taken at face value. CEA has twisted and contorted "fair use" beyond its true intent, turning it into a free pass for those who simply don't want to pay for creative works.
The "Digital Freedom" proponents have consistently staked their case out of the mainstream. CEA president and CEO Gary Shapiro's comment that unauthorized downloading is neither "illegal nor immoral" is illustrative of the extremist position of that group, especially given the U.S. Supreme Court's opinion otherwise in its 2005 Grokster ruling.
Sherman's first nifty rhetorical trick is to try to redefine fair use so narrowly as to be inapplicable to you and I. In truth, there's no place we can turn to in the Copyright Act that actually defines fair use as explicitly or exclusively as Sherman implies. What he avoids saying is that the entire doctrine is grounded ensuring the neither the commons nor individuals are unduly restricted by expansive copyright monopoly that serves only authors and owners.
For example, the transitive and temporary incidental copies of data made during their transmission over digital networks (ie, stuff that's cached or buffered when you download or stream it over the internet) was deemed fair use by the Copyright Office. One of the bills Digital Freedom is trying to fight, the Copyright Modernization Act, would force digital, interactive broadcasters (an on-demand internet radio station, like Pandora) to obtain separate licenses for those incidental copies, in addition to the usual licenses their conventional radio counterparts have to get. The Digital Freedom campaign doesn't want to let these services operate without licenses, but merely to ensure they don't face twice the financial burden of more traditional broadcasters. Shapiro's not exactly advocating "a free pass for those who simply don't want to pay for creative works."
Another example of the legislation Digital Freedom's trying to stop? The Audio Broadcast Flag Licensing Act (or NAMBLA), whose most odious provision explicitly stuffs fair use in a time capsule by allowing product designers and manufacturers (and users) the right only to "customary use." In other words, whatever Big Content has been forced to allow you to do in the past (like record to tape), they'll continue to permit, but no new stuff! In one fell swoop, fair use is no longer a balanced test applied to new situations as required, but a backward-looking, dead thing. It also means that innovation, any new, unforseen uses, are de facto infringing. Fighting this legislation is what it takes to be "out of the mainstream," in Sherman's view.
Not that you'll see Sherman tackle these, or any other substantive arguments, head-on in his op-ed piece. Then again, what do you expect from an industry whose companies feel justified in shaking down individual consumers, the technology industry, and treating their customers like criminals? Billboard magazine had this choice quote from one of the guys who pays Cary Sherman's salary:
"These devices are just repositories for stolen music, and they all know it," UMG chairman/CEO Doug Morris says. "So it's time to get paid for it."
It's true that what we have here is one well-paid lawyer and lobbyist slinging mud at yet another well-paid lawyer lobbyist, each representing huge corporations who, while professing an undyling love for the market, would just as soon have the government legislate their enemies into oblivion in order to guarantee their incomes. No matter who wins, I have a sneaking suspicion we lose. Even so, we have to pick a bastard in this fight, and I'm choosing the one whose client didn't just call me a crook.
Tags: Digital Freedom, RIAA, CEA, fair use, copyright, Audio Broadcast Flag Licensing Act, Copyright Modernization Act
Categories
Sun Starts Licensing Java Under GPL
I don't imagine for a moment that I'm alone this morning in trying to figure out the implications of Sun's decision to license and distribute their implementation of Java (SE, EE, and ME) under the Gnu General Public License (version 2).
Practically, it means that the code that makes up the various editions of the Java platform will be free (as in speech). I say "will be;" every line of every module must be vetted or incompatible copyrights, and those issues will have to be resolved before the code itself can be released under the GPL. Where the issues can't be resolved, Sun will release the modules as binary plug-ins. Sun expects the process to be done in 2007.
My initial reaction is that Sun is trying to get rid of any barrier to adoption on the part of the Linux vendors. By employing the GPL, Sun's essentially saying that there's no reason for Linux to ship without a Java implementation. Of all of the reasons Sun cites for going with the GPL, I think this is the most significant: Linux distros will be able to qualify and ship with the appropriate Java implementation as a default, thus broadening the footprint of the Java platform for developers.
Java, after all, is fighting a pitched battle to be the platform for the web. It's competitors are .NET (and there's no real hope of increasing Java's footprint on Microsoft's server operating systems) and the ever-mutable LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and Perl/PHP+various substitutes) stack. One look at O'Reilly's latest state of the computer book market tells you what you need to know about the rise of LAMP and the decline of Java when it comes to releasing web-architected applications. By (hopefully) shipping side-by-side with LAMP (and Mono, for that matter), Sun probably hopes to slow the defections and bring more developers back into the Java world.
The flip side of this, of course, is the health of Java itself. It's clearly an incredibly capable platform, but it would seem that to truly take advantage of the dynamics of the open source movement, you need to play nice with the GPL. The GPL is predominant among SourceForge's most active projects, so Sun has taken to heart the idea that developer community only forms around the license that afford the most transparency, reciprocity, and protection (as well as the broadest possible target platform).
In the end, I suppose I agree with Tim Bray, the really big, long-term effects of this decision aren't easy to predict. After all, Java now "behaves" like Linux; one of the Java implementations could be forked to go into some very un-traditional directions, and who knows what kind of markets that might open up? As with Linux, anyone can build a support and maintenance business around a GPLed Java. Sun, no doubt, is betting that they can fit that bill better than anyone, but that's still up to the customer.
I suppose it's safe to say that a lot of interesting stuff will be happening here.
Tags: Sun, Java, FSF, FOSS, GPL, open source, free software
Drew "Rocketboom" Baron has backed out of a Microsoft Zune launch partnership. He hints at a couple of reasons (including some cryptic stuff about Microsoft's behavior towards him in the past), but the main complaint is that Microsoft put some non-disparagement restrictions around use of their Zune logo on the Rocketboom site in conjunction with the launch.
Naturally, this hits Scoble, etc, etc, and ripples through the blogosphere. Carl "Blackfriars" Howe's post, for example, says:
Come on, guys. An End User Licensing Agreement for a logo? I thought Microsoft wanted publicity for Zune.
Props to Drew for recognizing an attempt to gag bad reviews in advance. Those efforts always backfire, and this one appears to be proving that rule. And given that Engadget's latest screenshot of Zune installation errors are reinforcing Microsoft's reputation for buggy software, Drew seems to have been appropriately leary of being able to say only good things about the Zune experience.
I don't know whether Baron (or, for that matter, Blackfriars) is being fair. I'm sure every company has standard, boilerplate langauge stating that their trademarks can't be used to "disparage" the company. But, fair or not, it's teh social.
Tags: social, Zune, Microsoft, Rocketboom, logo
A quick widget note. Ajaxian says the W3C wants to stop the widget madness and put some standards around the whole space:
Arve Bersvendsen of Opera let us know about the new working draft from the W3C: Widgets 1.0.
Everyone and their mother have created their own widget specifications, and now as a developer you need to make choices. Do you want it to work on Dashboard? Google? MSN? Yahoo!?
If the big hitters supported this widget standard then we could write once, widget everywhere. Kinda :)
Maybe someday writing widgets will be as easy as creating web sites!
Categories
Did Disney Out the Wireless iPod?
AppleInsider (a daily visit for me) seems to have gotten a bit ahead of itself with this article suggesting that a Disney patent filing heralds a wireless iPod from Apple:
Built-in wireless connectivity is an inevitable feature in the evolution of Apple Computer's iPod digital media players, and it appears that Walt Disney Co. could be ready and waiting to deliver some of its live ESPN content when the first wireless models arrive.
In a patent filing made last Nov. and published by the United States Patent and Trademark Office on Thursday, the entertainment conglomerate detailed plans for a ESPN-branded cell phone user interface that allows users to wirelessly receive ESPN video content, scores and other sports-related information in realtime.
However, it notes that the systems and methods described in the filing, titled "Graphical user interface for electronic devices," may also be used with electronic devices configured using a different hardware makeup.
"For example," the company wrote, "systems and methods of the present disclosure may be applied to other mobile electronic devices, such as PDAs, pagers, etc., and to other handheld electronic devices, such as, e.g., the iPod digital music player (available from Apple Computer, Inc.)."
Whoa there, Trigger! Not so fast. The way I read the filing, it specifically groups the "different hardware" devices upon which this wireless widget could operate into two types: "mobile," and "handheld." What's the difference? Take a look at the examples.
The mobile category includes pagers and PDAs. Now, who knows what they mean by "PDAs" but pagers are definitely mobile devices connected to a network. They clearly distinguish this class of devices from merely handheld things, like the iPod. An iPod is only mobile in the sense that you can put it in your pocket, but it's tethered to a computer in order to be useful.
Now, do I think we'll see iPods with wireless capabilities? Probably. [Do I ask myself questions and answer them? Yes.] I haven't got any insight into whether that means an iPhone, or Wi-Fi and/or Bluetooth for iPods, or both, but this filing doesn't look like evidence of anything. So, smoke perhaps, but no fire here.
I've been thinking about this story over the morning and, no matter how I look at it, it seems like a pretty bad idea. A New Scientist article has a laywer/professor calling for ISPs to be liable for distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks emanating from their networks:
Internet service providers (ISPs) should be made legally liable for the damage caused by "denial of service" (DoS) attacks carried out via their networks, a leading internet lawyer says.
At a conference called Blocking Denial of Service Attacks on the Internet, to be held in London on 13 November, Lilian Edwards, an internet lawyer based at the University of Southampton, UK, will argue that legal measures must be taken if these attacks are to be stemmed. Edwards notes that ISPs currently have no legal obligation to check data relayed to and from internet users. She thinks, however, that governments could require them to do so.
Where to begin? Let's start with the fact that once you accept a government mandate that ISPs are somehow responsible for some harmful traffic (DDoS packets), what's to stop ISPs from being held responsible for all harmful traffic, such as the transmission of (wait for it…wait for it…) child pornography (that's right, I'm doing this for the kids)? Furthermore, the definition of "harmful" is important. I think traffic on peer-to-peer network protocols should be treated by default as benign, but I'm sure Big Content would think otherwise. How about "hate literature," or propaganda from the terrorist enemy of the day? You see where I'm going with this: the ISP marketplace can only function if the job (as defined by the government) is that of a neutral carrier of traffic, shuffling every packet with equal disinterest.
Moreover, the marketplace is actually fielding the kind of services Ms Edwards describes. Both AT&T and Verizon, to cite just two examples, tout security in their backbones, including the ability to detect and defuse DDoS attacks before they hit their customers' network gateways. DDoS attacks are, ultimately, an economic problem—they degrade network performance, and can halt online business—and the victims can and should treat it as a business risk to be mitigated through technological means. There are plenty of ways for them to do so without the government mandating that ISPs carry the bag.
It's a curious choice of target for the involuntary assigment of liability and risk transfer. Surely the ISPs of the world aren't the most responsible party in a DDoS attack? What of the companies who provide vulnerable operating systems? The customers who misuse, misconfigure, or undermaintain those systems, making them ideal zombie targets? ISVs whose software defects render systems vulnerable? And, of course, we have the criminals conspiring to commit these crimes themselves. There's enough blame to go around that it seems strange to focus the blunt instrument of government regulation on ISPs in particular.
Tags: DDoS, ISP, liability, regulation, security