I'm written before about how Copperfield is now an egomaniacal blowhard. He's just phoning it in. But I now know that he's a copyright bully. Check out this fine YouTube video...

Oops, it's gone, because Copperfield claims copyright on it. Okay, maybe they just copied his video. Maybe there is a copyright claim and these are just scum. Except, you can still find the video...

If that doesn't work go here.

Not a single frame of video from the original trick. Copperfield has no copyright claim. This scum abused copyright to keep the secret of his trick. Sorry David, suck it up. Tricks get revealed. It must be doubly embarrassing because these are magicians, nor did they get the information from a leak. No, they just studied the trick and deduced what must have happened. But Copperfield has lawyers. He's apparently scared the Trickbusters into removing all references to his tricks. (If you search online, you can find their analysis of several of his tricks.)

David Copperfield is scum.

Fortunately I don't recommend his shows anyway. Mac King is more fun and cheaper. And I'm optimistic about Spencers: Theatre of Illusion, who Eva and I will be seeing tomorrow.

The Author's Guild is eager to help drag us all back into the 20th century.

The Guild previously made a big stink about Google's Book search, going so far as to sue. Google's crime: making it easier for people to find books! Google Books search system was quite well thought out. For most books you would only get a little snippit from the book, akin to the snippit you get from a web page search. But the Author's Guild, horrified that someone might see even a few sentences from a book without paying couldn't stand that. The Author's Guild apparently felt that books were worthy of protections beyond what web pages are. Seeing as how the entire point of the search system was to make it easier to find books, this was a profoundly stupid and backward thinking decision. Google eventually settled; and while the settlement is good for Google (they basically got everything they wanted in exchange for what Google would view as very modest fee), it's bad for society as a whole. Any small startup is unable to offer a competing service, since they'll be expected to pay the same "modest fee." While$150,000,000 or so is a modest fee fee Google, it's crushing to anyone else.

Now these Luddites have gutted the Kindle's TTS (Text-To-Speech) feature. For all of the Guild's claims, fundamentally TTS is simply converting media from one form to another. If TTS without a special agreement is illegal, so is copying your CD to tape, or ripping it to iTunes.

Yes, in the long run TTS will likely gut the audiobook market. Life's tough; suck it up. A few decades ago there wasn't an audiobook market at all! The market primarily exists because the technology didn't exist, and when it arrived the technology sucked. (It still sucks, but it continues to improve.) So there was a market to solve a problem technology couldn't. Now that technology has improved, demanding that technology be held back so you can maintain your existing business model is selfish and shortsighted. You might as well demand that scanner makers add complexity and cost to refuse to scan books, since it might compete with the eBook market.

I was suspicious of the Author's Guild before. Now I'm convinced. At best they're Luddites demanding that society as a whole suffer because they're afraid of the future. At worst they're scum abusing the legal system. Either way, they are worthy only of contempt. Instead of leading into the future, discovering new business models, they're doing a gross disservice to the authors they purport to represent.

While Disney is running around stretching copyright so that Micky Mouse will never enter the public domain, Disney is perfectly willing to engage in legal trickery to destroy someone else's copyright.

Take the saga of Bambi, by Austrian Felix Salten. The story of the fawn was first published in Germany in 1923 without a formal copyright notice, which wasn't required there. Three years later, Salten republished it with a notice.

In the 1930s, Salten's rights were assigned to Disney, which made the famous 1942 movie. When Salten's heirs renewed the copyright in 1954, they correctly listed 1926 as the year of Bambi's first copyright.

But in a 1994 dispute over royalties with a small publisher that had acquired the Salten family's rights, Disney lawyers said the 1954 copyright was void because it was filed three years too late -- based on the fact that the story was first published in 1923. A federal judge sided with Disney, ruling Bambi was in the public domain.

Though that finding was reversed on appeal, the legal ordeal bankrupted the publisher.

Scum. I hope they lose the copyright to Mickey because of a similar minor detail. They've clearly established that they feel the law should be applied that way.

I hate copyright abusers. For some reason the Jericho Historical Society (backup link) annoys the heck out of me. Their copyright claims are simply, absolutely, and completely wrong. These idiots claim:

Copyright/Public domain works

Wilson Bentley did not copyright his photographs and thus they are in the public domain and free to use for any purpose.
HOWEVER
No materials or images from this (or any other) website may be resold in any form (print or electronic). The Public Domain status does not give you the right to resell material unless you have access to the original source and permission from the owner to reproduce the material. Any published works of Public Domain material is only "Royalty free" if explicitly stated.

Bentley's works are in the public domain. Great. That means I can make all the copies I want, including for sale. Period. I can take their images off their web site and immediately resell them to anyone foolish enough to offer me some money. The JHS has no claim to stop me. "Unless you have access to the original source" is complete nonsense. There is no basis in law for this claim. Simply scanning the photographs and putting them online, even with a bit of cleanup, fails to meet the creative standards necessary to make a new claim of copyright. Public domain is the public domain; I can make and sell all the copies I want. By their insane claims only owner of the original folios can reprint Shakespeare's works.

Twits.

(To be clear, the logos, text, and any other original work they did is under copyright, and excepting fair use, copies are not allowed under copyright law.)

DRM means the things you paid for can be taken away from you. As previously covered, Microsoft did it, Google did it, and Circuit City did it.

Now Major League Baseball did it. Hundreds of dollars of purchased videos? Suddenly useless.

"Buy" DRM locked content at your own risk.

(Update 2008-05-22: Fixed link to Major League Baseball screw job.)

Some pro-DRM people figure that all of the worries are just whiners. After all, if they "buy" lifetme access to a video from a big company, say, Google, there is no realistic risk that they'll lose access to the thing they bought. Except when Google decided to shut down the program. Sure, you'll get a refund but you didn't want a refund, you wanted the product you thought you bought. Furthermore, it's not a real refund, instead you're getting credit on Google's online payment system. Like Divx (the DVD competitor, not the video compression format), people had only "bought" lifetime access to sometime suddenly discover that lifetime actually means "until the provider decides to stop supporting it."

DRM and closed standards put you at the mercy of your provider. Google screwed their customers. Microsoft screwed their customers.

Rick Cotton, general counsel of NBC/Universal and CEO of the Coalition Against Counterfeiting and Piracy, has this to say about crime:

Our law enforcement resources are seriously misaligned. If you add up all the various kinds of property crimes in this country, everything from theft, to fraud, to burglary, bank-robbing, all of it, it costs the country $16 billion a year. But intellectual property crime runs to hundreds of billions a year.

Let's be perfectly clear. The copyright lobby (to generalize) is saying that police should spend less time investigating fraud (like identity fraud, commonly known as identity theft), theft, and burglary. These are crimes in which victims lose property that typically is not recovered. These are crimes that make victims feel vulnerable. For theft, victims must spend large amounts of time filing insurance claims, reacquiring new versions of stolen things. Some stolen objects, like family heirlooms, cannot ever be replaced. In the case of identity fraud the victim will spend the rest of their lives fighting unearned bad credit. Most of these crimes are never solved.

But that's okay, according to Cotton. He's more worried about intellectual property infringement, crimes which don't take any money or good away from the victim. For many cases copyright infringement (perhaps the most common type of intellectual property crime), the victim hasn't even lost potential profits because the criminal would not have paid in the absence of the illegal option.

As for "hundreds of billions," it's not terribly plausible. The most pro-copyright analysis that assumes that every single infringing copy is worth as much as an original might generate a value in the area of $50 billion. If you are more realistic, discounting the claims to account for people who make infringing copies, but don't use them (strange, but true), discount the illegal copying of works which are unavailable and unlikely to become available, discount the people who would not or could not purchase a legal copy, you'll end up with a much smaller number.

I'm for copyright and against copyright infringement. But this is just another example of how extreme and dangerous the main copyright lobbies are. They overtly want to protect themselves at the expense of the rest of society. They're willing to lie and misrepresent to do so. It's sickening.

This is, of course, no surprise from the people who try to change laws so they can cheat songwriters, commit fraud, and generally get government handouts.

(Via Slashdot.)

Peter Gutmann has does an excellent overview of what Content Protection in Windows Vista means for you. In short: Nothing good, lots of bad. Thanks to Content Protection your next computer (assuming you buy a Windows box) will cost more, be less reliable, and less capable.

My favorite: a Doctor looking at a digital X-Ray or similar scan of you might innocently put a CD into his computer for a little background music. In doing so his computer might, with no notice to the Doctor, degrade the quality of the image he's looking at, potentially causing him to overlook a problem, or erroneously see a problem not really present.

DRM means Defective By Design. A popular slogan notes "DRM 'manages access' in the same way a prison 'manages freedom.'"

Mechanical royalties are a weird special case where you can essentially record any song you like. You don't need the songwriter's permission, you don't need to negotiate a fee to do so. You can just pay a price set by Congress.

Now that RIAA is asking that these mechanical royalties be lowered. The RIAA is asking for the law to change so they can pay songwriter's less. Assuming the RIAA members are on good terms with the songwriters this is unnecessary; it's standard practice to arrange a better rate through negotiations. Apparently these negotiations are too much work and the RIAA wants the government to dictate a maximum rate price songwriters can charge for their music.

Keep that in mind when the RIAA whines about needing more powerful copyright or no more music will be created. They are lying. It if was true, why are try trying to reduce copyright's power for the people who actually write the music? This isn't about music, this is about simple greed: the RIAA wants more copyright when it makes them money, but they'd prefer less if it costs them money.

Mechanical copyright is actually a good idea; it means that a songwriter can't "horde" his music. However, the mechanical rates should be carefully set relatively high to encourage people to negotiate with the songwriter. This is outright asking the government for a handout of someone else's work. The RIAA acts in bad faith and cannot be trusted.

Paul McCartney and a bunch of other musicians are begging the UK government for a handout. They want copyright on works they recorded almost 50 years ago to be extended. This is nothing more than greedy whining. Copyright is a two-way agreement, a temporary government granted monopoly as incentive to create new creative works. Apparently McCartney felt the agreement was acceptable in 1960s. By releasing his music then, he agreed: 50 years of copyright in the UK, no more. Now 50 years later he wants to renegotiate the agreement. He wants the UK to offer him 45 more years of a government granted monopoly. In exchange he promises to do absolutely nothing. Those artists seeking retroactive copyright extensions are nothing more than whiners who want to renege on agreements they've already made. In exchange for getting more they offer nothing.

(Bonus fun: Apparently artists are so in favor of copyright extensions that some rose from the grave to give their support.)

(Via Lawrence Lessig, who also has an excellent summary of why extending copyright is a idea in the Financial Times.)

(2009-03-02: Changed "rose from the grave" link to an archived location. It was broken.)

Some less ethical companies which rely on copyright law have been trying to gradually convince the public that copyright is much more invasive than it really is. By doing this, when they ask for unreasonable extensions to copyright people erroneously think these powers already existed, and are willing to grant these unreasonable extensions.

Via Boing Boing, just two good examples of people grossly misapplying copyright law.

1. A busker trying to preserve his business model. I'm sympathetic to his plight, but his claim that copyright somehow protects his business is at best gross ignorance of copyright and at worst outright deception.

2. A tour guide at Monticello (Thomas Jefferson's home) claiming that a copy of the Declaration of Independence is somehow protected by copyright. In this case it seems a case of ignorance; but in spreading ignorance she is removing a freedom people really do have: to reproduce historical records.

(Via Eva.)

It's called "pretexting," but that's just a euphemism. It's got a much more plain name: fraud. Pretexting is the act of pretending to be someone else, typically to gain access to information private to that someone else. A private investigator snooping on you might call your phone company, pretend to be you, complain about not getting bills or fishy charges, and get copies of all of your phone records. I appreciate the cleverness of this social hack, but it is fraud. Indeed, this is also known by the less accurate but popular name of "identity theft."

If this doesn't sound bad, realize this is exactly what the corporation Hewlett-Packard did. They used pretexting to snoop on their board of directors. Even worse, they snooped on private journalists!

Unfortunately not all pretexting is illegal. So California tried to pass a specific law against it, to protect you from people who might want to snoop into your private life by impersonating you. This perfectly rational law that seems obvious passed California's Senate unanimously. Then someone killed it. The Motion Picture Association of America.

Keep that in mind whenever the MPAA whines about copyright infringement as though it's the end of the world. The MPAA wants the right to impersonate you, to engage in so called "identity theft." Is this really the behavior of an industry who cares about ethics and legality? Just to make it a little easier to catch copyright infringers, they want to trample your privacy and harm the ability of journalists to collect evidence of crimes via whistleblowers.

(The RIAA is no better; several years ago they sought permission to engage in online vigilantism, potentially hurting the internet connections of innocent people.)

(MPAA news via Schneier on Security. Old RIAA reference via Pete Keller.)

While their FAQ page does have a lot of useful and correct information on copyright, there are two FAQs that are completely wrong. First:

The purchase of counterfeit designs and software is a violation of federal laws. Specifically, the U.S. Copyright Act. 17 USC 501

Flat out lie. (Or, if you're feeling generous, their legal advisor is grossly incompetant.) Check out the legal code itself. Not much to see there. Ultimately the crime is making the copy and selling or otherwise distributing it, not purchasing it, especially if you don't realize what you're purchasing was illegally copied. By that reasoning you could buy something from a flea market, only to get sued later because you didn't realize it was stolen property. There is a reason the RIAA only sues people for sharing music, not downloading it.

How about this gem?

What if I am innocent and did not know the designs or software were counterfeit when I purchased the designs?

It is your responsibility to investigate any designs or software that you purchased over the Internet or from online auctions. You must take steps to insure that they are legitimate original embroidery designs or software, not pirated copies.

They're seriusly claiming that whenever you purchase something protected by copyright, be it a movie on DVD, a video game, a book, a newpaper, software, or embroidery designs, the burden is on you to ensure that it's a legal copy. Wrong! The law is not designed to turn consumers into police. It's not even practical. How do check that something you bought online is legit? Look really close at the picture on the web site? I think not. Yeah, if something looks sketchy, you should probably avoid it, but demanding that people turn into police is bogus.

We cannot let these falsehoods stand. Corporations are all too eager to convince the public that copyright is nearly infinitely powerful. As they convince people that copyright is more and more powerful, they convince Congress to pass laws to match that perception. We've lost too many rights in the last 10 years. Copyright was extended to ensure Disney can make more money. You can legally use a short clip of a movie in a review, but you're forbidden from getting technology that will let you pull that clip from a DVD. The next generation TVs will have additional hardware that costs more money, but is designed to make your television harder to use. Now making a bad judgement in who to trust can cost you $300, or you face a powerful corporation suing you for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Complete bullshit. The copyright expansion needs to stop here.

God forbid you shoot some scenes for your documentary in Chicago's Millenium Park.

Is your computer security company working for you, or some Sony? Sony released music CDs with malicious software on them. The software tried to stop you from, say, importing your CDs into iTunes. Because you probably don't want software that makes your computer less functional, they tried to hide it. Software that hides itself and other programs is called a "rootkit." It's a common enough technology... in the illegal hacking community. So Sony installs a rootkit. Oops, turns out that viruses and other malware can use the rootkit to hide themselves from you. Oops, turns out the rootkit makes your machine slower. Oops, turns out the rootkit makes your machine crash more often.

So this is clearly bad software. Malware, as it is known. The sort of software you pay McAfee or Symantec to defend you front with tools like virus-scanners. Surely that software will find the program, warn you of it, and fix it?

Well, maybe not. They eventually marked the software as malware, but only after a long delay. Neither removes the functionality that cripples iTunes.

You paid Sony for thier music. Sony used the opportunity to install malware on your computer. You paid McAfee or Symantec to defend you against malware. They decided to side with Sony.

This is the future with "Digital Rights Management". Large corporations will conspire to make your computer (and your DVD player, and your CD player) less useful. When you're told that DRM won't interfere with your use of things you purchase, the speaker is either lying or clueless.

When media companies insist that "Digital Rights Management" won't impact end consumers, what they really mean is, "We're liars who will gladly cripple your computer and innocent usage in our quest for more money."

Some background. Mark Russinovich is a well respected Windows researcher. He has a knowledge of Microsoft Windows internals rivelled only by the Windows team itself (And I suspect he knows more than many of them). He and his partner Bryce Cogswell produce lots of useful software over at Sysinternals. Their tools (like regmon which logs all registry access or filemon which logs all access to the filesystem) are invaluable for anyone doing serious Windows development or administration.

One of Mark's tool is RootkitRevealer. It's software designed to detect various forms of hostile software. In particular, it tries to find software that hides from you. To be clear about this, there is no valid reason for software to hide from you, the user. The only software that does this regularly is malicious software like virus and spyware. After all, if the software is something good, why would it hide? This is your computer and you should control what is running on it.

Imagine his surprise to discover that he had some malicious software on his system. Software that was modifying his operating system. This wil almost certainly make the operating system less stable and more likely to crash. The software also made his computer slower. And who was responsible for his computer crashing more often and being slower?

Sony.

Mark had played a music CD on his new computer. That CD installed software he didn't want. The software knew he wouldn't want it, so it actively tried to hide. The software's purpose? It's Digital Rights Management software.

This is why DRM is bad. Sony decided that Mark was probably a criminal and tried to put shackled on Mark's computer. Mark's crime? He bought a music CD and tried to play it. That's whay DRM means for the consumer. "No impact for the consumer" means your computer will crash more often. You computer will be slower. Your computer will tell lies to you about what is installed and running. Sony and other media companies are lowering themselves to the level of virus writers and spyware manufacturers.

Mark Russinovich's original post on his blog.

(Mind you, not all Randians agree with the ARI's claims.)

I can only conclude that PC Magazine keeps John Dvorak around because posting badly-researched, inflammatory, and downright false opinion articles draws lots of traffic and traffic means advertising sales.

Recently John "I have no idea what I'm talking about" Dvorak pretty much said that he doesn't understand Creative Commons, therefore it's worthless. Congrats on the brilliant insight John! Indeed, I don't really understand automotive engineering, so clearly it's worthless. I definately don't understand John Dvorak.

Okay, John, here's the deal. It's Creative Commons. Right there on their web site it says, "Creative Commons offers a flexible range of protections and freedoms for authors and artists. We have built upon the 'all rights reserved' of traditional copyright to create a voluntary "some rights reserved" copyright."

If Creative Commons' summary is too complex, how about this: You create something protected by copyright (a photo, an illustration, a song, an article, a movie, whatever). You decide you want to let other people reuse your creation, but you don't want to just dump it into the public domain. Say, "I want more people to hear my music! So you can share my song, but you can't modify it, and you can't charge other people for it." In essence, you want to grant other people a license to use your work in a way that copyright doesn't normally allow, but you want something more restrictive than public domain. The correct solution is to write a short license explaining the rights. There are two big problems: 1. If everyone is writing their own licenses, it's hard for third parties to find available work. 2. Also, writing your own license takes time and effort; it's basically lawyer work. Creative Commons solves both problems: 1. Because there are a small set of standard licenses, you can search for licenses that match your needs. ("I'm looking for free music to use in my non-commercial documentary") 2. The licenses have been written and checked by lawyers, so you're getting a license better than one you'd likely craft yourself.

Indeed, Dvorak only has two semi-reasonable gripes. One, that Creative Commons didn't get back to him. Okay, so Creative Commons might have crappy PR. It's a shame, but hardly a fatal flaw. Hell, the GPL managed to survive having Richard Stallman being it's front man for decades. (Indeed, I suspect that Dvorak didn't get a response because the Creative Commons is almost entirely Professor Lawrence Lessig and he is on vacation. Not knowing that is understandable and indeed given the importance of the Creative Commons if this is the problem Lessig should have had someone cover his email for the month.) Two, people are "erroneously" putting things in the public domain by saying "Creative Commons license: Public Domain". Quick clue Dovark: it's not about needing to go through the Creative Commons to put something into the public domain, it's about advertising for a cause you believe in. Maybe it's a stupid way to do so, but it's harmless.

Ultimately Creative Commons offers some free tools to try and make releasing some, but not all, of one's copyright-based rights easy. I fail to see how it's "one of the dumbest initiatives ever put forth by the tech community". You revealed someone as being dumb, John, but it wasn't Lessig and the Creative Commons folks.