- In "The
Tyranny of Copyright?" the New York Times Magazine describes an
increasingly less quiet debate over where copyright law is taking us - down
the road of greater protection for artists and a "permission culture" for
consumers, the way of ever decreasing freedom to experiment and create toward
"a system of micropayments in return for which the [leasing rather than
ownership] rights to ever smaller pieces of our culture are doled out."
On one side is the "Copy Left," a broad group
of lawyers, scholars, and activists "who are not wild-eyed radicals opposed
to the use of copyright," writes Robert Boynton of New York University,
"though they do object fiercely to the way copyright has been distorted
by recent legislation and manipulated by companies...." Two examples Boynton
gives: forcing the Girl Scouts to pay royalties for singing songs around
campfires and "the infringement suit brought by the estate of Margaret
Mitchell against the publishers of Alice Randall's book 'The Wind Done
Gone' (which tells the story of Mitchell's 'Gone With the Wind' from a
slave's perspective)."
On the other side are proponents of the "permission
society" - "those who sympathize with the romantic notion of authorship
and view the culture as a market in which everything of value should be
owned by someone or other." Stanford law Prof. Paul Goldstein "characterizes
the permission society as a 'celestial jukebox' in which access to every
creation - music, literature, movies, art - is available to anyone for
a price."
What does the Net have to do with it? "One of
the central ideas of the Copy Left is that the Internet has been a catalyst
for re-engaging with the culture" - we're no longer couch potatoes, we're
interacting with our media. And that, the Copy Left says, is what
we do naturally. One Copy Leftist, Yale law Prof. Yochai Benkler, puts
numbers to it, comparing the $12 billion/year recording industry business
(what people pay to consume music) to the $250 billion/year telephone
business (what people pay to interact, participate, socialize). He says
economists call it "revealed willingness to pay," evidence of a great
deal of demand for interacting with others. (We could extrapolate, then,
that file- sharing is the missing, interactive, piece of the music business
equation that the RIAA is trying to stop or make pay.)
The Internet - with the instant cut 'n' paste
copying and free file-sharing it affords - sparks enormous questions and
fears, and spotlights the significant impact that tiny changes in copyright
law can have on the future. An example in the past: "Before the 1909 Copyright
Act, copyright was construed as the exclusive right to 'publish' a creation;
but the 1909 law changed the wording to prohibit others from 'copying'
one's creation - a seemingly minor change that thereafter linked copyright
protection to the copying technology of the day, whether that was the
pen, the photocopy machine, the VCR or the Internet." Copyright experts
are concerned about what Net-inspired litigation, fears, and laws will
do to future creativity and experimentation, and they want us to be aware
of what's happening for the sake of future generations.
- In "Big Music's Worst Move Yet," Business Week focuses on the "new reality"
the RIAA has helped create. "The culture of fear and loathing that the RIAA
has created is starting to put encryption on the must-have list of every
Joe and Jane Internet user." For example, tune-swappers are migrating to
encrypted file-sharing networks such as Blubster.com and BitTorrent
(that mask the digital fingerprints of file-sharers on the files they share).
See if kids at your house or classroom have made that move or started thinking
about it.
By fueling this technological shift, Business
Week says, the RIAA is only hurting itself, making it "nearly impossible
to pursue file-swappers in the future." The bottom line, though, is that
the Internet gets less and less public and accessible; echoing arguments
in the copyright law community, this is another window on what's happening
to the public domain these days. "In the end," according to Business Week,
"large chunks of computing and the Internet will go behind a much stronger
curtain of anonymity, and the pirates will remain untouchable underground
- thanks to the RIAA's misguided legal missiles."
- File-sharing shades of gray. Adding an unexpected
voice to the file-sharing discussion this week, a top recording industry
executive surprised his colleagues and everybody else by echoing the views
of many teenagers: Some music file-sharing and copying is ok, said
Andy Taylor, chairman of London-based Sanctuary Group. "Mr. Taylor said
that some file swapping ... had helped to expand the recording industry
by allowing consumers to 'investigate' music before they bought it," the
Times
of London reports.
Taylor called this sampling and sharing-among-friends
approach "completely different" from those of people who "have no intention
ever of spending money on music" or who "are making a business out of
it." The Times adds that Taylor's position contrasts strikingly with the
zero-tolerance one of the International Federation of the Phonographic
Industry (IFPI) and promises to make waves throughout the recording industry.
But Taylor seems to have a better handle than most record company executives
on what teenagers like about file-sharing, that it's a convenient way
of communicating who they are and placing themselves in a social scene
(kind of like trading albums or CDs when we were kids). Plus, Taylor told
the Times, teens "don't have the money, so they will only spend what money
they have on something they really, really care about." (See ast
week's issue for one teenager's perspective on file-sharing, and 1/16
for a dad's-eye-view.)
Pepsi and the American public seem to agree. This
week the Harris
polling organization announced that 75% of "Americans think downloading
music for personal use is an innocent act," though "downloading and then
selling the music is piracy and should be prohibited." And Pepsi is featuring
some 20 teenagers sued by the RIAA in a Super Bowl TV ad on February 1.
The ad "kicks off a two-month offer of up to 100 million free — and legal
— downloads from Apple's iTunes," USA
Today reports.
- This week's nightmarish worm
It's known as "MyDoom" and "Norvag" and is being
called the fastest-spreading email outbreak ever. Interestingly, it's
not actually targeting you and me, it's using us for a denial-of-service
attack targeting a (to the public) little- known company in Utah that
has been suing companies marketing the Linux operating system, CNET
reports. The viruslike program called a worm installs "a file that
will instruct infected computers to attack the SCO Group's Web server
with a flood of data on Feb. 1." Typical of new-style worms and viruses
that use rather than damage host PCs they infect, it allows infected computers
in homes and corporations to be controlled remotely. This week we all
were the "collateral damage" in Linux supporters' war against SCO Group.
As CNET explains, "the SCO Group has incurred the wrath of the Linux community
for its claims that important pieces of the open-source operating system
are covered by SCO's Unix copyrights. IBM, Novell and other Linux backers
strongly dispute the claims."
File-sharers were just as vulnerable as email
users - the worm's writers also tried to spread it through the Kazaa file-sharing
network, the Associated Press reported. Here's additional coverage Wednesday at the
New
York Times and Thursday at The
Register.
- Virus alerts from Uncle Sam
The US Department of Homeland Security this week
unveiled the National Cyber Alert System
"a new, centralized system for alerting the country to threats to computer
systems, from business and government networks to consumers' home machines,"
the Washington
Post reports. Modeled on the National Weather Service, it will serve
as a clearinghouse and provide news on PC vulnerabilities as well as tips
on what to do about them. People can sign up for regular e-newsletters
right on the US-CERT.gov home page. A later
Post piece said the service was quickly put to the test when a "more
dangerous" variant, MyDoom.B, targeting Microsoft, was detected mid-week
(the added
"danger" was from the worm's ability to block anti-virus updates
on infected PCs). And The
Register quotes one US senator as saying the service just represents
a challenge for virus writers and scammers who will try to mimic its email
warnings.
- US's new porn spam rule
The Federal Trade Commission announced this week
that, by next June, pornographic junk email will have to be clearly labeled
"SEXUALLY-EXPLICIT-CONTENT:" in the subject field, the Houston
Chronicle reports. The announcement marked the beginning of the required
three-week public comment period for this new rule under the CAN-SPAM
Act of 2003. Under the rule, pornographers will not be allowed to include
sexually explicit pictures in the body of the message, but they will be
allowed to include links to their Web sites. They will also be required
to include their postal addresses and an easy way to opt out of future
electronic mailings. "The ... 'SEXUALLY-EXPLICIT-CONTENT:' label, while
ungrammatical, will make it easier to block explicit content while letting
through messages from anti-pornography groups or others who may use the
phrase, the FTC said in its notice," according to the Chronicle, which
added that the FTC is interested in hearing during the public-comment
period if these requirements will "encounter any technical hurdles."
As for compliance with the new law, not surprisingly,
19 out of 20 spammers are ignoring the CAN-SPAM Act completely, Wired
News reports (from some research done by UK-based SurfControl).
- File-sharing companies: 'Can't block porn'
Contrary to what many people believe, a group
of file-sharing companies told the US Congress that they do not have the
ability to block porn or copyrighted material on their networks, CNET reports. In a letter, the group - P2P United, made up of
Blubster, Bearshare, Grokster, eDonkey2000, and Morpheus - likened such
a filtering capability to the long-wished-for invention of cold fusion.
They told Congress that in older, centralized file-swapping services such
as the original Napster such filtering would probably work, but not in
next-generation, completely decentralized ones like theirs, "in which
searches radiate out through a constantly shifting array of 'nodes,' or
individual computers," according to CNET.
Meanwhile, Kazaa, which is not a member of P2P
United, is suing the RIAA back, for copyright infringement, ZDNet
UK reports.
- School laptops for better writers?
One hundred fifty British Columbia 6th- and 7th-graders
who were given laptops to do their writing assignments "increased their
English test scores by just over 30%," according to a study cited by the
Toronto Globe & Mail. The study found that 90% of pupils who were tested
met the province's education standards after they started using the laptops,
up from 70% before they had the laptops. By way of explanation, the school
district's head of technology told the Globe & Mail that the laptops made
writing and editing more fun for the students.
- US crackdown on software piracy
The accused are not under age this time, but kids
who crack copy-protection code and send what it's protecting out on the
Net should take note: "Six people have pleaded guilty to stealing and
distributing computer software around the world ... and dozens more arrests
are expected in the schemes in which suspects copied and shared the software
through stolen Internet links at banks, communications companies, and
data centers," the Associated Press reports. It took US federal agents three years
to compile the case (with the help of an informant who used to manage
a piracy group). The agents said that some of the stolen software had
a retail value "in excess of $115,000 per copy."
- Teen political pundit/blogger
Almost weekly, 15-year-old Stephen Yellin posts
a detailed analysis of Senate, House, and gubernatorial races across the
US on daily KOS , "the most-trafficked liberal
political blog on the Net," Wired
News reports. His posts "read like memos written by a Democratic National
Committee senior staffer." The blog is run by Markos Moulitsas Zuniga,
a political consultant who says that "though his Web site is popular enough
that he can be very picky about who guest-blogs on his site, he chose
Yellin despite his young age, not because of it."
- Good spellers sell well on eBay!
Who would've thought that online auctions would
turn out to be a force for better spelling and grammar? People trying
to sell "labtop computers, throwing knifes, Art Deko vases, camras, comferters
and saphires" on eBay, for example, have a hard time finding buyers because
their shoddy spelling makes them look less credible or professional, apparently.
So, the New
York Times reports, people are making money by buying these goods
at low prices, then immediately turning around and - with properly spelled
product names and descriptions - selling them at a higher price.
