Push v. Pull

RSS is a funny thing. On the one hand, it's amazing, and allows me to read the 103-and-counting different news sources that I monitor every day. On the other hand, it converts a formerly active mechanism ("I think I'm in the mood for classical music commentary today") to a fairly passive one ("Oh, there are twenty new articles on food. I'd better go read them.") In the process, it becomes addictive in sort of the same way that TV is: effortless 'information,' delivered hexihourly [I know, I just made that word up]. I don't really agree with those traditional journalists who denounce blogs everywhere as useless and shallow, particularly because this RSS phenomenon happens with news stories and blog posts alike. Maybe, in fact, this phenomenon is what drives the increase in content creation at the edges, coupled with the increases in ease of producing semi-professional results enabled by technology. People just get bored of consuming other people's pushed content and go make their own, or remix whatever others have produced. Not that boredom is a new phenomenon, but boredom in an activity that couples you to the computer might be. I know I used to get bored with playing games back in the pre-Doom and immediately post-Doom eras and write some code instead.

--Ari

Video over Skype. SNIU

Lessig on citation.

Dan Hunter on DRM. "The vast majority of Creative Commons licenses that have been adopted to date (around 95%) require the licensee to attribute the work to its author, no matter what other conditions of use are attached. The lesson of this, and of various other examples of amateur content, is that the attribution interest is probably the most fundamental incentive of creativity in areas that are not driven by commercial concerns."

Wired picks up the roadcasting story. The collaborative-filtering is interesting, but still seems like it's missing the big advantage of social music listening: others vouch for the music. Perhaps the transient interactions of this mechanism would make it more problematic, but some sort of rating system might work (perhaps through a central voting server over cell networks or somesuch).

Chart-topping single of moped beats out Coldplay. And who says remixing doesn't add value?

More on EU software patents.

Movie franchise practices dissected. Also emphasizes tie-ins: <>

Bertelsmann gives P2P another try with GNAB. SNIU

More DRM tsurus.

Delta startup launches music label.

Cell phones to add hard disks. The content industries would love for cell phones to add media capabilities, rather than iPods adding phones, because cell phone users are used to more restrictions and $3 ringtones.

Unrated DVDs outsell theatrical ones.

More on the Darknet. Worth a read.

It should be a parody, but it's not.

TiVo for internet radio 'aids piracy.' <> Note the reduction in rights.

Yahoo Music DRM flaw.

10 minute ad-laden short. The future of advertising, perhaps...pull versus push.

More on Google.

Patry on the First Sale doctrine.

--Ari

Analysis of hit records using sonograms. Includes this link, which is interesting.

Terror.

More on the world's greatest infringer.

And oldie but goodie.

Mark Cuban does strange things. However right he is about underlying problems, the solution ($40 DVD's...?) doesn't seem quite practical.

NSL letters still mostly used for terrorism, it appears. Once the oversight disappears, how much longer before they spread to filesharing, particularly given the recent attempts to link piracy with terrorism?

Decent article on future copyright issues.

The long tail and IP. Towards the bottom.

Wireless mesh networks and Portsmouth's public transit. SNIU

OA to public-sector information.

Broadcast flag redux.

"Create a standardized collection of rights "bundles" similar to the Creative Commons licenses." NISO Initiative on Digital Rights Expression Hard to tell what it's really about, but this looks like maybe the 'right' way to do DRM.

Protecting American Goods and Services Act of 2005 Section 2, (b)
<< Any person who intentionally transports goods bearing a counterfeit mark or copies or phonorecords of a copyrighted work not authorized by the copyright holder into or out of the United States for the purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain shall be fined not more than $100,000, imprisoned not more than 10 years, or both.'. >> Going after the real pirates.

Museum tour podcasts.

Sirius/iPod?

Another informative and amusing post by Patry. << We did it by abolishing the tribunal and replacing it with ad hoc arbitration panels called "copyright arbitration panels" or "carps" (originally it was "copyright royalty arbitration panels," but the acronym didn't seem right). >>

200 British theatres get digital projectors for cutting down on Hollywood fare.

Copyright testimony before the Senate.

NYTimes attributes recent slump to other options. Other options have been around for a while. Maybe it's because the movies haven't been great?

G-d save our souls. The lede is scary.

The results of the biased Senate IP panel.

Free downloads=more sales.

Chip-level DRM arrives.

Sony exec bashing.

Apple and podcasts.

There used to be an old rule on the Internet that every conversation eventually devolved into calling each other Nazis....

Optional Law.

Europe watches Grokster.

Bizarre settlement creates a lovely set of rights for club owners.

Aftermath of Elite Torrents raid.

RIAA sues another 600ish. Still no trials, only settlements.

Broadcast flag pro/con.

Paid Content.org The economics of content.

Ad-based music model? Hey, wait, that's radio.

Star Wars IV released 28 years ago, would be entering public domain under Founders.

Natural born infringers.

IP pubs by law firm.

Cool new tech application with dubious copyright implications.

iCompositions.

Phone service song ID. Might be a nice byproduct of the music industry's throwing dollars at song fingerprinting cum anti-piracy tech.

Fox issues rather polite takedown notices over Star Wars.

Encryption bad. Except in DRM, of course.

Interesting contractual argument.

Open movie project.

After seeing this linked to from 12 different places, I finally decided it was time to link to it. Peer pressure wins out today. It's not really that surprising news, but the open access debate is interesting because it pits two champions of the spread of knowledge against each other, and the only difference is that one is an old champion and the other is new.

A link to a rumour, but a plausible one?

Comments on CC.

Fair and balanced panel on piracy. Or not.

File Hoarding on P2P networks.

Satradio concept not perfect. Buy an iPod then. Speaking of which, I just bought a Creative MuVo TX FM. It was $50 after rebate, the size of a pack of gum, records voice, FM radio, etc. I'm very impressed with the little thing. It's amazing how far the technology has come since my last MP3 player.

New bill to mandate Digital TV transition by 2009.

The Economist breaks down flaws in BSA study.

Michael Geist on Canada copyright wars, episode two.

eReserves. The article features a friend of mine from elementary school. Go figure.

Jeux manqués.

Film restoration techniques obscure detail.

More MP3 goodness.

Only in the classical world is there sympathy for a label. Hyperion puts out good stuff.

Compatibility is not a goal.

Eldred strikes again. Luck's music library, for the record, has some of the worst scores around.

Small study shows that DVRs hard to use for most.

MS DRM lockin.

USPTO director lectures middle school kids.

Interesting droit-moral-style case discussed by Patry.

A self-funded musician and his fans have a rational discussion about piracy. He still doesn't quite get that it may very well help his sales.

Links

DMB overly zealous with DRM.

Another iPod DRM circumvention plugin.

Anonymity through one-way hashes. As the technology develops to maintain privacy without sacrificing the ability to legitimately persue criminals, hopefully privacy rights will become even more enshrined in culture.

More end-user control over the web's content. Remixing webpages.

More co-marketing arrangements with music.

Sophisticated picture sharing. Sue 'em.

Strange fake interviews for radio.

PDEA introduced.


I started a new wiki collecting papers on copyright. The freely shareable media section keeps getting bigger. Still updating SNIU as stuff comes up, which it does fairly frequently. The Derivative Works and Copyright Abuse sections aren't really going anywhere, particularly because I'm not really putting much effort into them. The wiki definitely makes them all easier to update.

Press release.

Cell phone TV.

Wired article on BT search.

Another Grokster argument: even shutting down P2P would not eliminate piracy problem. NNTP has been used for piracy since the good ole' days.

Activist judges. One compares it to speeding, without getting into the rule-of-law issues that the analogy usually comes with.

More transition away from expensive studios.

Odd shady patent case with Best Buy.

CBC podcast.

Visions of sugarplums.

How the insurance business runs Hollywood.

Uphill battle and misunderstanding.

Mere technological novelty.

Implications of new BT trackerless implementation.

Patry and Judge Kozinski on Grokster.

A two-year-old article by Sunder on an interesting Supreme Court decision.

Distributed financing of movies.

Hormel persues SPAM trademark again.

Next step in BT trackerless evolution, P2P search.

Lessig on CC misrepresentation. Founder's Copyright is dead.

Podcasts from TV shows.

Robot swarming. SNIU

WalMart cedes to NetFlix.

Live remixes.

In game ads heat up.

IP addresses remain safe in Canada. Ultimately, such rulings are wise, as they will keep the information there, accessible for law enforcement in cases of true need. Otherwise, the data is likely to be lost for good.

Spanish teacher fired for P2P lecture. MPAA pressure.

BSA comments on trackerless torrents.

Blu-Ray DVDs to hit 100GB. !

Distributed single-signon. Very interesting if it works.

More BSA news, software piracy predicted to take 2/3 of the market. In other news, crystal balls in short supply.

802.11n moves backward in standards process.

50 Cent unfazed by P2P.

Star Wars P2P media frenzy.

BitTorrent itself has now added trackerless support. Bodes well for not splintering the client base.

Free Culture, continued from Lessig.

Another article rehashing why RIAA lawsuit claims are disingenuous, with links to some studies.

Star Wars fan films screened at Cannes. More content creation spins towards the edge.

Anonymous said...

The hardware sharing thing was an April Fool's joke. You're a *tad* late.
1:38 PM
------

Haha, I'm an idiot. I was wondering why I couldn't seem to wrap my head around the concept. Ok, back to school for a lesson in skepticism.

--Ari

An in-depth analysis of the Macrovision patents.

Interview with Rodi P2P developer. Rather down-to-earth perspective, refreshing after all the pie-in-the-sky optimism you often see from P2P developers dreaming they will overthrow the system overnight easily.

Napster marketing effect anecdote.

More on China.

Strange, strange, strange plan to add harware sharing to eMule.

Interview with Anatomic P2P developer; decentralized BT.

--Ari

EU parliament opposes software patent legislation.

Software piracy down, but piracy losses up

Doctorow gives a nice summary of BBC's progressive internet moves.

Tecmo suit settled. Leaves big questions unanswered.

Independent promotion avenue expands.

Office expands collaboration features. Spurred by recent acquisition of Groove. They won't call it P2P, but that's what it is.

UMD library grows.

FCC mislead about effects of power line broadband.

Felten on the Register of Copyright editorial.

IP-TV vs. Internet Video.

Doctorow on radio broadcast flag.

China IP roundup.

Darknet.

--Ari

Some Times content moving to subscription.

BBC moves forward with iMP. SNIU

Wired article on Tor.

Ad-supported cell phone music video channel. It's been much remarked on that the music industry wouldn't let MTV grow nearly as quickly today as it did then--they now regret their decision to let the videos go for free.

The latest on DVD format wars.

Miller gets all fired up about compulsory licensing.

DVD-R sales increasing.

Anti-patent fee diversion bill introduced. So necessary.

Some legal (C) analysis.

Copyright Office annual report is out.

--Ari

Open source infringement tool. If you need it, are you really liable?

More movie/game links.

Macrovision files patents on anti-P2P measures.

Control freaks. And it's a good thing.

Piracy is good.

Anonymizer reborn. Well, like anonymizer.com, it's expensive and fairly insecure (traffic to the site can still be monitored), largely because of centralization.

TiVo ed.

TR's IP issue.

Australia.

Alarmism.

How I learned to stop worrying and love ____.

Censorship-->infringement.

British iPod tax coming?

50-packs of movies! No monopoly-->lower prices-->greater consumption of things that would otherwise be unconsumed.

--Ari

4% of UK legal downloads are from women?!

Podcasts on Sirius.

Radio down, internet radio up.

Thought Thieves.

Analog degredation. From The Importance of Being Ernest.

Huge German copyright levy on printers.

Anti-DRMCA.

--Ari

Grokster editorial.

RFID DVD protection, the right and wrong way.

Schauman puts out new paper, "Direct Infringement on Peer-to-Peer Networks".

Copyright abuse.

DRM, high prices contribute to Adobe eBook shutdown.

Patent issues.

Orphan works reply comments.

Recent Congressional legislation gets its first narrow interpretation.

Internet-to-TV.

MPAA pushing for broadcast flag legislation.

Nice graphic.

Rumours, but believable ones.

Nolo's easy read on Fair Use.

--Ari

TV shows on DVD. MPAA targeting TV download sites. Maybe I don't know that much about the industry, but does the MPAA really include TV producers?

Gates claims iPod's days are numbered. Careful, Bill, it's an explosive topic.

In another one of those cases where defining a P2P network becomes difficult, a new spam filtering technique calls for using the already-existing social network as a P2P spam filter. SNIU

Grid computing in the enterprise.

Interesting Freenet conceptual flaw. Only really matters if you get caught, but still problematic. Shouldn't really be that hard for them to fix, but the fix will come at a considerable performance price.

Dutch ISPs fight back in anti-piracy case. Following the Verizon example....

'Rockonomics.' "The better the seat, the less likely it was to be sold."

--Ari

More on Yahoo! music store.

Toshiba and new DVD format.

Miller pulls some good quotes from Rosen.

Nice case study of how infringement increases use dramatically.

Patent political protection prognostication.

Warner IPO fails to deliver.

Porn on cell phones.

MP3 blogs.

Patry post. Dense, legalistic, but good. Another. Another. Another.

--Ari

Podcasts of non-commercial radio shows.

Totally cool BBC remix site.

Podcasts and other things on your cell phone. Bypassing the $3/30secs ringtone racket.

Lead developer on Yahoo!'s new music store. Sounds like they may finally get some of the original appeal of Napster:
"Community! AOL has the most popular instant message program and not one of their 500 media apps takes advantage of it! LAMERS! Ours allows you to LISTEN TO MUSIC FROM YOUR FRIENDS via Yahoo! Messenger! LEGALLY! YOU HEARD ME! Also, you can find users with tastes similar to you, view their collections, instant message them, whateva. Rad."

That just about wraps up the 600-someodd article backlog from exam week.
--Ari

Oops.

Apologies for the first link to two papers. They were good articles, but didn't really have anything to do with copyright. I forget sometimes that Joe's blog diverges with great frequency, and I hadn't yet read them when I posted.
--Ari

Patent problems' hope of fix yields land-grab.

Some articles. Another. And another. And another. And another.

Sampling battles.

Japan's less moralistic copyright regime.

DRM bad.

--Ari

Grand DRM plans.

Corporate SNIUs coming.

I2P, anonymizing P2P project, moving along. I had actually more or less given up on it as dead. Tor seems much more promising right now.

Can't remember if I've linked this one before. SNIU

"many record company executives now privately acknowledge that if they had tried to work with Napster in 2000, then the P2P situation might not have got to the level it later did."

Nielsen partnering with BigChampagne.

Interview with Glickman.

How to avoid getting sued.

Feds reluctant to prosecute P2P downloaders.

Flag workarounds.

--Ari

Interactive graph of sampling throughout time.

Frank Zappa's 1983 proposal.

Another DRMed interface proposal. Of course, the end of the broadcast flag wouldn't be the end of it, would it? It may turn out that the end of the flag just means that instead of most things being arbitrarily protected, ALL content is protected--this is essentially what DisplayPort does.

DJ Spooky writes book on remixing.

PSP's UMD cracked.

iTunes and iTMS tiptoe into video content.

A review of Fair Use from one of the most stringent IP nations.

irony: n. Hilary Rosen griping about iPod lockin.

ANts P2P, third-generation anonymizing, encrypting network.

TorrentFlux might be the basis for some interesting SNIU's.

--Ari

Irony. n.
Publicdomain.org being owned by a cybersquatter.

--Webster's New New American Dictionary

Ok, so I just had to post this:
The Broadcast Flag is dead!
http://news.com.com/Court+says+FCCs+broadcast+flag+is+toast/2100-1030_3-5697719.html
Ari

The reason for the lack of posts recently is that I've been finishing up my senior thesis in a mad haze of caffeine and bleary eyes, while simultaneously trying to pack up for the summer. While renting mini-storage holds few insights as to IP, the senior thesis bit has been interesting. It occurred to me, after days of tracking down citations for things that I've known for years, heard through word of mouth (or told from on high, as the case tends to be for we poor undergrads) and common knowledge. And at some point you just give up. Which makes sense, reading real papers. Rarely is every thing that probably could be cited actually cited. Often, a review of the subject is cited, which raises its own set of IP issues (if the 'currency' of academia is citations, and certainly it is at very least between journals, then you get no payment for a review article based on your work. [in fact, this may be one reason for the oft-opined critique of science--that it's highly regimented and somewhat conservative--given that review articles are almost always written by senior scientists in their field ]). Ok, back to finishing this thing up now.

A new invasion route for DRM into the home?

I2 rebuttal.

Another hamfisted education campaign.

Online shoppers aren't compulsive. If this means they are more educated buyers, and if that difference extends to downloaders, than it could further increase the marketing effect of P2P networks--they're doing their research.

We apparently put out an annnual report on how the rest of the world needs more IP. In cases like pre-TRIPS India, I'd be inclined to agree. But Canada?

July deadline for broadcast flag looms.

Three links to copyfight strategies.

Patenting the Internet.

Ringtone craze may be reeled in by...disgruntled parents.

Linkin Park claims payments withheld.

Detailed article on Fair Use.

This one, on the relative immunity to infringement lawsuits the government is afforded, I found particularly interesting. Does shielding government employees from the everyday realities of copyright drudgery put them out-of-touch with the problems new legislation creates?

--Ari

Public versus private crimes

So now that criminal sentences seem to be coming into political reality (at least when slipped into the tail end of the legislative cause du jour), I am thinking more about the curious nature of society's view of filesharing. Basically everyone knows it's illegal. Basically everyone does it. It's a highly social crime. The prevalence is very high, the moral stigma is extraordinarily low. The very name betrays its social nature: 'sharing.' Much of the piracy amounts to what used to be tape-trading: swapping collections of MP3s. What's curious, however, is that it is the private aspect that is punished. I'm willing to bet that any carefully designed study would show something on the order of 90+% of iPods containing 'pirated' music. Yet the same white earphones that make the iPod a target of thieves fail to make it the target of police officers. Why not? My gut instinct tells me that, on some level, Hollywood understands just how far they can push, and that the 'pirates' of new technology ferreted away in their bedrooms downloading, Neo-style, are much easier political targets than the iPod users walking around on the streets. Everyone knows an iPod owner or is one themselves. Picture the face of a friend being arrested for something you don't think is morally wrong, and the opposition to criminalization rises really quickly.

--Ari

Comment about fonts, but it applies equally well to other copywritten media.

--Ari

Sirius add podcasting channel.

An empty shell of a company nearly killed the Blackberry.

No free lunch.

Analysis of Mobile self-regulation moves.

Encrypted comics.

=1000 words.

SSRN paper on DRM and freedom of expression.

More on broadband war.

Video encryption technology advances. Sounds rather difficult to break. At least until someone discovers a weakness in the underlying implementation.

BT--> Hollywood.

Another study showing filesharing isn't declining.

Comment from Joe Hall and Pam Samuelson's class at Berkeley.

--Ari

Brief NYT blurb on the real expense of technological change.

Old/new media.

RIAA hits 10,000 lawsuit mark.
P2P Marketing effect may dominate.
Penalties too high. Both articles linked from /. article.

Verizon, fighting municipalities from providing their own WiFi, pulls its own free WiFi in NYC. Tempe, AZ, apparently not listening.

Back and forth on DVD rental services.

Orphan Works.

P2P statistics.

Filesharing argument with the AG.

Copyright renewal search engine. It's sad when such services are provided by a personal homepage, rather than the (pathetically disorganized) Copyright Office itself.