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If a new bill becomes law, it may soon be illegal to attempt (even if you fail) to share copyrighted material.
“Attempted infringment” appears in new House intellectual property bill
One of the bill’s controversial features is the fact that people can be charged with criminal copyright infringement even if such infringement has not actually taken place. “Any person who attempts to commit an offense under paragraph (1) shall be subject to the same penalties as those prescribed for the offense, the commission of which was the object of the attempt,” says the bill.
Read the gory details here. (pdf)
Despite stumbling on the way to winning approval for ISO standardization of its closed-standard ooxml document format, Micro$oft isn’t deviating from trying to position itself as a peacemaker, appearing to offer an olive branch in the ongoing document format wars by offering to support (or at least stop blocking) adoption of the Open Document Format so long as it “doesn’t restrict choice in formats.”
Restricting choice, as it is used here, can be roughly translated to mean something like, “eroding our stanglehold.” The way they spin it, adoption of the Open Document Format, based on open standards and completely free to use by anyone, will somehow limit users’ choice. So Microsoft is totally cool with ODF, so along as their closed-standard OOXML format somehow wins equivalent standing as an International standard, even though it is not an open standard.
Confused? Mission accomplished.
A similar, but better played anvil disguised as an olive branch maneuver was shown to internet radio operators last week as SoundExchange granted a “reprieve” from enforcement of the onerous royalty ruling handed down by the Copyright Royalty Board. It seems that even the music industry didn’t want internet radio to die.
In a dramatic, last-minute reversal Sound Exchange offered to negotiate more favorable royalty rates for webcasters if they agreed to implement Digital Rights Management technology to prevent “streamripping.”
That’s probably not a deal-breaker for most internet radio operators, but it further restricts a presently-held right of fair use (taping off the radio) for most listeners, and consolidates the music industry’s power online.
Bargaining from a position of strength is good PR, it seems, whether that strength is real or artifice.
Intel Joins One Laptop per Child: Financial News - Yahoo! Finance
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. & SANTA CLARA, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Intel and One Laptop per Child (OLPC) today announced they have agreed to work together to bring the benefits of technology to the developing world through synergy of their respective programs. Under the agreement, Intel and OLPC will explore collaborations involving technology and educational content. Intel will also join the board of OLPC.
More on this soon.
UPDATE
BBC: Intel and $100 laptop join forces
Chip-maker Intel has joined forces with the makers of the $100 laptop project.
The agreement marks a huge turnaround for both the not-for profit One laptop per Child (OLPC) foundation and Intel.
Intel, `$100 laptop’ project make peace
BOSTON - The nonprofit that aims to seed the developing world with inexpensive laptop computers for schoolchildren has made peace with Intel Corp., the project’s biggest and most powerful rival, The Associated Press has learned.
With GE Vice Chairman Bob Wright claiming that internet piracy is putting America’s “overall economic health at risk,” and NBC/Universal general counsel Rick Cotton saying, “…intellectual property crime runs to hundreds of billions [of dollars] a year,” the shrillness of the anti-sharing camp is now almost beyond the range of human hearing. (However, you can still read Cotton’s position in PDF form.)
But AT&T is listening. James W. Cicconi, an AT&T senior vice president, announced this week that the the nation’s largest telephone and Internet service provider would broaden its policing of customers from allegedly cooperating with a domestic spying program to include development of “anti-piracy technology that would target the most frequent offenders.”
Will customers revolt? Probably not.
From the LA Times:
AT&T’s decision surprised Gigi B. Sohn, president of Public Knowledge, a digital rights advocacy group.
“AT&T is going to act like the copyright police, and that is going to make customers angry,” she said. “The good news for AT&T is that there’s so little competition that where else are the customers going to go?”
Also, AT&T will soon enable you to see a roller-skating dog on your phone, so why worry about all this stuff? It’s all good.
Relax.
Many municipalities and rural county governments in the US are stepping up to fill a void, providing their citizens with taxpayer-subsidized broadband internet access, services that the private sector has so far neglected to provide. Economies of scale mean that areas without high speed internet get it, and low-income people without access to the internet are at least one step closer. A valuable public service is provided at a very low cost to the individual.
But for obvious reasons, some telcos, cable companies, and ISP’s hate it, and they are taking their objections to legislators in state houses across the country. Claiming it’s all about “fairness,” a private industry that has long lobbied for deregulation, now wants to impose restrictions on cities and local governments that would effectively spell the end of public-broadband.
In North Carolina, House Bill 1587, “The Local Government Fair Competition Act” (apparently named with the same sense of humor as “The Clean Air Act”) is up for consideration and has a good shot at passing. Despite opposition from the North Carolina League of Municipalities and cities that already offer or are planning to offer the service, a well-funded lobbying effort by the Alliance of North Carolina Independent Telephone Companies is bearing fruit in the legislature. Donations to campaign committees are being made and legislation is being written. The dynamics in North Carolina are typical, playing out all over the US, town by town, county by county. The outcomes there and elsewhere will define how broadband technology is used for a generation or two.
The core idea at the heart of the legislation is that it’s somehow not fair for a local government (which pays no taxes and has no need to turn a profit) to compete in the marketplace with private companies who are just trying to make an honest buck. Even for ardent free-marketeers, the idea that government might be “taking over” things that “should be” handled by the private sector is frightening enough to shake their convictions. It’s an argument often heard in the healthcare debate, and, to some, it is an interesting, amazingly complex question with delicate interplays between competing interests and with “no clear” answers…you know, it’s nuanced.
From the AP:
“HONG KONG - China should not punish people for expressing their political views on the Internet, Yahoo Inc. (Nasdaq:YHOO - news) said Monday, a day after the mother of a Chinese reporter announced she was suing the U.S. company for helping officials imprison her son.”
Yahoo is by no means alone in this predicament (although one could argue that jailed journalist Shi Tao is the one in a tough spot), and China is not the only government that uses technology to keep its citizens in check. Every techcompany (in fact every global company) will eventually have to wrestle with this issue.
At least Yahoo is finally being forced to talk the talk. If companies have to answer for their decisions in court and in public, they might put a little more thought into them beforehand.
Yahoo weighs in on free speech in China - Yahoo! News
It might seem a little bit of a stretch to equate the open source community’s struggle against Microsoft with a bloody Kentucky coal miners’ strike, but the tactics used by Duke Power and the Eastover Mining Company in 1974 to prevent workers at the Brookside Mine from joining the United Mine Workers of America have something in common with the divide and conquer tactics Microsoft is using to maintain its market dominance.
This isn’t hyperbole, it’s the way big companies and governments have managed to control human beings (and manipulate the marketplace) as long as there have been corporations and kingdoms.
No, Microsoft hasn’t resorted to violence to protect their bottom line, but sowing fear, uncertainty and doubt, and coercing companies to take sides by signing patent agreements is only the most recent version of a classic power play used effectively for generations.
For some real insight into how divide and conquer strategies work, and how they can be overcome, it’s worth watching Barbara Koppel’s Academy Award Winning 1976 documentary, Harlan County, USA. The movie shows how a large corporation uses money and fear to exploit divisions in a community and isolate those who oppose it. Local government and law enforcement is co-opted, racial and religious divisions are exploited, and the end result is a community at war with itself that is too fragmented (and exhausted) to stand up to the company.
The only way to fight the power is through solidarity, something that wears thin when individual liberty and livliehoods are constantly threatened.
Harlan County, USA tells this timeless story in stark terms, and it’s hard to watch it without noticing how unchecked corporate power has an almost reflexive aversion to anything collective. It comes from a faulty binary mindset: on/off, good/evil, male/female, black/white, etc. If it improves pay and conditions for workers, then it must hurt profits and shareholders. What’s good for the many must be bad for the few. Through that lens, it’s easy to understand why Microsoft sees the open source community as such a threat- it’s just in the nature of things.
But fortunately, it’s also in human nature to pull together and resist.
Amnesty International has launched a campaign to bring attention to the growing threat to Internet freedom posed by governments (and acquiescent IT companies) around the world. Unfortunately, it’s a growing problem that needs more attention.
Irrepressible.info is a user-fed news aggregator documenting instances of censorship and persecution for sharing information and other threatening online activities like “reading” or “looking at” forbidden content. There’s even a place where bloggers can find html fragments of banned content to post on their blogs in order to demonstrate that information cannot be repressed.
It’s not as if this issue needs much explaining, but Cory Doctorow’s usual editorial prowess in support of Irrepressible.info is on full display in The Guardian.
From the Memorial Day edition of the New York Times.
Since last year, the military’s embedding rules require that journalists obtain a signed consent from a wounded soldier before the image can be published. Images that put a face on the dead, that make them identifiable, are simply prohibited.
If Joseph Heller were still around, he might appreciate the bureaucratic elegance of paragraph 11(a) of IAW Change 3, DoD Directive 5122.5:
“Names, video, identifiable written/oral descriptions or identifiable photographs of wounded service members will not be released without the service member’s prior written consent.”
According to the Pentagon, the rules were put into place to spare the families of the fallen from the added pain and anguish that might come from discovering the loss of a loved one through the media. Ostensibly, the restriction doesn’t cover un-embedded journalists, but the Iraqi police, enforcing a 1-hour press ban after each bombing, recently fired warning shots over the heads of working press trying to do their jobs.
Fair enough, but it means responsible citizens may have to dig a little deeper to remain informed, and a lot deeper to understand the reality of what our fighting men and women are facing on our behalf.
Fortuantely, there are other ways of finding out what one needs to know.
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Content Owners Must Consider Fair Use
Open Source Software Licensing Train Wreck Averted
The Liability of License Enforcement
Universities grow weary of pirate chase
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