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Not since they tried to book Kid Rock for an Inaugural “youth concert” have the Bush Twins (aka: Jenna and Barbara) put their beleagured father in such jeopardy. (Um, except maybe for that time they got caught smoking and drinking backstage at another Kid Rock concert…)
According to reports scorching the world wide webosphere, the latest blow to the faltering Bush presidency came in the form of a sweet fathers day gift. On a rainy day in Crawford, the ebullient twins gave the President “a CD they had made for him to listen to while exercising.”
Hollywood, Florida attorney Mitchell L. Silverman took notice and fired off a letter to the RIAA asking them to take notice, encouraging the Recording Industry group to pursue the twins as aggressively as they do other offenders, pointing out that, by his calculations, damages could exceed $1,000,000.
On his blog, The Scrivener, Silverman’s first commenter points out that copying music for family members is probably fair use, but that didn’t stop anyone from having a good laugh.
Boing Boing: Lawyer to RIAA: Sue the First Twins for copyright violations!
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.
Microsoft’s deal with Linspire inspired (Or should I say “linspired?” No. No, I shouldn’t.) a lot of coverage this week which reverberated in an echo chamber of questions, guesses and speculation. But not all of it was noise.
Here is a grand buffet of some of the most illuminating analysis and reportage of the week.
Patent threats bad for Microsoft business - Red Hat
By Alastair Otter
18 June, 2007Microsoft going around threatening customers with patent litigation does not make good business sense. This is according to Red Hat’s Middle East and Africa channel sales manager, David Postel, who was speaking in Johannesburg last week.
Postel said that Red Hat customers do not have to worry about the threat of patent litigation because not only was it unlikely that this would happen, but the company also provides protection for customers against the possibility. He said that customers were protected at two levels.
“In the first instance Red Hat will repair or replace any software found to infringe patents. And Red Hat will also pay to defend any customer that does have to face ligitation,” said Postel.
Ubuntu, Red Hat reject Microsoft patent deal
By Martin LaMonica and Richard Thurston, CNET News.com
Red Hat Remains Unmoved
“Red Hat said there would be no such deal. Referring to previous statements distancing itself from Microsoft, the company insisted: “Red Hat’s standpoint has not changed.”
“The company referenced a statement written when Microsoft revealed it was partnering with Novell, saying that its position remained unaltered. Red Hat director of corporate communications Leigh Day added: “We continue to believe that open source and the innovation it represents should not be subject to an unsubstantiated tax that lacks transparency.”
Many open-source followers argue that Red Hat, as the largest Linux vendor, would have a lot to lose from partnering with Microsoft.
Microsoft’s Linux patent threats dismissed as baseless
By John Fontana
“The reality is that they are not going to sue a single customer,” says Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation. “It would not be in their business interest. Microsoft is not going to sue their customers.”
But Zemlin says the contracts are hurting Linux “only in the fact that Microsoft uses them to create a perception of risk that in reality is not there.”
Microsoft Freshman Course: How To Monetize Patents
Posted by Charles Babcock
Yes, this activity can be interpreted as support for Microsoft’s patents, but please note as well that money is changing hands, $440 million in the case of the Novell pact. Microsoft will spend that amount in give-aways of support for Novell’s SUSE and spend that on other aspects of the deal. It’s a boon for Novell at a time when its business plan is limping.
For Microsoft, doing so strengthens a weak competitor, which helps it fend off future antitrust accusations, while theoretically weakening a strong one, Red Hat.
Interview conducted by Robert Krátký 11 June 2007 for ABCLinux, a Czech site
Q: What is your take on the Novell - Microsoft deal? Should Red Hat be a party to such agreement sometime in the future, what would that mean for you?
A: Personally I think it’s a bad idea and that Novell are going to get stung by the GPLv3, and rightfully so. The license is designed to keep the software free, if it fails to do this then it needs fixing, so GPLv3 hopefully will fix this flaw.
If Red Hat did deals with Microsoft I’d hope they would find a better way to do things, to co-operate on things that help end users but not to compromise the freedom of the code or play any funny games.
Q: Do you share some people’s fear of Microsoft’s threats (concerning patents and intellectual property)?
A: I don’t think they are the biggest danger. As Microsoft has been finding out recently it is the patent trolls, and organisations with buried patents in interesting areas that are the biggest threat in the USA. The real answer to that problem however is to pull the USA back into line with the majority of the world which simply does not recognize patents on software but respects them as literary works subject to copyright law. Also therefore we have to make sure the continuing US attempts to spread bogus patent law into the EU are defeated.
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.
Via the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an update on the on-going dispute between spoon-bending “paranormalist” Uri Geller and online critic Brian Sapient. The case turns on the concept of fair use of copywrited material for criticism and “a legitimate discussion of [Geller’s] abilities.”
Geller’s quest to shut down Sapient’s criticism started when Sapient uploaded video to YouTube challenging Geller’s assertions about his mental powers. The 14-minute segment came from a NOVA television program, but Geller and his corporation Explorologist Ltd. claimed the video infringed its own copyrights and had the video removed from YouTube. Sapient filed a counter-notice under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), had the video restored to YouTube, and sued Geller for misrepresentation.
One would assume that Geller then retaliated by bending all the spoons in the EFF’s breakroom kitchen, causing the digital rights public interest group to switch to tree-killing, but mind-bending-proof wooden stir-sticks.
For more on EFF’s view of the case, check here and here.
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
You can almost hear the Disney witch-cackles and see the wicked rubbing together of hands as this insight developed into a strategy.
The fouth and final draft of the GPLv3 is available, and the Free Software Foundation has issued a “final call” for comments.
The latest draft addresses several new issues, primarily restricting distributors who make “discriminatory patent deals” after March 28 from conveying any software under the license. Some changes were made to untie the license from specific US consumer protection statutes in order make it easier to implement outside of the United States.
The new language that has garnered the most comments so far (and speculation in the press) is section 11, a passage inspired by the Microsoft-Novell deal.
According to the FSF’s accompanying discussion FAQ, the GPLv3 now
“…attacks the Microsoft-Novell deal from two angles. First, in the fourth paragraph of section 11, the draft says that if you arrange to provide patent protection to some of the people who get the software from you, that protection is automatically extended to everyone who receives the software, no matter how they get it. This means that the patent protection Microsoft has extended to Novell’s customers would be extended to everyone who uses any software Novell distributes under GPLv3.
“Second, in the fifth paragraph, the draft says that you are prohibited from distributing software under GPLv3 if you make an agreement like the Microsoft-Novell deal. This will prevent other distributors from trying to make other deals like it in the future.”
Richard Stallman posted an essay about why he thinks the GPLv3 is important.
For a more in-depth analysis (more in-depth than this blog’s, not Stallman’s), try this eWeek article by Peter Galli. It’s tight.
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