Mayhem & Chaos Blog

DRM

Don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out DRM!

The last couple of days have been quite interesting in the field of DRM and I'm glad to say its not good news for DRM.

First off, DRM peddlers are not happy about the state of the industry:

Among DRM peddlers, there's also a bit of jealously because some DRM systems are "successful." Take the comments made by Talal Shamoon, CEO of InterTrust (a company working on interoperable DRM schemes, among other things): "Apple is using encryption to try to do what Ma Bell used to do with the phone network: wall people in," he said. "It frustrates consumers and ultimately feeds piracy."

That's the pot calling the kettle black if I ever heard it. The bottom line is that Apple is the only company making head-way with music right now and everyone else is left holding the bag. And that feeds discontent and finger-pointing in the DRM circles. Awesome.

Concrete examples that show the DRM is failing also came about this week. Virgin Digital decided to shutter its DRM laden digital download store:

Virgin Digital, the online presence of the UK-based Virgin Group that owns Virgin Megastores, has announced that it has begun closing its doors in stages, beginning last week. According to a message on the site, the online music store has already shut its doors to new customers as of last Friday, and as of this coming Friday, it will cease selling individual tracks to current customers.

. . .

The site now advises its customers who have purchased tracks to back them up, as they will not be able to download them again once Virgin Digital has closed. It's unclear whether the purchasers of individual tracks will be able to access their songs without burning them to CD and reimporting them as MP3s, but it's better to be safe than sorry if you're one of those customers.

Now Virgin Digital tells its customers to circumvent its DRM in order to retain access to the files after the store closes. Let's count the things wrong with this:

• According to the DMCA anti-circumvention clause, aren't the US customers breaking the law?
• Once again, the DRM experience is shitty for customers who paid for the tracks legally. Those who are not savvy enough to burn-rip-end code their content will be SOL?
• The quality of the audio gets degraded by going to CD and then back to MP3.

Proof once again that DRM sticks it to customers and not the Pirates. This also reminds me of a quote from someone at the Future of Music Policy summit:

"There is a $1B gap between CD sales and digital audio download sales. The download sales are not making up what we've lost in CD sales."

I wish I would've written down who said that -- its clear that this person didn't understand that DRM is hampering the transition from CDs to digital downloads. Music sellers like CD Baby who sell their content to anyone who wants to offer it for download on the net, DRM or not, are doing great! They have no $1B gap to worry about!

Finally, Amazon.com opened its DRM free digital download store in beta today. We lost one crappy DRM site and gained a new download store from a reputable seller. We win, DRM loses!

Copyright

Ask a question, get Slashdotted

Last week in DC at the Future of Music Policy Summit I listened to Marybeth Peters, the register of copyrights and Ann Chaitovitz from the USPTO have a discussion about Marybeth Peter's 40 years at the copyright office. It was a nice look back on the changes of copyright over the last 40 years. There wasn't much earthshaking in the discussion, but it was interesting to hear Mrs. Peters talk about how the copyright scene has changed.

Then during the Q&A portion I asked (paraphrased):

The anti-circumvention clause in the DMCA has spawned a number of copyright unrelated and stupid lawsuits. I'm talking about garage door openers, inkjet printers and now even a religious case. As a geek and engineer I object to the anti-circumvention clause. Can we dump it yet??

C-Net picked up on this question and promptly wrote about a portion of her answer (and they didn't mention me :-( ). Then Slashdot picked up on the C-Net story and it was all over the net. However, what C-Net didn't blog about was one comment that Mrs. Peters made:

All the lawsuits that have been spawned from the anti-circumvention clause have turned out right.

I'm not sure if all, but she does have a point that the major suits have been found in favor of those doing the circumventing and against those who tried to apply the DMCA outside of its original context. While she has a point, I fear that her and I are diametrically opposed on the virtues and the vices of the DMCA. Mrs Peters likes the anti-circumvention clause, but she doesn't like the safe-harbour clause:

Peters indicated she was less thrilled, however, about a portion of the DMCA that generally lets hosting companies off the hook for legal liability, as long as they don't turn a blind eye to copyright infringement and remove infringing material when notified.

The safe-harbour clause is the only redeeming clause in the DMCA, in my opinion. Thus Marybeth Peters and I (and I suspect tons of geeks in this country) are diametrically opposed on the DMCA. But this shouldn't come as a surprise as I am a tech geek and Mrs Peters is a luddite.

This country is sooo broken its sad.

Dumbshit Dept.

Dumbshits sue the Creative Commons

The most interesting story of the day talks about the creative commons being sued. The founders of the CC were quite worried that this would happen and they crafted the non-profit to limit its exposure (and imposed a ceiling to what effect it could have on the world, but that is another blog post). But I don't think this case was one that they had envisioned -- proof once again that you can't make anything idiot proof.

A youth counsellor snapped a picture of one of his students and then posts it to Flickr with an attribution license. Commercial use was allowed! Virgin Mobile Australia finds the picture, uses it and gives attribution to the photographer -- nothing wrong was done here. Then the student finds out that she is part of the Virgin Ad campaign, gets pissy and sues Virgin Mobile in the US and the Creative Commons.

The family says that:

The experience damaged Alison's reputation and exposed her to ridicule from her peers and scrutiny from people who can now Google her, the family said in the lawsuit.

"It's the tag line; it's derogatory," said Damon Chang, 27. "A lot of her church friends saw it."

Oh please! This lawsuit boggles the mind -- I can't believe that they found a lawyer willing to file it. The Creative Commons didn't do anything wrong -- they provided the license, but had no hand in actually licensing the picture. Virgin Mobile USA wasn't involved either, yet they and the CC are the plaintiffs of the lawsuit.

It makes sense to sue one person in this case: The youth counsellor. But I'm guessing that this guy doesn't have deep pockets, so why sue him? Let's sue everyone tangential to the actual case, in hopes that someone is going to fork over cash to make this lawsuit go away.

I hate stupid people and I hate stupid lawyers that write suits like these. I hope that Larry argues these fools into the ground -- I'd pay to see that!

Burning Man

Did Burning Man jump the shark this year?

No.

Did the green man theme suck? Yes.
Have BM themes always sucked? Pretty much yes. Floating world was cool, but that was about it.
Does the next theme suck? Yes!
Was it a mistake to let corporations come in and show their green shit? Yes.

Burning Man LLC, please back off from the commercial shit, that is the one angle that gets people all pissy. Burning Man won't allow others any leeway on commercial presence, so why should the LLC get an exception? Please act consistently!

This was just another theme fuck up -- much like the previous theme fuck ups. But Burning Man is good about learning from its mistakes, so I am quite curious to see what will happen next year. (I've found that years after major shake-ups only the die hard burners attend and that makes the event much better -- I'm looking forward to it already!)

Was Burning Man green? Hell no. I think BM could make the event a hell of a lot of greener by bringing in a power line from Gerlach and providing power for the city, rather than every tom dick and harry bringing in their own polluting crap-ass generator. That single act would reduce emissions more than any other act on the playa. And all those RVs? If it wasn't for Burning Man some other yahoos would be driving them around the country during that week -- at Burning Man those beasts are at least parked for the duration and not belching crap.

Has Burning Man fundamentally changed this year? No. We didn't have a man for a couple of days, but no one I knew was really bothered by that. I personally don't know anyone who left because they were "distraught" by the burning of the man. If anything it was a refreshing change from the previous years.

Do I agree with Paul Addis that Burning Man has no value left? No. It clearly does not have the same values that it had in the mid-90s or even the late 90s after some serious changes. If you come to Burning Man looking for the drive-by shooting range, I'm sorry you're living in the wrong decade. If you come to find amazing art that you can't find in any art gallery on the planet, you're in the right place. If you want amazing people who will go to amazing lengths to connect and party with fellow human beings, you're still in the right place.

I think that Mr. Addis is clinging on to old ideals for too long. You can't go back to the early 90s -- that dot com fantasy period is not coming back and his burning the man early doesn't help change burning man back into something it grew out of. I think Mr. Addis displayed some lapses in judgement when he set the man ablaze -- afterall he is a lawyer and should've understood the consequences of his actions. He violated the artists who created the man (and the irony is that he was on the man team in 97) and put people at risk and I think that was wrong. But, I do appreciate the wake of his action to get people to look up for a minute and examine the fiasco of the green man theme.

Burning Man is an amazing organization that learns quickly compared other organizations. Over the last 14 burns I've witnessed Burning Man make a number of mistakes, only to recover from these mistakes with amazing speed and grace. My personal metric for whether or not Burning Man is still worthwhile is this: Does Burning Man still learn from its mistakes and improve the event for next year?

So far that has been the case. Expect to see me on the playa until that changes.

Now I need to think about how I can subvert the crappy "American Dream" theme for next year. I recently witnessed a people's revolt over the nearly identical theme on a much smaller scale. The subverted theme was much more strongly present than the official theme and I think we need to pull this for next year as to get the Burning Man theme choosing body to wake up and stop making mistakes.