Darknet

'Da Vinci Code' author sued in copyright claim

Wire services:

Author Dan Brown copied the central themes of his best-selling thriller, ``The Da Vinci Code,'' from a 1982 book, a lawyer for two of the book's three authors argued in a London courtroom Monday. But a lawyer representing Brown's publisher, Random House, dismissed the claims as ``scandalous'' and ``wild allegations, completely unsupported by facts'' on the opening day of a copyright infringement trial involving one of the best-selling novels of all time. The case could potentially involve millions of dollars in royalties and profits from ``The Da Vinci Code,'' which has sold tens of millions of copies worldwide and has been made into a film, starring Tom Hanks, which is scheduled to open in May. Brown is not a defendant in the case, which is being brought against Random House, but he is expected to testify. Brown has publicly acknowledged using ``The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail'' as part of his research in writing his book, but he has described it as a minor resource. Jonathan Rayner James, a lawyer for authors Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh, said Brown did not copy words from his clients' book but had taken ``the idea you are left with when you've read the book.''

Funny. I thought you couldn't copyright an idea.

Associated Press: 'Da Vinci' lawyer says ideas too general.

War of the world views

Had a good time this afternoon speaking to a lunch gathering at the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford University. I put together a half-hour slide presentation, which will be released on podcast, titled, "War of the World Views: The clash between big media and citizens media."

I had plenty of material to draw upon, both from Darknet and from Ourmedia. Showed one example of citizen journalism: Trusted Computing, created by Benjamin Stephan and Lutz Vogel and others in Germany. (It's terrific.)

Then I showed three mashups (could have drawn from scores of them) and discussed fair use in the digital age: the Bush-Cheney debate; an anime mashup; and a Charlie Brown mashup that isn't on Ourmedia because United Feature Syndicate won't let it.

Prof. Lawrence Lessig was in the audience and asked a question I hadn't heard raised before: As sites build out licensing capabilities that provide compensation for artists when part of their work is used in a mash-up, does that undercut the claims of fair use by those who don't seek permission and use the works anyway?

Great question. The answer is still unsettled. I suggested that users would welcome a narrowing of the large fuzzy grey area that currently confronts those who want to incorporate cultural works into their own. The trend line toward paying compensation to artists for use of their works online is unmistakable. We hope and believe that a grassroots marketplace can be built in a way that doesn't crimp fair use rights.

Cross-posted to Newmediamusings.com

Speaking at Stanford Monday

I'll be giving a presentation Monday, Feb. 27, at Stanford Law School's Center for Internet and Society from 12:30 to 1:30 pm.

Topic: When citizens media and big media collide

In recent years we've seen the emergence of new grassroots media forms: text blogging, podcasting, Webcasting, video blogging, and digital photography as social media. What happens when the cultures and values of these vibrant new media forms bump up the realities of copyright law and outdated business practices? One of the most striking examples of this disconnect occurs in the world of mash-ups, a new artform that combines elements of existing video and audio to create startling new works. How should website operators deal with such cutting-edge creations that may or may not fall under the traditional boundaries of fair use?

Free: It's open to all, and lunch will be served.

Where: Stanford Law School, Room 280B, Palo Alto, CA.

Free software? You can't just give it away

Gervase Markham at the London Times Online: Who could possibly be upset with the Mozilla Foundation for giving away its Firefox browser? How about a British Trading Standards officer?

Techdirt: Firefox Undermines UK Anti-Piracy Laws With All That Giving Stuff Away.

Amazing. As in amazingly stupid.

Worried? Try an encrypted bubble

p2pnet.net: Worried about the copyright police? Try an encrypted bubble.

Amazon's disappointing 'Report this'

Amazon.com has a feature called 'Report this': a link that lets the public alert Amazon's staff of book reviews that are clearly frivolous and have no bearing on the book being reviewed.

Such is the case with a couple of the recent reviews of Darknet, such as this misguided slam from "vhspreowner":

It is not okay to steal things and that what this book seems to say that it's okay to download things without permission. IT IS STEALING, THAT'S ALL, IT IS STEALING, AND ALL THE GEEKS WHO DO IT SHOULD BE TREATED AS CRIMINALS.

That "review" was flagged weeks ago, but is still there (along with a one-star rating). It's offset by the more intelligent critiques, both pro and con. But it's still sad to see Amazon falling down on the job of removing such tripe. Any reader of Darknet would know that I don't countenance stealing in any way.

Lessig makes plea for Read/Write Internet

InternetNews.com: Lessig Makes Plea For Read/Write Internet. Excerpt:

Stanford Professor Lawrence Lessig warned that today's fast-growing, free-wheeling Internet is threatened by network providers who want to control innovation and commerce on the Internet much the way AT&T once controlled the phone networks.

Speaking at the Open Source Business Conference here, Lessig said society has to decide if it wants to continue down the current path of a "read-only" Internet or embrace what he called a "read/write Internet" with broad access to content and the ability to legally build on the creative works of others.

Lessig did say he wasn't in favor of content being entirely proprietary or entirely free, but he fears the repercussions of the former being the dominant business model.

He cited Apple's popular iTunes music store as a perfect example of the read-only Internet.

"It's a massively efficient way to get content to consumers they can buy easily," said Lessig.

And the Internet is enabling other new streams of commerce for content providers. Lessig noted for example that Amazon is experimenting with a pay-per-page model for books.

"This read-only Internet is supported by copyright law to perfectly control how people get access," he added.

Copyright Criminals Remix Contest deadline extended

Attention all producers, DJs, and remixers: the Copyright Criminals Remix Contest over at ccMixter has been extended by two weeks, to March 14. New vocal samples from rapper Chuck D (of Public Enemy) and pioneering funk musician George Clinton (of Parliament-Funkadelic) have been made available for use in the competition.

Is that cool or what?

Sony BMG settlement

EFF: Sony BMG Settles Up with Music Fans for Copy-Protection Debacle.

Net neutrality

At MediaCitizen, Tim Karr has an account of the network neutrality call he hosted on Friday with Stanford University’s Lawrence Lessig, Jeff Chester of the Center for Digital Democracy and his colleague at Free Press, Ben Scott.

Bust Big Radio payola

FreePress.net:

Ever wonder why commercial radio has become a mind-numbing repetition of the same songs by Jessica Simpson and Celine Dion? It's not just you. Corporate radio in every town has become a wasteland. And in many cases, it's a crime.

An investigation airing tonight on ABC News "Primetime" exposes illegal payola across the radio dial. Radio conglomerates that control hundreds of local stations are taking bribes to endlessly spin major label acts, keeping independent artists off the air.

FCC Commissioner Jonathan Adlestein calls big radio payola "potentially the most widespread and flagrant violation of FCC rules in the history of American broadcasting." But the FCC's Republican leadership remains reluctant to crack down against the corporate radio giants that have sold off our airwaves.

This new age of payola is the product of consolidated radio ownership. Several of the largest radio conglomerates in America -- including Clear Channel, Viacom/CBS radio and Cumulus -- are among those now under subpoena in a criminal investigation by the New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer.

Tell the FCC to bust corporate radio payola.

Open source interview

Wikinews Interview of the Month is an open-source interview: Wednesday's guest is Michael Geist, renowned legal scholar at the University of Ottawa who specializes in IP issues. Ask away!

Cease and desist for bootleg site

Sounds like Get Your Bootleg On has received a cease and desist order, from what I can make of this posting in Dutch at the Mashculture site.

Only big companies' PCs will play high-def DVDs

Cory Doctorow at BoingBoing via Slashdot: Only big companies' PCs will play high-def DVDs

PCs with expensive video-cards won't be able to play high-definition DVDs unless they're built by big companies like Dell and Sony. PCs you build or upgrade yourself with "HDCP"-compatible high-end video cards will be locked out of high-def DVD playback by the copy-restriction system on the discs.

HDCP is a system for crippling PCs so that they are incapable of copying some digital files. It is overseen by a licensing authority that controls whose HDCP implementations can play back files that are locked with its restrictions.

The world's supermajority of "high-definition" displays are connected to PCs, and many PC owners have attempted to future-proof their investment in this equipment by buying video-cards that advertise HDCP compatibility.

However, true HDCP compatibility is controlled by an inter-industry consortium of giant CE companies and Hollywood studios, and these companies have ruled that merely buying a HDCP-compatible graphics card is insufficient for gaining access to HDCP-locked video. Only systems designed from the ground up by OEMs (such as themselves) will be able to gain access to these videos.

We've been able to confirm that none of the Built-by-ATI Radeons support HDCP. If you've just spent $1000 on a pair of Radeon X1900 XT graphics cards expecting to be able to playback HD-DVD or Blu-Ray movies at 1920x1080 resolution in the future, you've just wasted your money.

NVIDIA, being a GPU manufacturer was unable to discuss the plans of board manufacturers. We contacted all six of NVIDIA's Tier-1 board partners. None of the GeForce 6 or 7 video cards available on the market, including the most recently released GeForce 7800GS, have HDCP support. So if you just spent $1500 on a pair of 7800GTX 512MB GPUs expecting to be able to play 1920x1080 HD-DVD or Blu-Ray movies in the future, you've just wasted your money.

Tech companies don't really care about stopping you from making copies. They can't sell more units by advertising that their cards are crippled with DRM. The only reason for a tech company to play the DRM game is to lock out competitors who don't play it as well as they do. We've seen that in the lawsuit against Kaleidascape, a company that makes DVD jukeboxes -- the tech companies that sit on the licensing board for DVDs don't want an upstart offering a better product than they have.

The only good news here is that this will spur unauthorized P2P systems into developing the capability of sharing high-definition video more reliably. After all, you may not be able to play Matrix Impossible 2000 at high rez on your PC if you buy the DVD, but you'll sure be able to do so if you download it instead.

Way to fight piracy, guys.

Not surprising in the least, this action by the technology-entertainment cartel. (See chapter 2 of my book for similar stories.) Hopefully, someone will eventually figure out a hack to get around these restrictions on our fair use rights.

Keep community media local

The well-respected Alliance for Community Media is asking everyone who cares about community media to speak up for local media access.

An important FCC proceeding is underway that could impact the future for community access media, threatening the very existence of public, education and government (PEG) cable programming. Deadline for comments is the end of day Monday, Feb. 13.

Please take a few moments now and make public comments -- and ask every supporter you know to please join in. Here are three sites were you can post comments:

• General public & other allies: Freepress.net
• Access organizations: ACM
• Access producers & friends: Manhattan Neighborhood Network

Jeff Chester of the Center for Digital Democracy has more.

A gated Internet

Missed this the other day in PC World: A gated Internet.

You fire up your computer and want to watch some clips of yesterday’s game. You go to your favorite sports Web site, but pages are taking forever to load. Maybe you stick with it. More likely, however, you run out of patience and surf to another site to see if its video clips download any faster. Lo and behold, they do. The next time you’re after some football highlights, the same thing happens. After a while, I bet you’d stop even trying your now ex-favorite sports site.

We’ve all encountered slowdowns at our favorite Web sites, much like highway traffic that goes from 70 miles per hour to 35 for no readily discernible reason and then speeds up again. Most of us curse a little, shrug, then go on with our days. But if certain Internet providers have their way, Web site slowdowns may soon not be all that mysterious, and may become far more frequent. ...

Free Press: End of the Internet?

They saved the Internet's soul

Wired News: On the 10-year anniversary of civil libertarians' challenge to the first internet censorship law, the freedom fighters who kept the net from becoming the Disney Channel square off against new challenges in a more complicated world.

Digital music biz isn't booming

Wired News: Joanna Glasner says the digital music business doesn't add up.

Courts need to tread lightly in patent cases

Op-ed piece in today's San Jose Mercury News: Patent-infringement remedy needs Supreme Court tuneup. Excerpt:

A single computer produced by Dell or Hewlett-Packard or IBM may include thousands of patented hardware components licensed from others. A single computer chip set manufactured by Intel or AMD may involve more than 100,000 individual patents -- many which are licensed from third parties.

What the recent court decisions fail to consider is the impact of an injunction on a key component on the hundreds -- or thousands -- of other component manufacturers whose patented intellectual property is tied up in the complex product that the plaintiff seeks to pull off the shelf.

These innocent component manufacturers and their employees have done nothing wrong, but all pay a heavy economic price. Every student of litigation abuse knows that an injunction preventing the sale of the final product could be a corporate death sentence for these other component manufacturers. ...

Radio conglomerates targeted in 'payola' inquiry

Associated Press: Radio conglomerates become target of 'payola' inquiry

Senators mull an Internet with 'restrictions'

The Nation: Senators Mull an Internet With Restrictions.

It may have been the first and last hearing the US Senate holds on Net neutrality--the principle that Internet users should be able to access any web content or use any applications they choose, without restrictions or limitations imposed by an Internet service provider. In the time it takes to watch Wedding Crashers, nine experts on Tuesday galloped through testimony before a handful of Senate Commerce Committee members in a hearing room packed with telecommunications and cable lobbyists.

The experts largely fell into two camps. Representatives of major telephone and cable companies and conservative academics urged government to get out of the way, encourage the growth of high-speed Internet networks and enable Internet system operators to "recoup their investments" without statutory or regulatory constraints. On the opposing side were the Internet "evangelists" and innovators who urged Congress to enact into law longstanding principles that preserve an open Internet where no company can restrict any individual's access to content or place barriers on any lawful application or activity.

Those representing telephone and cable companies promised that they would never--ever--interfere with the public's ability to access any lawful information on the Internet. Walter McCormick Jr., president of the United States Telecom Association (USTA), pledged, "We will not block, impair or degrade content, applications or services" that customers want to access. ...

Unfortunately, the heads of the companies that the USTA represents have not been making the same promises. ...

Google vice president and "Internet evangelist" Vinton Cerf disagreed. "There is not enough competition" for high-speed Internet, Cerf said, noting that only 53 percent of Americans have any choice among broadband service providers and that 19 percent of Americans have no access to high-speed Internet.

In an argument that some senators seemed to have difficulty following, Cerf, Stanford Law School professor and open-access guru Lawrence Lessig, and Vonage head Jeffrey Citron argued that one could not assume the continued existence of the freewheeling Internet that fosters innovation. That is because the FCC changed the rules, upending a forty-year commitment to open access and nondiscrimination. That decades-old commitment made it possible for "innovation without permission" and the development of the World Wide Web, Yahoo, Google and Amazon, Cerf said.

Those policies were altered in 2002, noted Lessig, when the FCC changed how it would regulate Internet service providers. Companies that built and maintained the Internet pipes had been regulated like telephone companies, and they were not permitted to discriminate among content providers or Internet applications.

Under the FCC's current regulatory regime, these old constraints are gone. That leaves the door open for companies like Verizon and AT&T to drastically change the rules, hogging bandwidth for their own products, like the films and games they'd like to sell to subscribers, and charging other content providers a premium for quality access to their customers, leaving little space for other content and applications. "The only companies that could afford to buy access to the fast lanes on the Internet...are companies that already have succeeded in the marketplace," Lessig said. "The next generation of Yahoos and Googles...would face barriers to entry."

"At the root, the network neutrality debate is about who will control innovation and competition on the Internet," Citron added. "Imagine if the electric company could dictate which television or toaster you could plug into the wall.... What would happen tomorrow if one of the network operators decided to block Google, Vonage, Yahoo or Amazon? What would be the legal recourse?... There is nothing in the statute or regulation today that protects consumers or Internet application providers from potential network discrimination."

Trusted computing

On Ourmedia, Benjamin Stephan and Lutz Vogel put together this well-done short video essay about the computer industry's so-called "trusted computing" initiative. The 44mb file (avi playable in Windows Media) takes 90 seconds or more to load.

If they don't trust you, why should you trust them?

'Darknet' in five languages

"Darknet" will be coming out in Spanish, French, Italian and Russian. Looks like the Spanish version is the first one up on Amazon: Darknet: La Guerra Contra La Generacion Digital Y El Futuro De Los Medios Audiovisuales.

My French publisher wants me to attend Cannes in May. Needless to say, I've never been. It would be great if it works out.

Buy your 'Darknet' review here!

Well, a couple of security experts are selling a 430-word book review of "Darknet" for $5.95 through a digital download on Amazon.

Let's see. If I charged at that rate, the book would have retailed for $1,380.