DeepLinks Archives, May 2007
Noteworthy news from around the internet.
Convert to MP3 BEFORE Upgrading to iTunes 7.2!
Posted by Fred von LohmannAdding to previous revelations about the latest version of Apple's iTunes software, Playlist is reporting that the iTunes 7.2 (necessary for the so-called DRM-free iTunes Plus tracks) has broken the "buy-burn-rip-to-MP3" procedure that iTunes users have long relied on to convert the FairPlay-restricted songs they buy from the iTunes Store into unrestricted MP3s. Apparently, after the iTunes 7.2 "upgrade," MP3s created in this way will no longer play on your iPod!
While cumbersome, the "buy-burn-rip-to-MP3" workaround has been the primary way to start with a 99 cent iTunes download and end up with an unrestricted MP3 that will play on your Squeezebox, your non-iPod portables, or your MP3-enabled DVD player (it's not about "piracy" -- if that was your bag, you'd have started by downloading the song as an MP3 from the myriad P2P options).
So iTunes users who have an existing library of songs purchased from the iTunes Store may want to consider doing their conversions before they "upgrade" to iTunes 7.2. (Sure, you can "upgrade" some of your DRMd songs to the "DRM-free" higher-quality AAC format for 30 cents each, but remember that this is not currently an option for the vast majority of iTunes tracks.)
This is yet another example of the way that "upgrades" are often "downgrades" in our DRMd and EULAd world. I never update iTunes until I read up on all the misfeatures and downgrades that Apple has slipped in. Whether it's breaking the Internet streaming feature, restricting the number of streaming users per day, or reducing the number of burns permitted for songs purchased from the iTunes Store, Apple is among the worst offenders when it comes to messing around with stuff you've already paid for. But iTunes 7.2 is likely to be remembered for the especially wicked tricks it plays on iTunes customers.
Attention Returns to Orphan Works
Posted by Nancy SimsAn "orphan work" is something currently protected by copyright, but whose owner can't be found even with diligent searching. Currently, if someone wants to make a copy of an orphan work (say, for archiving or republication), or use it to create a derivative work (like a compilation or montage) they risk huge statutory damages if the actual owner ever appears and exercises their rights. Unsurprisingly, many choose not to take that gamble, and works with potential useful value are left to languish.
The problem got a lot of attention last year, when the Copyright Office issued a report (pdf) concluding that ?the orphan work problem is real?, and suggesting legislative solutions. An Orphan Works Act was introduced last May, and eventually incorporated into the problematic Copyright Modernization Act of 2006. The CMA stalled in September, but Congressional attention may yet return to this critical issue.
In today's New York Times, U.C. Berkeley professor Hal Varian revives the issue, highlighting the economic waste it creates. He discusses some of the various proposals for mitigating the problem, including revisions to the registration system, shortening default copyright terms, and provisions to waive statutory damages in some circumstances. Varian concludes:
"The orphan works legislation from the Copyright Office is still on the back burner in Congress. Let us hope that it soon gets the attention it deserves. Information plays a crucial role in today?s economy. Making it easy for creators and users of information to find each other should be a high priority for policy makers."
Anti-Secrecy Bill Gets Secret Hold
Posted by Hugh D'AndradeA bill designed to combat government secrecy won?t be coming to a vote on the Senate floor any time soon. An anonymous Senator who apparently thinks the government isn?t secretive enough has placed a secret hold on the bill.
The Open Government Act of 2007 (pdf), sponsored by Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) and Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX), would strengthen the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) by reducing delays in release of government records. FOIA is a crucial tool used by all kinds of public interest organizations, including EFF, to compel the release of documents and information that are of urgent interest to the public.
The Society of Professional Journalists has begun a campaign to unmask the Senator who placed the hold. Visit their site to find out if your Senators have made a statement denying involvement in the hold. And visit our Action Center to let your representatives know that you support the bill.
Update: The anonymous Senator who blocked the Open Government Bill has come forward. Senator John Kyl (R-AZ) admits to having placed the hold on the bill, because of what he said was the Justice Department's "uncharacteristically strong" opposition.
Apple's DRM-Free AAC Files Contain More Than Just Names and Email Addresses
Posted by Peter EckersleyA couple of recent posts on Ars Technica and TUAW pointed out that Apple is embedding personal information, such as the name and email address of the purchaser, in all of their AAC files (including the DRM-free ones). We got curious, and wondered whether Apple might also be watermarking the underlying audio data in these tracks.
We've found that there isn't a watermark in the compressed audio signal itself, but there are surprisingly huge differences in the encoded files. Much bigger differences than just different tags, or even different signed/encrypted tags.
We compared two DRM-free copies of the track Daftendirekt by Daft Punk. When decoded to PCM/WAV data, both copies produced an identical audio signal (the MD5sum is e40b006497f9b417760ca5015c3fa937). So there is no audio watermark. But one of the .m4a files is almost 360K larger than the other!
We haven't finished examining these differences yet, and we don't have in-house expertise on MPEG codecs, but some of them have an intriguing amount of structure. There's a region (see around offset 0x11470 in the Daft Punk track for example) where the files contain what look like tables with sequential indices but different data in the table.
We'll post again if we learn more about what's going on here. In the mean time, some pure speculation: it may be that large amounts of iTunes library data are present in each file. It's also possible that Apple has found a way to watermark the AAC encoding itself, such that users would need to either crack the watermark or transcode the audio signal in order to produce a file that does not identify them as the source.
Campus Lawsuits Against P2P != Stopping File Sharing
Posted by Derek SlaterThe NPD Group's latest music stats provide yet another reason that the RIAA's war on college students is misguided:
"The 'social' ripping and burning of CDs among friends ? which takes place offline and almost entirely out of reach of industry policing efforts ? accounted for 37 percent of all music consumption, more than file-sharing, NPD said."
This data suggests offline sharing is growing, and that's to be expected. Along with burning CDs and DVDs for each other, fans can swap hard drives, share USB drives, and use many other technologies to share music without hopping online or installing P2P software. It's only going to get easier to share mass volumes of music in this way -- these tools are increasingly ubiquitous, with ever growing capacity and ever diminishing price.
Sure does make the RIAA's recent litigation rampage against college students seem silly, doesn't it? The kinds of university network surveillance being pushed by the RIAA won't make any difference, either. After all, even if university administrators unplugged the student body from the Internet altogether, that still wouldn't stop students from walking out of their dorm rooms with a stack of burned DVDs filled with music. In fact, the more the RIAA attacks P2P, the more likely fans will simply migrate to these alternative channels.
So, short of ubiquitous surveillance (including hand-to-hand swapping), stopping fans from sharing music is doomed to failure.
Isn't it about time we start focusing on the real question: how do we ensure that artists and rights holders get adequately compensated for the unrestrained copying that is an inevitable fact of digital life?
Congressman Pushes Back on Administration's Dangerous Spying Bill
Posted by Derek SlaterFresh off announcing hearings on the NSA spying program, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Silvestre Reyes authored this Washington Post editorial criticizing the Administration and rebutting its call for expanded surveillance powers.
"The congressional testimony this month by former deputy attorney general James Comey called into question the accuracy of everything I had heard before about the so-called Terrorist Surveillance Program. According to Comey, in the spring of 2004 President Bush authorized a program of domestic surveillance even though his acting attorney general was so concerned about the surveillance that he could not in good faith "certify its legality."
"That the program didn't comply with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) was not a shock. We have known that fact since the program's existence was disclosed in December 2005. What was shocking was the amount of dissent, even within the president's own Justice Department, about the perils of ignoring FISA."
Google CEO: We Want All Your Personal Information
Posted by Derek SlaterGoogle can already collect and store a staggering amount of personal information - search queries, email records, copies of hard drives' contents, personal calendars, and much more. Collecting these records alone can paint a vivid picture of a user's most private interests and concerns, but apparently Google's just getting started.
In a recent interview, CEO Eric Schmidt stated that "We cannot even answer the most basic questions because we don?t know enough about you. That is the most important aspect of Google?s expansion." It's no secret that Google -- and, in fact, other search engines as well -- are interested in expanding the private data they collect, but this article puts the company's plans in especially plain terms.
Expansion of data collection must be matched with more expansive privacy protections both by businesses and the law. The FTC is looking into the Google-DoubleClick merger, which has raised concerns that too much information will be under one roof. Google recently decided to delete key information in its server logs that could be used to link particular users to records of their search queries, but, as we noted at the time, this is only a first step in the right direction.
UM Student-Musician on the RIAA?s Strong Arm Tactics
Posted by Hugh D'AndradeCheck out Jacob Loeb's excellent editorial railing against the RIAA's misguided student shakedown campaign. A student at the University of Maine and a drummer in a local band, Loeb does a great job of articulating the problem and suggesting solutions.
The RIAA?s campaign against college students ? who spend billions on music and movie content each year ? raises serious questions about whether lawsuits are the best way to address concerns about piracy. Commercial piracy is against the law and it is wrong. But instead of educating consumers and providing students with the digital content they want, thus reducing demand for pirated content, the RIAA tries to bully its way onto college campuses, and the University of Maine admirably refused to play along. The university has said it will notify students of the ["pre-litigation"] letters [sent to alleged filesharers], but will not serve as an agent of the RIAA by actively serving their legal papers to its students.
The University of Maine is among several schools that are resisting the RIAA?s strong-arm tactics. Take action to support an end to the P2P lawsuits, and read our "pre-litigation" letter FAQ for students.
Exporting Bad IP Laws Through Free Trade Agreements
Posted by Gwen HinzeSouth Korea has just signed a bilateral free trade agreement with the U.S. that will put severe restrictions on its ability to innovate. This is exactly the kind of arrangement that James Surowiecki, author of The Wisdom of Crowds, wrote about in the May 14 issue of the New Yorker magazine.
Recent U.S. trade agreements with the developing world, says Surowiecki, do more than regulate trade and tariffs ? they export stringent U.S. copyright and patent laws as well:
The U.S., in its negotiations, insists on a one-size-fits-all approach: stronger rules are better. But accepting a diverse range of I.P. rules makes more sense, especially in light of the different economic challenges that developing and developed countries face? [D]eveloping countries, being poorer, obviously have more to gain from shorter patent terms for foreign innovations, since that facilitates the spread of new technology and the diffusion of ideas. Tellingly, this is the approach the U.S. takes when it comes to labor standards, arguing that we shouldn?t impose developed-country standards on developing countries. But in the case of intellectual property the government?s position is exactly the opposite. The only difference, it seems, is whose interests are at stake.
In exchange for the promise of increased access to U.S. agricultural and textile markets, U.S. trading partners are being required to rewrite their IP laws. For instance, the last nine U.S. free trade agreements signed since 2002 have required trading partners to adopt the U.S./ EU copyright term of life of the creator plus 70 years, create laws banning the circumvention of DRM (or technological protection measures) modeled very precisely on the controversial DMCA, and to treat temporary reproductions of copyrighted works (such as in computer memory) as copyright infringement. The FTAs also require trading partners to broaden their patent laws. The Central American Free Trade Agreement also required extended protection of test data, seemingly directed at precluding registration of generic pharmaceuticals.
Unfortunately, the FTAs have efficiently harmonized U.S. normative standards without exporting the accompanying exceptions and limitations in U.S. law that provide a crucial balance between private and public interests. As a result, the FTAs require U.S. trading partners to adopt lop-sided legal regimes that do not serve the best interests of their citizens. Lop-sided regimes are likely to increase the costs of accessing information needed for development, and drive up the prices of desperately needed medicines in poor countries.
Surowieki?s piece comes at a very interesting time. In 2002, Congress voted by a slim margin to re-grant ?fast track? authority to the Office of the US Trade Representative (USTR). It?s the ?fast track? authority under the Trade Promotion Act that allows the USTR to negotiate these agreements and speed them through Congress on an expedited timetable with an up-or-down vote. However, that authority will expire on June 30 of this year, unless it is renewed by Congress - something that seems increasingly likely, despite the series of highly controversial FTAs, after the recent Bipartisan Deal on labor, environmental and patent issues in U.S. trade policy.
We will be posting more detailed analysis of the South Korea - U.S. free trade agreement's IP provisions shortly.
Major League Baseball Rattles Sabre at Slingbox
Posted by Fred von LohmannWe've all heard about the Slingbox, the innovative product that lets you enjoy the TV you've paid for from where ever you might be. Well, here's what Michael Mellis, senior VP and general counsel for Major League Baseball Advanced Media (MLBAM), had to say about the Slingbox in this week's issue of The Hollywood Reporter Esq. [sorry, subscribers only], a weekly for entertainment industry legal eagles:
"Of course, what they are doing is not legal," he said. We and other leagues have formed a group to study the issue and plan our response. A lot depends on ongoing discussions. Plus, there's no guarantee that Slingbox will be around next year. It's a startup."
Apparently MLBAM is upset because a Slingbox might allow baseball fans to "circumvent geographical boundaries written into broadcast rights deals" (read: watch games that are blacked out in their area). The argument appears to be that watching games remotely, even games you've paid to watch and that are not blacked out at home, violates the contractual fine print that comes with those cable and satellite sports packages that the fans are buying.
In other words, MLBAM thinks that it's against the law for baseball fans who have paid for premium sports packages to watch while away from home.
Yes, once again, the fans who are paying their bills are treated like the enemy.
This should sound familiar: an entertainment company targeting an innovator by arguing that otherwise law-abiding fans who use its products are thieves for doing so. This same argument was leveled at ReplayTV and XM's Inno recorder.
As usual, the "content owner" here appears to believe that innovation should be halted until paranoid fears can be allayed (read: until the innovator pays MLBAM and redesigns the product to its specifications).
