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Comments on this petition should be sent to ICANN via the email address "cyber-safety-petition@icann.org" mailto:cyber-safety-petition@icann.org

Yarro's anti-porn crusaders are currently bombarding ICANN with form letters supporting this censorship initiative. See: http://forum.icann.org/lists/cyber-safety-petition/mail3.html

Here is more information on this issue from IP Justice and the Internet Governance Project: http://ipjustice.org/wp/2009/03/19/robert-yarro-and-his-anti-porn-crusaders-march-on-icann/ http://blog.internetgovernance.org/blog/_archives/2009/3/17/4125801.html

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• "ACTA" - a New Plurilateral Policy Platform

Ok games related stub, but i'm going to use karaoke as an example since that's what I work with.

Karaoke fair use is a subject of hot debate between singers, KJ's (Karaoke Jocks) and karaoke manufactuers. Basically guys like me (1 man shows) are considered "commercial". Therefore fair use doesn't apply to us. This whole argument extends not just to karaoke, but music and gaming as well.

Ok from the karaoke anti-piracy agency faq.
http://www.karaokeantipiracyagency.com/faq.html

Am I allowed to make a copy of my discs for archive purposes?
This is one of the most confusing issues involving copyrighted music. It is also one of the arguments often presented by those who want to break the copyright laws. This entire issue revolves around the definition of the class of copyrighted material. By law, you are permitted to make an archive copy of "Software" class copyrighted material. However, music (including Karaoke CDGs) is part of the "Phonorecord" class of copyrighted materials. Archive copies are not permitted in this class. So, no, you may not make an archive copy of your Karaoke discs.

Some of the most prominent karaoke companies want to see the practice of PC based karaoke outlawed. Doesn't matter if you're pirating or not.

Now for a counterpoint from an IP lawyer.
http://ipjustice.org/wp/2007/02/22/karaoke_legal_myths/
TRUTH: While a commercial use weighs against fair use, copyright law permits copying a CDG disc in a number of commercial circumstances. Commercial use, does not by itself, determine if it is an illegal use.

I'm all for a new law that promotes fair use, but the one question I have in mind is will it protect guys like me. Will fair use extend to both personal and "Commerical".

Wow 25 replies. I'm going to respond to anyone with a +3 score. Won't waste my time on the anons and trolls.

SomeJoel:
Agreed. I recently saw an episode of Boondocks last week that parodied this. The freeman family was at the theater, with camcorders. At the beggining was an MPAA commercial about piracy. It showed a little old lady getting mugged, and the caption "YOU'LL GET THE SAME PUNISHMENT FOR PIRACY AS YOU WOULD MUGGING A LADY!"

I thought to myself that wasn't cool at all. I agree, the punishment should be equal to the crime. Maybe for the folks making tons of $$$ it should be the same punishment as mugging, but for some 12yro kid, nah.

  Jugalator :
Perve :)

  kindbud:

Cool name :) Ok, lets play logic here. I own a house, and I know someone is running a meth lab, or storing stolen goods. Or let's say I know about a murder but don't say anything about it. Usenet.com knows what's on their servers, which as much as I love technology, I hate to say they're an accomplice.

E-mail is different. The messages aren't public.

These last few answers are for all the folks below +3.

Price: Karaoke costs more to license and has a thinner profit margin than the original songs do. I could put together a compilation CD of dance hits, and make way more money on that than I would "Karaoke dance hits" simply because more people just listen to music than karaoke. Karaoke is a small fish in a big pond.

Right for a business to transform media:
Refer to this article from IP Lawyer Robin Gross: http://ipjustice.org/wp/2007/02/22/karaoke_legal_myths/

Our business is failing:
Heh, stupid troll.
http://www.7bamboo.com/cms/?q=node/54
10 years best karaoke in the South SF bay area. I don't think so.

The "I don't like you for your $500b comment guy":
Hey, seriously, i'd hope our .gov would be smarter than that to waste all that money on combating karaoke piracy. I'd rather see things like they were in Clinton years.

Everyone else:
Thanks for reading, commenting.

--toqer

If, on the other hand, someone decides there's a market in altering DVDs and reselling them to you, the consumer, then that is different.

Geist:
there are many groups (EFF, CDT, Public Knowledge, ACLU, EPIC, IP Justice, etc) that work in the area.

Electronic Frontier Foundation

Center for Democracy & Technology

Public Knowledge

American Civil Liberties Union

Electronic Privacy Information Center

IP Justice

etc

The only way this comment has something to do with the story is it's copyright related. I guess it could be interesting.

Anyways, I run a karaoke show a few nights a week. For those that aren't familiar with karaoke, most of it is produced in a format called CDG. It's exactly the same as a regular audio CD, but the subcode section that is normally set aside for seeking and disk position has a few extra bits crammed onto it for the graphic display.

Fair use is there for audio CD's. We're allowed to copy them for backup or playback on an ipod. Because karaoke CDG's contain the lyrical video element, they are not considered purely an "Audio" CD.

http://www.ipjustice.org/karaokefairuse.shtml There is an article on IP justice that theorizes copying your own legitimate karaoke CDG's is legal. On the other end of the spectrum there is KAPA http://www.karaokeantipiracyagency.com/ who is trying to outlaw folks from copying their CDG's to their hard drives.

The place I work at, it was sort of a needed evil. Our DKK set of karaoke CDG's was over 10 years old, and DKK no longer produces CDG's. There was no way for us to get a replacement set at all. Through 10 years of use, the CDG's were damn near unusable, prompting us to spend a week using a disk doctor to polish up and recover what we could, and transfer them to the computer in mp3+g format.

I've been doing this since 2001, before that I was a sysadmin for 10 years or so. I read slash religiously so I'm pretty well informed from the multitude of YRO articles on copyright, as well as software licesning issues. I maintain a strict no piracy policy at the club because I know what could happen if we were found to be pirating.

I don't really care about googles copyright issues. As much as we all love google, personally I find what they're doing to be in the gray area of copyright. My issue with karaoke CDG's is something personal, and I hope other slashdotters can give me some advice or insight into anything that can be done so there is a clear definition in law that personal backup of ones CDG's is fair use, and covered under fair use laws.

--toqer

• First you need to find the tag. Few people have scanners at home, and more and more tags are non-obvious (to avoid shoplifting by removing the tag in the store.) This is the current big problem.
• What happens if the tag is part of the product? Interesting you mention boots -- one of the first products to ship with embedded tags is likely to be sneakers. The tags will be in the soles of the shoes, no way to get 'em out without ruining the sneaker. Tags can be part of molded plastic (like the car keys that ship with them right now) so they'll also be in the handle of your toothbrush, not stuck on top of it and easy to remove. This is the coming big problem.
• Tag removal may eventually become illegal. A Proposed European Union IP Enforcement Directive failed, but had a small clause that citizens were not legally allowed to remove tags because -- I love this part -- it would violate the intellectual property rights of the manufacturers. See http://www.ipjustice.org/CODE/codewhitepaper.shtml #Ib3

This is going to be a big fight - no idea where it will end. Thus far, no one has a good solution for consumer privacy. A few things have been tried.

• The Metro group in Germany pledged to disable all tags at the point of sale. Turns out they didn't. But who knew, right? You take your purchase to a counter, the clerk waves something at it and tells you the tag is off, and you go on your way. Only, their system was broken. This points out that to have an effective assurance of privacy, consumers need a way to be able to check for themselves.
• Blocker tags (http://www.rsasecurity.com/rsalabs/node.asp?id=20 60) not only don't work in practice yet, they won't work for many sorts of tags. Blocker tags are only effective against specific types of tag communication protocols. That may be good enough, but I'm not yet convinced. I'm taking a wait-and-see approach here. I think the right people are working on it, though, and I expect they'll eventually come up with something that at least helps.
• Ari Juels came up with the most serious proposal I've seen, "A bit of privacy," http://www.rfidjournal.com/article/articleview/153 6/1/133/ IMHO, the solution won't work. It depends on everyone behaving and following the spec, but doesn't enforce good behavior. However, if he's able to lobby for changes to the EPC spec, perhaps a solution like this will eventually come to market. I figure that's five to ten years at best.

I fount a "Proposal for a DIRECTIVE OF THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT AND OF THE COUNCIL on measures and procedures to ensure the enforcement of intellectual property rights", I don't think it has been approved yet, but it gives companies in the member states these kind of enforcement rights.

I hope this will not be made into a directive, it goes against so many individual rights.

I feel your pain! Skip to the top ten reasons why the rules are teh suck. It gave me that instant "god i hate lawyers" feeling that I find so comforting these days.

I wonder, will they get sued by David Letterman for having a top 10 list?

Anyway, the link in the headline doesn't link directoy to the top 10 list.

Gotta love #2: It defies the Laws of Physics.

In most countries, sharing even one copy of a file over a p2p network is not fair dealing/fair use. Over IRC, however, if you know the person at the other end, it might be.

The story in Canada is different. The law at this precise moment appears to be that almost all p2p sharing is legal because of the levies you pay on blank CDs, iPods, etc.

Your government is about to change that and make file sharing illegal, unless you do something about it.

Actually, the answers weren't as hard to google as I thought. Italy approved the EUCD (EU Copyright Directive) on March 28, 2003. The EUCD was based on US's DMCA, and includes a similar Take-Down clause. So it seems pretty clear that nobody at Google would be jailed as long as they complied with take-down notices.

Not necessarily. At some point, they're going to start using tamper resistant hardware. Good luck mod-chipping that. The only hole you can actually count on, is digital-to-analogue-to-digital conversion, to get data out of your "trusted" box and into an ordinary computer. That might be fine for ebook pirates, but it's going to be one hell of a PITA for daily life.

Rather than planning to spend tens or hundreds of hours on work-arounds when this happens, it would make sense to donate tens or hundreds of hours of your wages to the EFF or similar organisations which are working to prevent this problem from prevailing in the first place.

That's all. Nowhere is mentioned who shall take the measures. But since raids by companies would be unconstitutional in all member states the 'raid by companies' bit was pulled out of the editor's ass.

FFII is a strong supporter of copyright and also is not against the scope of the directive, there are other more fundamental critics like IPjustice and so many other groups that helped to get the DRM out of it. FFII was quite a long time not very concerned about the directive as the patents were taken out, but now they are in again.

The problem from the FFII and industry side is: the directive mixes up different intellectual property rights and let stricter enforcement targeted to product privacy apply for patents as well. Given the fact that patent infrigements are usually not-intented and patents are usually more fuzzy defined this is totally inappropriate. The industry and FFII fear that the directive messes up the EU legal system. So to speak a free Kalschnikow to patent privateers.

See detailed information about FFII's position here. And don't discuss short quotes.

You misunderstood the case. This IPR Enforcement directive is NOT about the legal validity of software patents. The software patents directive was corrected by the EU parliament in September and is is going to be "recorrected" by the council, so the main focus of FFII laid on this.
SO FFII and all the others (AEL, EF Finland ecc.) defend the current corrected former swpat directive.

The IRP enforcement directive is about enforcement, giving power to the rights owner, orginally against product privacy some persons introduced DRM, TCPA ecc. This was already removed. The problem is as so many different spheres of law are comprised by the unscientific, unjudicial term Intellectual property rules that apply well for product privacy cause much trouble for patent enforcement. FFII UK explains this very good on their site.

There are several groups that critizise the directive, FFII has a moderate position as they are in favour of copyright. I suggest you to read the current council draft of the directive by yourself and look for problems. You can easily see in the proposal that it is premature. The language used is often inappropriate and infringes on certain legal standards.

Good news: DRM and TCPA was deleted, most groups were concerned about this, so the directive already failed from the viewpoint of those who drafted it. We won! So let's get rid of the ugly rest.

"Article 21
Legal protection of technical devices

Deleted"

But this does not mean that it will not be reintroduced by MEP amendments ecc. Criticism of the directive goes trough all parlamentary groups.

What FFII wants get out is that the directive also apply for patent legislation. Because patent infringements are very easy and criminal sanctions against patent legislation may be a danger for business. This is also the industry position. FFII is no mayor player in the IPR Enforcement debate. Most was done by IPjustice or other DRM activists. FFII was very busy with the swpat directive, so they could not devote time to the IPr enforcement directive or ENISA.

Sorry, but he's got the EUCD, which is like the DMCA but without any exceptions. Hopefully this law is so bad that it will be laughed out by judges, but I've been waiting for that to happen to the DMCA for about 5 years now, and I keep waiting...

Sorry, but he's got the EUCD, which is like the DMCA but without any exceptions. Hopefully this law is so bad that it will be laughed out by judges, but I've been waiting for that to happen to the DMCA for about 5 years now, and I keep waiting...

The EUCD (european union copyright directive) is even more restrictive than the DMCA, so there are less places to hack freely. good article and another. Makes me long for the days I did my hacking in deepest darkest Peru (ok, Lima wasn't deep and only dark in the wintertime)

this is misleading.

according to the complaint filed against him he was charged with vilolating section 145.2 of the Norweigan criminal statute "which outlaws bypassing technological restrictions to access data that one is not entitled to access."

according to the criminal complaint he was charged with accessing the master key, the master key list, as well as the contents of a protected disk.

the question is whether the master key, and the master key list, which are intentionally encrypted, can be considered as data he is not "entitled to access."

to say he is being prosecuted for "accessing his own property" is simply shrill hyperbole.

despite the confidence expressed by his lawyer, his case is not so clear cut.

Hey, I'm a fan of the capitalist ethos as much as the next guy, but when it comes to the interests of the populous it's clearly more responsible to choose open source and open standards. Should we really trust Our Data to invisible source code written by anonymous programmers ensconced in a proprietary bubble?

I guess we shouldn't be so surprised that the elite don't have the interests of the populous at heart. Hmm, maybe there's a worm in the Capitalist apple.... It's time the Open Source Community made it clear that we are an essential element of the free market ecosystem and not some fringe element to be vilified and marginalized.

On march 28th, italy implemented the EU copyright directive, which is modeled after the DMCA, but with fewer exemptions. All 15 EU members were supposed to adopt this by last december, but only a handful of countries have done it yet. The UK just became the sixth to adopt.

How did I get so interested in the DMCA? I recently interfaced the Ritz disposable digital camera to my computer, and didn't like how the DMCA has been used to stifle competition.

Text of the EUCD (eu copyright directive)

On march 28th, italy implemented the EU copyright directive, which is modeled after the DMCA, but with fewer exemptions. All 15 EU members were supposed to adopt this by last december, but only a handful of countries have done it yet. The UK just became the sixth to adopt.

How did I get so interested in the DMCA? I recently interfaced the Ritz disposable digital camera to my computer, and didn't like how the DMCA has been used to stifle competition.

Text of the EUCD (eu copyright directive)

The American backlash against the filesharing suits seems to be gaining steam (Stop RIAA Lawsuits Coalition), I wonder if the same will start happening down under as they crack down.

At some point, there needs to be a global citizen response to a global entertainment industry. The corporations are using all the tactics they have available in each country and consumers should do the same. The laws they're trying to cram into the FTAA are on a new level.

"The draft intellectual property rights chapter in the FTAA Agreement vastly expands criminal procedures and penalties against intellectual property infringements throughout the Americas... One clause would require countries to send non-commercial infringers such as Peer-to-Peer (P2P) file-sharers to prison. It is estimated that 60 million Americans use file-sharing software in the US alone." -From a new report by ipjustice.org.

its called THE STORY

what now people don't even know there is an A to RTFA!?

• Ip Justice
• EFF

The software patents directive has been voted on Sep. 23rd ; however the amendments proposed by the FFII have pretty much all gone in, transforming the directive into an anti-software-patents directive. The whole procedure isn't over yet but a little optimism is ok :)

You are wrong... patents is not the same as copyright. But there is a directive project too about Itellectual Property which will be DMCA equivalent in Europe. In Spain they are trying to approve an even more harmful version of that directive, something much alike DMCA. If you are interested you can read: IP Justice.

The not-for-profit organization IP Justice has a great summary of the isssue up at www.ipjustice.org and a collection of useful links here.

Take a look. They also oppose the Directive on software patents.

http://www.ipjustice.org/081103codepress.shtml

"If this proposal becomes a reality, major companies from abroad can use 'intellectual property' regulations to gain control over the lives of ordinary European citizens and threaten digital freedoms", said Andy Muller-Maguhn.

http://www.ipjustice.org/ipenforcewhitepaper.shtml

---
:-) Please also look at the evidence of anti-conspiracy conspiracy theory:
discussion: sept 11 (WTC 2001)
issued by EUC at January 30 2003(Hitler's takeover of power 1933)

http://www.ipjustice.org/081103codepress.shtml

"If this proposal becomes a reality, major companies from abroad can use 'intellectual property' regulations to gain control over the lives of ordinary European citizens and threaten digital freedoms", said Andy Muller-Maguhn.

http://www.ipjustice.org/ipenforcewhitepaper.shtml

---
:-) Please also look at the evidence of anti-conspiracy conspiracy theory:
discussion: sept 11 (WTC 2001)
issued by EUC at January 30 2003(Hitler's takeover of power 1933)

I don't think that's exactly what was meant. The idea is more along the lines of "just because I can copy it for free doesn't mean that the creator shouldn't be compensated. If somebody creates a work that adds value to society then they should be compensated.

I actually just posted the bullet-headlines of the principles. The full second principle (available here) includes "We will compensate artists who entertain and enlighten us with their art..."

Hopefully that helps. :) If I could just set my pet monkey loose on my computer for a few days and call that "creation" then I'd be set for money forever. Too bad value does count.

• We reserve the right to control our individual experience of intellectual property.
• Creators deserve to be compensated.
• We reserve our right to make private copies of lawfully acquired intellectual property.
• Technology and information that enable the exercise of rights should be lawful.
• "Copy Rights" come with "Copy Responsibilities."

Robin Gross, previously the staff attourney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation has founded a new group named IPJustice. I suspect it's still getting it's feet since it's so new, but it will hopefully be able to do to IP abuses what the EFF does for online/free speech/etc issues.

Robin Gross, previously the staff attourney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation has founded a new group named IPJustice. I suspect it's still getting it's feet since it's so new, but it will hopefully be able to do to IP abuses what the EFF does for online/free speech/etc issues.

Here is a link to their site:

IP Justice