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Adobe Uses DMCA On Protocol It Promised To Open
An anonymous reader writes "Despite promising in January to open RTMP, Adobe has issued a DMCA take down request for an open source implementation of the protocol. The former SourceForge project page for rtmpdump now reports 'Invalid Project.' rtmpdump has been used in tools such as get_iplayer and get-flash-videos. Adobe is no stranger to the DMCA, having previously used it against Dmitry Sklyarov."
Next time, before you open source developers get a hardon for the latest "Open" thing, read the fine print.
Just because something says "open" doesn't mean it is so. And just because some press release says "giving developers access", it doesn't mean they are giving it to you.
Why don't they do what they say, say what they mean?
MySQL have in the past (not sure about their current stance on it) said that any application implementing the MySQL client protocol is required to either have a commercial license, or be licensed under the GPL as they consider the protocol itself to be part of MySQL and thus under copyright.
How can a copyright law be used to take down a protocol implementation?
Ask The Tetris Company. It thinks it owns the exclusive right to make video games that incorporate falling shapes made of four square segments.
That would only be a trademark issue, not a copyright infringement.
My understanding: Under the DMCA, you can be in trouble for possessing technologies that could be used to circumvent technological protections on copyrighted material So it's not that the technology itself is copyrighted, it's probably that it's part of a copyright protection scheme and thus falls under DMCA.
The EFF's account of the Skylarov case (which is instructive and chilling) is fully documented here.
How can a copyright law be used to take down a protocol implementation? What copyrights were infringed? This would normally fall under patent law.
It's not copyright law, it's the anti-circumvention provision. The reference RTMP implements various restrictions that the content provider can specify, for instance, marking it as streaming only. The open-source version, however, did not implement those restrictions and was, in fact, used in various projects whose entire purpose was to download media marked only as streamed -- get_iPlayer being the most notorious as used to rip BBC content.
You get get the rtmpdump v1.5a source here, although this is not the latest version. AFAIK v1.6 was the last version to be released but it seems to have disappeared from the Web, even on non-sourceforge-affiliated sites.
jdb2
Is this really that surprising? Adobe's press release when they announced the RTMP spec even says, "To benefit customers who want to protect their content, the open RTMP specification will not include Adobeâ(TM)s unique secure RTMP measures, nor will the license that accompanies the specification allow developers to circumvent such measures."
So wasn't the takedown notice sent because they circumvented what the license said they couldn't?
Games (and video games) are explicitly protected by a special kind of design patent. This is what protects the rules and pieces of Monopoly, Scrabble, Risk, and so on. Their look and feel are protected by trademark, and their specific designs by copyright.
Tetris is likewise protected by design patents, trademarks, and copyright.
However only the copyright aspect can fall under the Digital Millenium Copyright Act.
My blog
sf.net may have taken it down, but the other sites are still up and running. Here are some download links:
get-flash-videos
index of rtpdump-1.3a, including source rpms
download page for getiplayer
linux/unix tarball
The project is down here google cache still up.
Does sourceforge (slashdot's partner site) publish DMCA requests to chilling effects. Allow, I am highly disappointed that it just says "Invalid project" instead of saying that it was removed per the DMCA. Learn something from google sourceforge!
You should be correct is 12USC1201 (et seq) referred to a product but actually, the statutes refers to technological measures. The no-copy-bit in the stream itself is not a product, but definitely a measure.
For the purposes of the DMCA, the measure itself "lives" inside the stream itself, not in the product meant to interpret that stream. A product is conformant if it does not circumvents (aka, respects) that measure and is in violation if it circumvents (aka, does not respect) that measure.
For instance, DeCSS does not circumvent the region-coding of DVD players, it simply implements the CSS algorithm in a way that circumvents the region-coding restriction (which is a "measure that effective controls access to a copyrighted work").
"Correct me if I'm wrong"
Ok. You're wrong. PDF is an Adobe proprietary format. There are other readers because (as I noted above) they publish enough spec to let you write readers. Acrobat Reader is the canonical reader implementation, and other Acrobat products are the canonical software for writing PDF.
Because there are other readers, and because those readers presumably don't know whatever magic incantation makes Acrobat Reader recognize linearization (which is a not an extension but rather is a core part of the spec), you could write PDF-producing software that might work 100% well with those other readers. But in the corporate world, that's not good enough; when a business publishes something as PDF, it needs to work wtih Acrobat.