If their patent becomes a standard, it's just more profit for them.
If their patent becomes a standard, then their "monopoly" doesn't violate various trade laws. They've been pushing their patented technology in a number of different standards arenas (i.e. the MPEG-21 rights language is based on an M$ patent).
And I agree that they really don't play well in those groups. In each group where I've encountered them I've seen them threaten to pull out when things don't go their way. It's an amazing phenomenon that an ego can be collective. Makes me want to shout at folks in Redmond "Don't drink the water!"
If they were serious about that they'd create a tiny computer center in each village and instead of sending rickshaws around, send teachers instead.
There are a few barriers, from what I understand. One is communications lines, which don't exist in many of the rural areas. The other is that many rural Indians speak only a local dialect which isn't found on the Internet. It is possible that the tech support that goes along with the rickshaw also provides some translation facilities to help people make use of the Net. A group in Delhi called Radiophony is proposing using the Internet for voice communications (p2p or radio-like) in India to overcome the language barrier. This same group works on voice software for the disabled, and wrote the voice synthesizer software for Stephen Hawking. The idea is that voice is a more universal medium than text.
No, they don't have to give the key to an untrusted party. What they do today is give the key to a piece of software that is itself encrypted. That's how Adobe PDF and various other secure document formats work. The transaction that takes your credit card number and prepares a file for you to download reads a hardware ID off of your machine (CPU, usually, but can be the hard drive or something else). The encrypted file that you have received also has an encrypted version of the key that opens it, but that key will only work if it finds the matching hardware ID on the machine it is on.
The Adobe PDF format was hacked (remember the Russian programmer who came to DefCon to explain how it did it and ended up in a US jail?), but not because users got the key... the encryption wasn't terribly strong and Sklyarov figured out how to open the files without a key.
You can join the
Freedom to Read Foundation, which is a non-profit associated with ALA that takes on issues of censorship (including censorship by copyright). Or you can donate to the Frank Zappa Memorial Fund, which goes to the FTRF, as set up in Zappa's will.
The real problem... ok, one problem of many, is that we are still typing every letter when in fact there is very high predictability in our language that makes shorthand feasible. And speeds things up. There is now software that takes the output from a court reporter's shorthand (see the keyboard) and expands it out to full words. And the first thing that we all learned in programming is the vowels are pretty much unnecessary.
Oh, and another thing, I am NOT recommending an expansion of the autocorrect function in M$ Word. Surely we can do better than that.
Gutenberg is an active project that's both becoming succesful, and demonstrates that people are out there trying to make an active effort to benefit from existing law.
Actually, PG is the proof that your politicians would use to show that works in the public domain do not contribute to the economy. PG runs on the stringy-est of shoe strings, depends on volunteer labor, and gives stuff away for free! What could be less productive? (from an economic standpoint)
LaMona
Project Gutenberg: Free as in Free Beer, but without the beer.
At the recent annual conference of the American Library Association, comics were being displayed in the exhibit hall alongside the traditional booksellers. There are serious discussions in the library world about the role of comics and graphic novels in reaching out to the reluctant reader, and similar discussions about comics in school curricula. So there are at least some folks who believe that comics can be part of a literacy program.
kc
Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside a dog, it's too dark to read. - Groucho Marx
Unfortunately, Doctorow doesn't understand how DRM works when he says:
DRM systems are broken in minutes, sometimes days. Rarely,
months. It's not because the people who think them up are stupid.
It's not because the people who break them are smart. It's not
because there's a flaw in the algorithms. At the end of the day,
all DRM systems share a common vulnerability: they provide their
attackers with ciphertext, the cipher and the key. At this point,
the secret isn't a secret anymore.
Actual systems have gone beyond this for years by providing keys that are tied to a hardware ID (CPU ID, usually), which means that the key is not given to the user, it's given to the hardware. The payload file has the key to open the key file, and the key file always checks the hardware ID before allowing the payload file to obtain its key. Doctorow is correct that encryption alone does not do you any good when the recipient of the key is the potential attacker. But folks selling digital resources figured that out a long time ago. For a primer on DRM techniques (aimed at a non-techie audience, but it looks like Doctorow qualifies) see http://www.kcoyle.net/drm_basics.pdf that is from a talk I gave at the Library of Congress.
DRM has nothing to do with copyright law. It has to do with usage restrictions, which copyright law is pretty much silent on (being about copying, logically enough). Even such benign statements as those in the CreativeCommons license are not statements of copyright law. Licenses are agreements between private parties -- law is public rule. Check out the taxonomy of Rights Languages at the Library of Congress site for an idea of how rights are expressed as contracts and control mechanisms.
Note that M$ recently partnered with Time-Warner to purchase ContentGuard (previously owned by Xerox and M$ jointly). ContentGuard holds that patents on DRM that M$ will use when its DRM-enabled OS is in place. Who will that OS benefit? Big media companies, who are currently holding off on distributing their content in digital form because they fear piracy. So your guess about purchasing a media company looks like a good one. They're already forming the partnerships with those companies.
It's hard to believe that the folks at Kazaa (and DRMWatch) don't understand this, but essentially EVERYTHING on the net is copyrighted, at least according to U.S. law. Since 1976, copyright is automatically accorded to any work that is fixed. What that means is if you've written it down, recorded it, or typed it into a file, it is covered by copyright, whether you intend for that to be the case or not. And it stays copyrighted until 70 years after your death, whether you want it to or not, and only then does it enter the public domain.
What I assume that Kazaa means is that they will try to detect files that represent songs owned by recording companies and others who assert that they do not want their songs traded. Indies can just sit back and let your copyrighted files be traded by fans without fussing. But it's not a question of copyright, it's an assertion of ownership and a desire to enforce copyrights. And changing one frame or a few bits doesn't affect copyright, even though it could make automated detection difficult.
Slashdot Mirror
If their patent becomes a standard, then their "monopoly" doesn't violate various trade laws. They've been pushing their patented technology in a number of different standards arenas (i.e. the MPEG-21 rights language is based on an M$ patent).
And I agree that they really don't play well in those groups. In each group where I've encountered them I've seen them threaten to pull out when things don't go their way. It's an amazing phenomenon that an ego can be collective. Makes me want to shout at folks in Redmond "Don't drink the water!"
If they were serious about that they'd create a tiny computer center in each village and instead of sending rickshaws around, send teachers instead.
There are a few barriers, from what I understand. One is communications lines, which don't exist in many of the rural areas. The other is that many rural Indians speak only a local dialect which isn't found on the Internet. It is possible that the tech support that goes along with the rickshaw also provides some translation facilities to help people make use of the Net. A group in Delhi called Radiophony is proposing using the Internet for voice communications (p2p or radio-like) in India to overcome the language barrier. This same group works on voice software for the disabled, and wrote the voice synthesizer software for Stephen Hawking. The idea is that voice is a more universal medium than text.
No, they don't have to give the key to an untrusted party. What they do today is give the key to a piece of software that is itself encrypted. That's how Adobe PDF and various other secure document formats work. The transaction that takes your credit card number and prepares a file for you to download reads a hardware ID off of your machine (CPU, usually, but can be the hard drive or something else). The encrypted file that you have received also has an encrypted version of the key that opens it, but that key will only work if it finds the matching hardware ID on the machine it is on.
The Adobe PDF format was hacked (remember the Russian programmer who came to DefCon to explain how it did it and ended up in a US jail?), but not because users got the key... the encryption wasn't terribly strong and Sklyarov figured out how to open the files without a key.
Now watch this swing!
You can join the Freedom to Read Foundation, which is a non-profit associated with ALA that takes on issues of censorship (including censorship by copyright). Or you can donate to the Frank Zappa Memorial Fund, which goes to the FTRF, as set up in Zappa's will.
The real problem ... ok, one problem of many, is that we are still typing every letter when in fact there is very high predictability in our language that makes shorthand feasible. And speeds things up. There is now software that takes the output from a court reporter's shorthand (see the keyboard) and expands it out to full words. And the first thing that we all learned in programming is the vowels are pretty much unnecessary.
Oh, and another thing, I am NOT recommending an expansion of the autocorrect function in M$ Word. Surely we can do better than that.
Now watch this swing.
Actually, PG is the proof that your politicians would use to show that works in the public domain do not contribute to the economy. PG runs on the stringy-est of shoe strings, depends on volunteer labor, and gives stuff away for free! What could be less productive? (from an economic standpoint)
LaMona
Project Gutenberg: Free as in Free Beer, but without the beer.
At the recent annual conference of the American Library Association, comics were being displayed in the exhibit hall alongside the traditional booksellers. There are serious discussions in the library world about the role of comics and graphic novels in reaching out to the reluctant reader, and similar discussions about comics in school curricula. So there are at least some folks who believe that comics can be part of a literacy program.
kc
Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside a dog, it's too dark to read. - Groucho Marx
Unfortunately, Doctorow doesn't understand how DRM works when he says:
Actual systems have gone beyond this for years by providing keys that are tied to a hardware ID (CPU ID, usually), which means that the key is not given to the user, it's given to the hardware. The payload file has the key to open the key file, and the key file always checks the hardware ID before allowing the payload file to obtain its key. Doctorow is correct that encryption alone does not do you any good when the recipient of the key is the potential attacker. But folks selling digital resources figured that out a long time ago. For a primer on DRM techniques (aimed at a non-techie audience, but it looks like Doctorow qualifies) see http://www.kcoyle.net/drm_basics.pdf that is from a talk I gave at the Library of Congress.
kc
DRM has nothing to do with copyright law. It has to do with usage restrictions, which copyright law is pretty much silent on (being about copying, logically enough). Even such benign statements as those in the CreativeCommons license are not statements of copyright law. Licenses are agreements between private parties -- law is public rule. Check out the taxonomy of Rights Languages at the Library of Congress site for an idea of how rights are expressed as contracts and control mechanisms.
Note that M$ recently partnered with Time-Warner to purchase ContentGuard (previously owned by Xerox and M$ jointly). ContentGuard holds that patents on DRM that M$ will use when its DRM-enabled OS is in place. Who will that OS benefit? Big media companies, who are currently holding off on distributing their content in digital form because they fear piracy. So your guess about purchasing a media company looks like a good one. They're already forming the partnerships with those companies.
It's hard to believe that the folks at Kazaa (and DRMWatch) don't understand this, but essentially EVERYTHING on the net is copyrighted, at least according to U.S. law. Since 1976, copyright is automatically accorded to any work that is fixed. What that means is if you've written it down, recorded it, or typed it into a file, it is covered by copyright, whether you intend for that to be the case or not. And it stays copyrighted until 70 years after your death, whether you want it to or not, and only then does it enter the public domain.
What I assume that Kazaa means is that they will try to detect files that represent songs owned by recording companies and others who assert that they do not want their songs traded. Indies can just sit back and let your copyrighted files be traded by fans without fussing. But it's not a question of copyright, it's an assertion of ownership and a desire to enforce copyrights. And changing one frame or a few bits doesn't affect copyright, even though it could make automated detection difficult.