Intellectual Property

Sony BMG recently settled the class-action lawsuit brought by EFF over their DRM-rootkit fiasco. If you purchased one of the 113 CDs that were affected, you’re probably eligible for some combination of cash payment, replacement CD and/or free music download. Just click here or on the image to the right for details.

MP3.com has the skinny on battery life for portable music players, with this little gem on how much decoding the DRM on purchased music costs you:

Take, for instance, the critically acclaimed Creative Zen Vision:M, with a rated battery life of up to 14 hours for audio and 4 hours for video. CNET tested it at nearly 16 hours, with MP3s–impressive indeed. Upon playing back only WMA subscription tracks, the Vision:M scored at just more than 12 hours. That’s a loss of almost 4 hours, and you haven’t even turned the backlight on yet.

We found similar discrepancies with other PlaysForSure players. The Archos Gmini 402 Camcorder maxed out at 11 hours, but with DRM tracks, it played for less than 9 hours. The iRiver U10, with an astounding life of about 32 hours, came in at about 27 hours playing subscription tracks. Even the iPod, playing back only FairPlay AAC tracks, underperformed MP3s by about 8 percent.

In other words, you pay between 8 and 25% of your battery life for the privilege of not being able to listen to your music where ever you want… now that’s customer service!

(Thanks to Nerfduck for the link!)

Update 3/23/06: Some folks are pointing out that comparing WMA or AAC format with DRM to MP3 isn’t a fair test since it conflates the effect of DRM with the effect of the format itself (a fair test would be to compare WMA with DRM to the same files without DRM). And Ed Felten at Freedom to Tinker comments that regardless of whether the test compares apples to oranges, wouldn’t it be nice if we could choose which fruit we wanted to eat?

Check out Bound By Law: Tales from the public domain, a comic about fair use and copyright in documentary filmmaking written by a cartoonist, a columnist and a filmmaker, all of whom also happen to be law professors specializing in intellectual property. Available for free download or paper-book purchase, and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license.

(Link via Dr. Wex at Copyfight.)

Ed Felton has just posted a new policy statement on DRM from the U.S. public policy committee of the ACM, the main professional society for computer science. (The ACM has also posted the policy in PDF form.) Looks like a good set of recommendations — the highlights are that no specific DRM should be legally mandated and that DRM should be used to enforce existing copyrights, to assert new legal rights or to interfere with consumer behavior that’s unrelated to the copyrighted items being managed. Though not named specifically, those two points sound like a pretty clear condemnation of the Broadcast Flag and the anti-circumvention clauses of the DMCA.

DocBug exclusive: Anheuser-Busch, the owner of the popular American beer brands Budweiser and Bud Light, is suing the Disney-owned ABC television network for copyright violation after ABC’s broadcast of ads for the two beers during this year’s Superbowl. In a statement, Anheuser-Busch lawyers said the fact that the disputed segments were ads for their own products did not excuse ABC’s behavior, nor did fact that Anheuser-Busch had paid $26 million to have them aired. “We have to protect our content,” explained one executive.

ABC executives said they could not comment on ongoing litigation, but that they were considering filing a similar suit against themselves for the broadcasts of ads for Desperate Housewives and Lost during the game.

(Thanks to Wendy Seltzer for something resembling the link.)

The news last week was that the Vatican is now enforcing their copyright on the Pope’s writings, including ex-cathedra pronouncements which according to Church doctrine are written “with the assistance of the Holy Spirit”.

Which to me just begs the question: who owns the copyright on these pronouncements anyway, the Pope or the Holy Spirit? Was this a work for hire?

The “balanced intellectual-property policy” advocacy group IPac has a new campaign to educate senators about media in the Internet Age by sending them iPods:

Last week, the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation held a hearing on the “Broadcast Flag” and “Audio Flag,” a set of proposals by the MPAA and RIAA that would stifle innovation by giving content holders a virtual veto over new technologies and existing user rights.

But Senator Stevens, the 82-year old committee chairman from Alaska, surprised the audience by announcing that his daughter had bought him an iPod, and suddenly Stevens had a much greater understanding of the many ways innovative technology can create choice for consumers. Content industry representatives at the hearing found themselves answering much tougher questions than they typically receive.

I’d thought this same thing when I first read about Senator Stevens, but figured it’d be illegal for Senators to accept the iPods as gifts. IPac’s FAQ says they’re donating these to the Senator’s campaign offices (for use in campaign-related activities) and so they get around the rules — whether the Senators will accept them given the current scrutiny over lobbying scandals is another question.

(Thanks to Amy for the link!)

The Free Software Foundation has posted a draft version of the new General Public License v3.0, and are soliciting comments. One thing that caught my eye is language intended to make it more difficult for people using GPLed code in DRM systems:

3. Digital Restrictions Management

As a free software license, this License intrinsically disfavors technical attempts to restrict users’ freedom to copy, modify, and share copyrighted works. Each of its provisions shall be interpreted in light of this specific declaration of the licensor’s intent. Regardless of any other provision of this license, no permission is given to distribute covered works that illegally invade users’ privacy, nor for modes of distribution that deny users that run covered works the full exercise of the legal rights granted by this License.

No covered work constitutes part of an effective technological protection measure: that is to say, distribution of a covered work as part of a system to generate or access certain data constitutes general permission at least for development, distribution and use, under this License, of other software capable of accessing the same data.

I gather the second paragraph is intended to grant specific permission to reverse-engineer and make derivative works under the DMCA. It’s an interesting tactic, but I’m not sure how often the licensor of the software (and thus the person granting general permission) would also own the copyright on the data being produced. If I make a DRM-enabled video-player and you break my crypto on the new Disney movie it’s playing, isn’t it Disney who’ll come after you under the DMCA? What difference does it make if you have my permission?

I just installed TurboTax Deluxe 2005 for the Mac (Intuit annoys me, but TaxCut discontinued their Mac version). Their installation program includes the following End-User Licence Agreement dialog-box::

Notice anything missing in this agreement that asks me to confirm that I’ve read and printed a copy? Like, say, a way to actually print the stupid thing? No print button, no menu items functioning, not even a way to resize the tiny window. About 20% of the way down (just below the part saying I agree to notify them promptly if my email address changes) is a note saying:

(f) Printing. You may print this document by clicking on the print button or by going to the TurboTax web site at www.turbotax.com to access and print a copy of it.

Of course, there’s no print button and no indication of where on their website this elusive copy of the EULA can be found (I eventually found the link in the fine print at the very bottom of their page).

And I’m trusting these guys with my taxes?

Random factoid of the day:

• Average time between filing a patent in the US and it being granted or abandoned, in 1995: 19.2 months.

• Average time in 2005: 29.1 months

• Year that, at current rates, patents will be pending for their entire 20-years-from-date-of-filing lifespan: 2198