A man walks past a display of Sony's products near its headquarters in Tokyo May 14, 2009. Sony Corp promised on Thursday to halve this year's losses, but the electronics to entertainment giant's better-than-expected outlook offered little solace to markets vexed by glum U.S. retail sales. REUTERS/Kim Kyung-Hoon (JAPAN BUSINESS)(Credit: Reuters)
I go out of my way not to buy products from Sony. I occasionally regret this because some of Sony’s hardware is best-of-breed. But there are alternatives, and I do my best to find them, because Sony is Exhibit A in the abuse of intellectual-property laws by corporations that believe they have all the rights — including how products may be used after sale — with users and purchasers having no rights at all.
In the latest case, as the Electronic Frontier Foundation explains, Sony has sued computer security researchers:
for publishing information about security holes in Sony’s PlayStation 3. At first glance, it’s hard to see why Sony is bothering — after all, the research was presented three weeks ago at the Chaos Communication Congress and promptly circulated around the world. The security flaws discovered by the researchers allow users to run Linux on their machines again — something Sony used to support but recently started trying to prevent. Paying lawyers to try to put the cat back in the bag is just throwing good money after bad. And even if they won — we’ll save the legal analysis for another post — the defendants seem unlikely to be able to pay significant damages. So what’s the point?
The real point, it appears, is to send a message to security researchers around the world: publish the details of our security flaws and we’ll come after you with both barrels blazing. For example, Sony has asked the court to immediately impound all “circumvention devices” — which it defines to include not only the defendants’ computers, but also all “instructions,” i.e., their research and findings. Given that the research results Sony presumably cares about are available online, granting the order would mean that everyone except the researchers themselves would have access to their work.
It’s not just an abuse of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which (to be fair) was designed to be abused. Among other freedom-limiting provisions, the DMCA makes it illegal to circumvent digital restrictions that companies put into their products to prevent you using them the way you see fit. The Library of Congress has granted some exceptions, including permission to jailbreak mobile phones like Apple’s iPhone, but the exceptions mean that the vast majority of electronic products really belong to the companies that sell them, not to the people who buy them.
Sony is also attempting to misuse another law in the current matter, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, by essentially claiming that the researchers are breaking the law by violating the endlessly worded terms of service that accompany all such products. As legal blogger Orrin Kerr writes, Sony’s stance is tantamount to saying, “You’re guilty of felony computer hacking crimes if you access your own computer in a way that violates a contractual restriction found in the fine print of the licensing restriction of the product imposed by the manufacturer.”
Of course, Sony is not the only technology company to abuse the legal system. But Sony has shown deeper disrespect for its customers than most others. Recall the scandal a few years ago when the company installed dangerous rootkit software on CDs, in an attempt to prevent copying, and tried to brazen its way out of an absolute scandal with trademark bluster and deceptions.
I hope the EFF and other legal organizations will help the researchers in this case. I especially hope this case will help wake people up to the dangers that corporate abuses of copyright and other laws represent to your rights in the Digital Age.
What I don’t expect, unfortunately, is for Sony to ever remotely understand how loathsome its behavior continues to be. So I will do the little I can to fight back — namely, donating to the EFF and other such organizations, and buying none of Sony’s gear, no matter how good it is, until the company stops treating the rest of us like chattel instead of customers.
Apple Inc. is challenging a federal jury’s order that it pay $625.5 million in damages for violating a small technology company’s patents.
If upheld, the verdict would be one of the largest in a patent lawsuit.
Last Friday, the jury in Tyler, Texas, found that Apple infringed on three patents held by Mirror Worlds LLC, a company founded by Yale University computer science professor David Gelernter to commercialize his ideas.
The patents cover characteristic features on Apple’s Macintosh computers, iPods and iPhones. The technologies include Cover Flow, which lets users flip through album covers and other content as if through a stack of cards; Time Machine, which performs automatic backups; and Spotlight, which is software for searching computer hard drives.
Over the weekend, Apple asked the U.S. District Court to hold off on imposing the jury award, saying there were still issues that needed to be addressed. Among other things, Apple objects to the way the damages were calculated.
Apple has not commented further on the case. Lawyers for Mirror Worlds did not return requests for comment.
In 1991, before access to the World Wide Web was mainstream, Gelernter published a book called “Mirror Worlds: or the Day Software Puts the Universe in a Shoebox…How it Will Happen and What it Will Mean.” The volume laid out a vision of the future in which people can access and interpret unprecedented volumes of real-time, real-world data using a computer.
A decade later, Gelernter’s Mirror Worlds Technologies Inc. launched its first and only product, Scopeware, which could organize all sorts of information on a timeline or “lifestream.” It looked like a cascade of index cards on the screen, each representing a unique piece of e-mail, a Web page, spreadsheet or other document, updated constantly as new items arrive. From descriptions at the time, Scopeware had a similar look to and functionality as Apple’s Cover Flow, which is built into the company’s Mac OS X operating system and the software that runs on iPods and other devices.
A key U.S. Senate committee will almost certainly vote this week to censor the Internet. A fast-track bill designed to whack copyright infringement is vastly more than that, and if it’s passed and signed into law it will put America into a league with China and Saudi Arabia, among others, as a nation that makes sure most of its citizens won’t find information that a tiny, elite group deems improper for their eyes.
Who’s behind it? I hardly have to tell you that Hollywood and the rest of the copyright cartel have persuaded their acolytes in Congress that it’s time to clamp down, and hard. The cartel is absolutely indifferent to the collateral damage it would cause — and that damage would be enormous.
The bill, S. 3804, is called the “Combating Online Infringements and Counterfeits Act” (COICA) — yet another dishonest conflating of infringement and counterfeiting, but that’s standard for lawmakers. A chief sponsor is, disgracefully, Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy, a Democrat who has stood tall for liberty in other contexts. But he’s been in love with Hollywood and its money for ages.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation, among many groups tracking this bill, explains what’s happening this way:
Although (COICA) is ostensibly focused on copyright infringement, an enormous amount of noninfringing content, including political and other speech, could disappear off the Web if it passes.
The main mechanism of the bill is to interfere with the Internet’s domain name system (DNS), which translates names like “www.eff.org” or “www.nytimes.com” into the IP addresses that computers use to communicate. The bill creates two blacklists of censored domains. The first is longer, and includes any sites where the DOJ decides that infringement is “central” to the purpose of the site. The bill gives ISPs and registrars strong legal incentives to censor the domains on that list. The Attorney General can also ask a court to put sites on a second, shorter blacklist; ISPs and registrars are required by law to censor those sites.
If this bill passes, the list of targets could conceivably include hosting websites such as Dropbox, MediaFire and Rapidshare; MP3 blogs and mashup/remix music sites like SoundCloud, MashupTown and Hype Machine ; and sites that discuss and make the controversial political and intellectual case for piracy, like pirate-party.us, p2pnet, InfoAnarchy, Slyck and ZeroPaid . Indeed, had this bill been passed five or ten years ago, YouTube might not exist today. In other words, the collateral damage from this legislation would be enormous. (Why would all these sites be targets?)
What’s so dangerous that this kind of wholesale censorship needs to happen? The cartel members decided that they don’t like the laws and rules that already give them a way to take down material that infringes on their copyrights. They already abuse this right in wholesale ways, as you can see at the Chilling Effects Clearinghouse site, which tracks abusive takedown notices and other such acts.
Now they want to raise the ante, by taking down whole sites. As the EFF notes, COICA would invite the government “to censor sites even when no court has found they have infringed copyright or any other law.” Due process, schmoo process.
And don’t think the censorship will stop at these kinds of sites. Censorship is seductive, once it’s in place. It’ll expand relentlessly.
As usual in copyright battles, this has gotten almost no attention from what Sarah Palin calls – accurately in this case — the “lamestream media,” which is typically AWOL when it comes to telling audiences about legislation that their own industry has a stake in. Many of the companies that run major media operations are part of the cartel, after all.
Hollywood and the music and publishing industries are nothing if not presistent about clamping down on the way we can use digital information. They are pushing us toward a world where we pay and ask permission for any use of anything they produce, a gross unbalancing of the long-standing traditions that sparked the greatest creativity the planet has seen. They’ve fought every new technology that they couldn’t control.
The industry has been emboldened during the Obama presidency, a time when many believed that we might move back toward a copyright system that defended rights on all sides. The president, as in so many other areas, has been a huge disappointment, because he led many in the field to believe he would work to restore that balance.
Web activist Aaron Swartz has organized an online petition to ask senators to vote down S. 3804. By all means join it, but do something else. Call and fax your U.S. senators, especially if they’re on the Judiciary Committee. They’re pushing some extremely bad legislation forward, and only you can stop it.
UPDATE: Thanks to the EFF and others who lobbied on behalf of Internet users, the bill did not come to a vote after all. This is, however, a temporary victory for pro-free speech people. Never forget that the copyright industry will push this again and again.
In the surely-you’re-joking category, here comes the music industry to say it needs even tougher copyright rules. Sorry, no joke.
As CNET’s Declan McCullagh reports from a conference in Aspen, Colo., Cary Sherman, president of the Recording Industry Association of America, complained about “loopholes” in the current copyright system. But what he calls loopholes are among the few parts of the law that remotely temper the absolute control that the RIAA and its allies, mainly in the movie business, want copyright holders to have over everything digital.
Specifically, the entertainment industry is looking to enforce copyright by getting third parties to do some of the dirty work. In particular, the industry wants companies such as search engines and Internet service providers — the latter is typically your phone or cable company — to keep an eagle eye on what you do with your own computer, inspecting what you download and upload in granular ways. This is the rough equivalent of getting your phone company to listen to your calls to make sure you aren’t planning anything illegal.
The way the entertainment companies are trying to make this kind of thing work in other countries is to get ISPs to shut down users’ access after accusations of infringing behavior, with harder punishments also a possibility. A legal battle royal is under way in France and the European Union over this insane policy.
What the cartel wants, essentially, is to make all the decisions about how what it produces may be used in any way. This flies in the face of tradition and law, and would inevitably lead to a regime under which we would all need permission to use digital content for any purpose whatsoever.
As Internet access consolidates into the hands of a few companies, these threats become more serious, not so much because the ISPs want to be spying on you but rather because they may be forced to do so. Let your ISP know you won’t be happy if this happens.
Good news in the copyright world is rare, but we have a couple of small victories to celebrate this week. The bad news: They only emphasize how grossly unbalanced our system remains.
These wins for customer freedom center around a technology broadly known as DRM, which stands for Digital Rights Management — methods used by hardware and software companies to allow customers only certain rights. It should more properly be called Digital Restrictions Management, because that’s the real aim of DRM. People have found ways to break or work around DRM, but federal law makes it illegal to do so in most circumstances.
The cracks in DRM’s legal facade are starting to grow, too. On Monday, the Copyright Office and librarian of Congress said, among other things, that it’s OK to A) “jailbreak” your phone, thereby letting you install software not approved by the phone seller; and B) use brief excerpts of DVD videos in other works. Renewing a previously granted exception to federal copyright law, the office also said it was OK to unlock your phone so that you can use it with a different mobile network.
The exceptions are still fairly narrow, to be sure, and how widely they’ll be used remains to be seen given the way our mobile phone and media markets work in the real world. But they’re notable in several ways.
One is the language the Librarian of Congress, James Billington, used in his rulemaking document (1.5MB PDF). For example, he called the act of jailbreaking a phone “innocuous at worst and beneficial at best.”
Industry arguments against these exceptions, for which the Electronic Frontier Foundation had led the fight, had been laugh-out-loud ridiculous. Apple, you’ll be unsurprised to hear, took the hardest-line stance against the concept that customers should have the right to use the devices they’ve purchased as they see fit.
Apple’s objections ultimately came down to its insistence that customer freedoms would “undercut the overall iPhone experience” (emphasis from the original document filed in the case). In other words, you should only be able to use the iPhone, which is nothing more than a handheld computer connected to digital networks — albeit a wonderfully designed device — in precisely the ways Apple determines.
Having lost in the Copyright Office, Apple responded with typical arrogance, telling the Cult of Mac blog that it might now be legal to use your iPhone the way you want to, but you’ll void the warranty if you do. And you can expect Apple to keep up its cat-and-mouse game of using software updates to screw up jailbroken phones, as the iPhone Dev-Team — leaders of the jailbreaking movement — are warning.
The continued ability to unlock your phone and use it on a competing network isn’t much help, because of the insanity of America’s competing mobile standards. Even if you unlock a newer iPhone, you can’t use it to its maximum capabilities on Verizon, Sprint or T-Mobile because of various radio and chip incompatibilites.
But if you travel overseas frequently, unlocking your GSM-based AT&T or T-Mobile phone will be nontrivial (assuming it isn’t already unlocked, as mine is). You can use local SIM cards in many countries and save a huge amount of money.
The other important move by the Copyright Office was to allow people to remix videos in other works. Essentially, the copyright officials observed that it was ridiculous to believe that we’re all but forbidden from quoting from others’ creative work just because it’s in a DRM’d video format.
Unfortunately, this exception is way too narrow in the real world. It allows circumvention of the DRM solely for:
(i) Educational uses by college and university professors and by college and university film and media studies students;
(ii) Documentary filmmaking;
(iii) Noncommercial videos.
In other words, it’s still not allowed to quote from another video work for commercial use (other than in a documentary). This is nuts. If authors had to get permission from every writer or publisher whose work they intended to quote, scholarship and journalism would grind to a halt.
The copyright office’s exemptions also included the right to bypass computer system dongles that are broken or obsolete; a research exception for studying video game security; and read-aloud functions in e-books if not provided by the publisher.
Again, we shouldn’t overstate the value of Monday’s ruling. The law remains horribly unbalanced in favor of the copyright holders. But any progress is helpful.
(Note: I’ve donated money to the EFF, an organization that is leading the way in preserving and enhancing our digital freedoms. Also, in 2002 the EFF honored me with one of its Pioneer awards.)
Sen. John McCain is taking heat from a television infomercial star famous for hawking free government money, who is angry that the Arizona senator used him in a campaign ad without permission.
Matthew Lesko, known for his distinctive question-mark suits and his high-energy infomercials promising “free money from the government,” says McCain used video of him to attack GOP rival J.D. Hayworth without asking — and Lesko’s not happy about it.
Lesko appears three times in a 1 1/2-minute Web video McCain released last week. The video pokes fun at Hayworth for hawking free government money in a 2007 infomercial.
“I’m amazed that these people just do things without requesting. I would’ve said yes,” Lesko told The Associated Press. “I’m just shocked at the impoliteness that people do this stuff. There’s no remorse.”
Lesko said he hasn’t ruled out suing McCain for copyright infringement, but said he’s not keen on the idea of involving lawyers. Mostly, he wants politicians to be polite and ask permission before using other people’s faces in their advertisements.
The McCain camp said its use of Lesko was clearly allowed under the “fair use” doctrine of copyright law.
McCain’s campaign has slammed Hayworth for peddling the services of a Florida company that charges thousands of dollars to help people get government grants. The company is accused of taking advantage of its customers.
Lesko said he voted against McCain in the 2008 presidential election, but he likes the Arizona senator more than Hayworth. He called the company Hayworth pitched “immoral” because it charged so much money.
“It’s remarkable that even Congressman Hayworth’s fellow infomercial pitchmen are appalled at the ‘free money’ scam he helped perpetrate,” McCain spokesman Brian Rogers said.
This isn’t the first time McCain has been in hot water for using copyrighted material without permission.
Last year, McCain and two Republican Party organizations settled a lawsuit filed by singer-songwriter Jackson Browne, who accused them of using his copyrighted song “Running on Empty” in an Internet video.
As part of the settlement announced in July 2009, McCain, the Republican National Committee and the Ohio Republican Party apologized for using a portion of Browne’s song without permission.
McCain didn’t know about the ad, according to a statement released at the time.
A man walks past a display of Sony's products near its headquarters in Tokyo May 14, 2009. Sony Corp promised on Thursday to halve this year's losses, but the electronics to entertainment giant's better-than-expected outlook offered little solace to markets vexed by glum U.S. retail sales. REUTERS/Kim Kyung-Hoon (JAPAN BUSINESS)(Credit: Reuters) 
