Expect Resistance & Library Autonomous Zone

Boing Boing: USC’s bizarre, non-legal copyright policy

Turns out our friend Cory Doctorow (see the video) is at USC for the year as a fulbright chair! This story’s truly bizarre and troubling for academic institutions. I thought the academy was supposed to protect scholars, not constrict them out of fear or ignorance?

…It purports to inform students about the contours and boundaries of copyright, but actually presents a collection of scare-tactic half-truths and astonishing statements about the purpose of the university.

In the letter, USC’s officers promise to spend students’ tuition on policing them on behalf of the entertainment industry, but make no comparable promise to protect them from the thousands of automated, baseless accusations generated by the RIAA, MPAA and BSA.

First off, let me apologize for not posting in a LONG time. It’s been hectic on this side of the monitor, and I’ve been blogging more on my other site, Free Government Information. Rest assured that LAZ is not defunct!

And now to the business at hand. Chairman Lamar Smith (TX-21) just introduced the ÒOrphan Works Act of 2006Ó (H.R. 5439), which creates new guidelines for use of copyrighted material when the original owner cannot be located. This is a fairly reasonable approach to orphan works, which have been estimated at upwards of 90% of all works still in copyright. For more see CopyBites and the US Copyright Office’s Report on orphan works.

Yale A2K conference

Named after the proposed treaty by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), (for more see Consumer Project on Technology A2K site), Yale Law school and the Information Society Project will host the A2K conference next month. The goal of the A2K is to “to come up with a new analytic framework for analysing the possibly distortive effects of public policies relying exclusively on intellectual property rights. Beyond this aim, the A2K initiative seeks to support the adoption and development of alternative ways to foster greater access to knowledge in the digitally connected environment.” The list of speakers includes a host of leading copyright thinkers and activists from around the world.

Thomas Hawk’s Digital Connection: An Open Letter to Myra Borshoff Cook, Tour Organizer for Jack Kerouac’s On the Road Manuscript Scroll

Jack Kerouac’s famous “On the Road” manuscript is currently on display at the San Francisco Public Library through March 19, 2006. The manuscript is a 120-foot long scroll of single-spaced, typed 12-foot long rolls of paper taped together. Really quite stunning!

There is, however, a growing controversy. Thomas Hawk has written an open letter to Myra Borshoff Cook, the tour organizer for the manuscript, asking her to explain her “no photography” rule — a rule she says is in place because of copyright. He points out the flaws in her argument and hopes that she will change that rule so that photos of the scroll can be taken and shown online. I wonder if I can videotape it or if that’s considered “photography”? Read on.

Boing Boing: What if pizzas came with licenses like the ones in DRM CDs?

What if you had to agree to a license in order to eat a pizza? BoingBoing pointed me to this parody by Groklaw of a restrictive license that is distributed with X&Y, Coldplay’s latest CD. The parody points out the rediculousness of DRM and Virgin’s licensing agreement being shipped with Coldplay’s latest CD. I mean really: “This CD may not play in DVD players, car stereos, portable players, game players, all PCs and Macintosh PCs.” The company is doing all this, “in order for you to enjoy a high quality music experience.”

DRM technology has its first two major trainwrecks, by David Berlind, ZDNet.com October 28, 2005.

…in addition to making sure your content doesn’t work on incompatible devices, now the DRM technology keeps the content from working on compatible ones.

Some license issuers will not allow you to store backups of their license filesÉ.However, if you use these steps to reset the DRM system and do not have backup copies of your licenses, you will lose the ability to play any previously acquired protected content.

EFF: 3-minute Guide to the Broadcast Flag, by Cory Doctorow, Electronic Frontier Foundation
European Affairs Coordinator.

Copyfight
calls this “The Broadcast Flag for Dummies” and has more useful links to basic information about the broadcast flag.

As Cory notes, the “broadcast flag” is just the most recent example of the entertainment industry running scared:

The entertainment companies don’t like tools that give you more control. The movie studios boycotted TV because they thought it would clean out the movie theaters. Then they complained that the remote control would make it too easy to skip commercials. Then they freaked out over the VCR, saying it was the “Boston Strangler” of the American film industry and accusing the Japanese (i.e., Sony) of deliberately sabotaging the American economy by targeting the made-in-America film industry with their infernal VCRs. They’re not fond of video-capture cards, sued into bankruptcy a personal video recorder company (like TiVo)…and the list goes on and on.

Media Companies Go Too Far in Curbing Consumers’ Activities, By WALTER S. MOSSBERG,
The Wall Street Journal., October 20, 2005.

Mossberg enumerates the problems with Digital
Rights Management (DRM) technologies on iTunes,
TiVo, Windows Media Player, and more. He notes
that “the real issue isn’t DRM itself — it’s the manner in which DRM is used by copyright holders…. [T]reating all consumers as potential criminals by using DRM to overly limit their activities is just plain wrong.”

Thanks to Copyfight!

DRM Talk for Hewlett-Packard Research
by Cory Doctorow,
European Affairs Coordinator, Electronic Frontier Foundation. (derived from notes for an invited talk to HP Research on DRM) 9/28/5

For nearly four years, I’ve
spent my time attending DRM standards meetings, consortia, and treaty
meetings at the United Nations. In that time, again and again, I’ve
seen tech giants like HP take suicidal measures to voluntarily cripple
their products to make them more palatable to a few entertainment
companies, even though this measure makes them less palatable to
virtually all of your paying customers….

I’ve had innumerable conversations with engineers, lawyers and execs
about DRM, but it’s rare that I get the chance to systematically
explain how DRM fails as a technology, as a moral proposition, and as
a commercial initiative. I’m grateful that HP has given me that chance
today.

India adopts fighting position to hold on to ancient yoga poses,
By David Orr in Delhi, News Telegraph (UK)
18/09/2005.

The Indian government is furious that yoga practices dating back thousands
of years are being “stolen” by gurus and fitness instructors in Europe and
the United States….

In an effort to protect India’s heritage, the taskforce has begun
documenting 1,500 yoga postures drawn from classical yoga texts - including
the writings of the Indian sage Patanjali, the first man to codify the art
of yoga. The data is being stored in a digital library whose computerised
contents will soon be made available to patents offices worldwide.