There's no place like home

From BoingBoing comes a research paper into the copyright issues surrounding the song "Happy Birthday To You".

I'll have to download this paper and read it later, but the abstract sure looks interesting:

"Happy Birthday to You" is the best-known and most frequently sung song in the world. Many - including Justice Breyer in his dissent in Eldred v. Ashcroft - have portrayed it as an unoriginal work that is hardly worthy of copyright protection, but nonetheless remains under copyright. Yet close historical scrutiny reveals both of those assumptions to be false. The song that became "Happy Birthday to You," originally written with different lyrics as "Good Morning to All," was the product of intense creative labor, undertaken with copyright protection in mind. However, it is almost certainly no longer under copyright, due to a lack of evidence about who wrote the words; defective copyright notice; and a failure to file a proper renewal application.

The falsity of the standard story about the song demonstrates the dangers of relying on anecdotes without thorough research and analysis. It also reveals collective action barriers to mounting challenges to copyright validity: the song generates an estimated $2 million per year, and yet no one has ever sought adjudication of the validity of its copyright. Finally, the true story of the song demonstrates that a long, unitary copyright term requires changes in copyright doctrine and administration. With such a term, copyright law needs a doctrine like adverse possession to clear title and protect expectations generated when, as with this song, putative owners do not challenge distribution of unauthorized copies for more than 20 years. And Copyright Office recordkeeping policy, which currently calls for discarding correspondence after 20 years and most registration denials and deposits after five years, must be improved to facilitate resolution of disputes involving older works.

Over two hundred unpublished documents found in six archives across the United States have been made available on a website that will serve as an online appendix to this article.

Link

According to Boing Boing, Jenni Engebretsen, the RIAA's Director of Communications, has been put in charge of PR for the Democratic National Convention.

Boing Boing also has a list of her "Greatest Hits".

If this is true, then I would guess that the Dems may have just lost a bunch of youth and techie votes, as the RIAA has been voted the most hated company in the world by that demographic. (An opinion I hold also.)

Stop the Big Brother State is an excellent video by David Scharf about the surveillance society that we are becoming and why it is bad.

This made me laugh today:

"You should go to Vista."

"So you like Vista?"

"Not really, no. I run a Vista simulator."

"Virtual Server?" the Boss asks.

"Nah, I just turned on all the flashy crap in XP, changed the background image, took some memory out of my box and clocked down the CPU. Then broke Media player. Works like a charm."

From BOFH episode 6 in The Register.

From BoingBoing:

Vista launched this week, and it's already broken. As with previous multi-year DRM development efforts, this one disintegrated like wet kleenex on contact with the general public.

The rest of the article is here.

There are a couple of stories on The Register about the DRM in the new Windows Vista operating system.

Windows DRM is the 'longest suicide note in history'

Vista's Suicide Bomb: who gets hurt?

They make for interesting reading. They both refer to Peter Gutmann's paper A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection:

Executive Summary
-----------------

Windows Vista includes an extensive reworking of core OS elements in order to provide content protection for so-called "premium content", typically HD data from Blu-Ray and HD-DVD sources. Providing this protection incurs considerable costs in terms of system performance, system stability, technical support overhead, and hardware and software cost. These issues affect not only users of Vista but the entire PC industry, since the effects of the protection measures extend to cover all hardware and software that will ever come into contact with Vista, even if it's not used directly with Vista (for example hardware in a Macintosh computer or on a Linux server). This document analyses the cost involved in Vista's content protection, and the collateral damage that this incurs throughout the computer industry.

Executive Executive Summary
---------------------------

The Vista Content Protection specification could very well constitute the longest suicide note in history [Note A].

Also in the news, Bill Gates bounces the irony meter.

Updated! This has got to be the funniest thing I have ever read about DRM!

Note D: In order for content to be displayed to users, it has to be copied numerous times. For example if you're reading this document on the web then it's been copied from the web server's disk drive to server memory, copied to the server's network buffers, copied across the Internet, copied to your PC's network buffers, copied into main memory, copied to your browser's disk cache, copied to the browser's rendering engine, copied to the render/screen cache, and finally copied to your screen. If you've printed it out to read, several further rounds of copying have occurred. Windows Vista's content protection (and DRM in general) assume that all of this copying can occur without any copying actually occurring, since the whole intent of DRM is to prevent copying. If you're not versed in DRM doublethink this concept gets quite tricky to explain, but in terms of quantum mechanics the content enters a superposition of simultaneously copied and uncopied states until a user collapses its wave function by observing the content (in physics this is called quantum indeterminacy or the observer's paradox). Depending on whether you follow the Copenhagen or many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, things then either get wierd or very wierd. So in order for Windows Vista's content protection to work, it has to be able to violate the laws of physics and create numerous copies that are simultaneously not copies.

Windows Vista will not be getting installed in my house. I'll teach the kids to use Linux first (which I arguably should be doing anyway.)

More nerd rap. The Futuristic Sex Robots say they are the only Gangster Nerd Rap band. I don't know if that's true, but their song (and video on YouTube) is entertaining and mirrors the way I feel about the RIAA, the MPAA, the BSA and the DMCA.

Watch it.



I'm downloading the rest of their free album now. It should be entertaining.

Cory Doctorow has a nice article in Locus about copyright and how it is broken and how it should work.

So this is where copyright breaks: When copyright lawyers try to treat readers and listeners and viewers as if they were (weak and unlucky) corporations who could be strong-armed into license agreements you wouldn't wish on a dog. There's no conceivable world in which people are going to tiptoe around the property they've bought and paid for, re-checking their licenses to make sure that they're abiding by the terms of an agreement they doubtless never read. Why read something if it's non-negotiable, anyway?

The answer is simple: treat your readers' property as property. What readers do with their own equipment, as private, noncommercial actors, is not a fit subject for copyright regulation or oversight. The Securities Exchange Commission doesn't impose rules on you when you loan a friend five bucks for lunch. Anti-gambling laws aren't triggered when you bet your kids an ice-cream cone that you'll bicycle home before them. Copyright shouldn't come between an end-user of a creative work and her property.

Worth a read.

The Consumer Electronics Association is finally starting to figure out that screwing over your customers is not a good business practice and is running an ad telling the RIAA to suck it.



More details at the EFF website.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has kept a running list of the unintended consequences arising from the Digital Millenium Copyright Act's passage seven years ago.

It's a long, sobering and scary list.

And the Copyright Office (who is charged with making changes to the DMCA to temper it's effects) is not doing it's job.

You can read the EFF's list here.

Also here is a column by Infoworld's Ed Foster discussing the how the DMCA and the Copyright Office protected the Sony Rootkit.

The DMCA was a bad law when it was enacted and it's still a bad law seven years later.