aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South
Wednesday, January 17, 2007
RIAA on Atlanta DJ raid
Brad Buckles, executive vice president of the RIAA’s Anti-Piracy Division in Washington, DC, said the case was developed in Atlanta. For more than a year, police have been investigating the manufacturing and distribution of pirated material in the city and “during that time, we’ve been working with police and picking up pirated product, going back and forth with local law enforcement to figure out where it’s coming from,” Buckles said. “[Tuesday’s raid] was just one of the many series of raids that have occurred.”
Many retail outlets have been raided for selling mixtapes in recent years - the RIAA press release cited four in the Atlanta area in 2005, and claimed 1 million pirated CDs were seized in the city that year - but Tuesday’s raid was the first involving a figure of DJ Drama’s stature.
Buckles was vague when asked about the product that had been seized, saying that he only knew what he had read in the report: that “the product violated state law” and that “I’m given to understand that the CDs also contained a variety of works and different artists” that weren’t licensed or cleared, and were being sold illegally.
When asked if Tuesday’s raid was part of a larger series of raids targeting mixtapes, Buckles said, “We don’t consider this being against mixtapes as some sort of class of product. We enforce our rights civilly or work with police against those who violate state law. Whether it’s a mixtape or a compilation or whatever it’s called, it doesn’t really matter: If it’s a product that’s violating the law, it becomes a target.”
More background here.
Not just on South Park anymore
According to Atlanta’s Fox 5, Atlanta police raided a recording studio and “cleaned the place out.” 17 people detained; 2 arrested “for making and selling illegal CDs.” Sounds like a South Park episode to me:
Via Boing Boing. More here.
Saturday, January 13, 2007
The RIAA 17th Century button-makers
Mike sees similarities between the RIAA and a group of 17th century French button makers:
“...the button makers guild raises a cry of outrage; the tailors are beginning to make buttons out of cloth, an unheard-of thing. The government, indignant that an innovation should threaten a settled industry, imposes a fine on the cloth-button makers. But the wardens of the button guild are not yet satisfied. They demand the right to search people’s homes and wardrobes and fine and even arrest them on the streets if they are seen wearing these subversive goods.”
Requiring permission to innovate? Feeling entitled to search others’ property? Getting the power to act like law enforcement in order to fine or arrest those who are taking part in activities that challenge your business model? Don’t these all sound quite familiar? Centuries from now (hopefully much, much sooner), the actions of the RIAA, MPAA and others that match those of the weavers and button-makers of 17th century France will seem just as ridiculous.
Via Cory at Boing Boing, who also provides a link to how to make the kind of cloth buttons that caused such a stir.
Saturday, January 06, 2007
Dems to the Net: Go to hell!
The Times today pretty much recaps a Christmas Eve post from Larry Lessig that I had missed:
Message to the Net from the newly Democratic House? Go to hell.
As everyone knows, one issue critical to those who are making the Net interesting (for politics at least) is IP reform. Not "reform" in the sense of the last decade (e.g., Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, DMCA, NET Act, etc.), but real reform designed to make IP laws work sensibly in the digital age. Real reform - not the piddly full-employment-act-for-lawyers reform proposed by the Copyright Office for "orphan works," or the puny reform suggested for digital libraries. Instead, reform that tries to fit the legitimate objectives of copyright - to assure that artists have the incentives they need to create great new work - into the contours of digital technology.
To craft that reform would require real work. I don't think anyone has a clear picture of what would be best yet. But what is clear is that the war on technology of the last decade must come to an end. And the efforts by content holders to leverage their power over rights they can't even prove they own (see, e.g., the Google Book Search battle) into control over the architecture of the net must be stopped. No one should defend "piracy." But no one should believe that the way the law currently defines "piracy" makes any sense at all.
So is there any hope for such reform from the Democrats? Word from Washington so far: Fat chance. As reported in the LA Times two weeks ago (registration required but hey, it’s LA), the crucial House IP subcommittee will be chaired by Hollywood Howard (Berman) - among the most extreme of the IP warriors. It is this committee that largely determines what reform Congress considers. It is the Chairman who picks what voices get heard. And while Berman is a brilliant man - whose brilliance could really have been used in the problems facing the mid-east - his brilliance has not yet been directed towards working out the problems of IP and the Net with any view beyond the narrowest of special interests.
This is like making a congressman from Detroit head of a Automobile Safety sub-committee, or a senator from Texas head of a Global Warming sub-committee. Are you kidding, Dems? The choice signals clearly the party's view about the issues, and its view of the "solution": more of the same. This war - no more successful than President Bush's war - will continue.
Tuesday, January 02, 2007
RIAA: Priceless
UMG v Lindor is being closely watched because a federal judge ruled that the RIAA will have to show that Ms. Lindor actually shared music, a higher burden than simply demonstrating that she made the files available for download.
Today Recording Industry v The People tells us that a new discovery dispute has erupted in the case:
[T]he RIAA is refusing to comply with Magistrate Judge Levy’s order directing them to turn over “all relevant documents” concerning their wholesale prices for downloads unless Ms. Lindor’s attorneys agree to keep the prices confidential. Ms. Lindor’s attorneys are willing to keep the details of the contracts confidential, but not the pricing and volume information, and have submitted a proposed order to the judge to resolve the dispute…
Clickthrough for links to the relevant docs. And stay tuned…
Tuesday, November 28, 2006
RIAA sues elderly hurricane Rita survivor
Recording Industry vs The People:
An elderly survivor of Hurricane Rita, Ms. Rhonda Crain, has been sued by the RIAA in Beaumont, Texas, in SONY v. Crain.
She is fighting back and has asserted a counterclaim against the plaintiffs, saying that the RIAA’s actions “amount to extortion, reciting a litany of other similar cases brought by the RIAA.
Ms. Crain has also asserted the defense, first raised in Arista v. Greubel, that the plaintiffs’ have been fully compensated by the $115 million settlement they received from Kazaa.
Friday, November 24, 2006
6 new DMCA exemptions
The Copyright Office has created six new exemptions to the hated Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which makes it a crime to break any digital lock, even if you’re doing so for a legitimate purpose.
Every three years, the Copyright Office hears petitions for exemptions to this sweeping rule. This year, it created six exemptions, including one for film profs, another for gamers whose consoles have gone obsolete, blind people, and cell-phone recyclers.
However, the office refused to grant exemptions that would benefit the general public—space- and format-shifting, backing up your DVDs—and they took back an earlier exemption that let people reverse-engineer the blacklists maintained by censorware companies to bring some transparency to their process.
Read the rest of "6 new DMCA exemptions" in the extended entry.
Monday, November 13, 2006
Sherman’s freedom is just another word for so much less to choose
I saw RIAA President Cary Sherman’s perspective on fair use and the Consumer Electronics Association’s ”Digital Freedom” campaign in CNet this morning. And watched for a good rebuttal:
We’ve noted for some time that one problem in the ongoing battle between Hollywood, technology companies and consumers over intellectual property issues is that consumers don’t have a group as visible and as noisy as the RIAA or MPAA standing up for them. But for some time, Gary Shapiro and the Consumer Electronics Association have been the closest thing to it, and CEA head Shapiro has proven himself an eloquent and intelligent point man on these issues. While his ability to talk sense and stand up to Hollywood is pretty self-evident, perhaps the biggest sign that he’s on the right track is how badly he manages to get under the skin of its shill groups like the RIAA. Four years ago, his speech on how the recording industry was shooting itself in the foot by using a scorched-earth legal policy elicited an angry and typically illogical response from the RIAA’s head, Cary Sherman. Shapiro and the CEA—and a host of other groups—a few weeks ago announced The Digital Freedom Campaign, which “is dedicated to defending the rights of students, artists, innovators, and consumers to create and make lawful use of new technologies free of unreasonable government restrictions and without fear of costly and abusive lawsuits” (apparently that’s something with which he’s familiar). Hardly surprising that something like that would bother the RIAA, and once again, Sherman’s gone all apoplectic at how the campaign is making “an extremist interpretation of fair use to frighten and mislead consumers and policymakers”. READ ON
RELATED: A much more honest collection of fair use resources (scroll down):
Three of the most comprehensive resources dealing with the topic of Fair Use are the Stanford University Copyright & Fair Use Center, the Fair Use Network (sponsored by the Brennan Center for Justice at the NYU Law School), and Electronic Frontier Foundation with its EFF Legal Guide for Bloggers. You can find less comprehensive information at the U.S. Copyright Office site. The Stanford website offers information on all aspects of fair use — from basics to specialized issues, to legislative activity, to caselaw, to lists of relevant website and articles.
Altered contours spark copyfight hopes
Larry Lessig tells us that the 9th Circuit heard arguments today in Kahle v. Gonzales, a case built on the rule articulated in Eldred v. Ashcroft:
If you remember, in Eldred, we raised a First Amendment challenge to Congress’ extension of existing copyright terms. Our argument was: “this is a regulation of speech; apply ordinary First Amendment review to the statute.”
The government argued the other extreme - no First Amendment review of a copyright statute. It argued the Court should affirm the DC Circuit’s rule that copyrights were “categorically immune from challenges under the First Amendment.”
The Court adopted neither position. It refused to apply ordinary First Amendment review to a copyright statute. But it also refused to exempt copyright statutes from First Amendment review.
[Instead, the Court wrote] a kind of tradition-triggered standard: So long as Congress stays within the “traditional contours of copyright protection,” then further First Amendment review is unnecessary. But if Congress changes a “traditional contour of copyright protection,” then the “built-in free speech safeguards” may not be sufficient.
We alleged a change in perhaps the most fundamental “traditional contour” of copyright protection - the shift from the opt-in system that copyright was from 1790=1976 to the opt-out system that copyright has become in the period since.
Emphasis (and the hopes in the headline) mine.
Sunday, November 12, 2006
RIAA, 70¢ v $750, and a judge
A US COURT is forcing the Recording Industry of America to explain why it charges people it catches pirating $750 a single rather than the 70 cents they flog them to retailers for.
In the case UMG v. Lindor, Judge Trager has allowed Ms Lindor, who the RIAA claim is a pirate, to challenge the $750 a track it wants in damages.
The RIAA fought to prevent the amendment to Ms Lindor’s case, claiming it was not up to her to decide damages. They said that her complaint about the level of damages was without merit and if the amendment went ahead it would prejudice them.
Of course it would. If the RIAA was forced to claim back the real market value of the music that was nicked by pirates it probably would not be worth the effort. It also looks better on a press release if they can claim that a pirate stole $7,000 worth of music when they actually only stole $7.
Details at Recording Industry vs The People.
Tuesday, October 31, 2006
Comedy Central on YouTube (continued)
I can’t find anything about this online, but on the local NBC news this morning, they reporrted that Comedy Central was not asking YouTube to pull all the clips from its show, only full episodes - a reasonable and wise position. It seems that cooler heads prevailed. YouTube is a magnificent new means of distribution and promotion. Now the key will be for Comedy Central to also make money on those clips; once that happens, the networks will fall over themselves to put their own stuff up.
it’s not over ‘til the fat kid stops singing:
I still say, make the player the ad and make everyone happy.
Sunday, October 29, 2006
How about a Free Culture badge?
You may recall that the Boy Scouts of LA struck up a collaboration with the MPAA “to teach young people about respecting copyrights.”
Liz Losh, a former scout and the parent of a current cub scout, wonders “How could such a one-sided, moralistic, anti-consumer marketing effort be foisted on a bunch of earnest and community-minded kids?”
[W]e’ve made up a new patch, for a much more challenging “Free Culture” badge, to be earned by intrepid, hard working, patriotic scouts. Here are some of the requirements:
- Appear at the door of a major studio, dressed in your full scout uniform, and try to talk them into allowing educational use of historical films commonly shown in public schools (Amistad, Schindler’s List, etc.)
- Raise money with a bakesale to go across the country to CMG Worldwide in Indianapolis or Intellectual Properties Management (IPM) in Atlanta to convince these organizations to free images associated with Rosa Parks or Martin Luther King and release them into the public domain for use in school projects, such as web pages
- Paint a colorful mural on a graffiti covered wall across the street from the headquarters of the RIAA with the 9 Reasons Digital Media Products Are a Bad Deal for Consumers.
- Using your knot-disentangling skills, visit a hospital or nursing home and help the aged with their DRM-hobbled digital products
- Go to an orphanage, battered children’s home, or juvenile detention facility and show kids how to use Creative Commons resources
- Put in 100 hours of community service at your local library and see the toll that new legislation against patron privacy and public connectivity takes on your local civil servants. Then imagine what it will be like if they have to deal with RIAA and MPAA lawsuits for circulating audio and video content.
Wednesday, October 25, 2006
The demise of Free Use
Perhaps motivated by my earlier post of Fair Use resources, with a librarian today I discussed the decline of free use as described by Larry Lessig in this podcast of a Princeton University panel on Creativity and I.P. Law: How Intellectual Property Law Fosters or Hinders Creative Work, and again in an answer to a question from Stephen Johnson at The Battle Over Books panel Wired magazine presented at the New York Public Library.
I said something like:
The freedom to read - in a library; from a borrowed book or from a book you bought - is a “free use.” In the digital realm...because every use requires a copy, every time we engage in any use it must be justified as either a “licensed use” or a “fair use.”
Once there were three kinds of uses: “free use,” “licensed use,” and “fair use.” If the content industry’s view prevails, in the world they’d like to construct, one day soon there will no longer be “free use.” There will only be “licensed use” or “fair use.”
This, I agree, is a serious, significant and culturally tragic loss. I urge you to hear his message too.
Fair Use Resources
An “investigative newsletter” with an outrageous clause (since ammended) appended to its copyright notice on each and every page - “This article is copyright protected and Fair Use is not applicable.” [emphasis mine] - occasioned an interesting exchange (see the p.s.) and this important collection of Fair Use resources:
Three of the most comprehensive resources dealing with the topic of Fair Use are the Stanford University Copyright & Fair Use Center, the Fair Use Network (sponsored by the Brennan Center for Justice at the NYU Law School), and Electronic Frontier Foundation with its EFF Legal Guide for Bloggers. You can find less comprehensive information at the U.S. Copyright Office site. The Stanford website offers information on all aspects of fair use — from basics to specialized issues, to legislative activity, to caselaw, to lists of relevant website and articles.
Here are some specific articles and webpages that may fit your needs:
-- The Copyright Management Center, sponsored by Indiana U. and Purdue U. is aimed at educational uses, but offers a Checklist for Fair Use that has general application.
-- The Chilling Effects Clearinghouse has an excellent set of Frequently Asked Questions about Copyright and Fair Use, with a nice summary of the four statutory factors. The FAQ answers the question Do I need permission from the copyright holder to make fair use? like this: “No. If your use is fair, it is not an infringement of copyright — even if it is without the authorization of the copyright holder. Indeed, fair use is especially important to protect uses a copyright holder would not approve, such as criticism or parodies. See Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, 510 US 569 (1994).” When at Chilling Effects, you might also want to check out Betsy Rosenblatt’s Copyright Basics.
--Kimberlee Weatherall (an academic Australian IP expert) and famed weblogging law professor Eugene Volokh offer 14 Copyright Tips for Bloggers, which looks at the issues from the perspective of both the copyright holder and the prospective Fair User.
-- Mary E. Carter’s eFuse article When Copying Is Okay is also a very useful document. As for the kind of copyright notice to use on your website, she advises: “Placing your copyright notice on your Web site is a start to protecting your copyrights on-line. Read some of the copyright notices on the Web sites of newspapers and other mainstream content providers for inspiration on how to word your notice. I generally recommend the simpler-is-better approach. Just place the “circle c” ©, or even just (C), and your name and the year of execution on the first page of your site and leave it at that.”-- — Nolo.com has a basic discussion on the Fair Use rule (annoyingly spread over 4 pages). [Note: In a lengthy monograph, I disagree with its notion that a haiku poem is too small to every be quoted under Fair Use].
Admittedly, it is not always easy to know with certainty whether some assertions of the Fair Use exemption are appropriate. Nonetheless, the Fair Use Network correctly says that “Despite this unpredictability, it is important to assert fair use, and reject assumptions that all uses must be licensed and paid for.” And, Marjorie Heins put it well in the Online Journal Review (Feb. 23, 2006, via Ambrogi’s Media Law): “To the extent that fair use is not used, it will shrink, and to the extent that it is used and asserted, it will remain healthy and even grow.” Perhaps, the courts or legislature should explicitly decide, as suggested by Judge Posner at Lessig Blog in Fair Use and Misuse, that excessive claims to copyright protection through the denial of Fair Use rights amount to copyright abuse that forfeits the law’s protections until remedied.
Via Boing Boing.
Friday, October 20, 2006
L.A. Boy Scouts copyright merit badge patch
The Los Angeles Council of the Boy Scouts of America will offer rewards to Scouts who absorb a brainwashing regime written by the MPAA. The merit
badgepatch in “respecting copyright” will almost certainly not include any training on fair use, anything about the fact that the film industry is located in Hollywood because that was a safe-enough distance from Tom Edison that the its founders could infringe his patents with impunity; that record players, radios and VCRs were considered pirate technology until the law changed to accommodate them; or that the entertainment industry enriches itself without regard for creators, who are routinely sodomized through non-negotiable contracts and abusive royalty practices. I’m sure it won’t mention the anti-competitive censorship masquerading as the Hollywood “rating” system, or the way that the studio cartel’s copyright term extensions have doomed the majority of creative works to orphaned oblivion, since they remain in copyright, but have no visible owner and can’t be brought back into circulation.
A later update explains it’s called a “merit patch” instead of a “merit badge” because it’s a local initiative by one group.
Thursday, October 19, 2006
Et Tu Bono update
Gregory Heller of Defective By Design wrote to thank me for signing the petition asking Bono to take a stand on DRM. Almost 5,000 people so far; the goal is 10,000 by the end of the month.
He also pointed to a Reuters report questioning the viability of a record industry business model built on DRM which included this great quote from Yahoo Music general manager David Goldberg:
“It’s all nonsense. Music is never going to be protected, and anybody who tells you that is not being honest. Yes, you can put up speed bumps, but the people who really want to steal music are going to steal it. So you’re just making it hard for people who want to do the right thing to get the music they legitimately purchased on the devices and services that they want.”
This difficulty, Goldberg continues, only serves to dissuade consumers from buying music legally and instead keeps unauthorized peer-to-peer services in business. He calls the protected a la carte download model a “failure,” noting that legal digital download figures have remained flat all year.
“There’s been no growth this year at all,” he says. “The market has stalled.”
Make money giving away your photos
One of Larry Lessig’s favorite Creative Commons articles, is from Mark Glaser in Media Shift. Here Glaser quotes Kris Krug, president of the online community management company Bryght:
“I think Creative Commons is a huge thing and I attribute a lot of my success to it,” Krug said. “Since the beginning I’ve given all my photos away on the Internet and they’ve been used by other bloggers and people all along the way and it’s gotten my name out there. So without going to photography school, and just networking with other photographers, and giving my stuff away with attribution, I’ve got my name out there, I’ve got a lot of incoming links to my website…I didn’t realize that I could make money on photography by giving away as much as I could, that I could build up a portfolio and reputation so I could get paid work.”
Krug says it’s sometimes difficult to explain the concept of Creative Commons to friends, who are used to holding onto their work and not giving it away. He admits it takes more than one conversation to convince someone to try it out. But Krug even tells musician friends to give away their music for a chance at better success in the long run.
“If [the music is] good, people will be turned on to it and go to the live shows and buy merchandise there,” Krug said. “The next thing you know, they’ll have 10,000 fans and they’ll be courted by record companies. You’re not going to make much money selling 100 MP3 singles on CD Baby…It’s a paradigm shift, man. There are a lot of people that don’t get it and they get upset at the suggestion that they give it away. But there’s a moment when they clue in.”
Saturday, October 14, 2006
How the RIAA Litigation Process Works
From Ray Beckerman at Recording Industry vs The People:
Introduction
The RIAA lawsuits pit a small number of very large recording companies against individuals who have paid for an internet access account.
On the plaintiff’s end, the owners of the underlying copyrights in the musical compositions are not involved in the case; neither are many smaller record companies.
As to the defendants, since no investigation is made to ascertain that the defendant is actually someone who engaged in peer to peer file sharing of copyrighted music without authorization, there are many defendants who have no idea why they are being sued and who did nothing even arguably violative of anyone’s copyright. Defendants have included people who have never even used a computer, and many people who although they have used a computer, have never engaged in any peer to peer file sharing.
Sometimes the cases are misleadingly referred to as cases against ‘downloaders’; in fact the RIAA knows nothing of any downloading when it commences suit, and in many instances no downloading ever took place.
It is more accurate to refer to the cases as cases against persons who paid for internet access which the RIAA has reason to believe was used by some person—possibly the defendant, possibly someone else—to engage in peer to peer file sharing.
Tuesday, October 10, 2006
MythTV again
TiVo’s latest DRM misadventure sent me back to look at MythTV again. PVRBlog:
MythTV is an open source home theater application that runs under linux, but for many new to linux and building your own PC, installing and configuring it can be a daunting task.
The Monolith Media Center is a small footprint PC pre-loaded with MythTV, Ubuntu linux, and a TV tuner card, ready to go for $650. It’ll even do over-the-air HDTV with a $275 upgrade card.
Among the many features:
Some DVRs boast letting you fast forward through your commercials - but this usually involves fumbling for a remote and seeking to the start of the next scene. The MonolithMC will actually skip the commercials - without any interaction from you. When the MonolithMC records a show, it is also quietly making notes to where it detects commercial breaks. Later when watching the show, the MonolithMC simply jumps from one mark to the next creating a seemless movie experience - the way it should be.
LATER: Cory has more on the TiVo self-destruct button, “Wouldn’t it be better if TiVo didn’t build in any technology that attacks its customers?”
Freer than free
IceWeasel is a version of Firefox created for use in “free” operating systems like Debian (and its derivatives, such as Ubuntu), which eschew any element that can’t be freely reused by anyone, for any reason. Iceweasel was developed because Firefox and the Firefox logo are trademarked, and because some of the default Firefox plugins can’t be freely redistributed. Iceweasel will be synchronized with the current Firefox release, but without the non-free artwork and plugins. Link
Copyright hope?
I said to friends last night that I have high hopes for the impact of GooTube on the copyfight. I hold that hope against hope in the Google Book Search debate. 
YouTube now adds to the picture.
I tend to think that with government (both Republican & Democrat) in the pocket of business (both the telecom and Hollywood varieties) the only (”legitimate," vs those with a slightly more guerrilla) way to win is for one market segment to defeat another.
A look at the players in the Net Neutrality debate - Google, eBay and Amazon v. AT&T, Verizon and Comcast - makes plain to me which represent the future and which the past. I’m looking forward. Perhaps with naive hope.
Mark Cuban has no such naiveté:
It will be interesting to see what happens next and what happens in the copyright world. I still think Google Lawyers will be a busy, busy bunch. I dont think you can sue Google into oblivion, but as others have mentioned, if Google gets nailed one single time for copyright violation, there are going to be more shareholder lawsuits than doans has pills to go with the pile on copyright suits that follow. Think maybe how Google discloses what they perceive the copyright risk to be in the SEC filings might be an interesting read ?
I think there will be supoenas to get the names of Youtube and Google Video users. Lots of them as those copyright owners not part of the gravy train go after both Google and their users for infringement.
It will be interesting to see how this impacts DRM. As it stands now, there is no DRM on all that video being offered from Google or YouTube. Millions of copyrighted videos that their owners spent a boatload to copyprotect that is available to everyone and everyone without it. (Personally i think DRM is a waste of money, but will all those labels and content providers ?)
His doom and gloom conclusion is well worth reading but better answered by others. I’ll be quoting them.
My own contention stands: YouTube’s no Napster. Downloading free songs does not a community make; uploading your favorite shows so that you become one of your friends’ favorite channels makes a very powerful community. Cuban and the Content Cartel will yet figure out that they’ll make money from that community using their copyrighted content.
As Bette Davis so famously said, “Fasten your seatbelts, it’s going to be a bumpy ride.” Flying’s still the fastest way to get to where you’re going; and I’m still betting on a safe landing.
Friday, September 15, 2006
Amazon Unbox: Raw deal!
Amazon’s new video-on-demand store may sound like a good idea, but once you take a look at the “agreement” you enter into by giving them your money, that changes. The Amazon terms-of-service are among the worst I’ve ever seen, a document through which you surrender your rights to privacy, integrity of your personal data, and control over your computer, in exchange for a chance to pay near-retail cost to watch Police Academy n-1. As Ben Franklin might have said: They that can give up general purpose computers for the sake of a little eye candy deserve neither computers nor eye candy. [...]
When you sign onto Unbox, you sign away all the amazing customer rights that Amazon itself is so careful to protect. Amazon Unbox takes away your privacy and every conceivable consumer right you have, and then tells you that the goods you buy from them don’t belong to you, and they can take them away from you at any time, or change the deal you get from them without any appeal by you.
Amazon Unbox’s user agreement isn’t just galling for its evilness—it’s also commercially suicidal. [READ ON]
Wednesday, August 30, 2006
Not nearly enough of a leap
A new online music company said yesterday that it would make a huge catalog of songs from the world’s largest record company, the Universal Music Group, available for consumers to download free.
The company, called SpiralFrog, said its intention was to wean music fans, especially young people, away from illegal downloads and pirate music sites by offering a legitimate source, supported by advertising instead of download fees.
Ok, I’m listening. I Like the idea of making the ad deal explicit. I tune in to some advertising, I get some stuff. The trouble is the content industry thinks their stuff is worth a whole lot more advertising than we do:
For consumers, SpiralFrog’s free downloads will come with many more strings attached than Apple’s paid ones. Users of SpiralFrog will have to sit through advertisements and will be prevented by special software from making copies of the songs they download or from sharing them with other people.
They will have to revisit the SpiralFrog Web site regularly to keep access to the music they download. And the songs will be encoded in the Microsoft WMA format, meaning they will probably not work on Apple iPod portable music players.
Spiral Frog will spiral down the toilet if they think we’re going to like that. I think I hear one flushing:
“Offering young consumers an easy-to-use alternative to pirated music sites will be compelling,” Mr. Kent of SpiralFrog said in a statement. “SpiralFrog will offer those consumers a better experience and environment than they can get from any pirate site.”
The Listening Post suspects the Spiral Frog buzz is just Crazy Frog redux and none of us will be talking about it in a couple months. I concur.
Friday, August 25, 2006
Directory of Lawyers Defending RIAA lawsuits
Ray Beckerman, a NY lawyer who represents people being sued by the RIAA, has put together a directory of lawyers who are actively contesting peer to peer file sharing cases brought by the RIAA against the public at his Recording Industry vs The People blog.
There’s one attorney from Georgia on the list:
*Caldwell, Michael A. DeLong, Caldwell & Bridgers, LLC Suite 3100 Centennial Tower 101 Marietta St., N.W. Atlanta, GA 30303 (404)979-3150 Email:
Not bad considering that Illinois and California only have one each as well.
He’s looking for others to add to the list. If you know of an attorney doing this good work, let them know at .
Wednesday, August 23, 2006
Go and buy the CD!
The video is out. BUY THE CD. Don’t download this song…
