Posts tagged `legal`

Do they give merit badges for prostituting yourself to a media conglomerate?

Boy Scouts in the Los Angeles area will now be able to earn a merit patch for learning about the evils of downloading pirated movies and music. [...]

The movie industry has developed the curriculum.

“Working with the Boy Scouts of Los Angeles, we have a real opportunity to educate a new generation about how movies are made, why they are valuable, and hopefully change attitudes about intellectual property theft,” Dan Glickman, chairman of the Motion Picture Association of America, said Friday.

…. Does this seem just a bit creepy to anyone else, or am I on my own here?

A few problems:

Allowing an industry to develop a curriculum is a recipe for disaster (or should I say “flop”?). I would no more allow the MPAA or RIAA to tell me about copyright than I would allow Exxon to tell me about alternative energy or Microsoft to tell me about “embrace and extend.” Remember, the MPAA’s the same organization that said you aren’t allowed to make backups of the DVDs you buy—if it gets damaged, you simply have to go out and buy another copy. Apparently, this sort of stricture is perfectly OK, but it strikes me as odd, given the Boy Scouts’ fear of homosexuals: apparently, getting fucked in the ass is only all right if it’s a litigious media conglomerate doing the mounting.

Glickman, ever stubbornly flogging the same dead horse, is right when he concludes that the attitude toward intellectual property theft needs to be changed—yes, by consumers, but just as much by the studios and the soulless abysses which represent them. I think people know the value of movies, and that is precisely the problem: certainly, they don’t seem to be worth buying anymore. At least, not when they suck, hard, and are available on digital media that was designed to give consumers the shaft.

The article goes on to that say that prospective badge-earners must also choose from a list of activities which include visiting a movie studio “to see how many people can be harmed by film piracy.” I love this, because I’m quite certain these children will be told that for every movie they download, some humble janitor or assistant to the assistant director will lose their job and return home, Bob Cratchit-like, to tell his starving family that there’ll be no Christmas presents this year—piracy has ruined the movie industry and it tireless, selfless constituents. No one will tell the Boy Scouts, of course, that the people who really care about piracy are executives whose salaries won’t be affected. The truth is that this tack by conglomerates to stem piracy with appeals to pathos is little more than people like Dan Glickman holding a pistol to some lowly worker’s temple and screaming that Dammit, if the piracy doesn’t stop, then Mr. Cratchit here gets it!

Dan Glickman is an asshole. And his merit badge isn’t worthy to wipe my ass with. Fín.

§1473 · October 23, 2006 · 2 comments · Tags: , , , ,

Microsoft continues to browbeat FOSS in higher ed

Inside Higher Ed. is running an article concerning a report created by the Commission on the Future of Higher Education. The article itself is neutral, but of course it really gets up the gander of an open source advocate like myself.

The panel’s members agreed at the time that the report would undergo only minor copy editing and “wordsmithing” between then and when it was formally presented to Education Secretary Margaret Spellings later this month.

That agreement was nearly imperiled last weekend, though. Gerri Elliott, corporate vice president at Microsoft’s Worldwide Public Sector division, sent an e-mail message to fellow commissioners Friday evening saying that she “vigorously” objected to a paragraph in which the panel embraced and encouraged the development of open source software and open content projects in higher education.

Is anybody surprised? I desire to blockquote the whole article, but I won’t for obvious reasons. Read it and come back to me; I’ll wait. Done? OK, good. Briefly:

  1. One could argue that there is no better tool for universities than open-source software, because it allows global collaboration, and provides good experience for students in computer science programs without hurting the university’s bottom line. With the right instructors, for instance, you could run an entire 4-year CS program with nothing but open-source tools and Creative Commons teaching materials. Even if the university taught using MS tools like VisualStudio, the value of shared content is still obvious.
  2. That being said, it should come as no surprise—even to Elliott—that the panel would endorse such methods. It’s not mere chaff that got thrown in the report because the panel was stocked with penguin-huggers; rather, open-source is genuinely healthy for schools, and examples like uPortal or OpenCourseWare bolster this claim.
  3. Elliott’s reaction, then, both to the original wording and to the later revision that endorsed both commercial and open-source methods, strikes me as the hysterical reaction of a true corporate floozy. Is Microsoft so scared of open source that they have to flail around like this? Importantly Microsoft has to-date portrayed its own proprietary products as not only better quality, but also of infinitely more utility. If it can no longer stand upon the demonstrable superiority of the closed-source model, but rather must instead actively lobby against any paradigm which contains the word “open,” what does that say about the future of the company?
  4. Elliott says that open-source is “a method of coding software, and one of several available, period.” She makes it sound as though it’s a stylistic preference, like indentation, rather than a means of sharing information. She is wrong, and her objection flimsy.
  5. She also say that open content is “a term which can mean different things and enter us into some copyright debate.” Except that the very nature of open content means that copyright isn’t an issue. This is why the Creative Commons was established—MIT’s OpenCourseWare, for instance, is licensed in just such a fashion. Poor Ms. Elliott can’t seem to wrap her head around the idea of free information exchange, and thinks that Higher Ed. can’t either. She is wrong, and her company flimsy.
§1351 · September 1, 2006 · 2 comments · Tags: , , , , ,

Eric S. Raymond failed Philosophy 101

That is, the part about the end not justifying the means.

In case you’ve missed the recent furor over proprietary modules in GNU/Linux distributions, here’s the deal: because of the rise of popular titles available for Linux gaming, and because of the availability of hardware-accelerated desktop graphics like Xgl+Compiz or AIGLX, getting the vendor-supplied drivers for ATI or nVidia graphics card is almost unavoidable. The problem is that unlike Intel, which recently opened the source for its modern graphics chipsets, the hardcore graphics card makers only provide binary blobs—closed-source modules whose very nature means they can’t be shipped with most distributions. Similar problems arise when discussing mp3 or Windows Media playback on Linux system, which require installing more binary files or open-source programs that exist in a legal grey area in countries that let software monopolies rape and pillage to their hearts’ content (read: America. Thanks, USPTO!).

This presents a problem for a number of reasons: one, the security and quality of the program itself is not up to package maintainers, but rather to the third parties that provide the binary blobs—until today, for instance, nVidia didn’t provide a driver set that would support X.org 7.1, which was released in May. But more important, binary blobs violate the spirit of the Open Source movement (e.g., users can’t edit the source or freely redistribute the program), and make life difficult for projects like Debian, which claim 100% compatibility with Open Source guidelines.

So, the furor is: to what extent to binary blobs like video card drivers get official sanction, and to what extent should development cater to the availability of these proprietary modules?

Well, enter in Eric S. Raymond, famed proponent of Open Source in general, saying some pretty strange things.

As an open-source ambassador, he’s prepared to push some uncomfortable notions. “We need to be prepared to go to the rights holders for these proprietary codecs and say, we’ll give you money, give us a license,” he said. “This is something that the Linux community has a huge antipathy to doing because we’ve got all this idealism about open source. And in the long run, I think that’s true, I view comprising with the proprietary codec vendors as a tactical move designed to get us larger end user market shares, so that in the end we can push more things to the open.”

He makes idealism sound like some sort of kinky hangup instead of a laudable quality. Mind you, I don’t doubt ESR’s sincerity—he’s been passionate about open source software for a long time, but I think he’s maybe missing the point. First of all, he suggests giving rights-holders money for licenses to, say, patented codecs. Who’s going to fork over this money? FOSS is by-and-large a volunteer movement—Novell and Redhat aside, there are no cashcows who are going to pay exorbitant licensing fees for a patent that should never have been granted. This is a problem with patent law, not the FOSS movement. Second of all, ESR seems to see this compromise as a means to an end, but he should know better (or am I too cynical?). If GNU/Linux makes compromises now—accepts binary blob graphics drivers as canonical, for instance, or starts shelling out licensing fees on a per-distribution basis for out-of-the-box WM[A/V] support—and somehow makes enormous gains in the desktop market, does he really think that’s going to give them bargaining power? If, a few years from now, GNU/Linux is a major player in the market, and has accepted into its philosophy the “mostly-open, but some proprietary” stance, what clout will it really have to turn proprietary providers into good, line-toeing GPL-followers? None. If GNU/Linux accepts proprietary now, I don’t think there will ever be a point at which the movement can stop and say, “OK, we’ve had enough of closed-source modules now. Let’s flex our muscles and make them open-source their drivers!” Vendors can merely point to the movement’s hypothetical history of tolerating closed-source code and insist that if proprietary code and licensing fees have worked for them ever since ESR advocated it, there’s no reason to stop that lucrative (for the vendors) deal now!

I hate the term “slippery slope,” but I think in this case, we really are looking at one: I understand that the end-user makes compromises in terms of the FOSS philosophy—hell, I’ve got ATI’s binary blobs running right now on my Ubuntu 6.06 installation—but I think that compromise needs to be left to the end user. Once the distributions start doing it, all bets are off—from there, you’ll see X server releases tailored to meet the whims of video card manufacturers. You’ll see wifi support bend over backwards to accomodate a legion of different vendors. You’ll see format wars—clusterfuck, thy name is Codec—until there’s no choice but to permanently taint everything out-of-the-box with the stink of proprietary code, meaning that you marginalize developers without the money or clout for licensing, and forever knock off-course the upward trend of free software.

I’d expect such blathering from John Dvorak, but Eric S. Raymond should goddamn well know better.

§1334 · August 26, 2006 · 1 comment · Tags: , , , ,

Death!

Something to ponder: Is it more Christian to be pro- or anti- capital punishment?

For all the sins of the Catholic Church, I will at least give them credit for consistency in many regards: when they say they are pro-life, by George, they mean they are against abortion and against capital punishment. Protestants, though sensible in many more regards, have a bloodthirsty streak that is discomfiting. They are of course against abortion like most Christians, but are statistically more likely to support the death penalty. Why is killing fetuses an incredible offense but killing grownup fetuses not?

I’ve previously pointed out some of the absurdities inherent in capital punishment—at one point, I had a long and detailed workup about a case somewhat similar to the one in the previous entry, but it has been lost to the ages. Essentially, a man on death row for murder acquired and died from a debilitating neurological disease that slowly and painfully killed him over a period of many months. Afterwards, the victim’s brother had the gall to tell reporters he was disappointed that justice hadn’t been served.

The impulse to exact revenge is deliciously tempting—and it’s easy to rationalize, if you subscribe to a theory of “an eye for an eye”—but not even Jesus advocated such a system: you have to look at Old Testament, wrath-of-God stuff to find it advocated. When you’re young, and your brother punches you, your mother tells you not to punch back, but instead to come and tell her. Analogously, killing a human being is a moral wrong: “killing them back” isn’t any less wrong. It’s easier to do, however, when the killing is being done by an abstracted entity like The State: the disembodied arm of ‘justice’ has connotations of infallibility and the divine. So when Red State conservatives propose the death penalty as administered by the Establishment while concomitantly lambasting the government for incompetence, there’s a noticeable conflict of interest.

It seems to me that there are a number of liberties which ought to be preserved from the government: some, like the freedom to free speech—yes even and especially against the government—are explicitly preserved in the Bill of Rights. But the government still has the power to kill, and that strikes me as a faculty I wouldn’t entrust to anyone.

But I digress. The question at hand today is “Is it more Christian to be pro- or anti-capital punishment?” I gave credit to the Catholic Church for their consistency on this issue, and I think such a conclusion is inescapable: the killing of another human being outside of his/her agency, despite the circumstances of age or behavior, is either entirely acceptable, or entirely unacceptable. The desire to be rid of a being—be s/he a murderer or a fetus—is one made arbitrarily acceptable apparently by popular vote.

It seems to me that the killing of a nation’s less desirable elements is a wholly barbarous thing, even if it may seem easier to simply eradicate the troublemakers than isolate them. Of the 2’148 people executed in 2005, 94% of them were executed in our own little “coalition of the willing”: the US, of course, but also China, Saudi Arabia, and Iran, those flourishing democracies of the Middle and Far East. Personally, I think we’re hanging with the wrong crowd.

§1317 · August 21, 2006 · 4 comments · Tags: , , ,

More fun with XOR

Continuing a trend of new posts that make me dredge up pieces from my archives, I recently read about the OFF System, a new theoretical P2P network that purports to get around copyright issues with a brightnet.

Why don’t I just let the guys at Ars Technica explain it?

The ideas behind the OFF System were originally expressed in a more formal paper (PDF) that outlined how copyright does not extend to random numbers. Thus, to get around copyright restrictions, the OFF System cuts up files into tiny chunks (128 kilobytes each) and then encrypts these chunks by using an XOR (exclusive OR) boolean operation with two sets of random numbers. The encoding system is similar to a One-Time Pad cipher, and makes decrypting the contents by someone who does not have the appropriate key extremely difficult. The use of two sets of random numbers instead of just one is a kind of cryptographic sleight-of-hand which is used to argue that the bits are no longer copyrighted.

The argument goes something like this: a copyrighted file is converted into small chunks, which are labeled “A.” These chunks are still copyrighted by the original owner. It is then encrypted by performing an XOR operation with a block of random numbers, called “B.” The resulting block “C,” is still copyrighted by the original owner, but things get really interesting when C is encrypted again, this time using not a series of random numbers, but a block “E” that is pulled out of the user’s cache. Block E is itself the result of an encryption of someone else’s copyrighted file (D), which would make the final result (F) copyrighted by two content owners at the same time. As it is not possible for both parties to hold a copyright on the same content, the result is that neither party does, and thus the block can be transmitted without fear of lawsuits from the RIAA or MPAA.

This sounds awfully familiar to me. In fact, it’s more or less the exact same concept as Monolith, which I blogged about just this past March. Essentially, both authors/developers claim that enough encryption and/or tying files to other files make these arbitrary digital representations indistinguishable from one another and therefore uncopyrightable.

As Ars says, though, it’s an interesting proof-of-concept (it really is: read the linked PDF file, and possibly the developer’s explanation and if you haven’t read my write-up of Monolith, read that too), but when it comes down to it as a legal defense, I’m not sure any judge is going to be tech-savvy to rule in favor of the filesharer.

Just a thought: maybe XOR isn’t the cure-all for filesharing woes.

On a semi-related note, a truly useful little tool for filesharers is a darknet (basically, a method of surfing completely anonymously), and the infamous Piratpartiet (the “Pirate Party,” a Swedish political party formed around the venerable PirateBay bittorrent site) has formed a super-fast darknet that users can buy into for 5 Euro a month.

§1303 · August 15, 2006 · (No comments) · Tags: , ,

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