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CleanFlicks Ruled an Infringer

July 10, 2006 by

Joe Gratz writes,

Judge Richard P. Matsch of the United States District Court for the District of Colorado [on] Wednesday filed this opinion granting partial summary judgment in favor of the movie studios, finding that CleanFlicks infringes copyright. This is not a terribly surprising result; CleanFlicks’ business involves selling edited DVD-Rs of Hollywood movies, buying and warehousing one authorized DVD of the movie for each edited copy it sells.

CleanFlicks edited the movies by bleeping out strong language, and removing or obscuring depictions of explicit sex and violence. (Tim Lee also has interesting commentary: 1 2 3.)

The opinion is relatively short, and worth reading if you’re interested in copyright. The judge ruled that CleanFlicks violated the studios’ exclusive rights to make copies of the movies, and to distribute copies to the public. He said that what CleanFlicks did was not fair use.

There are at least four interesting aspects to the opinion.

First, the judge utterly rejected CleanFlicks’s public policy argument. CleanFlicks had argued that public policy should favor allowing its business, because it enables people with different moral standards to watch movies, and it lets people compare the redacted and unredacted versions to decide whether the language, sex, and violence are really necessary to the films. The judge noted that Congress, in debating and passing the Family Movie Act, during the pendency of this lawsuit, had chosen to legalize redaction technologies that didn’t make a new DVD copy, but had not legalized those like CleanFlicks that did make a copy. He said, reasonably, that he did not want to overrule Congress on this policy issue. But he went farther, saying that this public policy argument is “inconsequential to copyright law” (page 7).

Second, the judge ruled that the redacted copies of the movies are not derivative works. His reasoning here strikes me as odd. He says first that the redaction is not a transformative use, because it removes material but doesn’t add anything. He then says that because the redacted version is not transformative, it is not a derivative work (page 11). If it is true in general that redaction does not create a derivative work, this has interesting consequences for commercial-skipping technologies – my understanding is that the main copyright-law objection to commercial-skipping is that it creates an unauthorized derivative work by redacting the commercials.

Third, the judge was unimpressed with CleanFlicks’s argument that it wasn’t reducing the studios’ profits, and was possibly even increasing them by bringing the movie to people who wouldn’t have bought it otherwise. (Recall that for every redacted copy it sold, CleanFlicks bought and warehoused one ordinary studio-issued DVD; so every CleanFlicks sale generated a sale for the studio.) The judge didn’t much engage this economic argument but instead stuck to a moral-rights view that CleanFlicks was injuring the artistic integrity of the films:

The argument [that CleanFlicks has no impact or a positive impact on studio revenues] has superficial appeal but it ignores the intrinsic value of the right to control the content of the copyrighted work which is the essence of the law of copyright.

(page 11)

Finally, the judge notes that the studios did not make a DMCA claim, even though CleanFlicks was circumventing the encryption on DVDs into order to enable its editing. (The studios say they could have brought such a claim but chose not to.) Why they chose not to is an interesting question. I think Tim Lee is probably right here: the studios were feeling defensive about the overbreadth of the DMCA, so they didn’t want to generate more conservative opponents of the DMCA by winning this case on DMCA grounds.

There also seems to have been no claim that CleanFlicks fostered infringement by releasing its copies as unencrypted DVDs, when the original studio DVDs had been encrypted with CSS (the standard, laughably weak DVD encryption scheme). The judge takes care to note that CleanFlicks and its co-parties all release their edited DVDs in unencrypted form, but his ruling doesn’t seem to rely on this fact. Presumably the studios chose not to make this argument either, perhaps for reasons similar to their DMCA non-claim.

In theory CleanFlicks can appeal this decision, but my guess is that they’ll run out of money and fold before any appeal can happen.

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University-Purchased Music Services a Bust

July 7, 2006 by

When universities buy music service subscriptions for their students, few students use them, according to Nick Timiraos’s story in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal. Students tend to download music illegally, or buy it from iTunes instead.

In explaining the popularity of Napster and other file-sharing systems, commentators have often overemphasized the price factor and underestimated convenience. Here we see students given the option of a free subscription service, and passing it up to use another free (though illegal) system, or a for-pay system that is more convenient than the free one. (These systems are free to the students, in the sense that using them costs no more than not using them.)

This error was particularly common when the original Napster was new. Before Napster, many people knew how to distribute music conveniently online, but licensing and payment issues were holding up the development of useful online music services. Napster cut the Gordian knot by building the distribution infrastructure and skipping the licensing and payment part. For Napster users, payment was not optional – there was no way to pay, even if the user wanted to. Napster users were choosing convenience, as much as they were choosing not to pay.

Thanks to the record companies’ insistence on intrusive DRM, most of today’s authorized online music services suffer from incompatibility and user frustration. iTunes offers the least intrusive DRM, and unsurprisingly it is by far the most successful online music store. Music fans want music they can actually listen to.

(link via Doug Tygar)

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Why Do Innovation Clusters Form?

July 3, 2006 by

Recently I attended a very interesting conference about high-tech innovation and public policy, with experts in various fields. (Such a conference will be either boring or fascinating, depending on who exactly is invited. This one was great.)

One topic of discussion was how innovation clusters form. “Innovation cluster” is the rather awkward term for a place where high-tech companies are concentrated. Silicon Valley is the biggest and best-known example.

It’s easy to understand why innovative people and companies tend to cluster. Companies spin out of other companies. People who move to an area to work for one company can easily jump to another one that forms nearby. Support services develop, such as law firms that specialize in supporting start-up companies or certain industries. Nerds like to live near other nerds. So once a cluster gets going, it tends to grow.

But why do clusters form in certain places and not others? We can study existing clusters to see what makes them different. For example, we know that clusters have more patent lawyers and fewer bowling alleys, per capita, than other places. But that doesn’t answer the question. Thinking that patent lawyers cause innovation is like thinking that ants cause picnics. What we want to know is not how existing clusters look, but how the birth of a cluster looks.

So what causes clusters to be born? Various arguments have been advanced. Technical universities can be catalysts, like Stanford in Silicon Valley. Weather and quality of life matter. Cheap land helps. Some argue that goverment-funded technology companies can be a nucleus – and perhaps funding cuts force previously government-funded engineers to improvise. Cultural factors, such as a general tolerance for experimentation and failure, can make a difference.

Simple luck plays a role, too. Even if all else is equal, a cluster will start forming somewhere first. The feedback cycle will start there, pulling resources away from other places. And that one place will pull ahead, for no particular reason except that it happened to reach critical mass first.

We like to have explanations for everything that happens. So naturally we’ll find it easy to discount the role of luck, and give credit instead to other factors. But I suspect that luck is more important than most people think.

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Does the Great Firewall Violate U.S. Law?

June 28, 2006 by

Clayton, Murdoch, and Watson have an interesting new paper describing technical mechanisms that the Great Firewall of China uses to block online access to content the Chinese government doesn’t like.

The Great Firewall works in two parts. One part inspects data packets that cross the border between China and the rest of the world, looking for “bad” content. The other part tries to shut down cross-border connections that have contained “bad” content. I’ll focus here on the shutdown part.

The shutdown part attacks the TCP protocol, which is used (among many other things) to transfer Web pages and email. TCP allows two computers on the Net to establish a virtual “connection” and then send data over that connection. The technical specification for TCP says that either of the two computers can send a so-called Reset packet, which informs the computer on the other end that some unspecified error has occurred so the connection should be shut down immediately.

The Great Firewall tries to sever TCP connections by forging Reset packets. Each endpoint machine is sent a series of Reset packets purporting to come from the other machine (but really coming from the Great Firewall). The endpoints usually respond by shutting down the connection. If they try to connect again, they’ll get more forged Reset packets, and so on.

This trick of forging Reset packets has been used by denial-of-service attackers in the past, and there are well-known defenses against it that have been built into popular networking software. However, these defenses generally don’t work against an attacker who can see legitimate traffic between the target machines, as the Great Firewall can.

What the Great Firewall is doing, really, is launching a targeted denial of service attack on both ends of the connection. If I visit a Chinese website and access certain content, the Great Firewall will send denial of service packets to a machine in China, which probably doesn’t violate Chinese law. But it will also send denial of service packets to my machine, here in the United States. Which would seem to implicate U.S. law.

The relevant U.S. statute is the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (18 U.S.C. 1030), which makes it an offense to “knowingly cause[] the transmission of a program, information, code, or command, and as a result of such conduct, intentionally cause[] damage without authorization, to a protected computer”, as long as certain other conditions are met (about which more below). Unpacking this, and noting that any computer that can communicate with China will meet the definition of “protected computer”, the only part of this requirement that requires any discussion is “damage”. The statute defines “damage” as “any impairment to the integrity or availability of data, a program, a system, or information”, so that the unavailability to me of the information on the Chinese website I tried to visit would count as damage.

But the offense has another requirement, which is intended to ensure that it is serious enough to merit legal attention. The offense must also cause, or attempt to cause, one of the following types of harm:

(i) loss to 1 or more persons during any 1-year period (and, for purposes of an investigation, prosecution, or other proceeding brought by the United States only, loss resulting from a related course of conduct affecting 1 or more other protected computers) aggregating at least $5,000 in value;

(ii) the modification or impairment, or potential modification or impairment, of the medical examination, diagnosis, treatment, or care of 1 or more individuals;

(iii) physical injury to any person;

(iv) a threat to public health or safety; or

(v) damage affecting a computer system used by or for a government entity in furtherance of the administration of justice, national defense, or national security;

This probably wouldn’t apply to an attack on my computer, but attacks on certain U.S. government entities would trigger part (v), and there is a decent argument that the aggregate effect of such attacks on U.S. persons could add up to more than $5000 in damage, which would trigger part (i). I don’t know whether this argument would succeed. And I’m not a lawyer, so I’m relying on real lawyers to correct me in the comments if I’m missing something here.

But even if the Great Firewall doesn’t violate U.S. law now, the law could be changed so that it did. A law banning the sending of forged packets to the U.S. with intent to deny availability of content lawful in the U.S., would put the Great Firewall on the wrong side of U.S. law. And it would do so without reaching across the border to regulate how the Chinese government interacts with its citizens. If we can’t stop the Chinese government from censoring their own citizens’ access to the Net, maybe we can stop them from launching denial of service attacks against us.

(link via Bruce Schneier)

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Long-Tail Innovation

June 27, 2006 by

Recently I saw a great little talk by Cory Ondrejka on the long tail of innovation. (He followed up with a blog entry.)

For those not in the know, “long tail” is one of the current buzzphrases of tech punditry. The term was coined by Chris Anderson in a famous Wired article. The idea is that in markets for creative works, niche works account for a surprisingly large fraction of consumer demand. For example, Anderson writes that about one-fourth of Amazon’s book sales come from titles not among the 135,000 most popular. These books may sell in ones and twos, but there are so many of them that collectively they make up a big part of the market.

Traditional businesses generally did poorly at meeting this demand. A bricks-and-mortar book superstore stocks at most 135,000 titles, leaving at least one-fourth of the demand unmet. But online stores like Amazon can offer a much larger catalog, opening up the market to these long tail works.

Second Life, the virtual world run by Cory’s company, Linden Lab, lets users define the behavior of virtual items by writing software code in a special scripting language. Surprisingly many users do this, and the demand for scripted objects looks like a long tail distribution. If this is true for software innovation in general, Cory asked, what are the implications for business and for public policy?

The implications for public policy are interesting. Much of the innovation in the long tail is not motivated mainly by profit – the authors know that their work will not be popular. Policymakers should remember that not all valuable creativity is financially motivated.

But innovation can be deterred by imposing costs on it. The key issue is transaction costs. If you have to pay $200 to somebody before you can innovate, or if you have to involve lawyers, the innovation won’t happen. Or, just as likely, the innovation will happen anyway, and policymakers will wonder why so many people are ignoring the law. That’s what has happened with music remixes; and it could happen again for code.

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