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Lobbyists to Solve Copyright Problem

November 22, 2002 by

Declan McCullagh at news.com reports that “Technology and entertainment lobbyists will sit down at the negotiating table [today] to seek a resolution to the long-running political spat over digital copyright.”

The article makes the alarming but unstated assumption that the last Congress’s refusal to pass any “anti-piracy” bills is actually a problem. When Congress rejects bad bills, that’s not an “impasse,” that’s democracy at work. We should all hope that Congress continues to reject any bad bills that are put before it.

It’s a classic error to assume that every social problem can best be solved by passing new laws. Copyright infringement is a difficult problem, but so far I haven’t seen any convincing argument that passing laws can do much to address it.

Clarification (added at 11:30 AM): Declan is one of the last people I would expect to make the “classic error” of assuming that all problems require government action. I suspect the hand of an editor at work here.

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RIAA's Anti-Infringement Site Infringes

November 21, 2002 by

I swear I’m not making this up.

DSLReports observes that the RIAA’s new anti-infringement website, UnitedMusic, contained material copied without permission from a page at the University of Chicago. The RIAA has now removed the apparently infringing material.

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My Worst Fears, Confirmed

November 21, 2002 by

Cory Doctorow points to a new tool, GetContentSize, that evaluates what portion of a Web site is content, as opposed to formatting and other junk. When applied to this site, here is GetContentSize’s report:

http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com

Total page size: 32939 bytes (not including images, attached scripts or style sheets)

…

[NO CONTENT]

UPDATE (1:00 PM): Adrian Holovaty, the author of GetContentSize, writes that he has fixed the bug that caused this site to be labeled as content-free. Now the site rates as 38.7% text content. Now that it’s fixed, GetContentSize looks pretty useful in diagnosing sites that have too much baggage and too little content.

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Post-Napster File Sharing at Princeton

November 20, 2002 by

Today’s issue of the Daily Princetonian, our student newspaper, reports on file sharing issues on campus.

(Note that the article has its facts wrong about the Napster case. Napster was not found to have violated the DMCA. Napster’s legal problems had to do with contributory and vicarious copyright infringement.)

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Report from the ACM DRM Workshop

November 19, 2002 by

Yesterday I attended the ACM “Digital Rights Management” Workshop in Washington DC. There were about 100 attendees, most of them computer scientists, with a few lawyers and Washington policy types thrown in. Papers from the workshop are available online.

My main impression was that the speakers were more openly skeptical about DRM than at past conferences. I don’t think this represents any real change in opinion. The real cause, in my view, is that industrial researchers are now starting to say in public what they would only say in private before.

The skepticism about watermarking was especially strong. One speaker described a simple attack that apparently can defeat essentially all state-of-the-art watermarking methods. Another speaker’s paper says

Proposals for systems involving mandatory watermark detection in rendering devices try to impact the effectiveness of [file sharing systems]…. In addition to severe commercial and social problems, these schemes suffer from several technical deficiencies, which, in the presence of an effective [file sharing system], lead to their complete collapse. We conclude that such schemes are doomed to failure.

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