TinyP2P is a functional peer-to-peer file sharing application, written in fifteen lines of code, in the Python programming language. I wrote TinyP2P to illustrate the difficulty of regulating peer-to-peer applications. Peer-to-peer apps can be very simple, and any moderately skilled programmer can write one, so attempts to ban their creation would be fruitless.

For more information about TinyP2P, see http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/tinyp2p.html.

DVD-CCA, the outfit that licenses the lame DVD anti-copying technology, has sued Kaleidescape, a maker of home video servers, according a news.com story by John Borland:

[DVD-CCA is suing Kaleidescape.] The company, which has won several recent consumer electronics awards, said it has worked closely with the DVD CCA for more than a year, and will fight the suit, filed Tuesday.

Kaleidescape creates expensive consumer electronics networks that upload the full contents of as many as 500 DVDs to a home server, and allow the owner to browse through the movies without later using the DVDs themselves. That’s exactly what the copy-protection technology on DVDs, called Content Scramble System (CSS) was meant to prevent, the Hollywood-backed group said.

“The express intent and purpose of the contract and CSS are to prevent copying of copyrighted materials such as DVD motion pictures,” Bill Coats, a DVD CCA attorney, said in a statement. “While Kaleidescape obtained a license to use CSS, the company has built a system to do precisely what the license and CSS are designed to prevent–the wholesale copying of protected DVDs.”

From the DVD-CCA rhetoric, you might think this suit is about copyright infringement. Reading the article and DVD-CCA statements carefully, though, it seems as if it’s just a contract dispute about whether Kaleidescape violated the terms of its license agreement with DVD-CCA.

(I haven’t seen DVD-CCA’s complaint yet, so I can’t be absolutely sure that there are no copyright claims. But if it were a copyright case, one would have expected the plaintiffs to include some major copyright owners, such as movie studios.)

The subtext here is that DVD-CCA is trying to maintain its control over all technology related to DVDs. In the good old days, copyright law gave copyright owners the right to sue infringers but gave no right to stop noninfringing uses just because the copyright owner didn’t like them. These days, copyright interests seem to want broad control over technology design.

It’s far to early to tell whether this lawsuit will involve big policy issues, or whether it will be confined to narrow issues of contract interpretation. Regardless, its a good bet we’ll learn more about how the DVD-CCA operates.

By the way, the DVD-CCA’s “Procedural Specifications” are freely available for download by anybody who provides their name and contact information. (Amusingly, the Procedural Specifications document itself says, falsely, that “[t]he Procedural Specifications are provided only to CSS Licensees, prospective CSS Licensees, and others with a business need to know consistent with the intent and purposes of the CSS licensing process.”)

Ben Edelman offers a nice dissection of the latest End User License Agreement (EULA) from Gator. It has to be one of the worst EULAs ever written. Below are some highlights; see Ben’s post if you want more details.

[Background about Gator: Many people say Gator’s product is spyware. Gator has a habit of threatening those people, to get them to say “adware” instead of “spyware”. Draw your own conclusions.]

For starters, the EULA is nearly 6000 words, or 63 on-screen pages. Worse, Gator has taken affirmative steps to make the EULA harder to read, harder to understand, and harder to save. They eliminated helpful formatting, such as boldface section titles, and they removed a button that let you capture the EULA text in Notepad for searching or printing. (Both features were present in previous iterations of the Gator EULA.)

The EULA forbids the use of packet sniffers to determine what information the Gator software is sending out about you.

Worst of all, the EULA forbids you from removing the Gator software, except by removing all of the programs that came bundled with Gator. (It’s not clear how you’re supposed to figure out which programs those are.) Even if you remove all of the programs bundled with Gator, this would only invoke the removal program that Gator provides, which may or may not actually remove all of Gator from your system.

EULAs like this seem designed to create as many unsuspecting or inadvertent violations as possible. James Grimmelmann argues that this is just a tactic to give Gator legal ammunition in case their users sue them, the idea being that anybody suing Gator would face counterclaims for breach of the EULA. That seems plausible, but I doubt it’s the whole story.

To the extent that the EULA gives Gator legal leverage over its users, that leverage could be used to deter criticism of Gator, and not just lawsuits. Experience has shown that some companies, especially ones with dodgy products, do use what legal leverage they have against their critics. If I planned to criticize Gator in detail, I would worry about this issue.

There are two solutions to this overEULAfication problem. A court could throw out this kind of egregious EULA, or at least narrow its scope. Alternatively, users could raise the price of this behavior by refusing to use overEULAfied products. Realistically, this will only happen if users are given the tools to do so.

The best kind of tool for this purpose is information. I would love to see a “EULA doghouse” site that listed products with excessive EULAs, or that rated products by the content of their EULAs. At the very least, EULA evaluation could become standard procedure for people writing reviews of software products. Unfortunately, there hasn’t been much progress on this front.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has named its first advisory board. I’m on it, along with Michael Froomkin, Paul Grewal, Jim Griffin, David Hayes, Mitch Kapor, Mark Lemley, Eben Moglen, Deirdre Mulligan, Michael Page, Michael Traynor, and Jim Tyre.

The video of my Princeton President’s Lecture, “Rip, Mix, Burn, Sue: Technology, Politics, and the Fight to Control Digital Media” is now online. The lecture, which lasts about an hour, is a layperson’s introduction to the technology/copyright wars. I gave it on October 12. The first six minutes of the video consists entirely of introductions, which can safely be skipped.

UPDATE (Nov. 22): This entry has been updated to point to a new page for the lecture, which includes a Creative Commons license for the lecture video, and will eventually link to the lecture in more formats.

Princeton offers a great set of lecture videos on the net.