One of my favorite advocacy groups, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has launched a new website called Copyright Watch. The site allows users to see the latest news in copyright law. The effort is to inform the general public about the threat that looming copyright laws poses to individual freedom, and maintaining an open Internet.

In other related news, here’s a quote from BoingBoing for you… I can’t improve upon their words:

“Two US Senators, Bernie Sanders (I-VI) and Sherrod Brown (D-OH), have written to the US Trade Representative demanding that the text of the secret Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement be made public. This is the treaty that allows for criminal sanctions against noncommercial file-sharers, demands border-searches of laptop hard-drives and personal media players and phones for pirated material, requires ISPs to spy on their users, and gives movie and record companies the right to take whole households off the Internet with unsubstantiated allegations of piracy.”*

This secret copyright treaty is pretty black and white to me; we must crush it. The consequences of this treaty are unimaginably dreadful.

For more information you can visit the following links:

The Geek Whisperer: Scary Secret Copyright Treaty: From Music to Purses, This is Bad News

Copyright Watch

The Electronic Frontier Foundation

* BoingBoing: Two US senators demand publication of secret copyright treaty

This guy is accused of attempting to rob a bank. He allegedly handed a note to a bank teller demanding money. The video picks up with his arrest and subsequent search.

Enjoy.

To followup yesterday’s post, Copyright, teh Internets & the Future, here’s a bit on the secret international copyright treaty known as the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA).

ACTA is an international copyright treaty that is being negotiated in secret; although a lot of details have been leaked. The sections regarding the Internet are obscenely draconian; three strikes and you lose your right to connect to the Internet for a year. If this passes, I want that applied to major media conglomerates as well. Three misuses of intellectual property and the whole company loses it’s connection.

This video explains the treaty as it exists today, it’s origins, and it’s potential impact. This isn’t the best video, but it does the job. You are on the Internet, and you are reading a blog, so this treaty will harm you. You should watch the video, don’t be ignorant on this issue.

Make no mistake about it, ACTA will impact everyone. We all handle intellectual property on a daily basis, and current copyright law just doesn’t make sense in a post-Internet world (see yesterday’s post for more on that).

How can the US Government participate in secret negotiations for a treaty that will directly impact so many American’s? This isn’t some right wing thing pro business thing, this is the Obama Administration (not that I care for either side, but some of you do).

Current copyright law turns everyone into a criminal.

Kill ACTA. Reform copyright law.

Copyright law has fascinated me since high school. I read a lot about it, I understand it (fairly well), I have a lot of informed opinions on it, but I have never been able to articulate my ideas on the subject in the way that I am confident.

Fortunately, law professor and Creative Commons founder Larry Lessig does it for me. His presentation perfectly explains Copyright law, then he breaks it down in ways that make so much sense. So much more sense then I could ever make. Not only that, the presentation uses PowerPoint in fun ways.

This isn’t short, but if you have any curiosity or interest in Copyright law and how it impacts you, watch this video. If you don’t have a lot of time, watch the first twelve minutes, and the last five; you won’t regret it.

“No Doubt” is suing Band Hero (and Guitar Hero) maker Activision over their appearance in the game (GameSpy).

Allegedly, the band’s contract with Activision dictates that the band member’s avatars can only be used on their own songs, but they are fully playable characters in the game. This means that players can appear as say, Gwen Stefani on any song in the game.

Apparently this is damaging to the members of “No Doubt.”

Someone screwed up badly, and only time will tell who it was. Either…

1. “No Doubt’s” lawyers dropped the ball or…
2. Activision breached their contract.

I don’t know how it actually went down, but either way, this is pathetic.

At the end of the day, I don’t see how the members of “No Doubt” are actually damaged and deserving of financial reward on account of this, but I’m sure their lawyers would be happy to explain why I’m wrong. By the same token, Activision needs to get their shit together and make sure that the artists that they put in their games understand, and are happy with their role within it, as the very same thing happened with Guitar Hero 5, and their use of Kurt Cobain.

Speaking of the late Mr. Cobain…

Cobain’s wife Courtney Love complained that the ability for players to use Cobain on any song in the game, including a lot of pop and electro-crap that he probably would hate was damaging to his legacy. Normally I would agree. Cobain was a revolutionary figure in music, popular culture, hell, culture in general. Having him play a song like “Play That Funky Music” is degrading. Then I saw this commercial for Nicktoons that is set to Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” (Sorry, I can’t embed this one, but it’s worth watching).*

I’m sure that the same lawyer who approved the deal with Activision over Cobain’s appearance along with the song “Smells Like Teen Spirit” in Guitar Hero 5, had to approve the deal with Nicktoons as well. I can’t imagine that Cobain would have liked that commercial.

So, “No Doubt” & Courtney Love, let’s cut this shit out. Everyone got paid and these games introduce the music of “No Doubt” and Nirvana to a younger generation. Everyone is making money, and that’s all that you folks really want at this point.

* That commercial really does break my heart.

“People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people.” ~V

Today the FCC proposed a number of net neutrality guidelines that most notably include prohibiting broadband providers from “discriminating against content or applications, and mandate transparent network management” (Engadget).

It’s nice to see a government agency leaning towards personal freedom.

Of course, this isn’t law or policy and there is a good chance there will be any number of loopholes for broadband providers to exploit.

It reminds me of a bit from Lewis Black’s stand-up routine about Enron. He said something along these lines:

“If you have a company, and you can’t explain in one sentence… what it does. It’s illegal.”

This may seem incredibly simplistic, but what’s wrong with using this language?

“It is not permissible for a broadband provider to discriminate against content or applications. Discriminating against content or applications will result in the following penalties…”

Why do we have to make this so complicated that it will be ineffective?

Across the United States analog television will go away for good as of June 12, 2009, so long as it isn’t pushed back again like it was in February (I sincerely doubt that the digital conversion will be delayed again).

If you are reading this site you probably know about the conversion, but this is one of those tech issues where I ask that you keep an eye out for people who don’t know; the elderly in particular.

If you are receiving your television from a cable, phone, or satellite provider you should be fine even if you don’t have a digital television. The box does the conversion for you.

You will need a converter if you are using a television that has an antenna or you are using a roof-based antenna to receive your television signal.

Not too bad right?

Be kind and help those who aren’t in the know.

Last week President Obama gave Queen Elizabeth II an iPod with 40 show tunes as a gift.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation pointed out that the President probably violated the iTunes terms of service as a result of giving her the gift. At the very least it is incredibly ambiguous.

I took a look at the terms of service for myself and they are absolutely correct that there seems to be no real answer about who owns the music after a user pays for it.

I recommend reading the original EFF post because it clearly explains the problems and ambiguity with our current intellectual property laws. Any attempt to improve upon their post would be a total waste of your time and mine.

This just goes to show you how ill-equipped our legal system is for present and future technology.

"YES WE CAN accidentally violate ambiguous terms of service agreements!"

The police out in Arizona are pretty ridiculous. I’ve seen some pretty loopy things in Phoenix and heard a ton of stories about how vicious the authorities can be in that desert city… but this is absolutely insane:

In what should send a frightening chill down the spine of every blogger, writer, journalist and First Amendment advocate in the United States, Phoenix police raided the home of a blogger who has been highly critical of the department.

Jeff Pataky, who runs Bad Phoenix Cops, said the officers confiscated three computers, routers, modems, hard drives, memory cards and everything necessary to continue blogging.

Pataky started his blog a month before his own harassment trial to rant against the police. He felt he had been wrongfully charged and ultimately a judge agreed.

After the charges were dropped Pataky was going to shut down the site when he began receiving tips from people within the Phoenix Police Department about police wrongdoing. The site has been highly critical of the Phoenix Police Department ever since – they have between 50 and 100 active and retired police sources.

Now in what appears to be an act of retaliation the Phoenix Police have confiscated his belongings and charged him with both “petty theft” and “computer tampering with the intent to harass.” No affidavits have been produced to establish probable cause for the charges or the search and seizure.

Unless there is some deeper story it seems that Phoenix Police are trying to terrorize Pataky into ceasing his criticism.

I recommend reading the whole story over at “Photography is Not a Crime.”

If the Phoenix Police have no substantive evidence of real wrongdoing on the part of Pataky, this is absolutely unacceptable.

Nuff said.