Technology Archives

May 02, 2007

DMCA takedowns have no merit to the world

Wow internet people of the world. I was surprised tonight. As slow as defending DeCSS took off all those years ago, so quick was the defending of the AACS key. Many people on the Internet spoke out tonight after AACS LA started sending out takedown notices to companies that hosted a key published by some of their users. The biggest thing as far as I'm concerned is that people seem to be willing to break the companies they love (digg and Google) just to prove the stupidity of the DMCA take down notices. These users are not against Digg and Google, they are it's most active supporters, and they will use their favourite tools to prove the governments in the world that the DMCA is giving the DRM companies too much power over other companies that are simply doing their work. They proved that the "secret" is to be protected by the DRM company, and not by all the other companies in the world. The secret is out, and Google and Digg can't stop it, just as little as the DRM companies could prevent the "secret" from getting out in the first place. To ask Google and Digg to stop it is unrealistic, costly and without merit to society as a whole. There are thousands of ways we can communicate those few digits, songs, videos, DNS records, different notations, weak "encoding" variants, barcodes, images, ascii art, etc etc.
It is my full conviction that not a judge in the world will judge Google or Digg as libel in this case. There was no stopping the world, without a full take-down of the companies involved. They couldn't have hired people fast enough to remove it, as others would be able to post it online. Let's HOPE it goes to court, that will stop this idiot-icy once and for all.

I'm proud to be part of the new Internet generation. Sure it has it's faults, the world always has had faults, but it's time people realize that there is no stopping to this. Information is shared now almost by definition, and the knowledge it has spread is far outweighing the "bad" knowledge it's spreading. Information is our drug, our virus. Change your business models, because I'm tired of not owning what I buy, and I'm not the only one.
These companies are forgetting that they serve society in their needs. We pay them and expect certain things back. More and more of our expectations are flatly ignored in order to "save the income" of these companies. If we don't give you money, then that means you are doing something wrong, and the company deserves to go broke. It should not get protected by governments and organizations that serve those same organizations. Many people have said: "If there was a better business-model, then that model would be more successful and win over the other companies". However this is no longer true. This industry as a whole has become so protected that any other business model is no longer viable. You want proof of that ? Well here is a model: I use work of others that I'm allowed to use for free. Let's say an Internet radio station and freely licensed music. Sounds like a viable model, albeit one where I have to do a lot of work. Any commoner would come to such a conclusion. Guess what; It's not viable. In the USA you will have to pay SoundExchange (a daughter of RIAA) regardless of what kind of music you broadcast on the Internet. If the artist doesn't join up with RIAA and collects it's fees, too bad for them, all the money goes to RIAA. (link) This is just anti-competitive and the US government should be thrown out over allowing RIAA to work in such a matter.

There is one big thing that people are often forgetting. There is a lot of talk about the movie and music industry. Their sales are indeed rapidly decreasing etc etc. But what we forget is that the Entertainment industry as a whole is still growing. Television, gaming, sports, events, internet entertainment, iPod, etc have all seen enormous growth over the past years. We are just busy with more stuff then ever before and that's the primary reason we consume less music and movies. You are not losing money over piracy, you are losing money because you are not correctly reading the market you are selling to. Hell some people are even turning to piracy now because of the trouble they have to go trough with their legally bought digital music. And knowing the average computer capabilities of the Internet user I'm not surprised, and neither should they be.

Finally more and more people start to see where all these guidelines are problematic and they start fighting it. This is not about not being willing to pay certain companies for their products. It's about the protection these companies enforce and the government's involvement with these companies. It's about owning a song once you bought it, regardless of the format. It's about being able to buy what you want, without having to wait 1,5 year before the product enters your geographic-market. It's about being able to decrypt your movies 30 years after official DVD players were taken out of production. It's about your right to publish a 16 hex number, regardless of what it means. It's about the bullying of the companies we love, by the companies we hate. And if one happens to go bankrupt in order to defend that, then we will gladly sacrifice such a company and create another one once the issue is settled.

So with saying: "09-f9-11-02-9d-74-e3-5b-d8-41-56-c5-63-56-88-c0" to everyone I end this post.

Posted by The DJ at 04:40 PM | Comments (0)
Posted in Technology , VideoLAN

June 01, 2005

Copyright for tomorrow

My friend Jon Lech Johansen pointed me at some speaches by Cory Doctorow and Lawrence Lessig. Cory is a Science Fiction writer and EFF spokesperson and Lawrence is a Stanford Professor of Law. Both have great ideas on copyright, DRM and Freedoms. And even better examples of what often goes wrong in the current situation of regulation of these.
I would consider this obligated viewing material for all European Parliament members before they take the all important EU Patent vote. It's directly related to patents in that patent law is BUILT on these copyright laws. And the current proposal (let's not even talk about the legality of how it got trough the EC :D ) protects and exploits exactly some of the defects of current copyright law.

And it's interesting material for anyone interested in Piracy, Copyright, DRM, Creativity and Freedom.
Cory's famous DRM speach at Microsoft (txt)
Cory's NUUG speach (mpg)
Cory's NUUG post speach discussion (mpg)
Lessig's talk (takes a while before it gets really interesting, but VERY good). (mpg)

Posted by The DJ at 03:25 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Posted in Technology

March 16, 2005

"Please mummy, make it go away!", the distressed child said

It seems the Australian Actor's Guild doesn't think much of the concept of sharing. A company called MOD films had asked permission to release work of several their actors under a Some Rights Reserved Creative Commonse License. Apparently they are very afraid for the concept of Some Rights, because the actors had all agreed to take part in this experiment and new about the consequences of the project. The guild however forbid their actors to participate. I'm guessing some people will just not accept that a new form of Freedom is coming and they are afraid to loose their power or something.

See also: Boing Boing: Aussie actors' guild forbids members to use Creative Commons

Posted by The DJ at 03:32 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Posted in Technology

March 01, 2005

Pardon me?

So you wake up and you think you live in a continent that is democratic and sensible. Well guess again.

This is getting redicilious we now have:
1: a patent vs. non patent issue.
2: a directive that has been rewritten so much over 4 years that it's a joke
3: a directive that was accepted in the EC undemocraticly, cause Denmark never actually accepted it.
4: a power struggle between European parliament and the European Commission

What the hell happend? Has everyone gone beserk?
And with the current outsourcing we are really cutting into our own foot. Korea/Japan took over our consumer hardware innovation for a large part. Do we really think we can keep software innovation to ourselves? With this directive we are driving innovators out of Europe if anything.

Posted by The DJ at 11:20 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Posted in Technology

February 24, 2005

An Apple iBook's travel tales

So I decided it was time. My trusty old Mac G4/400 was getting old, and VLC was getting too large to comfortably compile on it. I could really use a bit more mobility as well and therefore I decided to get the 1.2 Ghz iBook 12". I'm not gonna explain why. I'm an Apple freak and if you don't like it everyone can just keep buying Wintel pieces of shit.

So the idea is to sell the G4/400 and get some extra bucks. The iBook wil be my new machine and at home I'll hook it up to keyboard, ethernet and 19" monitor. In a couple of months I will upgrade my current wintel machine (can't afford more macs :( ) with some components to become my new Desktop machine with a bit more punch.

I made this decision on thursday the 10th of februari. Had to wire the money so that was gonna take a few days. My order was finally confirmed on Tuesday the 15th.
Friday the 18th my iBook was ready and left Apple. I was hoping it would arrive just before FOSDEM in Brussels (the 26 and 27th). However it's now the 24th and apparently due to an aircraft failure of the shipper (Kuehne + Nagel) my mac was delayed for over 3 days !!! Big bummer cause the earliest it will now arrive is the 28th and that's if I'm lucky !

True shame and to be honest I don't understand that you need 7-9 days (not counting the delays) in the first place to do a product shipment. I mean if UPS can do shipments in 24 hours, then why does a normal shipment has to take so much longer? This proces could surely be optimized couldn't it?

Posted by The DJ at 09:01 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Posted in Technology

August 13, 2004

Mac OS X on your phone

Or at least the next best thing !!!
This site hosts a slew of mobile phone themedesigns for Debian, Mandrake, SuSE, Redhat, BSD, YellowTab Zeta and various Mac OS X versions. I own a Sony Ericsson T610 phone, and it now looks like this.

Posted by The DJ at 02:33 AM | Comments (154) | TrackBack
Posted in Technology , Webbing