Sony BMG Settles rootkit related lawsuits

www.jeremydebeer.ca – Sony BMG Settles Canadian Class Actions:

Sony BMG has agreed to settle Canadian class action lawsuits relating to its use of restrictive contractual terms and DRM technologies on music CDs. If approved by the courts following hearings in late September, the Canadian settlement will resolve disputes in Québec, British Columbia and Ontario.

The structure of the agreement mirrors the one reached in the United States earlier this year, and the terms are generally similar. People who purchased CDs containing certain digital rights management systems will be entitled to various forms of compensation, depending on the type of software on the CD. Purchasers of “XCP” CDs will receive a DRM-free replacement disc and MP3 versions of the tracks, as well as a choice between either a cheque for C$8.40 (American purchasers got US$7.50) and a free album download, or 3 free album downloads. “MediaMax 3.0″ purchasers get only a free MP3 version of the album they had bought, while “MediaMax 5.0″ purchasers get the MP3s plus another free album download.

Online video rental services

Films That Come Over the Net Don’t Come Easy – New York Times:

In addition to the lethargic download times, the playback restrictions imposed by studios are reminiscent of the fine print on a car lease. CinemaNow’s typical rental fees for the store’s 1,000-plus library of movies range from $2.99 for older titles to $3.99 for new releases. Offerings include most of the latest major releases, matching those you would find in a video store. You have 30 days from the date of rental to watch a movie, but once you hit the start button you have just 24 hours to watch before the rental self-destructs. If you want to download a title permanently to your hard drive, prices at CinemaNow are $9.95 to $19.95. The catch is that to adhere to Hollywood’s copyright restrictions these movies can be viewed on only three devices, all compatible with Windows Media Player, that you register with the service. You can make a backup copy of a purchase to a DVD, but that DVD will play only on the computer that was originally used to download the movie. Furthermore, not all rental movies are available for purchase — and not all movies available for purchase are available for rental.

the rest are as pathetic as this one. combat p2p with this….

POGO has launched a world-first in mobile phone file sharing platform.

My Broadband :: 3G & Cellular : POGO announces launch of world-first mobile phone file sharing software:

POGO allows users to share ringtones, music, games, videos and themes. The application also allows users to send messages at 1c per SMS as well as access classifieds, body weight calculator and car performance facilities.

POGO is downloadable to all GPRS and 3G mobile phones that are Java and WAP (wireless application protocol) enabled. The application is compatible with all phone types.

POGO carries a once-off download fee and is accessed by sending the POGO keyword to the shortcode 4 20 30. This premium rate service is charged at R30. POGO does not bill for any further use of the file sharing facility and users pay only for the airtime to access the Internet.

BSA has called for government to mandate stiff penalties

Fine unlicensed software users, says BSA | The Register:

the BSA wanted the government to take more action to educate the market on software licences. “You do hear from the government that they are very supportive of intellectual property rights, but that doesn’t mean anything unless something is done,” he said. The BSA earlier this year said around 80 per cent of the infringement cases it comes across are down to negligence and not to malice, and said that many firms neglected to keep software up to date in times of rapid growth. Arthur suggested that these firms need to hear from the government that they must ensure that their software licences are up to date.

I don’t understand why are they wnat to use public resources to do things they could do themselves? Maybe becasue it is cheaper if the police runs after negligent companies instead of the BSA? Cheaper for whom?

YouTube statistics

WSJ.com – Portals:

Will All of Us Get Our 15 Minutes On a YouTube Video? August 30, 2006; Page B1 If the data from YouTube are to believed, the world has a lot of explaining to do. The video-sharing site doesn’t make public much of the information it has about itself, such as a breakdown of the nationalities of its registered users. But it’s possible to piece together that sort of information by “scraping” the site, a popular and entirely legal practice of using a computer to gather methodically all the tiny bits of public information scattered around a Web site, and then piecing them together. I did a scrape of YouTube a month ago and found there were 5.1 million videos. By Sunday, the end of another scrape, that number had grown by about 20% to 6.1 million. Because we know how many videos have been uploaded to the site, the length of each, and how many times it has been watched (total views were 1.73 billion as of Sunday) we can do a little multiplication to find out how much time has collectively been spent watching them. We will get to the result in due time. First, some other bits of YouTube fun — data-crunching style. For example, the words “dance,” “love,” “music” and “girl” are all exceedingly popular in titles of YouTube videos. Also, nearly 2,000 videos have “Zidane” in the title. Who at a desk anywhere on the planet didn’t watch at least one head-butt video in the days after French soccer star Zinedine Zidane’s meltdown in the World Cup final? For all the talk of the Internet fragmenting tastes and interests, YouTube is an example of the Web homogenizing experiences. YouTube videos take up an estimated 45 terabytes of storage — about 5,000 home computers’ worth — and require several million dollars’ worth of bandwidth a month to transmit. Those costs are one reason that some predict YouTube will collapse under the sheer weight of providing a haven for every teenager with a cellphone camera eager to be famous for 15 minutes of video. An even more enterprising YouTube scraper is Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, which, equipped with a supercomputer with 400 nodes and a 10 gigabit Ethernet connection, was able to learn about all of the 500,000 or so people who bothered to create profiles for themselves at the site. While YouTube’s messaging software is rudimentary, and often doesn’t work, many users nonetheless rely on it to stay in touch with each other. That gives YouTube — and other Web locales — some of the “social network” characteristics usually associated with the likes of MySpace. And it’s another reason that established players like Yahoo and Google are ramping up their video-sharing competitors. Johan Pouwelse, a Delft professor who helped develop a peer-to-peer, video-sharing technology at Delft called Tribler (one that he says could help YouTube cut down on bandwidth costs), reports that 70% of YouTube’s registered users are American and roughly half are under 20 years of age. The oldest active viewer apparently is geriatric1927, a 79-year old U.K. resident who sits at his PC in his study with headphones on and narrates memories of World War II. Ernie Rogers, a 23-year old from Colton, Calif., whose handle is “lamo1234,” has watched more YouTube videos than anyone. Mr. Rogers claims he is on the site 24/7. And as “the YouTube rockstar,” he has shared his original songs, including one called “Waste of Time.” The most devoted uploader is Christy Leigh Stewart, a 21-year-old college student who lives near Modesto, Calif., and who has so far uploaded nearly 2,000 videos. Nearly all involve Korean pop music, a passion of Ms. Stewart. Indeed, she says the main reason she spends too much time with YouTube is to drive traffic to hwaiting.net, a Korean-oriented Web site she runs with her friend Megan Hansen. The notion of using the enormous YouTube audience for marketing other products has occurred to many people, including YouTube itself. It recently struck a deal with Paris Hilton, whose “channel,” reports Prof. Pouwelse, instantly became the most popular. Another is Marc Pearson, 24, who, as pearson101, records backyard wrestling matches: enthusiastic but low-budget versions of the fake-real matches you see on cable. Because his hometown of Stoke-on-Trent, England, is short on wrestlers, Mr. Pearson uses YouTube to attract opponents. “We used to have a lot of wrestlers around here, but not anymore, on account of all the injuries,” he explains. The YouTube juggernaut has attracted the interest of many others, including academics. Anita Elberse, a Harvard Business School professor with an interest in the digital-entertainment marketplace, said the site is a good laboratory for studying how some forms of content become popular. Andrew M. Odlyzko, a mathematician who heads the Digital Technology Center at the University of Minnesota, has examined YouTube data, such as lists of most-viewed videos, to see whether the numbers follow a pattern familiar to statisticians, where a few of the most popular items get an especially large percentage of the traffic. They do. Oh yes, I owe you a statistic: The total time the people of the world spent watching YouTube since it started last year. The figure is — drum roll, please — 9,305 years!

Legal P2P in SKorea

The Korea Times : Online Music Sharing Flourishes:

Soribada, the largest peer-to-peer music sharing service in South Korea, said yesterday the number of its paying subscribers exceeded 500,000 as of Saturday. The number of users who pay 3,000 won (3.12 USD, 671 HUF) per month for unlimited music downloads has steadily increased since the charging system was first adopted on July 10, it said. In August alone, over 300,000 have registered as new subscribers.

Easy torrent creation

Slyck News – Snakes on a Torrent:

In order to share work with friends, family, or whoever, simply drop and drag the files you wish to share into a folder. Snakebit does the rest. No need to create .torrent files, upload .torrents or seed files.

The Swedish Pirate Party presents their election manifesto

via Torrentfreak:

On August 28, the Pirate Party of Sweden made their election program official. An introduction stating the ideas and ideology behind their program, the party stated their program for the election in a number of concrete points.

In a situation where they can gain position of forming a government by striking a deal with us in an issue that they, themselves, believe to be less important, there is every reason to believe that they will be eager to find a solution.

But in either case, there are three possible scenarios:

1) One of the factions agree to our demands, and the other does not. Then we will choose the faction that agree with us. Whether this is the red faction of the blue faction is of no concern for us. As long as we see that they are doing their best to seriously run our issues, we will support the government in all other issues as well, without questioning.

2) Both the factions agree to our demands. If there are differences of nuances making one faction looking slightly better than the other, we will choose this faction. If both are exactly as good, we will support the faction with the more votes. This way we won’t influence the balance between the factions in Swedish politics. As long as the government is running our issues, we will support them in all decicions, just as in the first scenario.

3) Both the factions refuse to meet our demands. This is the more complicated case, but we can handle this one too. Initially we will support one faction, and make a government possible. Most likely this will be the ones with the less votes, so that the others, the ‘victors’, will feel that they have lost power they were entitled to. They can, however, not do much about it, since we will support the government without questioning in anything that does not involve our principles.

When the “victors” are safely placed in the penalty box of opposition, we start our businesslike, low-voiced conversations with them, until they realize that our proposals are not, in fact, that dangerous, and that they can only win from working with us. When they have seen our arguments in the glow of the miraging governmental position for a while, there are good reasons to believe they will agree with us. This is when we will call for a vote of non-confidence and change the government. After that, the Pirate Party with support the new government without questioning, in all issues, as long as the government runs our issues forcefully, just as in scenario 1 and 2.

This is our entire strategy. This way we can guarantee that our policies will have a break-through.

Monopolies, substitutes and Intellectual Property

There is some discussion going on in the economic literature whether copyright creates a monopoly for the author or there are many substitutes to any work protected copyright (see the reading list for relevant literature).

The monopoly argument is important because economists do not like monopolies and look at them as strong reasons for regulatory intervention. The fair use provisions are part of any copyright legislation just because of this: they serve as escape routes from the monopolistic power of creators.

So far I have not seen any convincing argument for or against the monopoly case. Maybe because there is none. So here is a solution, that defines monopoly (a very economic term) with the help of culture.

Anyone, who wishes to read the the book for which author Imre Kertesz won the Nobel price will be in difficult position to find a substitute. Other Nobel price winners or other works from Mr. Kertesz simply wont do the job. So whoever owns the rights for that work has indeed monopoly power ower the work.

This is also the case when we think about fan communities. For a die-hard Star Wars fan a film about Superman wont be a good substitute, morover it wont be a substitute at all.

On the other hand, for someone like me, who dislikes most of the movies from hollywood, it makes no difference if -having nothing else to do-, my local cinema does not play You Me and Dupree, only Superman Returns. I am not loyal, I am not fan, I am not member of that culture that values that specific piece of culture as his own. These two movies compete for me, and they are perfect substitutes for that night.
The bottom line is: intellectual property legislation creates monopoly for those whom a piace of cultural good really matters, and is an imperfect monopoly for those who do not care.

Mass produced, low shelf-life entertainment products tend to fall into the non-monopoly category, as few of them have loyal fanbase. Other cultural items, classics, cult pieces, things part of ‘high culture’ (meaning that they have a consumer base that values them on very sophisticated terms) tend to be monopolies.

But either way. If we can talk about a cultural monopoly in cases where there are consumers who really care, than it is a monopoly, even if there are consumer segments where it behaves like a competing product.

A good starting point

James Boyle: Cruel, Mean or Lavish? Economic Analisys, Price Discrimination and Digital Intellectual property.

Now this is important because there is no sign of people going out from business because of piracy. Or is there? Please leave a comment if you know about artists, producers who had to look for another job because of piracy!

Steal this film

via Boing Boing:

Steal This Film is a spectacular documentary on Sweden’s piracy movement — The Pirate Bay BitTorrent site, The Pirate Bureau think-tank and The Pirate Party, a political party. Steal This Film ingeniously combines Hollywood footage, scare-interviews with Hollywood execs, Hollywood anti-piracy PSAs and footage of interviews with Swedish pirates, politicians and people on the street.

(LINK)

Celebrity Deathmatch

BBC NEWS | Programmes | Click | Film piracy: Is it theft?:

In the blue corner: Dan Glickman, President of the Motion Picture Association of America, the body that wields the collective political and legal muscle of the Hollywood studios.In the red corner: John Perry Barlow, lyricist in the US band The Grateful Dead. More pertinently, he went on to co-found the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the pressure group that’s placed itself centre-stage in the fight to keep the digital copyright cops at bay.

The fascinating thing is how Dan Glickman talks about the “products” their “consumers” “buy”. Just as if he was selling toilet paper. And he uses FMCG analogies. What he will never understand (and it is not because he was old when internet came as JPB suggests) is that what muvie and music industries produce is not another goods to be sold on the market. It is culture.
If you think about culture as toilet paper you will never  be able to understand why people want to share it. Or why people want to download it even if their reservation price is lower then the market price. “Consuming” culture is being part of it.

US consumer good firms were very successful constructing brands that promise the same stuff. If you buy this brand of jeans you will be part of that and that family, tribe, identity, community, whatsoever. But unlike manufactured identity, cultural goods are identity themselves. If you really like it, you want to share it.

There is no word for describing that in the dumb corporate boardroom  vocabulary. It is a shame.

Macrovision v. Sima

EFF: DeepLinks:

Macrovision’s “Analog Copy Protection” (ACP) technology is intended to degrade the quality of video copies made on analog VCRs. It does this by intentionally adding noise to the vertical blanking interval of analog video signals. This noise confuses the automatic gain control (AGC) circuit used by analog VCRs. In short, Macrovision’s ACP is an exploit against a weakness in analog VCRs. Thanks to Section 1201(k) of the DMCA, VCR makers are now forbidden by law from fixing the weakness, which means that analog VCRs have remained vulnerable to ACP. In other words, Macrovision’s ACP is an antiquated DRM technology that owes its effectiveness in the analog world to a government mandate.

Market for online videos

GigaOM reports: Get Ready For Online Video Price Wars:

In-Stat, a market research company predicts that the global market for “online content services is expected to expand by a factor of 10, growing from about 13 million households during 2005 to more than 131 million households by 2010.”

Piracy and video sharing

Technology Review has a nice article on video sharing services and piracy:

Pirated video makes up about one-fifth of the moving-image content uploaded to video-sharing sites, according to Tom McInerney, founder and CEO of San Francisco-based Guba. And while the sharing sites benefit indirectly from pirated videos, which generate Web traffic and advertising impressions, hosting this material is often more trouble than it’s worth.

Considering that only “YouTube visitors upload 65,000 videos every day and download 100 million of them”, it is not that bad, isn’t it?

eMule Content Database

Slyck News reports:

The content database has been online since around new years 2004. This means that any content free of copyright or content allowed by the author to be distributed freely are more than welcome in the content database.

http://content.emule-project.net/

Russell McOrmond’s effort to frame p2p

Canadian Peer-to-Peer (P2P) legal theories:

Canadian Peer-to-peer (P2P) legal theories, proposals and questions Conversations in the Digital-copyright.ca discussion forum in the last few weeks have suggested there is more than one theory about how peer-to-peer “file-sharing” (P2P) works, what it does, and what the meanings of terms like “upload” and “download” are when used in the context of P2P.

Next target: the musicians themselves

New York Times reports:

In the last few months, trade groups representing music publishers have used the threat of copyright lawsuits to shut down guitar tablature sites, where users exchange tips on how to play songs like “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door,” “Highway to Hell” and thousands of others. The battle shares many similarities with the war between Napster and the music recording industry, but this time it involves free sites like Olga.net, GuitarTabs.com and MyGuitarTabs.com and even discussion boards on the Google Groups service like alt.guitar.tab and rec.music.makers.guitar.tablature, where amateur musicians trade “tabs” — music notation especially for guitar — for songs they have figured out or have copied from music books. On the other side are music publishers like Sony/ATV, which holds the rights to the songs of John Mayer, and EMI, which publishes Christina Aguilera’s music. “People can get it for free on the Internet, and it’s hurting the songwriters,” said Lauren Keiser, who is president of the Music Publishers’ Association and chief executive of Carl Fischer, a music publisher in New York.

German music industry complains about “excessive private copies”

heise online reports:

“These are good signs, but the overall market is still not developing according to expectations,” explained Michael Haentjes, chairman of IFPI. He claims that the “ongoing common use of illegal sources on the Internet” such as peer-to-peer networks and “the unresolved problems due to excessive private copies” are “slowing down market growth for music downloads. The Association said it plans to redouble its efforts to combat illegal downloading.

Who pays the piper?

A quick note on the differences of who pays the price of copyright infringements in the US and in Europe.

In the US RIAA and other organizations as well as the copyright owners pay the lawyers and people to track down infringers and they use the money they win from settlements to initiate more actions. So finally those who have (or in many cases those who have not) committed unlawful acts pay the price of enforcement.

In Europe copyright crime is pursued by the police and the prosecutors. Thus taxpayers pay the price of unlawful behaviour of some members of society. They pay for the extra resources necessary to pursue illegal activities and where resources are limited and resources are diverted from pursuing other crimes to pursue copyright infringers they pay the price in the form of rising crime-rate in other fields. In this latter case the cost of strict copyright laws might be the rise in other crimes. Well, well…

Clearing rights for documentaries

LA Weekly has a nice article on the difficulties of clearing rights for documentaries.

“There’s actually a discussion within the BBC between people like me and some quite senior executives who are keen to say, ‘If we are a public broadcasting corporation, then we should make everything we have ever made completely free and downloadable at an MPEG-2 level, and people can do whatever they want with it. I think there is a feeling that if we could do that, we would be able to do something that those who are constrained by commercial considerations cannot. And then where will Rupert Murdoch be?

Piratbyran’s message isn’t so much about fighting the copyfight as explaining to the other side that

Wired News: A Nation Divided Over Piracy:

n Fleischer’s world, the Motion Picture Association of America and rights holders are attacking digital technology itself, trying to hang on to an outdated model. “It’s an inevitability that digital data will be copied…. The alternative to peer-to-peer piracy is person-to-person piracy,” he says. While some online pirates take pains to distinguish themselves from those who sell counterfeit DVDs and CDs, he sees such physical bootlegging as just “a symptom of underdeveloped computer networks.”

The story behind Pirate Bay

Wired News runs an uber-interesting story on the  Secrets of the Pirate Bay:

“The general perception is that they are doing something good … they’ve always had this image, very ideological,” says Tobias Brandel, the reporter who broke the story. If the Pirate Bay turns out to be a collection of businessmen profiting off of piracy via porn ads and online poker, it would lose popular support in the moralistic Swedish society. And if the Pirate Bay’s crew is eventually convicted of copyright crimes “they will have a much harder punishment,”

So, the dilemma, according to Wired and the swedish journalist representing the “swedish moral (minimum) consent” is that stealing a la Robin Hood is okay, but keeping a share of the bounty is bad.

Apart from the fact that pirating is not by definition an altruistic activity, lets think for a moment about the economics of this case.
Providing access to “pirated” material comes with a cost. The two images show the difference:

The first 3 servers of pirate bay

The current configuration of 12 Hewlett-Packard ProLiant DL140 servers.

And these are only the hw costs. The costs of litigation, police raids, and eventually the inevitable conviction are much-much higher. These guys are willing to pay that price for

The Pirate Bay’s jaunty image was blemished when a July 5 article in the Swedish daily paper Svenska Dagbladet revealed the site’s hidden financial life for the first time. Posing as an internet firm seeking advertising on the Bay, the paper phoned Eastpoint Media, which sells banner ads for the Pirate Bay in Scandinavia. Eastpoint revealed to the reporter that they place 600,000 Kr of ads per month — about $84,000 U.S.

for an indefinite amount of (but possible not very long) time. So this is the wage of fear (Le salaire de la peur) for providing links to 3.513.240 torrent files on the net. Good to know.

The work in progress

Here I collect the texts I have written as part of the research:

The Club model of cultural consumption and distribution

When it comes to the market of digital goods, clubs –buyers teaming up to buy a single item and share it among themselves– seem to have little or no economic significance. Digital files are either perfectly controlled, thus the producer can appropriate all of the consumer surplus that could have arose by forming a club, or there is no way to control unauthorized copying thus there is no price at which it would be reasonable to sell a good on the market.
But if we include other, noneconomic aspects of clubs, notably their ability to negotiate and
enforce norms on how a given good is accessed and used, clubs can have a significant effect
on markets. So far we have seen that technological protection measures and copyright laws cannot effectively curb unauthorized uses of digital content. User communities around jambands can be an exception from this general trend as together with the artists they have created a normative environment that is able to police and enforce undesirable actions.

Is there a way to propagate the emergence of such communities through adequate
technologies designed to connect artists and fans? What can we do to help fans and artists to negotiate rules they are both are happy with?

Bodó Balázs- Gyenge Anikó: A könyvtári kölcsönzések után fizetendő jogdíj közgazdasági
szempontú elemzése

A nyilvános könyvtári kölcsönzések után a jogosultaknak fizetendő jogdíj (Public Lending
Right – a továbbiakban PLR) ötlete több sebből is vérzik.
Ha a PLR-re mint a nemzeti kulturális politikától független eszközre tekintünk, mely e jogot természetjogi érveléssel a tulajdonhoz való jogból vezeti le, minden esetben oda jutunk, hogy a jogosultak monopoljogát kiterjesztjük és az ezzel járó járadékot növeljük. Ennek következménye jelentős fogyasztói csoportok kulturális fogyasztásból való kiszorulása lehet, melyre eddig a legolcsóbb és hatékonyabb megoldás a könyvtári kölcsönzés szabadsága volt.

Ha a PLR nemzeti kultúrpolitikai eszköz, akkor viszont azt a megállapítást tehetjük, hogy a PLR a meglévő kultúratámogatási rendszerek mellett való üzemeltetése indokolatlanul
bonyolult, és költséges, és ha az állami döntéshozók úgy találják, hogy van a költségvetésben kultúratámogatásra fordítható tartalék, akkor azt érdemes a meglévő intézményrendszeren keresztül szétosztani.

Végül pedig a jogosultak, szerzők szemszögéből megvizsgálva a kérdést: nincs olyan szerző a földön, aki visszavonná egy megjelent művét a könyvtárakból csak azért mert azt vélelmezi, hogy a kölcsönzések miatt eladásoktól esik el. Ennek az egyetlen oka az, hogy a szerzők számára a könyvtárban való jelenlét haszna nagyobb, mint a könyvtári olvasók által okozott kiesett kereslet. Már csak emiatt sem érdemes a PLR bevezetése.

The Pirates of The Pirates of the Caribbean

This is the PowerPoint presentation of the talk I gave on the Chicago Kent Law School this March.

Robin Hood Digital – english

“File-sharing communities are also remembering communities. They direct attention and thus demand, they discuss and thus keep alive cultural goods. When something is posted as available for download, not only those fetch it have requested a particular item, but also those who were standing nearby. These individuals are reciting work long forgotten like those who in Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 memorize books to be able to share them with others.”

Sobri Joska Digital – in hungarian

Megjelent a Café Babel 2006 decemberi, Hiány c. számában.

“A Csendes Könyvtár és az összes többi hasonló szolgáltatás az úgynevezett közjavakra épülő internetes kooperációs hálózatokra (commons based peer production networks) példa. A piac által (kényszerűségből) szabadon hagyott résekben, marginális igények, érdekek körül a semmiből jönnek létre olyan közösségek, melyek a hálózat tagjai között elosztott különböző képességeket, erőforrásokat (időt, szkennert, karakterfelismerő programot, korrektúrázó képességet) képesek hatékonyan összehangolni egy olyan feladat érdekében, melynek gyümölcseit aztán mindenki szabadon és ingyenesen élvezheti.”

A szerzői jog gazdaságtana az online világban

Frissen elkészült könyvfejezet.

“A szerzői jog közgazdasági elemzése során a szerzőknek biztosított monopoljog különös figyelmet vívott ki magának. Ennek az az oka, hogy a monopol helyzetben levő termelők maguk határozzák meg a piaci árat, és ez az ár jellemzően nagyobb, mint amennyi versenyhelyzetben lenne. Tökéletes verseny esetén a piaci ár megegyezik a termék határköltségével, azaz azzal az összeggel, amennyibe a legutolsó példány elkészítése kerül. A monopóliumok határköltségnél magasabb ára azzal jár, hogy a piaci kereslet egy
része nem tudja megfizetni a monopolista szabta árat.”

A szőnyeg alá söpört archívum
Megjelent a Manager Magazin 2006. Decemberi számában Tartalomraktárak címen.

“Ma Magyarországon az a kérdés, hogy a piacra várnunk-e, hogy ezeket az archívumokat kiépítsék, a nehézkesen működő és alulfinanszírozott közintézményekre lőcsöljük-e ezt a feladatot, vagy megteremtjük annak lehetőségét, hogy a magyar kulturális közösség fenntartsa önmagát. A Neumann-ház megrendelésére elkészített Nemzeti Digitális Adattár 2.0 vitaanyag a közösségi archiválás lehetőségének kiterjesztését tartalmazza, az első lépés tehát ezügyben megtörtént. Még egy lépés azonban hátra van. Dekriminalizálni kellene kirillt, scan_dalt, helpert és társaik. Hogy ne fordulhasson elő az, hogy ennek az örökségnek piaci, személyes érdekeket sértő részei esetleg nem maradnak fenn. Hogy ne legyen bűnöző az a soktízezres közösség, amelyik a magyar audiovizuális örökség archiválásán dolgozik – társadalmi munkában.”

A retardált archívum

Megjelent az Élet és Irodalom 2007. január 5-i számában.

“A közpénzből finanszírozott, közszolgálati archívum kapuit minél szélesebbre kell tárni. A hat havi elérhetőséget nem szűkíteni kell, hanem az archívum digitalizálásával bővíteni. Az archívumi anyagok lementését, felhasználását, adott esetben átalakítását nem megakadályozni kell hanem a megfelelő jogi konstrukció kidolgozásával megengedni , támogatni, bátorítani. Ezt követeli a finanszírozás módja. Ezt követeli a közszolgálatiság jelentése. Ezt követeli a piaci értékesítés igénye. Ezt követeli a józan ész.”
PhD 2-page research proposal in english

A short description of my research.

Régebbi cikkek/ older writings

A „mély link”
Internetes tartalomszolgáltatók vs. internet

Megjelent a Beszélő 2003 szeptemberi számában.

“Mély link valójában nincs. Link van, mely mutathat bárhová: egy portál címoldalára, a legutolsó, senki által nem olvasott cikkére, képre, linkgyűjteményre, bárhova. A mély linkelést nem lehet megtiltani, csupán azt lehet technológiai eszközökkel elérni, hogy egy adott gyűjteménybe csak egy, a hivatalos kapun keresztül lehessen bejutni. Ott pedig, ahol korábban szabad volt az átjárás, jogi vagy technológiai falak kezdenek épülni, melyek az internet mindent mindennel összekötő hipertextuális szövetéből kiragadnak, elérhetetlenné tesznek tartalmakat. Az intertextualitásból kiemelt, a többi szöveggel való kapcsolatától megfosztott valami pedig megszűnik szövegnek lenni.”

Bolyongás egy áldás nélküli térben
Graffiti és street art mint a társadalmi diskurzus eszköze

Megjelent a Café Babelben 2004-ben.

“Az egyre lezáródó fizikai, média- és kulturális terekben az autonómia megteremtése egyre költségesebb: magas a lebukás veszélye és nagy a várható büntetés, megfizethetetlenek a kártérítési és nem utolsó sorban jogi költségek. Nehéz felbecsülni, hogy az egyre szigorodó ellenőrzési technikák milyen mértékben gátolják üzenetek megjelenését, hiszen a leginkább kockázatvállalókat kivéve az alkotóknak nem áll érdekükben láthatóvá válni, nem szeretnék magukra felhívni a figyelmet. Ha mégis, akkor a szólás szabadságát keresők szükségszerűen mozognak a gyengébb ellenállás, tehát olyan médiumok felé, melyek könnyebben támadhatók, azaz ellenőrzésük architekturális okokból nehezebben megoldható”

Italochina

Tegnap Giorgio, avagy Dzsordzs, a sebhelyesarcu a Cafe Trieszt elott a napsutesben elmagyarazta a szemkozti utcasarkon talalhato vaskereskedes tortenetet. Az olasz negyed hataran vagyunk, itt talalhatok az elso olyan villanyoszlopok, amikre ki vannak festve az olasz nemzeti szinek, jelzik a terulet hatarat akarcsak a diszes kapuk a kinai negyedet.

A szemkozti sarkon, mar benn az olasz teruleten azonban a vaskereskedes kinai. Tower hardware store, es a kinai irasjelekkel gondolom ugyanez.

- “Korabban a boltot ‘First chinese hardware store’-nak hivtak. De mondtuk nekik, hogy ez igy nem lesz jo. Nem lesz itt elso kinai bolt senki sem. Az utolso inkabb.” – szuri a foga kozott a sziciliai akcentussal kevert angolt Dzsordzs, majd kikop.

Probalom elkepzelni azt a beszelgetest, ami a nevvaltoztatasrol zajlott a kinaiak es az olaszok kozott.

Vajon a kinai tulaj agyaba helyezett vicsorgo lofej dekodolasa problemamentesen megtortent-e a globalis popkultura koraban?

This is happening to me

This is my schedule for Spring/Summer 2007:

March 21: Tim Holbrook invited me to give a talk at the Chicago-Kent Law School International Intellectual Property Program. I will speak about “The pirates of the Pirates of the Caribbean – what can we learn from file-sharers”

March 26-29: I will try to go to the O’reilly Emerging Tech Conference, San Diego, as I have a pass. I hope I can fit that in.

April 12-15: Fulbright Enrichment Seminar, San Antonio, TX

April 27-29: Iain Boal of Retort has invited me to participate in a panel at the “Crisis of the Commons in California” Conference. Though the commons in California is not exactly my filed of research, underground commons is, and this idea has captured Iain’s imagination.

May 18: My paper was accepted to the ‘Communication Technologies of Empowerment’ Conference organized by Institute of Communications Studies at the University of Leeds

May 24-27: My submission was accepted for the International Communication Association’s 2007 Conference . I will talk at the “File-sharing, The Music Industry and the New Economy” session.

June 16-19: ICommons meeting in Dubrovnik, Croatia. I am involved in organizing a panel together with Lawrence Liang on piracy.

July 16-27: I was accepted to the Oxford Internet Institute Summer Doctoral Program to be held at Harvard Law School. I am proud and excited.

What can Hungary learn from Canada

Michael Geist compares the popularity of Canadian artists in the US and back home. Though the results are not surprising (Canadians are mostly famous, well, in Canada) the conclusion is worth noting elsewhere:

For businesses and policy makers, the message of the Canadian Long Tail is clear – Canadian success, whether in domestic or foreign markets, will increasingly depend on Internet-based distribution that can overcome the scarce availability of Canadian content in book stores, music shops, and movie theatres.

Hardware manufacturers vs. content owners

Deathmatch!

The following statement was issued today by Consumer Electronics Association (CEA®) President and CEO Gary Shapiro regarding a letter sent last week from the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) to U.S. Congressman Rick Boucher (D-VA) concerning the RIAA’s refusal to participate in the Copy Protection Technical Working Group (CPTWG) to discuss efforts to prevent the mass, indiscriminate redistribution of copyrighted works over the Internet:

“We are pleased to see the RIAA letter finally confirmed, as we have long suspected, that no technical specification for an audio flag, or in fact anything else, exists and that the RIAA has stayed away from the Copy Protection Technical Working Group in part because it has nothing to propose. The letter also confirms that the RIAA’s interest lies solely in preserving its existing ways of business, with the hope that it can maximize profits by limiting innovation and undermining long-standing consumer rights. – CEA

Who is the biggest mp3 player manufacturer?

Wrong. It is Nokia.

Nokia said it had sold more than 15 million music-enabled phones in April to June, roughly double the amount Apple’s iPod’s and making it the world’s largest manufacturer of digital music players, and it aims to sell more than 80 million music devices this year, adds The Washington Post. – p2pnet.net

Shifting pro-DRM arguments

Ed Felten writes on p2pnet:

Instead, advocates of DRM-bolstering laws have switched to two new arguments. First, they argue that DRM enables price discrimination — business models that charge different customers different prices for a product — and that price discrimination benefits society, at least sometimes. Second, they argue that DRM helps platform developers lock in their customers, as Apple has done with its iPod/iTunes products, and that lock-in increases the incentive to develop platforms. I won’t address the merits or limitations of these arguments here — I’m just observing that they’re replacing the P2P piracy bogeyman in the rhetoric of DMCA boosters.

Yummy p2p hardware

The ASUS WL-700gE Wi-Fi Router:

• has a 160-gig hard-drive.
• it comes with a BitTorrent client!
• has three USB 2.0 ports for connection of additional external hard drives

via p2pnet.net

The Canadian Library Association’s bravado

The Canadian Librarians stand up against Captain Copyright - a controversial kid targeted copyright consciuous comic.

CLA is equally concerned about the terms of use of the Captain Copyright website, which shamefully purport to restrict linking to the site, stating “permission to link is explicitly withheld from any website the contents of which may, in the opinion of Access Copyright, be damaging or cause harm to the reputation of Access Copyright.” CLA believes that this poses a threat to our shared information commons, as it attempts to create a new category of rights that will unduly restrict public discourse and freedom of expression on the free web. CLA

Fans and copyright owners

It was also clearly explained that the only products we sold on the website were historical recordings that Universal Music Sweden had refused for years – despite countless requests from fans – to release. It was also explained that the money raised from these sales was used to promote ABBA and Universal Music’s products via the ABBAMAIL website, mailing list, forum, newsletters etc. The MIPI representative said they didn’t care about that at all.

We found out in the early days that ABBA’s record company didn’t mind ABBAMAIL’s activities because they knew that it didn’t conflict with their products and that ultimately it benefitted them. They realised that ABBA fans needed to be kept interested in ABBA so they would be more willing to buy the next incarnation of GOLD or MORE GOLD or FOREVER GOLD or LOVE SONGS or THE DEFINITIVE COLLECTION etc. Their primary concern was that we didn’t make a “big deal” out of it – as long was we kept it low key and just sold to the hard-core fans, they were fine with it.

What has changed?

Well apparently the Managing Director of Universal Music in Sweden has made it his personal mission to close us down – he won’t stop until he achieves this.

via p2pnet.net

Csak idő kérdése, míg visszafoglaljuk Friscót!

Első Kaliforniai Huszár Regiment Szent István Napján:

Keresünk új huszárokat és ló nélküli tagokat is akik hajlandóak valamilyen formában résztvenni és hozzájárulni a kis huszárcsapatunk kifejlesztéséhez.

Interactive City Summit 2006

Interactive City Summit is happening in San Francisco at the moment. Rebar was great, Mirjam Struppek researching Urban Screens was a bit fuzzy and unfocused for me. The organizers did a great job setting up this event. More to continue.

The move from pay-per-view to ad supported content has begun

MarketWatch reports:

Google Inc. later this month will begin distributing free, commercially-supported video clips from Viacom Inc.’s MTV Networks to about 200 Web sites catering to young adults and teen-agers, in effect syndicating the programming to the Internet.

As we knw there are three different ways to charge for a content: sell it by the piece (view), sell it for a flat rate (subscripition based) and package it with advertising. As for now video content was not really available for advertising, at least the majors were reluctant to engage in such a business model. Now it seems the time has come. Will it be strong enough to catch on with other cultural goods like  movies or music as well?

Appropriation artists against Canadian Artists Representation CARFAC

CARFAC – the coalition of canadian artists with the question “if artists are not paid for what they create, why would anyone make art?” on their banner and Appropriation Art- a coalition of appropriation artists seem to have some issues among each other. From the letter of the latter in reply to the former:

The practice of appropriation is internationally recognized as a long standing, historic art practice. It includes works of collage, found footage and conceptual art. Works that use appropriation are collected and exhibited by major galleries and museums internationally, are written about in virtually every art history book and taught in universities and colleges throughout the world. Works that use appropriation are legitimate works of art. Period. Contemporary sources of appropriation are found in film, radio, television, advertising, text, character, situation, cast off material, found material, quoted material, borrowed material, …and on and on. Artists use this rich vein of source material because it is meaningful; because it holds and reflects popular, cultural or civic memory, because it conjures personal associations or connects us together in a profound way. These works question, push boundaries, advance technologies; they encourage experimentation and invention. They tell new stories. Contemporary culture should not be immune to critical commentary. Without this new work our cultural environment would be much the poorer. It is surprising that an organization that claims to speak for Canadian artists can be so out of touch with contemporary art practice.

What is on stake? Moral rights in the new canadian copyright law.

While the loosers pay…

… high tech proprietary networks rise. Slyck News reports on the All-New Warez P2P – Version 3.0:

Warez are entering a tough market. Due to the stability of file sharing there simply is not a necessity to switch clients or try something new. It will take more than just the promise of BitTorrent speeds to switch people away from BitTorrent, which also has the advantage of being open source.

However, by bringing together the two phenomena of file sharing and social networking, this client may tap into great success. Add anonymity in the future and this will be a network to watch closely.

If the promise of networks being able to grant speed, variety and anonimity as protection for the everyday user whom will RIAA sue? All those poor souls who are not smart enough to choose a software offering the protection? Not the most “dangerous” but the lamest? We’ll see.

LimeWire sued by RIAA but what for?

After so many companies failing in court to RIAA I am wonderning what they were hoping for? That noone will notice the several million users? Do they have a good defence?

Slyck News’ Thomas Mennecke speculates that:

Many believed, as did LimeWire, that their open source nature would preserve their existence – at least for some time to come.

I do not see that commercially exploting an open source software would mean an excuse from being sued. But anyway, whom will RIAA sue after they take LimeWire out? All the contributors who have developed the code?

LimeWire’s open source nature may not save the company from the RIAA’s onslaught, but it may save the Gnutella network. LimeWire’s newest features and talent comes from the open source world; even if Lime Group vanishes tomorrow, development won’t.

Well said.

Legal liability IP addresses and mapping them onto specific persons

Well, i know it is a very bad title for anything but it was the shortest way to describe the content of Ken Fischer’s article on “The RIAA, IP addresses, and evidence” in which he explains the recent RIAA backdowns on some alleged pirates. The bottom line is: when it proves to be difficult to link illegal downloads to a specific person that might be behind an IP addresss RIAA chooses to walk away rather then trying to make the link. At least that was the case so far in the US.

Búcsuvacsi

A legnagyobb, hosszan, hosszan tartó tapsot a libanoni fiú kapta. Gombóc lett a torkomban.

Washington, San Francisco

Holnap hajnalban indulok San Franciscoba Washingtonbol, azt hiszem ez egy jo alkalom arra, hogy megosszam veletek mi is tortent edddig.
Read on…

Net Neutrality and Illegal Filesharing

IPcentral drew my attention to Chris Castle’ article on net neutrality and copyright in which he argues, no, rants about net neutrality supporters who are defending illegal downloading by opposing people peeping into IP packet contents. As for myself, this is certainly a reason supporting net neutrality. Another one is that I dont want people like Chris policing my communications.

Skype applies for the trademark”The whole world can talk for free”

via ZDNet.
If i was an incumbent telco that would scare the sh*t out of me. Now, that You can place free calls from Skype to any US mobile or landline I see how it works. I am here and i decided that i do not need a mobile or a landline. Even better: in San Francisco I will be available most of the time as i have a wifi enabled pocket PC.

Google Hacking to Locate MP3s

GUse this tool to find downloadable mp3s on Google.

This is just great. The right search term for google is:
intitle:index.of “mp3″ +”Artis Name” -htm -html -php -asp “Last Modified”

Searching P2P networks is near

SiliconBeat reports:”Skyrider, a Mountain View start-up, is developing technology that will be able to search peer-to-peer traffic, in order to help media and other companies become more profitable. The two-year old company has raised $8 million from Silicon Valley’s top VC firm Sequoia Capital, along with Charles River Ventures. The company’s product will be announced in fall, the company told us last night. (Here is their release.) The company aims to “monetize” popular peer-to-peer networks, which have emerged to help circulate large files such as video. Since that’s where the information is, that’s where to do the best mining. And the company is working on a search platform that spans across P2P platforms.”

An alternative explanation to the success of file-sharing networks

From experience goods to search goods

There has been several measurements on how illegal downloading affects markets of cultural goods. Although the results sometimes contradict each other, there is a consensus that in fact there is a conversion of illegal downloaders into purchasers. There are several explanations offered: downloaders pay for items they were not exposed to before (the publicity value argument), downloaders are not evil, and they are willing to pay to artists they like (community support argument), downloaders are buying because there is a market they are happy to use or they are threatened to use by lawsuits (industry argument) or illegal downloads are not (good enough) substitutes for a DVD or a CD.

In this essay I would like to offer a different approach that explains the coexistence of illegal downloading and legal purchases by a shift that affects the status of cultural goods. A shift that made culture to act like a search good instead of an experience good, a shift that at the end completely rewrites the rules of cultural markets.

In the economic literature cultural goods are described as experience goods the value of which can only become apparent to its consumer after it has been consumed. Unlike drinking just another bottle of coke, one cannot tell if she liked a concert, a movie or the new album of an artist until she has experienced it. This attribute of cultural goods defines a very special economic context to these goods as this uncertainty on the experience creates a factor of risk on the consumer side, a risk which heavily affects prices and demand for the goods, thus creating a risk for the supply side as well.

There are several methods by which both the consumers and the suppliers try to lower the level of uncertainty on the demand side. On the consumer side listening to word of mouth and peer reviews and the general avoidance of things unheard of and unknown are the tools to reduce the risk of paying for something that might turn up as a bad experience. Suppliers give away free previews in form of trailers, teasers; a whole media system of commercial radio airs these goods in exchange for commercials; professional or paid reviewers are writing about these goods; charts and top-lists are complied; massive multi-million dollar marketing campaigns are launched; stars with known reputation are bred and employed. These techniques are designed to provide the potential consumers with extra information and thus lower their uncertainty.

Today the efforts and resources of cultural industries are equally divided between the production of cultural goods and their marketing. Production costs are in the same range as marketing budgets and the marketing has spawn a distinct culture of celebrities and parasite media dealing with celebrities, reinforced by the cross-ownership of media conglomerates in every media type.

Despite all these efforts consumers might end up not being satisfied. There are several signs of this ‘post-coital sadness’: bad reviews on blogs, quickly dying films after the opening weekend, weak DVD rentals and sales and falling reputation of stars. This signals the distance between the actual and the promised experience, the size of the information asymmetry between the consumer and the supplier.

With the advent of file-sharing technologies this situation has changed. The risk of consuming a cultural good is not a financial risk anymore if one can download a song freely before purchasing it. Of course there are costs still associated with consumption: the cost of acquiring information about a good, the cost of searching, the cost of downloading, the cost of possible lawsuits, etc., but one does not have to pay at the counter only to realize that all the other songs on that album are not at all that good as the one played all the time on the radio, or that the trailer actually contains every enjoyable second of a feature film. Consuming a cultural good for free is the cheapest way to get to know the actual value of it. As the risks of consuming something unknown decrease, cultural goods shift to be search goods in economic terms, as no transaction is takes place before the actual experience.

But that does not mean that market transactions cannot and will not happen afterwards. But in this case a purchase will happen only if the consumer had a positive experience, when she actually had full information on the goods that she was about to purchase.

Will this shift result is a loss in sales? Well, the supplier will lose only the sales that were happening only because the information asymmetry – in other words sales that at the end resulted in an unhappy customer. Will new sales occur? Certainly, from consumers for whom the risk of paying for something unknown was too high of an entry barrier to make the actual purchase in the first place. Illegal downloading is lowering the entry barrier of consumers to markets.

Many still argue that illegal downloading is actually replacing or rather killing markets. I would argue that the efforts trying to keep cultural goods as experience goods are killing markets. Trailers, paid-for radio broadcasts, 30 second online listening-in services do not lower the uncertainty barrier enough to draw significant amount of new customers to markets outside of the mainstream. And for those consumers who are free-riding on this system will eventually face a serious problem: the end of supply of the goods they actually liked but never paid for.

From experience goods to search goods

I will soon post my theory on how the fact that cultural goods’ shift from being experience goods to search goods actually changes the market. Till then read p2pnet.net’s stroy on how it is happening in practice:
“The p2p networks are invaluable. My young daughter, Emma, and I use them to sort out the garbage, meaning most Hollywood product. Does that mean we don’t go to the movies any more? Nope. We (I should say I) downloaded The Incredibles, Over the Hedge, March of the Penguins and Corpse Bride and we not only went to see them at our local cinema (a half-hour’s drove away, BTW), we also bought DVDs of the last two. That’s not huge. But we saw, and bought, what we, not Hollywood, wanted. On top of that, we home-school Emma and she enjoyed the extras that come with the DVDs. And since we’re not loaded, think of the money we’ve saved! Trying-before-buying? As a dad without a vast income, I like it. Thank you, p2p networks ………”

All the stuff one might need

About the author

Stuff I read: www.p2pnet.net, www.slyck.com, michaelgeist.ca, slashdot.com, boingboing.net, http://gigaom.com/, http://www.downloadsquad.com/, http://www.topix.net/tech/p2p/, http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/, http://recordingindustryvspeople.blogspot.com/

Friends&family: bodoo.dj, antaldani, shuriken, sanyi, Mike Linksvayer, Tóth Benedek, Remixtures, creativecommons.hu

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