Copyright

Every three years, the U.S. Copyright Office accepts comments on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) for additional rule-making and exemptions. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has given up on participating in the process, which they consider too broken to be worthwhile–consumer interests are simply not taken into consideration. The RIAA’s most recent filing (PDF) in this process shows that they’ve reversed their position since testifying before the Supreme Court last November in the MGM v. Grokster case, when attorney Don Verrilli stated (PDF, p. 12): The record companies, my clients, have said, for some time now, and it’s been on their website for some time now, that it’s perfectly lawful to take a CD that you’ve purchased, upload it onto your computer, put it onto your iPod.The RIAA’s position in the new filing (PDF, p. 22 footnote 46) is: Nor does the fact that permission to make a copy in particular circumstances is often or even “routinely” granted, […] necessarily establish that the copying is a fair use when the copyright owner withholds that authorization. In this regard, the statement attributed to counsel for copyright owners in the Grokster case is simply a statement about authorization, not about fair use.That is, they are claiming that they’ve given permission for such use, and have the right to take it away at any time, because it is not a matter of fair use. The filing points out that this is the 2003 position of the Register of Copyrights, who is quoted (p.22): proponents have not established that space-shifting or platform-shifting is a noninfringing use.On the same page (22), the filing states: Similarly, creating a back-up copy of a music CD is not a non-infringing use….(Somewhat less information may be found at the EFF’s blog entry which pointed me to this filing, Deep Links.)

Cory Doctorow visited the offices of Nature and gave an interesting talk. (Link via Pharyngula.)

Sony has said it will “temporarily” stop making CDs with the problematic DRM technology. I’m sure they’ll make more in the future with a modified version or a new DRM technology.

As reported at Brian Krebs’ Washington Post blog, there has been a class action lawsuit filed against Sony in California and another one about to be filed in New York. The California lawsuit alleges violations of California’s anti-spyware law, the Consumer Legal Remedies Act, and the California Unfair Competition law. In other news from Krebs, there is now real malware exploiting Sony’s DRM to hide itself. Krebs seems to be breaking the key news on this story–there are a number of other related articles on his blog worth reading, such as the one on Sony’s past history of cavalier and inconsistent actions on DRM. The EFF has an analysis of the EULA for Sony’s software–it’s something no reasonable person should agree to. Back at Mark Russinovich’s blog that exposed this issue and began the controversy, he rebuts a response from First 4 Internet, the implementers of the Sony DRM, and points out more evidence that their software is poorly written and can crash Windows.

Mark Russinovich at Sysinternals.com, a security professional who is careful about what software he installs on his computer, found a rootkit on his Windows machine. A rootkit is a set of applications designed to hide malicious activity from the owner or administrator of a machine. He found a hidden directory, several hidden device drivers, and a hidden application. After further investigation, he found that the software installed on his machine without his consent or authorization included files identified via Sigcheck as part of “Essential System Tools” from a company called First 4 Internet. Google revealed that First 4 Internet has implemented Digital Rights Management for several record companies, including Sony. It turned out that a recent CD he had purchased, “Get Right with The Man” by the Van Zant brothers, contained Sony’s DRM. Additional experimentation shows that the software is poorly written, and creates a load on the system by scanning the executable files associated with every running process every two seconds, and querying file information including size eight times per scan. The End User License Agreement (EULA) gives no indication that this software will be installed to your machine, and provides no mechanism for removing it. (They have apparently since modified the EULA in response to Russinovich’s analysis.) Russinovich took the trouble to take the steps necessary to remove the software (and return his computer to a functional condition), but as his analysis points out, this would be very difficult for an inexperienced user. A typical responsible computer user who saw the rootkit files and simply deleted them would cripple their computer. This software appears to me no different from spyware, which was made illegal in the U.S. under the SPY ACT (Securely Protect Yourself Against Cyber Trespass), and also appears (as a commenters on Russinovich’s blog note) to violate California state law, UK law, and Australian law. Arizona’s anti-spyware law doesn’t seem to apply. Russinovich’s detailed step-by-step analysis may be found here. Don’t purchase CDs with such irresponsible and sleazy DRM software. ...