DVD publishers add DRM to their movie releases so they can control whether the dvds can be copied and even what devices are allowed to play the dvds. In February 2007, Arnezami, a hacker on the Doom9 forum who was frustrated because his purchased HD-DVD movies wouldn’t play on his Linux-based computer (I believe), cracked the code and published the 128-bit number on the web. The Wired blog wrote up an article about what that meant for the future of DRM.

The AACS Licensing Authority recently took a stand against those who published the number on the web and set out a bunch of legal threats. In protest, Digg users began voting for sites that contained links to the crack.

The Digg staff, who had received one of these legal threats, decided to comply with the law and removed several links to pages with the published code. Digg users got mad and started a massive campaign to get every link on Digg’s front page to point to sites linking to the code. Eventually, Digg founder, Kevin Rose gave up the fight against its community members and posted his comments on the Digg blog.

So what’s the issue at stake here? Why all the fuss? First off, the AACS Licensing Authority isn’t trying to copyright a 128-bit number, like many sites proclaimed. (For an interesting legal perspective on if you can actually copyright a number, see Ben Manevitz’s post, You CAN Copyright a Number. But Not As Such.) They are simply claiming that the key violates the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA)’s ban on any “component” or “part” of a “technology” that circumvents AACS, according to Fred von Lohmann of the EFF in a great legal primer on the issue.

And the user revolt hasn’t deterred Michael Ayers, the chairman of the AACS-LA, from threatening to go after all the sites that have published the code.

In all of this, there’s been talk about what this means - and a number of sites have cropped up poking fun at the issue. One of the more imaginative sites explains how you can get your own 128 bit number that you can claim violates your rights via the DMCA. The idea is that you can publish your own copyrighted stuff and then encrypt it with your own 128-bit number. Thus, if anyone attempts to publish that number, you can sue them (or at least threaten them) just as the AACS Licensing Authority.

And of course, it proves that Digg users wield a heck of a lot of power over the website.

But Viacom wasn’t the first company to sue YouTube. There’s also a much smaller lawsuit involving Robert Tur, a LA news reporter who sued for copyright infringement. NBC Universal and Viacom just recently asked the US District Court in LA that they be allowed to file a friends-of-the court brief. The thought is that this case will be tried before the Viacom case and could set precedent for how the Viacom case plays out in court.

Next, the Premier League (the UK soccer league) sued YouTube for copyright infringement, apparently claiming that YouTube encourages copyright infringement and doesn’t pay copyright owners. They also have a class action suit site up for anyone else who feels YouTube violated their copyright and wants to get in on the settlement (if there is one).

Finally, Thailand is also taking YouTube to court because they hosted a video that many Thais felt insulted their king. At the heart of the case is whether Google lied about not being able to stop the video clip last month that ridiculed Thai King Bhumibol Adulyadej.

At least Google has the cash to fight back. In the copyright infringement cases, it’s likely that Google’s response will be similar to the Viacom one. I’m not entirely sure how it will respond to the Thailand claim which wants YouTube to censor inappropriate content.

If I understand the complaint, Thailand has blocked the site since April 4 because YouTube didn’t take the clip down. According to this BBC article, eventually YouTube did cave to censorship and removed the clip. While I’m not sure exactly what the clip was about but a search on YouTube shows a number of derogatory videos still up about the Thai King. Are they looking to have YouTube ban each one? Will they provide a list of “inappropriate content” and hope Google caters to their demands? I guess we’ll see…

Here’s the chart Charlene Li posted on her blog. The rungs at the top of the ladder indicate a higher level of participation.

Like the Pew study, the Forrester study places those who engage with blogging and video creation as the high end of the tech spectrum, though here, they’re at 13% vs the 8% in the Pew study.

Of those Elite Tech Users, 8% are avid Web 2.0 devotees. This group is far more likely to own a digital or video camera, a web cam, and an iPod/MP3 player than the rest of the groups. They also are more likely to create and engage with video content. Nearly all (97%) have broadband connections at home or work. Not surprisingly, most are young - the median age is 28 - ethicnically diverse, and are mostly male (70%).

In contrast, the least connected group is more likely to watch TV every day and have cable or satellite service. This group is the oldest - median age is 64 - and they report the lowest levels of household income. They are more likely to be women (57%). Three quarters are white and 18% are African American.

I can’t say I’m surprised that young people are more likely to actively engage with online technology and have made it part of their lives while older people tend to prefer to do things they way they’ve always done… I wonder, however, if it’s more of an educational thing - people would like to learn more about technology but don’t have the time/resources to do so - or simply a matter of preference - ie they’re more efficient without technology.

1) Watchdog group, Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), got involved and started requesting that anyone whose materials were unfairly removed because of the blanket search were to contact them as they started building a case.

2) Fox demanded that Google turn over user data on anyone that uploaded unaired episodes of 24 - and Google complied.

3) Copyright lawyer, Wendy Seltzer of ChillingEffects.org, uploaded a snippet from the Super Bowl which stated that all rights, accounts and descriptions of the game were owned by the NFL onto YouTube in an experiment to see if YouTube would remove it. They did within 5 days but after protests that the video was clearly “fair use”, reinstated her video last week.

4) Yesterday, Viacom filed a lawsuit against YouTube in New York for $1 billion in damages - quite steep given that Google paid about $1.7 billion for YouTube last year - because “almost 160,000 unauthorized clips of Viacom’s programming have been available on YouTube and that these clips had been viewed more than 1.5 billion times.” It is also requesting an injunction that will prohibit Google and YouTube from other copyright infringement.

It will be interesting to see how this one plays out in court. I wouldn’t be surprised if other lawsuits will follow but Google does have a huge chunk of change - $11 billion in cash - to fund their legal defense. It’s going to be difficult for any media company to stop YouTube, which serves over 100 million video streams a day, but that doesn’t mean that lawyers won’t try.

Not surprisingly, there are a lot of “opportunists” out there who give up their info in exchange for this possibility of wealth. These gullible saps soon become the victims of identity theft.

So, how does it work?

Police have just arrested two guys in Florida who allegedly run one of these identity theft scams. They’ve been trolling neighborhoods looking for vacant homes where they can send credit cards, bills and other mail without the home owner’s knowledge. Then, they apply for all sorts of credit cards, have them sent to these homes, and collect the mail.

The scary thing is that it sounds like police caught these two guys by accident. A patrol car just happened to be cruising the neighborhood and see a Pontiac drive up to a mailbox and grab the mail. They pulled the guys over, questioned them, and then searched their car - where they found all sorts of information in the names of other people.

Even more scary, one of the guys - Adentuji Idowu - has been investigated by the Secret Service since 1992 and has been arrested twice for committed identity fraud.

The moral? If an opportunity sounds “too good to be true”, it likely is. Save yourself a lot of time and hassle by not providing your personal information to anyone that offers you several million dollars. Learn how to protect yourself from identity theft.

I’m a bit of a domain junkie, in that I’ve purchased somewhere around 90 domain names, though I haven’t gotten into the domain resellers business yet. Admittedly, I have grand plans for all of them - if I ever get around to building the sites and writing the content.

I consider myself pretty good at the trial and error process of finding a good, keyword rich .com or .net domain for under $7 (I use GoDaddy.com for domain registration + search the web for a coupon to use to get domains for $6.95.)

That said, I didn’t realize how “entrepreneurs” were profiting from domain name trial periods. Apparently, there’s a five day grace period that was originally designed to correct mistakes like registrants mistyping the domain name they’re trying to buy.

Entrepreneurs, spammers, and scam artists are taking advantage of this grace period to buy domains during this period and test them out to see which ones generate the most paid search traffic. They keep those that make more than their $6-7 annual fee and give the non-profitable domains back on day four.

Speculators write software to automatically register hundreds or thousands of names. Some are variants of trademarks or generic keywords that Internet users are likely to type — or mistype. Others are names grabbed after their original owners fail to renew.

During the grace period, the entrepreneur puts up a Web page featuring keyword search ads and receives a commission on each ad clicked. Services like Google Inc.’s AdSense for Domains and Yahoo Inc.’s Domain Match help large domain name owners set them up, even as the search companies officially oppose abuses in tasting.

Addresses likely to generate more than the $6 annual cost of domain name are kept — not a high threshold given how lucrative search advertising is these days.

The rest are thrown back into the pool on the fourth or fifth day, only to be grabbed by another group of domain name tasters.

What’s crazy is that there are up to 6 million domain names tied up in this process at any give time! When one person gives back their domain, another snaps it up before it can go back on the market to the public.

The practice has spiked, with an average tasting of 1.2 million names each day in December, compared with 7,200 two years earlier, according to data from Name Intelligence Inc., which analyzes domain name patterns. Legitimate registrations made up 2 percent of the registrations at the end of 2006, down from about half in 2004.

Only 2%!

I like Apple, but I’m not a raving fan who believes they can do no wrong, like some. I love my iPod Nano, and have considered purchasing an iBook in the past… but I never felt like they are a company that can do not wrong - especially when they sued bloggers (and lost).

So I admit that when I first read his memo, I didn’t believe he was sincere. If he really wanted to do something, he would remove DRM from all the indie artists out there who offer their audio on iTunes but would prefer their files not be protected by DRM.

Cory Doctorow responded in a Salon article late last month, saying

DRM’s principal effect is legal, not technical. Since the passage of the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, it’s been illegal to break DRMs in this country. It doesn’t matter if DRM restricts access to something you have every right to use (for example, a DRM that region-locks a movie you’ve bought so that it won’t play in the U.S.). You’re not allowed to break DRM, and corporations certainly can’t field products that break it. The results are ugly: Companies like 321 Studios (whose DVD X-Copy software lets you make otherwise legal backups of your DVDs) were sued into oblivion by the motion picture companies for trying such a thing.

So if you shellac a one-atom-thick layer of DRM over a product, you get the full power of the American legal system as a weapon to use against competitors. Apple may have created a successful “Switch” campaign by reverse-engineering Microsoft products like PowerPoint to make Keynote, an Apple program that lets you run old PowerPoint decks on your Mac, but Microsoft can’t create a “Switch to the Zune” campaign that offers you the ability to play your iTunes Store songs on a Zune, Microsoft’s latest abortive iPod-killer.

Although Apple’s DRM is wholly ineffective at preventing copying, it does manage to raise the cost of switching from an iPod to a competing device. Every iTunes song you buy for 99 cents amounts to a 99 cent tax on switching from an iPod to a Zune. That’s because your iTunes songs won’t play on your Zune — or on any other player, save those made or licensed by Apple. Jobs tries to skate around this in his memo, suggesting that only a tiny fraction of the music on iPods comes from his music store, and so the anti-switching effects are minimal.

So what, exactly, does Steve Jobs hope to get out of his memo? Maybe some good will - even though he knows that his appeal won’t change anything? It’s more PR than anything, I think.

There is some good news in all of this, though. A few weeks ago, Reps. Rich Boucher (D-Va.) and John Dolittle (R-Calif.) introduced what they call the “Freedom and Innovation Revitalizing U.S. Entrepreneurship” (or FAIR USE) bill, which may crack down on companies that use DRM. They say

“The Digital Millennium Copyright Act dramatically tilted the copyright balance toward complete copyright protection at the expense of the public’s right to fair use,” Boucher said in a statement. “Without a change in the law, individuals will be less willing to purchase digital media if their use of the media within the home is severely circumscribed and the manufacturers of equipment and software that enables circumvention for legitimate purposes will be reluctant to introduce the products into the market.”

Let’s hope that Congress makes this an issue in the upcoming months.

While BitTorrent is still a P2P distribution network, it works differently from the others. For most P2P, a file (mp3, video, pdf, etc) sits on a server in cyberspace. You connect to that computer, request the file, and download it from that computer.

BitTorrent changes the model. Instead of one server holding the file and handling all the bandwidth transfer, it allows you to connect to a bunch of people and download the file from them - even as they are still downloading the file from someone else. You still need at least one computer to hold the completed file (called a “seed”) but as long as a bunch of other computers are also trying to download that file, you share resources and bandwidth among all connected computers. (see Wikipedia for a more in depth explanation.)

Admittedly, I first started using BitTorrent to download various Asian tv programming like anime and kung fu that hadn’t been launched yet in the US. Many others used it to download the latest tv shows, movies, and music - and because you can find virtually anything through BitTorrent, it’s not surprising that it soon had a reputation for piracy.

So, it’s somewhat interesting that in December, BitTorrent raised $20 million and decided to go “legitimate”. I suppose it was either that or be dogged by the MPAA, RIAA, and other Digital Rights Management (DRM) supporters.

Two weeks ago, BitTorrent launched its BitTorrent Entertainment Network. Now, you can use BitTorrent to access over 5000 movies, tv shows, and songs at a price between $1.99-$3.99 per download. Unfortunately, like iTunes, they’ve implemented DRM on their files, which limits their usage - and there have been all sorts of complaints by customers trying to download their content and not being able to because of the DRM.

I haven’t tried it - and don’t plan to, honestly. While I like the idea of digital content, I can’t stand DRM. I once bought an eBook on Amazon.com because it was out of print and impossible to find. It took me 2 hours to configure my computer to work with Microsoft and Adobe Acrobat’s DRM before I could even open the book. It was an absolute nightmare - made worse because Microsoft’s registration servers were down for about an hour and kept telling me to come back later to re-register.

I love iTunes for its free content - and subscribe to numerous podcasts - but would never buy music from it. I’d prefer to buy the audio cd, which I can do virtually anything with, than worry about what mp3 players I can and can’t play my music with.

I anxiously await the day when companies realize that DRM doesn’t work and stop trying to restrict my media consumption, but I doubt that day will come any time soon. Until then, check out Gizmodo’s Anti-RIAA manifesto.

Fortunately, Wikipedia’s community of editors were on top of the situation and quickly stopped all editing of the elephant page for a few days until interest in the story died down.

But what’s Wikipedia to do about all the other “experts” who are editing its entries with false information? Stephen Colbert is a high profile figure, but most of Wikipedia’s community are volunteers who can make up credentials and then add anything they want.

Take, for example, the most recent scandal in which a college dropout posed as a professor of theology to post all sorts of information. The frequent contributors who claim to have prestigious credentials can also act as gatekeepers to monitor and/or delete information that others post. Of course, anyone can put up fraudulent information on a website and claim that it’s true - that kind of stuff is all over the web - but Wikipedia is supposed to be above that.

Wikipedia is planning to start reference checking its editors and cracking down on anonymous postings - but with so many people adding and updating information, is that really possible? It sounds to me like one of those idealistic goals that is impossible to put into practice.