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…

When referring to the case, an eBay spokesperson stated the obvious

“What the case highlights is the importance that people need to place in choosing a sensible password,”

What exactly makes for a good password? I read an article once (can’t remember where) that said to do the following:

1. Think of your favorite phrase, quote, or song lyric that’s at least 8 words long.
2. Take the first letter of each word.
3. Substitute numbers for letters.

The example I remember was a Dr. Seuss quote, so I’ll use an Animaniacs spin-off of Green Eggs and Ham:

1. Phrase: “I does not like gold eggs and meat.”
2. Take the first letters of the phrase: idnlgeam
3. Now, substitute some numbers for letters.”i” and “l” kind of look like “1″ and “e” looks like a backwards “3″ so “1dn1g3am”.

The system has been working for me - and since I create my password from scratch with a meaning behind it, I have a greater tendency to remember it.

Is there another solution? I read a few months back that eBay (or, at least, Paypal) was looking into implementig security keys.GearFuse.com posted a picture of these security devices, which generate unique keys every 30 seconds. Users must type in that unique key along with their username and password.

It sounds like a pain to use, but perhaps something like that would reduce the number of phishing scams. If scammers need your randomly generated security key along with your username and password, that may make the stolen data more difficult to use.

Do you still have the right to name the doctors on the site?

That was a case heard by the Philadelphia appeals court last week against Pennsylvania resident, Dominic Morgan. Morgan had kept the names of the doctors off his website until his medical malpractice case ended. Since he didn’t sign a non-disclosure agreement, he then added the names of the doctors to his website, http://www.lasiksucks4u.com.

Not long after, he got a nastygram claiming he was libeling the doctors.

The case went to the Court of Common Pleas in Philadelphia, where a judge ruled that he did, in fact, waive his right to further criticize the doctors by taking down the site. That’s when Public Citizen stepped in to help.

In June 2006, they filed an appeal in the Pennsylvania Superior Court in Philadelphia to reverse the decision, and last week, the judge overturned the lower court’s decision.

Note - this case isn’t about whether or not he libeled his doctors. It’s about whether he waived his rights to criticize the doctors when he took the content down.

If the lower court decision would have stood, it would have a chilling effect on freedom of speech. Large companies often bully the small guys by shooting off nastygrams demanding they take down their content. Initially, many of the little guys do. The question here was - does doing so mean they agree not to discuss the matter in the future? Thankfully, the legal answer is now “no”.

Source: Dave Farber’s Mailing List via TechDirt

In 2004, McGuire allegedly shot her husband and dismembered his body. This week, she’s on trial for murder.

The Court has no fingerprints, blood or DNA evidence yet, but does have a variety of circumstantial evidence including Google searches for “how to commit murder”, “instant poisons,” “undetectable poisons,” “fatal digoxin doses,” and searches on gun laws found on McGuire’s computer.

The moral of the story - what you search for can be used as evidence against you in court.

Source: TechDirt

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.

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.

The point of the email is to convince you that this stock is so hot that you’d be stupid not to buy in. Since most sell for pennies a share, those people looking to get rich quick and cash in on easy profits snap up shares quickly.

As thousands of people buy shares, they push the stock price higher. When the price spikes (even just a few cents), the spammer - who owns a large amount of this stock - sells it off, leaving you with shares of virtually worthless stock.

Thursday, the SEC took action to punish the stocks that profit from these spammers by suspending trading of 35 companies that are frequently promoted in these types of emails for the next 10 days.

According to the SEC, 100 million spam emails are sent each week - and as much as a third push stock tips. If the SEC can stay on top of this type of spam monitoring and suspend company trading as soon as they see evidence that this is happening, perhaps they’ll be able to curb the problem.

Still, it’s a difficult task. There are so many people out there looking for “the next big opportunity” that the SEC have to act extremely quickly - something that the government isn’t known to do well - to stop these scams before they get off the ground. At least it’s a start.

Source: SEC Cracks Down on Stock Spammers

“We feel strongly that since you are creating the programming and controlling the internet-based network, not just advertising on it, you have a higher responsibility to ensure that youth are not exposed to the marketing on your site,” the letter to A-B reads. “We fail to see how your use of age verification on the Bud.tv site is a genuine attempt to keep youth from accessing the site’s content.”

Apparently asking people to enter their birth date isn’t good enough for lawyers - even though you can’t actually buy beer from the website! Apparently, they are calling for more follow up - phone calls and/or mailings to the person to ensure that the registrant is who they say they are.

Today’s technology, I suppose, could do something like that. I’ve made two purchases recently - for web hosting and for a web template design - that had a computer call me up and I had to enter a pin number to verify I was who I said I was before they’d complete my order.

A-B could do something similar, but I have to wonder how effective that would be. If kids are lying about their age, wouldn’t they just lie when an automated system called them up?

The AGs also found fault with A-B’s attempts at viral marketing, which they claim defeats the purpose of having viewers register. If users can send the video to friends to view, there’s a chance that kids under 21 will see it as well.

The whole spiel makes me curious about what A-B is broadcasting on Bud.tv. Is it really just advertising and product placement for their line of alcoholic beverages? And if so, how is that different from, say, turning on any sporting event and seeing beer commercials? I thought they were actually broadcasting shows with some semblance of a storyline and focused around something other than hard partying 20-somethings drinking beer…