When Copyright Goes Bad

When Copyright Goes Bad

Info from the YouTube video page:

A film by Ben Cato Clough and Luke Upchurch.

Suddenly, copyright rules no longer do what they are supposed to do. They have gone bad.

This is a film about how copyright has become one of the most important consumer issues of the digital age; why corporate lobbying risks criminalising the actions of hundreds of thousands of people; and what the future holds for the fight for fairer copyright laws.

When Copyright Goes Bad is an introduction to the renegotiation of copyright and is for anyone interested in how copyright is affecting consumers. It features some of the key players in the copyright debate, including:

Fred Von Lohmann – Electronic Frontier Foundation; Michael Geist – University of Ottawa Law School; Jim Killock – Open Rights Group; and Hank Shocklee – Co-founder of Public Enemy.

For more, visit http://www.A2Knetwork.org/film

Microsoft: Litigate on FAT, and you’ll be the next Unisys

Microsoft: Litigate on FAT, and you’ll be the next Unisys (ZDNet.com)

Remember “Burn All GIFs” from 1999? In 2009, the Open Source mantra of choice could very easily turn into “Destroy all FATs”

The ‘Burn Your GIFs” campaign of 1999 has a follow up and for just as insidious reasons!

Please, take a few minutes to check out this ZDNet.com article and read up on this insidious mess that Microsoft has been pulling on Linux builders and users behind their backs!

This is a major issue and one that needs to be dealt with swiftly by anyone who uses GNU Linux knowingly or unknowingly (such as through your GPS device or smart phone).

We really need to wake up on this issue. Device creators are trying to keep the cost of their devices down to the customer and this is how we and they get paid back!

I get so angry that companies will take advantage of GNU Linux and then bite the very hand that feeds them with double deals under the table with large bully proprietary companies.

It really, really ticks me off.

Remember a certain company that created a Linux Distribution a while back and then turned around and started suing left and right? Making claims that GNU Linux violated their patents?

SCO -vs- IBM (and by extension GNU Linux)

Thank you TomTom for NOT violating the GPL! Thank you also for bringing this dirty little dealing to light! I hope you are eventually vindicated for being true to the GPL and Linux which buttered your bread — unlike some other companies.

Windows 7 Seemingly Blocks Audio Capture

Windows 7 Seemingly Blocks Audio Capture (LIfeHacker):

One rather feisty (and—surprise!—Linux-savvy) Slashdot reader writes about his DRM discoveries in Windows 7. Along with complaints about seemingly big-software-friendly firewall access and registration DLLs, the author’s chief discovery is that Windows 7 doesn’t allow for any kind of software audio capture. In other words, if you’ve got one application playing sound, Windows 7 doesn’t seem to allow you to use your same sound card to also grab the audio from that app.

Like one of the commenters said, I hope this is just a Beta issue and one that will be fixed by the time it is released. This is totally ludicrous. There are LOTS of valid, legal captures that can be done.

If this is some draconian DRM crap, Microsoft just did themselves out of a sale from me, and I will strongly recommend my clients move to the Mac.

This would be very disappointing if they didn’t fix this.

iTunes news and other Apple Macworld 2009 announcements

I watched the video of the Macworld 2009 Keynote last night by Philip Schiller, Senior Vice President of Worldwide Product Marketing.

Several things stood out for me. First once I got past Philip Schiller’s initial nervousness, he really did a great job. I am sure it weighted heavily on him when he first got up on stage.

Oh, yes, I did miss Steve Jobs being there but Philip did bring you in after the first few minutes with a similar type of excitement as Steve Jobs.

I am sure many will say he was no Steve Jobs, but Steve couldn’t be there – so that’s irrelevant. Philip did a great job and kept my interest and excitement on the products he was talking about. Which would have been hard ordinarily since hardware wise, there was only one new – upgraded thing.

I have to say I really did like the awesome features of the new iLife and iWork a lot, and the pricing was where it should be and I was very happy to see it! Thanks Apple! Oh, and the iPhone Remote app for Keynote presentations is really kewl too.

And who could be unhappy with iTunes Music Store going totally DRM-free by March and some songs going to 69 cents a song! That part was really good news.

However, in this economy, it’s sad that people will have to pay 30 cents PER SONG to remove the DRM (which sounds like extortion to me) … as TechCrunch pointed out here, that is quite a ‘music tax’ – $1.8 BILLION DOLLARS if everyone (over 6 BILLION songs) who has DRM’d music from the iTunes Store were to use the 1-click to remove the DRM from their entire library of songs. I hope the process is not too difficult to do on a onsey-twosey basis for folks. Cuz I have a feeling many will be having to do it by album or tracks over time, rather than the entire library like they were saying. Unless you had a small library.

Me? I never bought any DRM’d music so no sweat for me.

But will others who might have a BIG library be able to afford it in one fell swoop? Hard to say.

Also, I doubt if, for that money, the file will move from being a lower bit rate 128kbps DRM’s file to a 256kbps DRM-Free file like the iTunes Plus store has been selling.

The 17″ MacBook Pro sounds great as well with many new features. The 7-8 Hour/5 year Battery life sounds great, but I worry about the “being able to charge it 1,000 times.” The Anti-Glare Screen was greatly needed and I am sure will go over very big.

Philip did get me to want all of that … but then … I remembered I needed food on the table, fuel in the heater, and normal utilities to be paid, as well as gas in the car to get to appointments — maybe someday I might be able to consider buying something like that. It’s not your fault Philip, you did great! It’s the economy that sucks.

But then this from someone who hasn’t gotten the iPod Touch she wants yet either! LOL!

What do Microsoft and Apple have in common?

They apparently both have sold out to the entertainment cartels (movies, games, music, etc.) to prevent you from even making legitimate use of what you buy….meaning on the very computers and display hardware that you pay your hard earned money for!

The funny thing is, MacWorld is playing this up like it’s a good thing:

Apple didn’t just introduce new laptops Tuesday; it also introduced a new term to the vocabulary of Mac users—DisplayPort. The Mini DisplayPort found on new MacBooks, the refreshed Macbook Air and 15-inch MacBook Pros replaces the DVI and mini-DVI interfaces found on older models. But is this another proprietary debacle like Apple’s failed Apple Display Connector (ADC) interface? No.

DisplayPort is, in fact, an open industry standard promoted by the Video Electronics Standards Association (VESA), the same group that determines standard sizes for flat panel display mounts, for example. And Apple isn’t the only company supporting DisplayPort. HP, Philips, Samsung, Lenovo, AMD, Nvidia, Intel and many other companies have thrown their weight behind the standard, so we’ll be seeing a lot more DisplayPort-compatible devices in the coming years.

But at least MacWorld does at least try to list some of the downsides:

Unless you’re content with the infinitesimal selection of displays that work with DisplayPort right now, you’ll have to buy more gadgets to get your new Mac to work with a DVI or VGA display. You’re going to pay $29 for the privilege of getting such an adapter through the Apple Store. Unless you need a Dual-Link DVI adapter to hook up a Cinema HD Display or another 30-inch LCD panel, that is—that’ll set you back a full c-note, and you’ll be waiting four to five weeks for it, according to the online Apple Store.

What’s more, regardless of whether you buy Apple’s DisplayPort adapter or a third party’s (if you’re lucky enough to find one, that is), you’re going to mess up your desk with more boxes and wires getting that DVI or VGA display to work.

First Microsoft caved under the entertainment cartel’s unreasonable demands and turned Vista OS/hardware into Vista The Enabler. Now Apple’s newest hardware and OS on the new Aluminum laptop computers has turned into Leopard the Enabler … NOT enabling you as the owner of the harware, but enabling the entertainment cartels to say what you can and can’t do on your hardware with movies, music that you buy. And so many hardware companies have also caved!

All so Apple can make a few bucks in the iTunes Store??

Read it and weep:

Apple brings HDCP to a new aluminum MacBook near you

High Definition Content Protection (HDCP)—you can’t live with it, but you practically can’t buy an HD-capable device anymore without it. While HDCP is typically used in devices like Blu-ray players, HDTVs, HDMI-enabled notebooks, and even the Apple TV in order to keep DRMed content encrypted between points A and B, it appears that Apple’s new aluminum MacBook (and presumably the MacBook Pro) are using it to protect iTunes Store media as well.

So what you say? AppleTV already had this, did you know that? Maybe you want to educate yourself a bit, eh? HDCP, DPCP, DisplayPort Content Protection.

Arstechnica continues a little later in the article AFTER explaining one way in which a teacher has already been frustrated by unreasonable unintended consequences of not being able to play a movie on a Mini DisplayPort-to-VGA adapter, plugged into a Sanyo projector that is part of his room’s Promethean system:

The technology in Apple’s MacBooks that prevents a seemingly arbitrary collection of iTunes Store files from being played on HDCP non-compliant devices is perhaps more accurately called DPCP, or DisplayPort Content Protection. As we’ve covered in the past, DisplayPort was designed as an open, extensible standard for computers that offers lower power consumption over DVI (especially in the Mini DisplayPort format that Apple uses on the new MacBooks). But more importantly, DisplayPort also beats DVI in the studios’ books by offering the option of 128-bit AES encrypted copy protection.

And folks at the Apple Support Forums are also complaining about this iTunes movie purchases will not play on external display – HDCP auth error:

Well, I’m surprised there hasn’t been more of a storm over this one already but I expect there will be.

Just got a new MacBook last week and finally found a mini Display Port -> VGA adapter so i could use my 19″ external display. I rented a movie from the iTunes store yesterday and when I tried to play it on my external display, it gave me a warning/error that the display was ‘not an authorized HDCP display’ and it would not play. Plays fine on the small MacBook screen, just nothing external. To make it even worse, i tried all the movies that I have purchased from the iTunes store with the same result… NONE of them will play on anything but the MacBook’s small 13″ screen. This is crazy unacceptable.

Has anyone else run into this yet or have any ideas of something I may be overlooking in order to get purchased movies to play on an external display?

Yep…and I am sure there are many more that will find things they can’t do with what they bought.

Gawd, I hate it when I am right. I knew Apple would sell out to the entertainment cartels like Microsoft did.

Companies that are adopting or plan to adopt DisplayPort Content Protection in their hardware.

And as Wikipedia notes DisplayPort is basically just another standard — more of the same but different — like HDMI, it’s direct competitor:

DisplayPort is a competitor to the HDMI connector (with HDCP copy-protection), the de facto digital connection for high-definition consumer electronics devices. Another competitor is Unified Display Interface,[2] a low cost compatible alternative to HDMI and DVI. However, the main supporter of UDI, Intel Corporation, has stopped the development of the technology and now supports DisplayPort.

Yeah, that should help the new TVs, electronics devices and computers work together, eh?

Well, it looks like we add another set hardware that are never gonna be part of this ladies’ electronics gizmos … unfortunately.

Thanks for nothing Apple.

Sad.

This is a conflict of Interest that’s very annoying!

Apple keeps putting in these gawd awful caveats in their SLAs for updates that are really ticking me off…like this one:

4. Consent to Use of Data. You agree that Apple and its subsidiaries may collect and use technical and related information, including but not limited to technical information about your computer, system and application software, and peripherals, that is gathered periodically to facilitate the provision of software updates, product support and other services to you (if any) related to the Apple Software. Apple may use this information, as long as it is in a form that does not personally identify you, to improve our products or to provide services or technologies to you.

And you can’t even get your update unless you agree to that stupid policy! This is not the first time I have noticed this ludicrous statement, but today it really ticked me off, because it was part of the Migration and DVD/CD Sharing update!?! How stupid is that?!

Windows XP SP3 – time for an exorcism?

I am beginning to think that SP3 was Microsoft’s “killer” app for Windows XP so folks would get frustrated with XP and move to Vista … and at the same time, when they move to Vista, they wouldn’t have too high of expectations.

Looks to me like Microsoft has just proven that Apple definitely does it better! And Microsoft has no room to ever say a word about Linux, ever again!

Talk about a true dog of a Service Pack! Some folks may not be having problems, but some clients have been through h*ll this past week with their haunted XP SP3 systems after the September 2008 Windows Updates.

We had, obviously wrongly, thought we were out of the woods when we were able to get all the updates for the hardware and software in preparation for SP3 and then the SP3 update went very smoothly and worked well for about a month … until the September 2008 Windows Updates turned one client’s set of computers into possessed computers that would all of a sudden decide that their printers were no longer installed, or Outlook or Firefox or Quickbooks. Or just puke when Adobe Distiller tried to convert to PDF.

By last night they seemed to be working OK, but gawd knows what today will bring. I hope they are out of the woods, but there’s no way to be sure till they try to work with them today. I was beginning to think the computers needed an exorcist. And they still might. If so, I sure hope Microsoft made a safe reversal on SP3.

I can not believe they didn’t test these stupid updates better than this! We were so careful and waited at least a number of months before installing SP3 to make sure SP3 wasn’t creating problems after installation before we figured it was safe to install it.

I think like many, we just thought that once you finally were able to get the daggone thing installed Microsoft would do better than this on the updates. Knowing full well that many people depend on their computers for work!

I think this posting at blogcritics pretty much continues to sum up my feelings on it:

I’d like to extend a nice big F-U to Microsoft for releasing yet another product that’s screwing up my computer (pardon my French). Windows XP SP3 has been out for a few months and I haven’t heard about the world coming crashing down as a result, so I figured it might be safe to install. HA! I should have known the clowns in Redmond wouldn’t be able to get this right.

Well, Microsoft, you’ve managed to once again make people skiddish about installing security updates … Thanks for nothing Microsoft.

Well, it turns out it is Mozilla and Apple!

Turns out that the problem I was having regarding speaking text was both Apple And Mozilla.

I went into the Speech section of the System Preferences, and looked at the setting for the keystrokes for speaking text and set it to Control V. Now even though it doesn’t it ‘show’ Speak under Services, Speech, it does now work in Mozilla Firefox, Thunderbird and SeaMonkey by highlighting and using the Control V key combo.

Very happy there was a work around for it. (At least for the Speak Text).

Still need to have Thunderbird be able to print individual Address Book cards; instead of only the complete Address Book. That only changed recently and I don’t like it one bit. Very annoying issue.

Firefox 3 Download Day 2008 Coming Soon!

The site link above says, “The official date for the launch of Firefox 3 is June 17, 2008. Join our community and this effort by pledging today.”

But it isn’t available just yet. So when is Download Day?

According to the FAQ, “Download Day will coincide with the general availability of Firefox 3. The clock will start ticking when Firefox 3 goes out the door! We don’t have a definitive date for Firefox 3 yet, but it should be in June.”

So keep an eye out! It could start at any moment!

Next Mac OS X — 10.6 — at WWDC 2008? another big cat? end of PPC?

Well, it makes sense that 10.6 will be announced soon especially with Steve Jobs’ comments to the New York Times regarding major Mac OS X, but at WWDC 2008? Hard to say.

There is also the naming question brought up at Mac360 as well …some say the only big cat left is Lion. But even a cursory look at wikipedia’s big cat page would indicate that Lion isn’t the only one unless you go with strict ‘big cat’ names. A more expansive list also includes things like Cougar, Snow Leopard, Clouded Leopard and Cheetah (or Puma) (which Apple has been used already and broke the ice for the more expansive Big Cat naming for Mac OS X).

My guess would be Cougar. I would think that would be the most logical choice. Wait to use Lion till they move to an all Intel based Macs and maybe proved their dominance might be a better choice of timing to use “The King” Lion.

And if the RoughlyDrafted magazine/blog article was correct in 2007 about their thoughts on Unraveling the PPC Myth (linked in their Leopard and the History and Future of Mac OS X on PPC article noted above), then it’s not likely going to be with 10.6.

I tend to be leaning toward RoughlyDrafted being right on that score, at least after reading over the history of Apple again in those two articles.

Also, Ars Technica last year also didn’t give any real hope that ZFS would be in 10.5 — maybe have to wait for 10.6, but I don’t think so. Too soon. I think they will wait for the next one, 10.7? or whatever that will be called. Might as well wait to do ZFS when it goes to all Intel Macs makes more sense. Make the major change then.

So, I would say Cougar makes more sense at this time. No Lion King here yet…no MAJOR change to the underpinning….yet.

And really, if the truth be known about Cougars — the Cougars are nothing to sneeze at! And with this description: “This large, solitary cat has the greatest range of any wild terrestrial mammal in the Western Hemisphere,[3] extending from Yukon in Canada to the southern Andes of South America.”?? Doesn’t that sound like the desire of Apple with their next version of Mac OS X? To be the most broadly used Mac OS/computers?

Which also would indicate (to me) that they would not want to ditch PPC just yet either … like the RoughlyDrafted articles indicated.

I really think that Microsoft made that Mistake with Vista. And I really hope Apple will not make that same mistake. But who knows with the Entertainment Cartels whispering in their ears just like they did with Microsoft…

When the dust settles and if the Entertainment Cartels get their big Win (controlling when and where you can view content on every front from TV (HDTV, computers, etc.), and the Major OS makers have totally pissed off their real paying customers, we shall see what happens then. But I think we’ve already had about enough of that as evidenced by this ExtremeTech article entitled, “How the Hollywood Morons Can Beat the Pirates! (Thanks Adam for the link!!)

EDIT: Well, I guess I had a better opinion of Apple than I should have. Apparently, according to MacRumers, who was reporting on an article from Ars Technica, Apple has decided to turn PPC users away now after all. Oh, and it’s Snow Leopard, not Cougar. More like Nuclear Winter. Very unhappy Mac user here. What a crock!