chowarmaan.com

The RIAA has constantly said that they are suing file sharers to raise awareness of the piracy issue, and not to seek financial benefits.

The group has said on numerous occasions that its legal campaign against P2P users isn’t about making money—indeed, an industry executive testified during the Jammie Thomas trial that the lawsuits are a money-losing proposition. Instead, the suits are meant, among other things, as a deterrent to copyright infringement and to teach P2P users a lesson.

There is a good article covering the story and the actions of the RIAA.

Yahoo has decided to close their music store, and they are disconnecting the license servers as well in September. This article gives a good description of the problem.

Here you have people that have purchased music legally from the online store, and now, when they switch computers in the future, or shortly based on a crash or an upgrade, they will not be able to listen to their music anymore.

Why is DRM allowed? Here a customer who purchased the music is the one losing out. Not the record labels, the recording company, or even Yahoo. Why would you not download music to ensure you are DRM free? The customer just got screwed again by big business.

This is why I refuse to use software or anything else with DRM. If I have to link to something outside my computer to use the software or other digital item I purchased, I refuse to purchase it. This should not be tolerated in our society. They could sell new music up to the actual closing date, then take the license server offline, and someone may not even be able to listen to the song they just bought.

The new Canadian Copyright Bill (B-61) will even make it illegal to work around this DRM, which is actually not doing anything wrong, except trying to listen to the music that was purchased legally.

I hate DRM.

Please go to the Canadian Coalition for Electronic Rights site and use their letter writing tool as well to help stop the Canadian DMCA. This site supports English and French.

Some numbers from a recent Angus Reid poll are quite interesting, as it appears that Canadians are learning more about this appalling potential law and are preparing to fight against it.

* 76 percent agree with the statement that the proposed amendments “are being introduced as a result of lobbying by the North American music market”
* 63 percent agree with the statement that the proposed amendments “will expose millions of Canadians to lawsuits by copyright holders”
* 66 percent agree with the statement that the are symbolic that “the government will not be able to enforce the new law”

The original summary is in Michael Geist’s blog.

The new bill for copyright reform is really just a joke. While Canadians did get a time shifting option, and the ability to play back the recording on any device, this is only allowed as long as the vendor does not say you can not. I am missing something? Did the MPAA (I know, not Canadian) not say the only way to watch a movie that was legally purchased for download to your computer, on a portable DVD player, was to buy another copy.

When do you think that the vendor will not lock down the recording is when it is in the public domain. All CDs, DVDs, etc… will come locked down. What a piece of crap this law will be. It should have been the reverse. It should be illegal to lock down the media in Canada so we can have our time shifting and device shifting options. If I buy a DVD, why can I not watch it on my iPod?

From the Michael Geist coverage:

Prentice’s strategy appears to have been to include a series of headline-grabbing provisions that would attract the support of the Canadian public and simultaneously mask rules that will reshape Canadians’ rights over their personal property. Accordingly, the bill includes a time shifting provision that legalizes recording of television programs, a private copying of music provision that allows consumers to copy music onto their iPods, and a format shifting provision that permits transferring content from analog to digital formats. While those provisions sound attractive, Canadians would do well to read the fine print. The new rules are subject to a host of limitations - Canadians can’t retain recorded programs and backing up DVDs is not permitted - that lessen their attractiveness.

I can not summarize this any better than the Michael Geist Blog Entry.

The Canadian DMCA is a kick in the gut to Canadians everywhere. But I believe we will get back up and demand better. Start now.

1. Write to your MP, the Industry Minister, the Canadian Heritage Minister, and the Prime Minister. If you send an email, be sure to print it out and drop a copy in the mail. If you are looking for a sample letter, visit Copyright for Canadians.
2. Take 30 minutes from your summer to meet directly with your MP. From late June through much of the summer, your MP will be back in your community attending local events and making themselves available to meet with constituents. Give them a call and ask for a meeting. Every MP in the country should return to Ottawa in the fall having heard from their constituents on this issue.
3. If you are not a member of the Fair Copyright for Canada Facebook group, join. If you are, consider joining or starting a local chapter and be sure to educate your friends and colleagues about the issue.

Well it is going to be presented in the House of Commons, and already some key people are not liking the new law. Read the main quick review on Michael Geist’s Blog and some interesting pieces are below.

1. As expected, Prentice has provided a series of attention-grabbing provisions to consumers including time shifting, private copying of music (transfering a song to your iPod), and format shifting (changing format from analog to digital). These are good provisions that did not exist in the delayed December bill. However, check the fine print since the rules are subject to a host of strict limitations and, more importantly, undermined by the digital lock provisions. The effect of the digital lock provisions is to render these rights virtually meaningless in the digital environment because anything that is locked down (ie. copy-controlled CD, no-copy mandate on a digital television broadcast) cannot be copied. As for every day activities like transferring a DVD to your iPod - those are infringing too. Indeed, the law makes it an infringement to circumvent the locks for these purposes.

2. The digital lock provisions are worse than the DMCA. Yes - worse. The law creates a blanket prohibition on circumvention with very limited exceptions and creates a ban against distributing the tools that can be used to circumvent. While Prentice could have adopted a more balanced approach (as New Zealand and Canada’s Bill C-60 did), the effect of these provisions will be to make Canadians infringers for a host of activities that are common today including watching out-of-region-coded DVDs, copying and pasting materials from a DRM’d book, or even unlocking a cellphone. The liability for picking the digital lock is up to $20,000 per infringement.

3. The other headline grabber is the $500 fine for private use infringement. This will be heralded as a reasonable compromise, but check the fine print. Canadian law already allows a court to order damages below $500 per infringement, so the change may not be as dramatic as expected. Moreover, the $500 fine may well be offset by the new sources of much larger liability as Canadians face $20,000 per infringement for transferring music from a copy-protected CD to their iPod. Finally, it is already arguably legal to download sound recordings in Canada. Under the proposal, there are exceptions for uploading or posting music online (ie. making available) and even the suggestion that posting a copyright-protected work to YouTube could result in the larger $20,000 per infringement damage award.

4. The ISP provisions are precisely as expected with a statutory notice-and-notice system. However, check the fine print. The role of the ISP may be undermined by the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, which the government trumpets in its press release.

We need to stop this from becoming law for sure. It is time that everyone acted!

It looks like another company has now pointed the FBI to MediaDefender for illegal activity. Revision3 is an online TV show that uses torrents for distribution, and is completely free.

Revision3 is the first media company that gets it, born from the Internet, on-demand generation. Unlike aggregators, mash-ups, and user-generated video sites, Revision3 is an actual TV network for the web, creating and producing its own original, broadcast quality shows.

The company was founded in 2005 by technology visionaries Kevin Rose, Jay Adelson, Dan Huard, Ron Gorodetzky, and David Prager, because they couldn’t find anything they wanted to watch on traditional television, and is now led by Internet TV pioneer Jim Louderback.

Revision3’s shows can be found everywhere from Revision3.com to a wide range of traditional and new platforms, including iTunes, Bittorrent, DivX, YouTube, PyroTV and more. We will work with almost any distribution platform, using every video encoding format available, including flash, H.264 and others. We want our content accessible to the greatest possible audience, on as many devices and networks as possible.

This lengthy blog covers how MediaDefender was identified and the conversations that took place. MediaDefender does not even deny any of this. I personally hope the company follows up and sues the business out of MediaDefender so they can go away, or at least get more RIAA/MPAA money to pay to legal users. This blog article is certainly worth the read.

In a lengthy blog post Louderback explains what happened, as he writes: “Media Defender was abusing one of Revision3’s servers for their own purposes – quite without our approval. When we closed off their backdoor access, MediaDefender’s servers freaked out, and went into attack mode – much like how a petulant toddler will throw an epic tantrum if you take away an ill-gotten Oreo.”

Torrent Freak Coverage

The best part is that this is completely illegal in US law, and the FBI should have no choice but to file charges against the company. Hopefully this might put a final death nail in MediaDefender that operates against the law in the US and thinks they are immune since they have the RIAA and MPAA backing them.

I have been following this story for a few days now, but this story best illustrates what is going on. SmokeyB sent me this article which really illustrates the problem with secret government treaties.

Federal trade agreements do not require parliamentary approval.

The agreement is being prepared similar to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) which does not require it go before the politicians to at least hold someone responsible. The agreement can simply be signed by the Government.

The deal would create a international regulator that could turn border guards and other public security personnel into copyright police. The security officials would be charged with checking laptops, iPods and even cellular phones for content that “infringes” on copyright laws, such as ripped CDs and movies.

The guards would also be responsible for determining what is infringing content and what is not.

The agreement proposes any content that may have been copied from a DVD or digital video recorder would be open for scrutiny by officials - even if the content was copied legally.

The problem here is that your average border guard is not an Intellectual Property Lawyer, which means songs I placed on my iPod that I have on CD, which is legal in Canada, could cause the border guards to confiscate my iPod and fine me. I did not break a law, yet here it is.

I love the quote:

“If Hollywood could order intellectual property laws for Christmas what would they look like? This is pretty close,” said David Fewer, staff counsel at the University of Ottawa’s Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic. “The process on ACTA so far has been cloak and dagger. This certainly raises concerns.”

So it turns out that MediaSentry does not have a Private Investigator license in the state of Massachusettss. This means that when the RIAA uses them to hack into people’s computers to find shared songs, they are doing so illegally in even attempting to do the search. With this in mind, the students at the school who had the Cease and Desist letter sent, may be able to evade the RIAA and get them blocked in the state. This is not the only state that prevents MediaSentry from operating since the company does not have licenses in most states.

It now appears that MediaSentry is not following the Cease and Desist Order. The state attorney is now looking into this and the government will now look to stop the actions. Hopefully there are large fines and other penalties that MediaSentry has to pay, and hopefully they are large enough to stop this company, and the RIAA from this style of malicious prosecution.