Octavus Ars Scholae Palatinae
20y
1,213
The root problem is copyright terms are much too long, they should be closer to 20 years. The purpose of copyright is to encourage new art but terms today are so long they do they exact opposite effect. There has never been any artist who created a piece of work because copyright terms are life + 70 years but that artist wouldn't have created the work if copyright was 30 years.
- Extending Copyright and the Constitution: 'Have I Stayed Too Long?
- A Reconsideration of Copyright's Term (PDF)
- The true impact of shorter and longer copyright durations: from authors’ earnings to cultural creativity and diversity (PDF)
By exploring the true impact of different copyright
durations, this paper scrutinizes why a longer duration does not improve the author’s earnings, and in fact, impedes cultural creativity and diversity
Amazon Prime Video is under fire for streaming a butchered version of “It’s a Wonderful Life” that guts the beloved Christmas classic.
Viewers say the abridged cut — roughly 22 minutes shorter than the original 130-minute film — removes the iconic “Pottersville” sequence, the pivotal stretch that explains why despairing hero George Bailey suddenly rediscovers the will to live.
In that part, Bailey declares his wish never to have been born and gets to see how crummy life would have been without him.
Without that sequence, audiences are left watching a man contemplate suicide one moment, then sprint joyfully through town the next — with no logical explanation. //
The “Pottersville” sequence is the portion most directly adapted from Stern’s story.
Legal experts say the abridged version appears to be a workaround — by removing that specific sequence, distributors may have believed they could avoid infringing on the short story’s copyright while still offering a version of the film. //
Amazon Prime reportedly carries both the full and abridged versions, but viewers say the platform does not clearly explain the difference — leaving unsuspecting viewers to click the wrong one.
While 300 TB comprising roughly 86 million music files, which the group claims represent about 99.6 percent of Spotify’s listens, is a vast amount of audio, it falls well short of the platform’s full catalog. Anna’s Archive says Spotify contains around 256 million tracks in total, meaning the audio files it archived cover only about a third of the catalog, with the remaining tracks represented only in metadata rather than preserved as music files.
By not bothering with all the musical chaff in Spotify's catalog, the Anna's Archive team is apparently content to let those less popular songs languish despite their claim to want to avoid focusing on just the most popular artists.
thatanonymouscoward Ars Scholae Palatinae
13y
901
I'm gonna have to prepare more crow for people to eat.
I saw a shark once upon a time long ago... of course I'm an untrusted source by design.
As I often pointed out, courts don't let you create events to profit from.
See they could have owned the films, even openly filed cases on behalf of themselves but then there would have been questions, depositions, etc. So they invented shells to hide the client from view and convince the world it was some poor copyright holder getting screwed by evil pirates.
If your playing the home game -
They forged a name on a copyright assignment & submitted a knowingly forged document to courts.
They placed the content on TPB, knowing it would be downloaded.
They lied about their involvement/control/ownership of various firms & shells.
They lied under oath... a lot.
They funneled money out of Prenda from the main accounts, not a client account where actual lawyers place client funds to keep everything above board.
They shifted the money around rapidly trying to hide the trail.
They hired the best of the best lawyers off of craingslist.
They used another lawyers ECF login to file court documents in his name.
They ghostwrote & submitted documents to courts the lawyer of record on the case had never seen.
They tried to sue the person whos identity they stole to forge the copyright assignment. (Not to mention a bunch of us nice people who called them extortionists online.)
They lost that case before it even began because they lied to amend the filing, lied about what another Federal Judge said about a concurrent case they had filed, and pretty much pissed all over the bench.
When this all went sideways they applied the same pay us or else strategy filing bogus Americans with Disability Act lawsuits, and managed to force several small businesses to go under.
@StanFL - there might be a chance that Hans thinks his father can work miracles one more time to save him. He's bailed him out several times but I think he's burned most of goodwill.
@yasth - Thats the fun thing about copyright you can demand actual damages OR statutory damages. The statutory damages are $150,000. Its a very scary number to threaten people with and makes a few thousand sound reasonable. Of course settlement amounts don't get subtracted from the $150K so they can keep scaring people with that number.
Former attorney John Steele was sentenced this week to five years in prison for his role in the Prenda Law porn-trolling scheme, putting an end to a years-long legal drama wild and stupid enough to be prime-time TV.
Steele pleaded guilty in 2017 to federal charges of fraud and money laundering and then cooperated with authorities in the investigation into his former legal partner Paul Hansmeier. That cooperation weighed heavily in Steele’s favor at his sentencing, the Minneapolis Star Tribune reports.
US District Judge Joan Ericksen said federal guidelines recommended a sentence of 10 to 12-1/2 years for Steele’s “vile scheme” but agreed that given Steele’s extreme willingness to cooperate, his defense attorney’s recommendation of five years was “eminently fair.”
Ericksen also said Steele and Hansmeier were liable for paying about $1.5 million in restitution, separate from all the fines and sanctions the two already accrued in recent years. //
Hansmeier was sentenced in June to 14 years in prison for his role in the scheme.
The Prenda Law saga kicked off in 2012, when the copyright troll firm sued Comcast and AT&T, claiming they were accessory to their subscribers “stealing” certain pornographic content. A chain of courtroom events unfolded from there, and in 2013 a judge sanctioned the firm and referred Steele and Hansmeier for criminal investigation.
Prenda made its money by suing people who allegedly downloaded pornographic films online. Its targets frequently agreed to settlements worth a few thousand dollars rather than facing a courtroom process. These copyright trolling tactics netted the company more than $6 million between 2010 and 2013.
But eventual criminal investigations revealed that rather than representing real companies who had a real product that was being traded in violation of copyright law, Prenda was filming its own porn, inventing fraudulent shell companies, and uploading those supposed companies’ content to torrent sites itself. Then the settlement money went directly into the Prenda attorneys’ pockets. //
biffbobfred Ars Scholae Palatinae
11y
1,172
Will they kick off Meta/Facebook for torrenting, or is “pirating is only bad if you’re not rich already” going to be the rule here? //
Messy Wise, Aged Ars Veteran
21y
190
can we just have dumb pipes? i don't want a utility knowing or caring what i do.
imagine getting your electricity cut off because the power company doesn't like what you cook. //
thadco Ars Centurion
9y
380
You child stole a candy bar. No more food for you or your whole family forever! //
TylerH Ars Praefectus
13y
4,472
Subscriptor
I would very much like the justices to ask counsel whether they would kick a customer like Facebook/Meta off for large-scale pirating in abuse of this position, or if they would turn a blind eye if the organization has a large enough contract.
I would also very much like the justices to ask whether Sony has considered just making the pirated content more conveniently available for purchase/access. I wager a large portion of pirated content is not actually readily available in an offline-consumable format.
Glaringly absent from these arguments (at least those covered in the article) is "why should the ISPs act merely on the accusation of piracy? Why not just send a notice after you have sued an individual in court and won/proven that they are the specific person committing the piracy? Wouldn't that preserve liability and due process, albeit at the cost of the copyright holder (where it ought to belong, frankly)?" //
Mad Klingon Ars Tribunus Militum
5y
1,776
Subscriptor++
Is Sony and the other copyright holders willing to assume liability for damages for submitting a list of IP addresses performing infringement and being wrong? Even a 90% correct rate would result in 100 improper cutoffs for every 1000 addresses. I doubt that Sony's lists are that good. A fair number of folks use an ISP connection as a VOIP landline. What damages apply if that is cutoff due to being on a Sony list and someone dies due to 911 not working? Or a house is destroyed due to delays in fire department arriving? Bonus points if that person proves no infringement happened. And before someone says "But cell phones....", not everyone lives in an area where cell services is available or reliable.
With Internet connections becoming increasing required for modern life, cutting a house off from the Internet should be a method of last resort. //
GFKBill Ars Tribunus Militum
21y
2,674
Subscriptor
“The approach of terminating all access to the Internet based on infringement, it seems extremely overbroad given the centrality of the Internet to modern life and given the First Amendment,” he said.
And "based on infringement" isn't even in the picture - the studios haven't taken these infringers to court, Cox et al are supposed to just take their word for it. On that basis alone this should be chucked out.
Sony and their ilk want a cheap shortcut, when they should be filing charges against the infringing user and letting a judge determine penalties, if they prove their case. //
GFKBill Ars Tribunus Militum
21y
2,674
Subscriptor
TylerH said:
Glaringly absent from these arguments (at least those covered in the article) is "why should the ISPs act merely on the accusation of piracy? Why not just send a notice after you have sued an individual in court and won/proven that they are the specific person committing the piracy? Wouldn't that preserve liability and due process, albeit at the cost of the copyright holder (where it ought to belong, frankly)?"
The whole thing is an end-run around due process, because it's easy and saves them the expense and effort of suing.
The courts should be telling them to pound sand. //
42Kodiak42 Ars Scholae Palatinae
13y
1,165
Clement said that hotels limit speeds to restrict peer-to-peer downloading, and suggested that universities do the same. “I don’t think it would be the end of the world if universities provided service at a speed that was sufficient for most other purposes but didn’t allow the students to take full advantage of BitTorrent,” he said. “I could live in that world. But in all events, this isn’t a case that’s just about universities. We’ve never sued the universities.”
Clement is either a ... moron, or is hoping the judges are by telling them this outright lie. This is nothing more than a brash assertion that a network configuration that supports peer-to-peer services has no valid personal use cases.
Stewart gave a hypothetical in which an individual Internet user is sued for infringement in a district court. The district court could award damages and impose an injunction to prevent further infringement, but it probably couldn’t “enjoin the person from ever using the Internet again,” Stewart said.
A court isn't even likely to block the user's internet access while the case is ongoing. The fact of the matter is simple: People's livelihoods can very well depend on continued and reliable internet access. What Sony is asking for is a clear violation of our fifth amendment rights by requiring ISPs to enact an unjustified punishment without due process in a court of law.
Streaming is now the most popular way to watch TV, yet many are unaware of what they’re buying. As Reingold's lawsuit points out, paying for content in the streaming era is different from buying media from physical stores. Physical media nets control over your ability to watch stuff for years. But you also had to have retrieved the media from a store (or website) and to have maintained that physical copy, as well the necessary hardware and/or software for playing it. Streaming services can rip purchased content from customers in bulk, but they also offer access to a much broader library that's instantly watchable with technology that most already have (like a TV and Internet).
We can debate the best approach to distributing media. What's clearer is the failure of digital content providers to ensure that customers fully understand they’re paying for access to content, and that this access could be revoked at any time. //
galvanash Seniorius Lurkius
17y
14
Subscriptor++
Is it really that controversial to expect that the word "buy" should have a legally binding meaning? Seems like a pretty simple and straight forward concept to me.
I give you money, you give me a thing. Maybe there are terms binding me as to what I can do with the thing, but assuming I never violate those terms if you can then take the thing away from me I never bought it.
Can we please get a judge to just settle this after like 50 years of this nonsense??? //
SimonRev Ars Praetorian
10y
434
You know, as long as I "bought" a digital asset, I have no ethical compunctions about creating/obtaining a more convenient copy for personal use. I don't do that with rentals.
If Amazon et al tried to provide a "non-fixed term lease" (and yes, I know that is what they really mean with the "buy button"), I would expect to pay roughly 1/2 to 1/3 vs purchasing the physical media. //
17 U.S. Code § 107 - Limitations on exclusive rights: Fair use] said:
Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include —
(1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
(2) the nature of the copyrighted work;
(3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
(4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
The fact that a work is unpublished shall not itself bar a finding of fair use if such finding is made upon consideration of all the above factors.
symbolset Wise, Aged Ars Veteran
12y
116
If you let any vendor be essential to your operation, they will blackmail you or they will go out of business and leave you inoperable. That is the nature of the essential dependency relationship. You can't shut them down, can you? No.
This very thing is both the reason for Unix and the thing that killed it. Mainframe lockin being what it is. People got tired of rebuilding everything and demanded portability. And then AT&T exploited their need for Unix.
Sure, their software is convenient. It's useful. But you have to be ready to unhook from any vendor instantly without disrupting your operation. That's inconvenient. It's expensive. It's necessary. If a vendor controls whether you could continue in business, they own your business. You work for them. You wouldn't allow that from any employee, a security contractor, a landlord, an Internet service, an accountant, an engineer, tech or manager. If your CEO goes rogue or dies in the chair you get another and move on. Why should a software vendor have this privilege above all others? There's always another way to do anything. For everything essential responsible people always have a hot spare, a workaround, a plan B. Always
This is also useful when going into negotiations. The one who cares the least controls the relationship.
RickyP784 Ars Tribunus Militum
13y
2,213
Subscriptor
I'm so looking forward to de-VMware-Ing and de-Cisco-ing my network over the next few years as much as possible.
We're starting soon with Arista fiber switches and will start replacing copper IDF switches in the coming years. I think we'll keep Cisco APs, phones, and firewalls, but it's gonna be real nice when our only SMARTnet costs are FirePowers and an ISR voice gateway.
Our Dell VxRail ends service life in 2 years, and that will be the last VMware equipment to go. Unless Proxmox comes a long way in a short time, we'll switch to straight Nutanix. Not ideal, but it's the best of a bad situation. //
Evil_Merlin Ars Legatus Legionis
25y
23,732
Subscriptor
We got ours. And we WERE a big VMware user. We migrated from Hyper-V to ESXi in 2019 for stability and extendibility reasons. The cost increase could be justified by the back end we had, so it wasn't a huge deal. Fast forward to now, we are on a deadline.
July 18th, no more ESX. Anywhere. No VMware products period.
All Windows systems going back to Hyper-V using Windows Server 2025.
All Linux/GNU and appliances going to KVM.
The company saves a BOAT load of money.
Broadcom made the decision REALLY easy for us. Best thing is that we will have it all gone before the audit, so when they get here (and we will LET them come) we can turn them away at the door with proof in hand. //
Are you willing to pay for your host? Windows Server does VM's quite fine for almost any loads. Good management tools and decent amount of guest coverage. //
Depending on guest oses
Proxmox, quemu with vmm or other gui, openstack , openshift with addon for vm's
or
if mostly windows hyperv. //
sjl Ars Tribunus Militum
19y
2,785
Spuwho said:
Heard a company is looking into a general Broadcom boycott. processors, controllers, network switches, storage equipment, other software products. Not just dumping VMWare, but anything related to or dependent on Broadcom. They really pissed off a lot of people.
I have an LSI (Avago, Broadcom - in order of the buyouts) SAS controller in my home-brew NAS.
If I ever need a replacement, I'll be looking at options from Microchip (the company that bought the company [Microsemi] that bought the company [PMC-Sierra] that bought Adaptec.) Possibly Marvell. Not Broadcom, specifically because of this. Sure, I'm a very small fish in that particular pond, but still.
On Monday, court documents revealed that AI company Anthropic spent millions of dollars physically scanning print books to build Claude, an AI assistant similar to ChatGPT. In the process, the company cut millions of print books from their bindings, scanned them into digital files, and threw away the originals solely for the purpose of training AI—details buried in a copyright ruling on fair use whose broader fair use implications we reported yesterday. //
Ultimately, Judge William Alsup ruled that this destructive scanning operation qualified as fair use—but only because Anthropic had legally purchased the books first, destroyed each print copy after scanning, and kept the digital files internally rather than distributing them. The judge compared the process to "conserv[ing] space" through format conversion and found it transformative. Had Anthropic stuck to this approach from the beginning, it might have achieved the first legally sanctioned case of AI fair use. Instead, the company's earlier piracy undermined its position.
But if you're not intimately familiar with the AI industry and copyright, you might wonder: Why would a company spend millions of dollars on books to destroy them? Behind these odd legal maneuvers lies a more fundamental driver: the AI industry's insatiable hunger for high-quality text. //
Publishers legally control content that AI companies desperately want, but AI companies don't always want to negotiate a license. The first-sale doctrine offered a workaround: Once you buy a physical book, you can do what you want with that copy—including destroy it. That meant buying physical books offered a legal workaround.
And yet buying things is expensive, even if it is legal. So like many AI companies before it, Anthropic initially chose the quick and easy path. In the quest for high-quality training data, the court filing states, Anthropic first chose to amass digitized versions of pirated books to avoid what CEO Dario Amodei called "legal/practice/business slog"—the complex licensing negotiations with publishers. But by 2024, Anthropic had become "not so gung ho about" using pirated ebooks "for legal reasons" and needed a safer source. //
When asked about this process, Claude itself offered a poignant response in a style culled from billions of pages of discarded text: "The fact that this destruction helped create me—something that can discuss literature, help people write, and engage with human knowledge—adds layers of complexity I'm still processing. It's like being built from a library's ashes."
A federal judge in San Francisco ruled late on Monday that Anthropic’s use of books without permission to train its artificial intelligence system was legal under US copyright law.
Siding with tech companies on a pivotal question for the AI industry, US District Judge William Alsup said Anthropic made “fair use” of books by writers Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson to train its Claude large language model.
Alsup also said, however, that Anthropic’s copying and storage of more than 7 million pirated books in a “central library” infringed the authors’ copyrights and was not fair use. The judge has ordered a trial in December to determine how much Anthropic owes for the infringement. //
AI companies argue their systems make fair use of copyrighted material to create new, transformative content, and that being forced to pay copyright holders for their work could hamstring the burgeoning AI industry.
Anthropic told the court that it made fair use of the books and that US copyright law “not only allows, but encourages” its AI training because it promotes human creativity. The company said its system copied the books to “study Plaintiffs’ writing, extract uncopyrightable information from it, and use what it learned to create revolutionary technology.”
Copyright owners say that AI companies are unlawfully copying their work to generate competing content that threatens their livelihoods. //
Anthropic and other prominent AI companies including OpenAI and Meta Platforms have been accused of downloading pirated digital copies of millions of books to train their systems. //
Anthropic had told Alsup in a court filing that the source of its books was irrelevant to fair use.
“This order doubts that any accused infringer could ever meet its burden of explaining why downloading source copies from pirate sites that it could have purchased or otherwise accessed lawfully was itself reasonably necessary to any subsequent fair use,” Alsup said on Monday.
The broader lesson of this study is that the details will matter in these copyright cases. Too often, online discussions have treated “do generative models copy their training data or merely learn from it?” as a theoretical or even philosophical question. But it’s a question that can be tested empirically—and the answer might differ across models and across copyrighted works. //
For any language model, the probability of generating any given 50-token sequence “by accident” is vanishingly small. If a model generates 50 tokens from a copyrighted work, that is strong evidence that the tokens “came from” the training data. This is true even if it only generates those tokens 10 percent, 1 percent, or 0.01 percent of the time. //
There are actually three distinct theories of how training a model on copyrighted works could infringe copyright:
- Training on a copyrighted work is inherently infringing because the training process involves making a digital copy of the work.
- The training process copies information from the training data into the model, making the model a derivative work under copyright law.
- Infringement occurs when a model generates (portions of) a copyrighted work.
A lot of discussion so far has focused on the first theory because it is the most threatening to AI companies. If the courts uphold this theory, most current LLMs would be illegal, whether or not they have memorized any training data.
The AI industry has some pretty strong arguments that using copyrighted works during the training process is fair use under the 2015 Google Books ruling. But the fact that Llama 3.1 70B memorized large portions of Harry Potter could color how the courts consider these fair use questions. //
The Google Books precedent probably can’t protect Meta against this second legal theory because Google never made its books database available for users to download—Google almost certainly would have lost the case if it had done that. //
Moreover, if a company keeps model weights on its own servers, it can use filters to try to prevent infringing output from reaching the outside world. So even if the underlying OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google models have memorized copyrighted works in the same way as Llama 3.1 70B, it might be difficult for anyone outside the company to prove it.
Moreover, this kind of filtering makes it easier for companies with closed-weight models to invoke the Google Books precedent. In short, copyright law might create a strong disincentive for companies to release open-weight models.
“It's kind of perverse,” Mark Lemley told me. “I don't like that outcome.”
On the other hand, judges might conclude that it would be bad to effectively punish companies for publishing open-weight models.
“There's a degree to which being open and sharing weights is a kind of public service,” Grimmelmann told me. “I could honestly see judges being less skeptical of Meta and others who provide open-weight models.”
A day after the US Copyright Office dropped a bombshell pre-publication report challenging artificial intelligence firms' argument that all AI training should be considered fair use, the Trump administration fired the head of the Copyright Office, Shira Perlmutter—sparking speculation that the controversial report hastened her removal.
The report that the Copyright Office released on Friday is not finalized but is not expected to change radically, unless Trump's new acting head potentially intervenes to overhaul the guidance.
It comes after the Copyright Office parsed more than 10,000 comments debating whether creators should and could feasibly be compensated for the use of their works in AI training.
"The stakes are high," the office acknowledged, but ultimately, there must be an effective balance struck between the public interests in "maintaining a thriving creative community" and "allowing technological innovation to flourish." Notably, the office concluded that the first and fourth factors of fair use—which assess the character of the use (and whether it is transformative) and how that use affects the market—are likely to hold the most weight in court. //
Only courts can effectively weigh the balance of fair use, the Copyright Office said. Perhaps importantly, however, the thinking of one of the first judges to weigh the question—in a case challenging Meta's torrenting of a pirated books dataset to train its AI models—seemed to align with the Copyright Office guidance at a recent hearing. Mulling whether Meta infringed on book authors' rights, US District Judge Vince Chhabria explained why he doesn't immediately "understand how that can be fair use."
"You have companies using copyright-protected material to create a product that is capable of producing an infinite number of competing products," Chhabria said. "You are dramatically changing, you might even say obliterating, the market for that person's work, and you're saying that you don't even have to pay a license to that person." //
Some AI critics think the courts have already indicated which way they are leaning. In a statement to Ars, a New York Times spokesperson suggested that "both the Copyright Office and courts have recognized what should be obvious: when generative AI products give users outputs that compete with the original works on which they were trained, that unprecedented theft of millions of copyrighted works by developers for their own commercial benefit is not fair use."
You wouldn't steal a car, right? So you shouldn't pirate a movie, either.
That was the gist of the infamous "You Wouldn't Steal a Car" anti-piracy campaign from the Motion Picture Association of America during the mid-2000s. But questions are now being asked about just how carefully the MPAA followed its own anti-piracy principles when designing the campaign. Specifically: Did the MPAA rip off a key font?
The answer to that question is, like many matters involving typefaces, fonts, and copyright, somewhat complicated.
Once you pay for an e-book on Amazon, it has been licensed, not sold to you, according to the company's terms of service. This gives the company a lot of leeway in deciding what you do with a purchased e-book. The terms of service explicitly forbid bypassing the DRM and reading it on devices or apps that Kindle doesn't officially support. //
The legalities involved in bypassing DRM
Bypassing DRM is illegal in the US, thanks to the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act), but it may be legal in other regions. The DMCA, among other things, makes it difficult to create a legal backup of the digital media you own. I reached out to Cory Doctorow, an author and vocal DRM critic, to learn more about this subject.
In an email, he explained the complexities involved in understanding where the boundary lies here. "It isn't a copyright infringement to move a book from one device you own to another ([aka 'format shifting']). However, in 1998, the US Congress passed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which created a new kind of copyright—a copyright that protects DRM itself," Doctorow wrote. "Under Section 1201 of the DMCA, it's a felony (punishable by a [five]-year prison sentence and a [$500,000] fine) to give someone a "circumvention device" that defeats an "access control" for a copyrighted work. This law applies even if you don't violate copyright.
"Say I tell you that you have my permission to move a book I wrote (and am thus the copyright holder for) from your Kindle to another device. If the Kindle book has DRM, you're still not allowed to move it. The fact that I am the copyright holder has no impact on whether Amazon—a company that didn't create or invest in my book—can prevent you from moving that book outside of its walled garden...In fact, if I supply you with a tool to remove DRM (like some versions of Calibre), then I commit a felony and Amazon can have me sent to prison for five years for giving you a tool to move my book from the Kindle app to a rival app like Kobo," he wrote.
When you download a Kindle e-book, it's available in the AZW format, and audiobooks from Audible use the proprietary AAX format. If you download these to your computer, that is format shifting, but it may be illegal if you had to circumvent DRM to do it. Doctorow added, "that means that even though copyright law says you can format shift your books, music, videos, games, [etc.], DMCA 1201 (a "paracopyright law") makes this an imprisonable felony if you have to break DRM first." //
However, without changing the DMCA, we can't expect to see real, lasting change in this space. Doctorow said as much to me: "What we really need to do is get rid of DMCA 1201, that law that makes it a crime to format shift your media...it's the same law that stops farmers from fixing their tractors, blocks independent mechanics from fixing your car, stops rivals from setting up alternative app stores for phones and games consoles...this law is a menace!"
DVDs, if taken care of properly, should last for 30 to up to 100 years. It turned out that the problems that Bumbray had weren't due to a DVD player or poor DVD maintenance. In a statement to JoBlo shared on Tuesday, WBD confirmed widespread complaints about DVDs manufactured between 2006 and 2008. The statement said:
Warner Bros. Home Entertainment is aware of potential issues affecting select DVD titles manufactured between 2006 – 2008, and the company has been actively working with consumers to replace defective discs.
Where possible, the defective discs have been replaced with the same title. However, as some of the affected titles are no longer in print or the rights have expired, consumers have been offered an exchange for a title of like-value. //
Damn Fool Idealistic Crusader noted that owners of WB DVDs can check to see if their discs were manufactured by the maligned plant by looking at the inner ring codes on the DVDs' undersides. //
evanTO Ars Scholae Palatinae
7y
839
DRM makes it difficult, and in some cases impossible, for people to make legitimate backups of their own media. Not being able to legally do this, particularly as examples like this article abound, is just one more example of how US Copyright Law is broken.
But David Seubert, who manages sound collections at the University of California, Santa Barbara library, told Ars that he frequently used the project as an archive and not just to listen to the recordings.
For Seubert, the videos that IA records of the 78 RPM albums capture more than audio of a certain era. Researchers like him want to look at the label, check out the copyright information, and note the catalogue numbers, he said.
"It has all this information there," Seubert said. "I don't even necessarily need to hear it," he continued, adding, "just seeing the physicality of it, it's like, 'Okay, now I know more about this record.'". //
Some sound recording archivists and historians also continue to defend the Great 78 Project as a critical digitization effort at a time when quality of physical 78 RPM records is degrading and the records themselves are becoming obsolete, with very few libraries even maintaining equipment to play back the limited collections that are available in physical archives.
They push back on labels' claims that commercially available Spotify streams are comparable to the Great 78 Project's digitized recordings, insisting that sound history can be lost when obscure recordings are controlled by rights holders who don't make them commercially available. //
Music publishers suing IA argue that all the songs included in their dispute—and likely many more, since the Great 78 Project spans 400,000 recordings—"are already available for streaming or downloading from numerous services."
"These recordings face no danger of being lost, forgotten, or destroyed," their filing claimed.
But Nathan Georgitis, the executive director of the Association for Recorded Sound Collections (ARSC), told Ars that you just don't see 78 RPM records out in the world anymore. Even in record stores selling used vinyl, these recordings will be hidden "in a few boxes under the table behind the tablecloth," Georgitis suggested. And in "many" cases, "the problem for libraries and archives is that those recordings aren't necessarily commercially available for re-release." //
That "means that those recordings, those artists, the repertoire, the recorded sound history in itself—meaning the labels, the producers, the printings—all of that history kind of gets obscured from view," Georgitis said.
Currently, libraries trying to preserve this history must control access to audio collections, Georgitis said. He sees IA's work with the Great 78 Project as a legitimate archive in that, unlike a streaming service, where content may be inconsistently available, IA's "mission is to preserve and provide access to content over time."
"That 'over time' part is really the key function, I think, that distinguishes an archive from maybe a streaming service in a way," Georgitis said.
An ARSC member and IA supporter, Seubert agreed with IA that any music fan wanting to listen to songs "for entertainment purposes" would go to Spotify or Apple Music, rather than IA, which is more for "people who for whatever reason need to take a deep dive into some obscure corner of recorded sound history."
To Seubert and IA fans, there seems to be little evidence that the Great 78 Project is meaningfully diverting streams from labels' preferred platforms. Bing Crosby's "White Christmas" is perhaps the most heavily streamed song in the case, with nearly 550 million streams on Spotify compared to about 15,000 views on the Great 78 Project.
As we've said many times here, the normal community understanding on contribution licensing is inbound=outbound, which is to say that contributors agree for their contributions to be licensed under the project's existing licence.
In the case of copyleft licences, as the linked question says, this is actually a requirement of the licence. In the case of the permissive licences like MIT, however, it's just a community understanding. Unless the project required a CLA from you, you could make an argument that you never licensed your contributions to the project at all, but I'd expect it to be a hard, uphill business to convince a judge of that (indeed, as Bart points out (thank you, Bart!), given GitHub's embedding of in=out in their TOS, it will likely be next to impossible).
But the project is completely entitled to change to a proprietary licence, and unless you can convince a judge that you never agreed to licence your contributions, you have no right to demand they stop using your contribution. One of the many advantages of copyleft licensing is that, once contributions have been accepted, the project can no longer unilaterally relicense. The permissive licences don't give the same protection, and this is generally understood, so what they've done, though not nice, is neither unlawful nor unethical.
One thing you can do is to take the copy of the MIT-licensed source you've found, and make sure it's available from your website (or at least, not solely from your github account). You have every right to do that, and as the search engines pick it up, you may hope that their proprietary-licensed version is supplanted by the free version.
Months later, according to the SFC, AVM provided all the relevant source code and scripts, but the suit continued. AVM ultimately paid Steck's attorney fee. The case proved, once again, that not only are source code requirements real, but the LGPL also demands freedom, despite its "Lesser" name, and that source code needs to be useful in making real changes to firmware—in German courts, at least.
"The favorable result of this lawsuit exemplifies the power of copyleft—granting users the freedom to modify, repair, and secure the software on their own devices," the SFC said in a press release. "Companies like AVM receive these immense benefits themselves. This lawsuit reminded AVM that downstream users must receive those very same rights under copyleft.". //
At the top is perhaps the best-known case in tech circles, the Linksys WRT54G conflict from 2003. While the matter was settled before a lawsuit was filed, negotiations between Linksys owner Cisco and a coalition led by the Free Software Foundation, publisher of the GPL and LGPL, made history. It resulted in the release of all the modified and relevant GPL source code used in its hugely popular blue-and-black router.
The backstory, such as it exists from reports and retrospectives, is that Cisco bought Linksys, Linksys outsourced certain chipset development to Broadcom, and Broadcom outsourced firmware development to an overseas developer. Everybody up the chain ended up with a lawsuit once people started looking.
Cisco made history yet again in 2007 when it was the first entity to be actually sued by the FSF over GPL violations, which started in 2003 and continued to come up with new hardware products. Cisco settled the case with the FSF in 2009, making a donation to the FSF and appointing a Free Software Director at the company to keep track of its licensing obligations.