Another Word For It Patrick Durusau on Topic Maps and Semantic Diversity

February 1, 2019

Google vs. IBM (Claw of Mordor) Licensing

Filed under: Intellectual Property (IP) — Patrick Durusau @ 10:54 am

Contrasting the licensing strategies between Google and IBM:

Google: Natural Questions Data: Licensed under: Creative Commons Share-Alike 3.0.

Terms (not the entire license):

Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.

ShareAlike — If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you must distribute your contributions under the same license as the original.

No additional restrictions — You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits.

Compare:

IBM: Diversity in Faces: Terms include:


Licensee grants to IBM a non-exclusive, irrevocable, unrestricted, worldwide and paid-up right, license and sublicense to: a) include in any product or service any idea, know-how, feedback, concept, technique, invention, discovery or improvement, whether or not patentable, that Licensee provides to IBM, b) use, manufacture and market any such product or service, and c) allow others to do any of the foregoing. (emphasis added)

I don’t doubt that Google has issues and behaviors we all would like to see changed, but the claw of Mordor licensing terms from IBM take your breath away.

If the question is: IBM?

The answer is: NO!

October 25, 2018

DMCA Exemptions – 10/26/18 or White Hat Advertising Rules

Filed under: Cybersecurity,Hacking,Intellectual Property (IP) — Patrick Durusau @ 7:57 pm

Beau Woods posted a tweet with the URL for: Exemption to Prohibition on Circumvention of Copyright Protection Systems for Access Control Technologies.

Cutting to the chase:


(i)Computer programs, where the circumvention is undertaken on a lawfully acquired device or machine on which the computer program operates, or is undertaken on a computer, computer system, or computer network on which the computer program operates with the authorization of the owner or operator of such computer, computer system, or computer network, solely for the purpose of good-faith security research and does not violate any applicable law, including without limitation the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986.

(ii) For purposes of this paragraph (b)(11), “good-faith security research” means accessing a computer program solely for purposes of good-faith testing, investigation, and/or correction of a security flaw or vulnerability, where such activity is carried out in an environment designed to avoid any harm to individuals or the public, and where the information derived from the activity is used primarily to promote the security or safety of the class of devices or machines on which the computer program operates, or those who use such devices or machines, and is not used or maintained in a manner that facilitates copyright infringement.
… (page 65)

I have long puzzled over claims of fearing DMCA enforcement by security researchers. The FBI is busy building illegal silencers for the mentally ill. Or engaging in other illegal, if not insane, activities. When would the FBI find the time to pursue security researchers when fantasies about Russian/Chinese/North Korean election “interference” are rippling through Washington?

Although phrased as “fear of prosecution,” the DCMA issue for white hats was one of advertising. Advertising a hack could annoy a vendor. Annoying vendors along with your identity and location seemed like a bad plan. But with a DMCA exemption, white hats are free to spam the Internet with their latest “research.”

Not that I mind white hats advertising but drawing lines based on the economic interests of stakeholders doesn’t always point to greater freedom. Today it worked in favor of security researchers and possibly consumers, but there’s no guarantee that will always be the result.

March 31, 2018

More Google Censorship – ‘Kodi’ Banned from Auto-Complete

Filed under: Censorship,Free Speech,Intellectual Property (IP) — Patrick Durusau @ 7:42 pm

Google Adds ‘Kodi’ to Autocomplete Piracy Filter

From the post:

Google has banned the term “Kodi” from the autocomplete feature of its search engine. This means that the popular software and related suggestions won’t appear unless users type out the full term. Google has previously taken similar measures against “pirate” related terms and confirms that Kodi is targeted because it’s “closely associated with copyright infringement.”

In recent years entertainment industry groups have repeatedly urged Google to ramp up its anti-piracy efforts.

These remarks haven’t fallen on deaf ears and Google has made several changes to its search algorithms to make copyright-infringing material less visible.

In addition to censoring a legitimate project, Kodi, Google is reported to be acting on behalf of entertainment industry groups, gasp, without being paid.

That’s anti-capitalist! It conditions entertainment industry groups and the anti-piracy crowd to expect free handouts. (Property class privilege for any Marxists in the audience.)

To hell with that!

I urge you to not censor at all, but if you do, make others pay dearly for the privilege.

Forced to pay for censorship, entertainment/anti-piracy groups will collect legitimate data on piracy to determine their cost/benefit ratio for censorship. (Legitimate data being defined as data unchanged by membership calendars and fund raising drives.)

February 9, 2018

Alexandra Elbakyan (Sci-Hub) As Freedom Fighter

Filed under: Intellectual Property (IP),Open Access,Open Data — Patrick Durusau @ 3:33 pm

Recognizing Alexandra Elbakyan:

Alexandra Elbakyan is the freedom fighter behind Sci-Hub, a repository of 64.5 million papers, or “two-thirds of all published research, and it [is] available to anyone.”

Ian Graber-Stiehl, in Science’s Pirate Queen, misses an opportunity to ditch the mis-framing of Elbakyan as a “pirate,” and to properly frame her as a freedom fighter.

To set the background for why you too should see Elbakyan as a freedom fighter, it’s necessary to review, briefly, the notion of “sale” and your intellectual freedom prior to widespread use of electronic texts.

When I started using libraries in the ’60’s, you had to physically visit the library to use its books or journals. The library would purchase those items, what is known as first sale, and then either lend them or allow patrons to read them. No separate charge or income for the publisher upon reading. And once purchased, the item remained in the library for use by others.

With the advent of electronic texts, plus oppressive contracts and manipulation of the law, publishers began charging libraries even more than when libraries purchased and maintained access to material for their patrons. Think of it as a form of recurrent extortion, you can’t have access to materials already purchased, save for paying to maintain that access.

Which of course means that both libraries and individuals have lost their right to pay for an item and to maintain it separate and apart from the publisher. That’s a serious theft and it took place in full public view.

There are pirates in this story, people who stole the right of libraries and individuals to purchase items for their own storage and use. Some of the better known ones include: American Chemical Society, Reed-Elsevier (a/k/a RELX Group),Sage Publishing, Springer, Taylor & Francis, and, Wiley-Blackwell.

Elbakyan is trying to recover access for everyone, access that was stolen.

That doesn’t sound like the act of a pirate. Pirates steal for their own benefit. That sounds like the pirates I listed above.

Now that you know Elbakyan is fighting to recover a right taken from you, does that make you view her fight differently?

BTW, when publishers float the false canard of their professional staff/editors/reviewers, remember their retraction rates are silent witnesses refuting their claims of competence.

Read any recent retraction for the listed publishers. Use RetractionWatch for current or past retractions. “Unread” is the best explanation for how most of them got past “staff/editors/reviewers.”

Do you support freedom fighters or publisher/pirates?

If you want to support publisher/pirates, no further action needed.

If you want to support freedom fighters, including Alexandra Elbakyan, the Sci-Hub site has a donate link, contact Elbakyan if you have extra cutting edge equipment to offer, promote Sci-Hub on social media, etc.

For making the lives of publisher/pirates more difficult, use your imagination.

To follow Elbakyan, see her blog and Facebook page.

November 29, 2017

Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement – EUC – Government For The Few, The Greedy, The Rich

Filed under: EU,Intellectual Property (IP) — Patrick Durusau @ 8:57 pm

The EU Commission, struggling to justify its existence to the few, presented initiatives on intellectual property rights today.

Two important “take aways” from the news bulletin:

First, the servitude of the EUC to the wealthy isn’t just my opinion, but the EUC admits as much saying:


And yet, according to a recent study, counterfeit and pirated goods account for 2.5% of global trade with a tendency to increase. 5% of all imports into the EU are counterfeit and pirated goods, corresponding to an estimated EUR 85 billion in illegal trade (see also Factsheet – Why Intellectual Property Rights matter).

So the EUC efforts today, are on behalf of the tiny group of people who control 5% of the imports into the EU?

And the members of that tiny group aren’t even members of the EU?

That’s serious hunting for wealthy people in need of government toadies!

Second, the EUC has created a communication tax on interoperable products by enabling FRAND (Fair, Reasonable and Non Discriminatory) licenses on technologies that should be governed by Open Source standards.

The EUC position can be illustrated by re-casting the familiar Matthew 6:28 verse from:

And why take ye thought for raiment? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin:

to read:

Consider FRAND owners, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin:

FRAND owners are parasites on otherwise vibrant and growing networks of communication. They contribute nothing to the public. What, if anything, they contribute to members of the EUC isn’t known to me.

November 8, 2017

IP Cultists Achieve Hollow Victory (American Chemical Society vs. Sci-Hub)

Filed under: Intellectual Property (IP) — Patrick Durusau @ 4:47 pm

Latest legal defeat unlikely to scuttle Sci-Hub by Rebecca Trager.

From the post:

A US court has handed a $4.8 million (£3.7 million) legal victory to the American Chemical Society (ACS), ordering Sci-Hub, which provides illegal access to millions of scientific papers, to be shut down for copyright and trademark infringement. But this is unlikely to be the end of the story.

The court granted the ACS a permanent injunction against Sci-Hub and its affiliates, and gave the organisation the right to potentially demand that internet search engines stop delivering Sci-Hub content in their search results. Representatives of Sci-Hub, including founder Alexandra Elbakyan who operates the site out of Russia, did not attend the court proceedings.

The ACS filed its lawsuit in June, right after another US court had awarded publishing giant Elsevier $15 million in damages from Sci-Hub, the Library of Genesis and similar sites.

The filed its lawsuitACS called the latest development ‘a victory for copyright law and the entire publishing enterprise’. The organisation said it was clear from the outset that Sci-Hub has pirated copyrighted and trademarked content on a massive scale, and that the group’s decision to not attend the court proceedings indicates that its position was indefensible.

President Trump’s speech writer must be moon-lighting.

The American Chemical Society files a lawsuit after Elsevier had won, the defendant doesn’t appear in court (it’s called a default judgment), and it recovers a judgment for less than 1/3 of what was awarded to Elsevier.

That’s ‘a victory for copyright law and the entire publishing enterprise’.

Really?

Sounds more like the American Chemical Society wasted money on somebody’s cousin who was a lawyer. A lawyer that with the defendant not showing up, worked really hard and got 2/3 less than Elsevier.

Oh, I do have a correction to offer for Trager’s post:

ACS is a global leader in providing access to chemistry-related information and research through its multiple databases, peer-reviewed journals and scientific conferences.

Should read:

ACS is a global leader in denying access to chemistry-related information and research found in its multiple databases, peer-reviewed journals and scientific conferences.

Why that is consistent with its mission and obligations to the scientific community, well, you need to address those questions to the American Chemical Society.

September 25, 2017

If You Are Keeping A Public Enemies List…

Filed under: Government,Intellectual Property (IP) — Patrick Durusau @ 2:53 pm

Not everyone keeps a “public enemies” list and fewer still actively work against those on the list.

If you do more than grumble against your list members on Buttbook, I have important information for you.

Bell Calls for CRTC-Backed Website Blocking System and Complete Criminalization of Copyright in NAFTA

From the post:

Bell, Canada’s largest telecom company, has called on the government to support radical copyright and broadcast distribution reforms as part of the NAFTA renegotiation. Their proposals include the creation of a mandated website blocking system without judicial review overseen by the CRTC and the complete criminalization of copyright with criminal provisions attached to all commercial infringement. Bell also supports an overhaul of the current retransmission system for broadcasters, supporting a “consent model” that would either keep U.S. channels out of the Canadian market or dramatically increase their cost of access while maintaining simultaneous substitution.

There may be clearer declarations against the public good but I haven’t seen them. But, I haven’t read all the secret documents at the Office of the US Trade Representative (USTR). Judging from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) documents, the USTR advances only the interest of business, not the public.

You can picket the offices of Bell in Canada, collect arrest/citations while mugging for TV cameras at protests that disrupt traffic, etc., all the while Bell labors 24 x 7 to damage, irrevocably, the public good.

Bell and numerous others have openly declared war on the rights of the public (that includes you).

Just for your information.

September 18, 2017

Upsides of W3C’s Embrace of DRM

Filed under: Cybersecurity,DRM,Intellectual Property (IP),Security — Patrick Durusau @ 4:23 pm

World Wide Web Consortium abandons consensus, standardizes DRM with 58.4% support, EFF resigns by Cory Doctorow.

From the post:

In July, the Director of the World Wide Web Consortium overruled dozens of members’ objections to publishing a DRM standard without a compromise to protect accessibility, security research, archiving, and competition.

EFF appealed the decision, the first-ever appeal in W3C history, which concluded last week with a deeply divided membership. 58.4% of the group voted to go on with publication, and the W3C did so today, an unprecedented move in a body that has always operated on consensus and compromise. In their public statements about the standard, the W3C executive repeatedly said that they didn’t think the DRM advocates would be willing to compromise, and in the absence of such willingness, the exec have given them everything they demanded.

This is a bad day for the W3C: it’s the day it publishes a standard designed to control, rather than empower, web users. That standard that was explicitly published without any protections — even the most minimal compromise was rejected without discussion, an intransigence that the W3C leadership tacitly approved. It’s the day that the W3C changed its process to reward stonewalling over compromise, provided those doing the stonewalling are the biggest corporations in the consortium.

EFF no longer believes that the W3C process is suited to defending the open web. We have resigned from the Consortium, effective today. Below is our resignation letter:

In his haste to outline all the negatives, all of which are true, about the W3C DRM decision, Cory forgets to mention there are several upsides to this decision.

1. W3C Chooses IP Owners Over Web Consumers

The DRM decision reveals the W3C as a shill for corporate IP owners. Rumors have it that commercial interests were ready to leave the W3C for the DRM work, rumors made credible by Tim Berners-Lee’s race to the head of the DRM parade.

We are fortunate the Stasi faded from history before the W3C arrived, lest we have Tim Berners-Lee leading a march for worldwide surveillance on the web.

The only value being advanced by the Director (Tim Berners-Lee) is the relevance of the W3C for the web. Consumers aren’t just expendable, but irrelevant. Best you know than now rather than later.

2. DRM Creates “unauditable attack-surface” (for vendors too)

Cory lists the “unauditable attack surface” for browsers like it was a bad thing. That’s true for consumers, but who else is that true for?

Oh, yes, IP owners who plan on profiting from DRM. Their DRM efforts will be easy to circumvent, the digital equivalent of a erasable marker no doubt and offer the advantage of access to their systems.

Take the recent Equifax breach as an example. What is the one mission critical requirement for Equifax customers?

Easy and reliable access. You could have any number of enhanced authentication schemes for access to Equifax, but that conflicts with the mission-critical need for customers to have ready access to its data.

Content vendors dumb enough to invest in W3C DRM, which will be easy to circumvent, have a similar mission critical requirement. Easy and reliable approval. Quite often as the result of a purchase at any number of web locations.

So we have N vendors sites, selling N products, for N IP owners, to N users, using N browsers, from N countries, err, can you say: “DRM opens truck sized security holes?”

I feel sorry for web consumers but not for any vendor that enriches DRM vendors (the only people who make money off of DRM).

DRM Promotes Piracy and Disrespect for IP

Without copyright and DRM, there would be few opportunities for digital piracy and little disrespect for intellectual property (IP). People can and do photocopy individual journal articles, violating the author’s and possibly the journal’s IP, but who cares? Fewer than twenty (20) people are likely to read it ever.

Widespread and browser-based DRM will be found on the most popular content, creating incentives for large numbers of users to engage in digital piracy. The more often they use pirated content, the less respect they will have for the laws that create the crime.

To paraphrase Princess Leia speaking to Governor Tarkin:

The more the DRM crowd tightens its grip, the more content that will slip through their fingers.

The W3C/Tim Berners-Lee handed IP owners the death star, but the similarity for DRM doesn’t stop there. No indeed.

Conclusion

Flying its true colors, the W3C/Tim Berners-Lee should be abandoned en masse by corporate sponsors and individuals alike. The scales have dropped from web users eyes and it’s clear they are commodities in the eyes of the W3C. Victims if you prefer that term.

The laughable thought of effective DRM will create cybersecurity consequences for both web users and the cretins behind DRM. I don’t see any difficulty in choosing who should suffer the consequences of DRM-based cybersecurity breeches. Do you?

I am untroubled by the loss of respect for IP. That’s not surprising since I advocate only attribution and sale for commercial gain as IP rights. There’s no point in pursuing people who are spending their money to distribute your product for free. It’s cost free advertising.

As Cory points out, the DRM crowd was offered several unmerited compromises and rejected those.

Having made their choice, let’s make sure none of them escape the W3C/DRM death star.

August 3, 2017

DMCA Complaint As Finding Aid

Filed under: Intellectual Property (IP),Library,Searching — Patrick Durusau @ 6:18 pm

Credit where credit is due, I saw this idea in How to Get Past DMCA Take-Downs in Google Search and report it here, sans the video.

The gist of the idea is that DMCA complaints, found at: Lumen, specify in the case of search engines, links that should not be displayed to users.

In a Google search result, content subject to a DMCA complaint will appear as:

In response to multiple complaints we received under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, we have removed 2 results from this page. If you wish, you may read the DMCA complaints that caused the removals at LumenDatabase.org: Complaint, Complaint.

If you follow the complaint links, knowing Google is tracking your following of those links, the complaints list the URLs to be removed from search results.

You can use the listed URLs to verify the presence of illegal content, compile lists of sites with such content, etc.

Enjoy!

PS: I’m adding their RSS feed of new notices. You should too.

June 17, 2017

American Archive of Public Broadcasting

Filed under: Archives,Broadcasting,Intellectual Property (IP) — Patrick Durusau @ 1:16 pm

American Archive of Public Broadcasting

From the post:

An archive worth knowing about: The Library of Congress and Boston’s WGBH have joined forces to create The American Archive of Public Broadcasting and “preserve for posterity the most significant public television and radio programs of the past 60 years.” Right now, they’re overseeing the digitization of approximately 40,000 hours of programs. And already you can start streaming “more than 7,000 historic public radio and television programs.”

The collection includes local news and public affairs programs, and “programs dealing with education, environmental issues, music, art, literature, dance, poetry, religion, and even filmmaking.” You can browse the complete collection here. Or search the archive here. For more on the archive, read this About page.

Follow Open Culture on Facebook and Twitter and share intelligent media with your friends. Or better yet, sign up for our daily email and get a daily dose of Open Culture in your inbox.

If you’d like to support Open Culture and our mission, please consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us provide the best free cultural and educational materials.

Hopeful someone is spinning cable/television content 24 x 7 to archival storage. The ability to research and document, reliably, patterns in shows, advertisements, news reporting, etc., is more important than any speculative copyright interest.

April 13, 2017

How To Win Friends – The Malamud Strategy

Filed under: Intellectual Property (IP),Law,Law - Sources — Patrick Durusau @ 10:26 am

Last week, Judge Richard W. Story (Northern District of Georgia), ruled in favor of the State of Georgia and ordered Carl Malamud to remove the Official Code of Georgia Annotated (OCGA) from public.resource.org.

There are a number of reports circulating:

The State of Georgia wins its suit against Carl Malamud for publishing official annotations to the law of the land by Simon Reichley.

If you publish Georgia’s state laws, you’ll get sued for copyright and lose by Joe Mullin.

Reprinting Georgia legal code violates copyright law, US judge rules in Ars Technica.

I think fees for FOIA requests serve to suppress inquiry so you can imagine where my sympathies lie in this case.

However, to promote greater public access to law, Malamud’s strategy with the State of Georgia is a lesson in how NOT to proceed (from Ars Technica):


In 2013, Malamud scanned all 186 volumes and supplements of the OCGA and posted copies on the website. He also sent flash drives with copies of the laws to Georgia speaker of the House, David Ralston, and other lawmakers, lawyers and policymakers.

Accompanying the flash drives, Malamud wrote a letter stating his intention to make the laws available so that “public servants, members of the bar, citizens, and members of the business community have ready access to the laws that govern them.”
… (emphasis in the original)

Whether the Code Revision Committee withholds the OCGA from the public out of spite, some deluded notion of competition between digital and print products, or for more nefarious reasons isn’t known to me.

But taking Code Revision Committee’s toy and waving it in front of them, isn’t going improve the situation.

Now we have have bad case law on law + annotation. Bad case law likely to be affirmed in this circuit. (Poor forum shopping.) Reversal requires Malamud to win the Supreme Court lottery. Way to go.

Here’s an alternative:

First, Judge Story lists contents of each O.C.G.A volume:

The Agreement requires the official Code to include not only the statutory provisions, but also “annotations, captions, catchlines, headings, history lines, editorial notes, cross-references, indices, title and chapter analyses, research references, amendment notes. Code Commission notes, and other material related to or included in such Code at the direction of the Commission” [Doc. No. 29-8, p. 2]. Each O.C.G.A. volume and supplement therefore contains statutory text and non-statutory annotation text, including judicial decision summaries, editor’s notes, research references, notes on law review articles, summaries of the opinions of the Attorney General of Georgia, indexes, and title, chapter, article, part, and subpart captions, which are all prepared by Lexis/Nexis under the requirements of the Agreement [Doc. No. 17, ¶¶ 3, 9, 18, and 26]. (Code Revision Commission, et
al. vs. Public.Resource.Org, Inc.
, page 3)

You will notice that court decisions, law review articles, opinions of Attorney General of Georgia are all “facts” and not subject to copyright. That is you could not use Lexis/Nexis summaries but you certainly could provide your own.

Some other “facts” in the annotations include:

The Official Code of Georgia’s copious annotations help you expand your research and include:

• Decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court, the Supreme Court of Georgia, the Courts of Appeals of Georgia, and all federal cases arising in Georgia
• Opinions of the Georgia Attorney General
• State law reviews
ALR
American Jurisprudence
American Jurisprudence, Pleading and Practice
American Jurisprudence, Proof of Facts
American Jurisprudence, Trials
Corpus Juris Secundum
Uniform Laws Annotated
• Cross reference notes to statutes, rules, and regulations including the United States Code and the Official Compilation of the Rules and Regulations of the State of Georgia
• All case citations are Shepardized® for accuracy and relevant subsequent history.

… (Official Code of Georgia Annotated)

The first step in production of a public access version of Georgia law would be the acquisition of LexisNexis CD – Georgia Primary Law as a comparison or proofing copy to be used against your OCR of the scanned volumes. Once that’s done, use XQuery to purge the non-factual material, leaving markers where new summaries need to be added.

The second step would be to crowd-source among law students the missing summaries. Proposed summaries are critiqued by other law students. Not every student makes law review but a killer annotation in the Unofficial Code of Georgia Annotated (U.C.G.A.) could provide some street cred.

A possible third step, taking the U.C.G.A. beyond the traditional product, is to use crowd-sourcing to annotate statutes with trial judge rulings, parties and their lawyers. Facts have some relationship to outcomes in court cases but not as much as you may think. Why do so many IP cases go to the Eastern District of Texas? I promise, it’s not the facts of the cases.

More complicated than scanning and posting images but public access, a value-add and a better product than is currently available.

PS: I would omit Code Revision Committee annotations as they are unlikely to grant permission and the U.C.G.A. will be valuable even without their participation. This means, of course, they would not be getting any royalties from the use of the U.C.G.A.

PPS: These principles apply to other legal publishing monopolists. I’m game if you are.

March 29, 2017

What’s Up With Data Padding? (Regulations.gov)

Filed under: Data Quality,Fair Use,Government Data,Intellectual Property (IP),Transparency — Patrick Durusau @ 10:41 am

I forgot to mention in Copyright Troll Hunting – 92,398 Possibles -> 146 Possibles that while using LibreOffice, I deleted a large number of either N/A only or columns not relevant for troll-mining.zip.

Except as otherwise noted, after removal of “no last name,” these fields had N/A for all records except as noted:

  1. L – Implementation Date
  2. M – Effective Date
  3. N – Related RINs
  4. O – Document SubType (Comment(s))
  5. P – Subject
  6. Q – Abstract
  7. R – Status – (Posted, except for 2)
  8. S – Source Citation
  9. T – OMB Approval Number
  10. U – FR Citation
  11. V – Federal Register Number (8 exceptions)
  12. W – Start End Page (8 exceptions)
  13. X – Special Instructions
  14. Y – Legacy ID
  15. Z – Post Mark Date
  16. AA – File Type (1 docx)
  17. AB – Number of Pages
  18. AC – Paper Width
  19. AD – Paper Length
  20. AE – Exhibit Type
  21. AF – Exhibit Location
  22. AG – Document Field_1
  23. AH – Document Field_2

Regulations.gov, not the Copyright Office, is responsible for the collection and management of comments, including the bulked up export of comments.

From the state of the records, one suspects the “bulking up” is NOT an artifact of the export but represents the storage of each record.

One way to test that theory would be a query on the noise fields via the API for Regulations.gov.

The documentation for the API is out-dated, the Field References documentation lacks the Document Detail (field AI), which contains the URL to access the comment.

The closest thing I could find was:

fileFormats Formats of the document, included as URLs to download from the API

How easy/hard it will be to download attachments isn’t clear.

BTW, the comment pages themselves are seriously puffed up. Take https://www.regulations.gov/document?D=COLC-2015-0013-52236.

Saved to disk: 148.6 KB.

Content of the comment: 2.5 KB.

The content of the comment is 1.6 % of the delivered webpage.

It must have taken serious effort to achieve a 98.4% noise to 1.6% signal ratio.

How transparent is data when you have to mine for the 1.6% that is actual content?

March 28, 2017

Copyright Troll Hunting – 92,398 Possibles -> 146 Possibles

Filed under: Fair Use,Intellectual Property (IP) — Patrick Durusau @ 6:51 pm

When hunting copyright trolls, well, trolls of any kind, the smaller the number to be hunted the better.

The Copyright Office is conducting the Section 512 Study, which it describes as:

The United States Copyright Office is undertaking a public study to evaluate the impact and effectiveness of the safe harbor provisions contained in section 512 of title 17, United States Code.

Enacted in 1998 as part of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (“DMCA”), section 512 established a system for copyright owners and online entities to address online infringement, including limitations on liability for compliant service providers to help foster the growth of internet-based services. Congress intended for copyright owners and internet service providers to cooperate to detect and address copyright infringements. To qualify for protection from infringement liability, a service provider must fulfill certain requirements, generally consisting of implementing measures to expeditiously address online copyright infringement.

While Congress understood that it would be essential to address online infringement as the internet continued to grow, it may have been difficult to anticipate the online world as we now know it, where each day users upload hundreds of millions of photos, videos and other items, and service providers receive over a million notices of alleged infringement. The growth of the internet has highlighted issues concerning section 512 that appear ripe for study. Accordingly, as recommended by the Register of Copyrights, Maria A. Pallante, in testimony and requested by Ranking Member Conyers at an April 2015 House Judiciary Committee hearing, the Office is initiating a study to evaluate the impact and effectiveness of section 512 and has issued a Notice of Inquiry requesting public comment. Among other issues, the Office will consider the costs and burdens of the notice-and-takedown process on large- and small-scale copyright owners, online service providers, and the general public. The Office will also review how successfully section 512 addresses online infringement and protects against improper takedown notices.

The Office received over 92,000 written submissions by the April 1, 2016 deadline for the first round of public comments. The Office then held public roundtables on May 2nd and 3rd in New York and May 12th and 13th in San Francisco to seek further input on the section 512 study. Transcripts of the New York and San Francisco roundtables are now available online. Additional written public comments are due by 11:59 pm EST on February 21, 2017 and written submissions of empirical research are due by 11:59 pm EST on March 22, 2017.

You can see the comments at: Requests for Public Comments: Digital Millennium Copyright Act Safe Harbor Provisions, all 92,398 of them.

You can even export them to a CSV file, which runs a little over 33.5 MB in size.

It is likely that the same copyright trolls who provoked this review with non-pubic comments to the Copyright Office and others posted comments, but how to find them in a sea of 92,398 comments?

Some simplifying assumptions:

No self-respecting copyright troll will use the public comment template.

grep -v "Template Form Comment" DOCKET_COLC-2015-0013.csv | wc -l

Using grep with the -v means it does NOT return matching lines. That is only lines without “Template Form Comment” will be returned.

We modify that to read:

grep -v "Template Form Comment" DOCKET_COLC-2015-0013.csv > no-form.csv

The > pipe adds the lines without “Template Form Comment” to the file no-form.csv.

Next, scanning the file we notice, “no last name/No Last Name.”

grep -iv "no last name" no-form.csv | wc -l

Where grep has -i and -v, means case is ignored for the search string “no last name” and in the file, no-form.csv. The -v option gives us only line without “no last name.”

The count without “no last name:” 3359.

A lot better than 92,398 but not really good enough.

Nearing hand-editing so I resorted to LibreOffice at this point.

Sort on column D (out of A to AI) organization. If you scroll down, line 123 has N/A for organization. The entry just prior to it is “musicnotes.” What? Where did Sony, etc., go?

Ah, LibreOffice sorted organizations and counted “N/A” as an organization’s name.

Let’s see, from row 123 to row 3293, inclusive.

Well, deleting those rows leaves us with: 183 rows.

I continued by deleting comments by anonymous, individuals, etc., and my final total is 146 rows.

Check out troll-mining.zip!

Not all copyright trolls mind you, I need to remove the Internet Archive, EFF and other people on the right side of the section 512 issue.

Who else should I remove?

Couple of reasons for a clean copyright troll list.

First, it leads to FOIA requests about other communications to the Copyright Office by the trolls in the list. Can’t ask if you don’t have a troll list.

Second, it provides locations for protests and other ways to call unwanted attention to these trolls.

Third, well, you know, unfortunate things happen to trolls. It’s a natural consequence of a life predicated upon harming others.

February 13, 2017

Do You Feel Chilled? W3C and DRM

Filed under: DRM,Intellectual Property (IP),W3C — Patrick Durusau @ 8:56 pm

Indefensible: the W3C says companies should get to decide when and how security researchers reveal defects in browsers by Cory Doctorow.

From the post:

The World Wide Web Consortium has just signaled its intention to deliberately create legal jeopardy for security researchers who reveal defects in its members’ products, unless the security researchers get the approval of its members prior to revealing the embarrassing mistakes those members have made in creating their products. It’s a move that will put literally billions of people at risk as researchers are chilled from investigating and publishing on browsers that follow W3C standards.

It is indefensible.

I enjoy Cory’s postings and fiction but I had to read this one more than once to capture the nature of Cory’s complaint.

As I understand it the argument runs something like this:

1. The W3C is creating a “…standardized DRM system for video on the World Wide Web….”

2. Participants in the W3C process must “…surrender the right to invoke their patents in lawsuits as a condition of participating in the W3C process….” (The keyword here is participants. No non-participant waives their patent rights as a result of W3C policy.)

3. The W3C isn’t requiring waiver of DCMA 1201 rights as a condition for participating in the video DRM work.

All true but I don’t see Cory gets to the conclusion:

…deliberately create legal jeopardy for security researchers who reveal defects in its members’ products, unless the security researchers get the approval of its members prior to revealing the embarrassing mistakes those members have made in creating their products.

Whether the W3C requires participants in the DRM system for video to waive DCMA 1201 rights or not, the W3C process has no impact on non-participants in that process.

Secondly, security researchers are in jeopardy if and only if they incriminate themselves when publishing defects in DRM products. As security researchers, they are capable of anonymously publishing any security defects they find.

Third, legal liability flows from statutory law and not the presence or absence of consensual agreement among a group of vendors. Private agreements can only protect you from those agreeing.

I don’t support DRM and never have. Personally I think it is a scam and tax on content creators. It’s unfortunate that fear that someone, somewhere might not be paying full rate, is enough for content creators to tax themselves with DRM schemes and software. None of which is free.

Rather than arguing about W3C policy, why not point to the years of wasted effort and expense by content creators on DRM? With no measurable return. That’s a plain ROI question.

DRM software vendors know the pot of gold content creators are chasing is at the end of an ever receding rainbow. In fact, they’re counting on it.

February 8, 2017

Court: Posting Standards Online Violates Copyright Law [+ solution]

Filed under: Government,Intellectual Property (IP),Law,Law - Sources — Patrick Durusau @ 3:22 pm

Court: Posting Standards Online Violates Copyright Law by Trey Barrineau.

From the post:

Last week, the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ruled that public-records activist Carl Malamud’s organization, Public.Resource.Org, violated copyright law by publicly sharing standards that are used in laws such as building codes. It also said organizations that develop these standards, including those used in the fenestration industry, have the right to charge reasonable fees to access them. Malamud told DWM in an e-mail that he’ll appeal the ruling.
… (emphasis in original)

I was working on a colorful rant, invoking Mr. Bumble in Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist:

“If the law supposes that,” said Mr. Bumble, squeezing his hat emphatically in both hands, “the law is a ass- a idiot.

based on the report of the decision when I ran across the full court opinion:

AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR TESTING AND MATERIALS, et al., Plaintiffs, v. PUBLIC.RESOURCE.ORG, INC., Defendant. Case No. 13-cv-1215 (TSC)

The preservation of copyright despite being referenced in a law and/or regulation (pages 19-24) is one of the stronger parts of the decision.

In part it reads:


Congress was well aware of the potential copyright issue posed by materials incorporated by reference when it crafted Section 105 in 1976. Ten years earlier, Congress had extended to federal agencies the authority to incorporate private works by reference into federal regulations. See Pub. L. No. 90-23, § 552, 81 Stat. 54 (1967) (codified at 5 U.S.C. § 552) (providing that “matter reasonably available to the class of persons affected thereby is deemed published in the Federal Register when incorporated by reference therein with the approval of the Director of the Federal Register”). However, in the Copyright Act of 1976, Congress made no mention of these incorporated works in § 105 (no copyright for “any work of the United States Government”) or any other section. As the House Report quoted above indicates, Congress already carefully weighed the competing policy goals of making incorporated works publicly available while also preserving the incentives and protections granted by copyright, and it weighed in favor of preserving the copyright system. See H.R. Rep. No. 94-1476, at 60 (1976) (stating that under § 105 “use by the Government of a private work would not affect its copyright protection in any way”); see also M.B. Schnapper v. Foley, 667 F.2d 102, 109 (D.C. Cir. 1981) (analyzing Copyright Act and holding that “we are reluctant to cabin the discretion of government agencies to arrange ownership and publication rights with private contractors absent some reasonable showing of a congressional desire to do so”).

However, recognizing the importance of public access to works incorporated by reference into federal regulations, Congress still requires that such works be “reasonably available.” 5 U.S.C. § 552(a)(1). Under current federal regulations issued by the Office of the Federal Register in 1982, a privately authored work may be incorporated by reference into an agency’s regulation if it is “reasonably available,” including availability in hard copy at the OFR and/or the incorporating agency. 1 C.F.R. § 51.7(a)(3). Thirteen years later, Congress passed the National Technology Transfer and Advancement Act of 1995 (“NTTAA”) which directed all federal agencies to use privately developed technical voluntary consensus standards. See Pub. L. No. 104-113, 110 Stat. 775 (1996). Thus, Congress initially authorized agencies to incorporate works by reference, then excluded these incorporated works from § 105 of the Copyright Act, and, nearly twenty years later, specifically directed agencies to incorporate private works by reference. From 1966 through the present, Congress has remained silent on the question of whether privately authored standards and other works would lose copyright protection upon incorporation by reference. If Congress intended to revoke the copyrights of such standards when it passed the NTTAA, or any time before or since, it surely would have done so expressly. See Whitman v. Am. Trucking Ass’ns, Inc., 531 U.S. 457, 468 (2001) (“Congress . . . does not alter the fundamental details of a regulatory scheme in vague terms or ancillary provisions—it does not . . . hide elephants in mouseholes.”); United States v. Fausto, 484 U.S. 439, 453 (1988) (“[It] can be strongly presumed that Congress will specifically address language on the statute books that it wishes to change.”). Instead, Congress has chosen to maintain the scheme it created in 1966: that such standards must simply be made reasonably available. See 5 U.S.C. § 552(a)(1).
… (emphasis in original, pages 21-23)

Finding to the contrary, that is referencing a privately authored standard as terminating the rights of a copyright holder, creates obvious due process problems.

Some copyright holders, ASTM for example, report sales as a substantial portion of their yearly income. ASTM International 2015 Annual Report gives an annual operating income of $72,543,549, of which, $48,659,345 was from publications. (page 24)

Congress could improve both the “reasonable access” for citizens and the lot of standard developers by requiring:

  • for works incorporated by reference into federal regulations, agencies must secure a license renewable without time limit for unlimited digital reproduction of that work by anyone
  • digital reproductions of such works, whether by the licensing agency or others, must reference the work’s publisher for obtaining a print copy

That gives standard developing organizations a new source of revenue, increases the “reasonable access” of citizens, and if past experience is any guide, digital copies may drive print sales.

Any takers?

January 3, 2017

Expiring Patents

Filed under: Intellectual Property (IP),Law — Patrick Durusau @ 7:37 pm

Expatents returns a list of patents expiring that day and you can sign up for a weekly digest of expiring patents.

The site claims that over 80% of patents are never commercially exploited.

Are expired patents, that is without commercial exploitation, like articles that are never cited by anyone?

Potential shareholder litigation over the not-so-trivial cost of patents that never resulted in commercial exploitation?

Was it inside or outside counsel that handled the patent filings?

There’s an interesting area for tracing relationships (associations) and expenses.

November 14, 2016

U.S. Navy As Software Pirates

Filed under: Cybersecurity,Intellectual Property (IP),Software — Patrick Durusau @ 9:13 pm

Navy denies it pirated 558K copies of software, says contractor consented by David Kravets.

From the post:

In response to a lawsuit accusing the US Navy of pirating more than 558,000 copies of virtual reality software, the Navy conceded Monday that it had installed the software on “hundreds of thousands of computers within its network” without paying the German software maker for it. But the Navy says it did so with the consent of the software producer.

I suspect that “consent” here means that Bitmanagement Software modified its product to remove installation restrictions in hopes the U.S. Navy would become utterly dependent upon the software and only then “notice” the Navy had licensed only 38 copies.

Nice try but sovereigns have been rolling citizens for generations.

The complaint and the government’s answer are both amusing reads.

The lesson here is you are responsible for protecting your property. Especially when exposing it to potential thieves.

November 11, 2016

The TPP Is Dead! Really Most Sincerely Dead! (Celebration Is In Order!)

Filed under: Government,Intellectual Property (IP),Transparency — Patrick Durusau @ 5:47 pm

Obama Administration Gives Up on Pacific Trade Deal by William Mauldin.

From the post:

The Obama administration on Friday gave up all hope of enacting its sweeping Pacific trade agreement, a pact designed to preserve U.S. economic influence in fast-growing Asia that was buried by a wave of antitrade political sentiment that culminated with Tuesday’s presidential election….

Yes!

I have ranted about the largely secret Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade agreement on several occasions.

Negotiated entirely in secret and even worse, designed to be kept secret from the citizens of signing countries, among the worse provisions (there were several), were those enabling investors to sue sovereign countries if laws diminished their investments.

I don’t know, like health warnings on cigarettes for example.

With the election of Donald Trump, I should say president-elect Donald Trump, the TPP is dead. (full stop)

As the proverb says:

It’s an ill wind that blows nobody any good.

Whatever your feelings about president-elect Donald Trump and any of his decisions/policies as president, the defeat of the TPP is one for the win column.

Hazards and dangers lie ahead, just as they would for any presidency, but take a moment to appreciate this win.

November 1, 2016

Copyright Office Opens Up 512 Safe Harbor ($105 Fee Reduced To $6)

Filed under: Electronic Frontier Foundation,Intellectual Property (IP) — Patrick Durusau @ 4:26 pm

After reading the Copyright Office explanation for the changes Elliot Harmon‘s complains of in Copyright Office Sets Trap for Unwary Website Owners, I see the Copyright Office as opening up the 512 safe harbor to more people.

In his rush to criticize the Copyright Office for not taking EFF advice, Elliot forgets to mention:


Transitioning to the electronic system has allowed the Office to substantially reduce the fee to designate an agent with the Office, from $105 (plus an additional fee of $35 for each group of one to ten alternate names used by the service provider) to $6 (with no additional fee for alternate names).

Copyright Office Announces Electronic System for Designating Agents under DMCA

Wow! Government fees going down?

Going from $105 (plus $35 for alternate names) to $6 and no additional fee for alternate names, opens up the 512 safe harbor to small owners/sites.

True enough, the new rule requires you to renew every three years but given the plethora of renewals we all face, what’s one more? Especially an important one.

The Copyright Office has prepared videos (with transcripts) to guide you to the new system.

A starting point for further reading: Copyright Office Reviews Section 512 Safe Harbor for Online User-Generated Content – The Differing Perceptions of Musicians and Other Copyright Holders and Online Service Providers on the Notice and Take-Down Process by David Oxenford. Just a starting point.

If you have or suspect you have copyright issues, consult an attorney. Law isn’t a safe place for self-exploration.

PS: I understand that EFF must write for its base, but closer attention to the facts of rules and changes would be appreciated.

August 30, 2016

Elsevier Awarded U.S. Patent For “Online Peer Review System and Method” [Sack Pool?]

Filed under: Intellectual Property (IP),Patents — Patrick Durusau @ 7:19 pm

Elsevier Awarded U.S. Patent For “Online Peer Review System and Method” by Gary Price.

Gary quotes the abstract:

An online document management system is disclosed. In one embodiment, the online document management system comprises: one or more editorial computers operated by one or more administrators or editors, the editorial computers send invitations and manage peer review of document submissions; one or more system computers, the system computers maintain journals, records of submitted documents and user profiles, and issue notifications; and one or more user computers; the user computers submit documents or revisions to the document management system; wherein one or more of the editorial computers coordinate with one or more of the system computers to migrate one or more documents between journals maintained by the online document management system.

Is there a pool on the staff that recommended and pursued that patent being awarded the sack in the next week?

August 28, 2016

The Court That Rules The World

Filed under: Government,Intellectual Property (IP),Law — Patrick Durusau @ 3:35 pm

The Court That Rules The World by Chris Hamby.

If the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) don’t sound dangerous to you, this series will change your mind.

Imagine a private, global super court that empowers corporations to bend countries to their will.

Say a nation tries to prosecute a corrupt CEO or ban dangerous pollution. Imagine that a company could turn to this super court and sue the whole country for daring to interfere with its profits, demanding hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars as retribution.

Imagine that this court is so powerful that nations often must heed its rulings as if they came from their own supreme courts, with no meaningful way to appeal. That it operates unconstrained by precedent or any significant public oversight, often keeping its proceedings and sometimes even its decisions secret. That the people who decide its cases are largely elite Western corporate attorneys who have a vested interest in expanding the court’s authority because they profit from it directly, arguing cases one day and then sitting in judgment another. That some of them half-jokingly refer to themselves as “The Club” or “The Mafia.”

And imagine that the penalties this court has imposed have been so crushing — and its decisions so unpredictable — that some nations dare not risk a trial, responding to the mere threat of a lawsuit by offering vast concessions, such as rolling back their own laws or even wiping away the punishments of convicted criminals.

This system is already in place, operating behind closed doors in office buildings and conference rooms in cities around the world. Known as investor-state dispute settlement, or ISDS, it is written into a vast network of treaties that govern international trade and investment, including NAFTA and the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which Congress must soon decide whether to ratify.

These trade pacts have become a flashpoint in the US presidential campaign. But an 18-month BuzzFeed News investigation, spanning three continents and involving more than 200 interviews and tens of thousands of documents, many of them previously confidential, has exposed an obscure but immensely consequential feature of these trade treaties, the secret operations of these tribunals, and the ways that business has co-opted them to bring sovereign nations to heel.

The BuzzFeed News investigation explores four different aspects of ISDS. In coming days, it will show how the mere threat of an ISDS case can intimidate a nation into gutting its own laws, how some financial firms have transformed what was intended to be a system of justice into an engine of profit, and how America is surprisingly vulnerable to suits from foreign companies.

(emphasis in original)

Read carefully and take names.

Few, if any, are beyond one degree of separation from the Internet.

Do Your Part! Illegally Download Scientific Papers

Filed under: Intellectual Property (IP),Open Access — Patrick Durusau @ 2:46 pm

download-papers-460

From Rob Beschizza’s post at: Do Your Part! Illegally Download Scientific Papers, which has a poster size, 1940 x 2521 pixel resolution, version.

June 26, 2016

Digital Rights – Privacy – Video Conference – Wednesday, June 29, 2016

Filed under: Electronic Frontier Foundation,Intellectual Property (IP),Privacy — Patrick Durusau @ 7:49 pm

Video conference for campus and community organizers (June 2016)

From the webpage:

student-organizing-460

Are you part of a campus or community organization concerned about digital rights?

If not, do you want to raise a voice in your community for privacy and access to the intellectual commons?

We'd like to help! EFF will host a video conference to highlight opportunities for grassroots organizers on Wednesday, June 29, 2016 at 3pm PST / 6pm EST.

We'll hear from speakers describing campaigns and events available for your group's support, as well as best practices that you might consider emulating with your friends and neighbors. We're also eager to hear from you about any digital rights campaigns on which you're working in your community, and to expose others in this growing grassroots network to social media opportunities to support your activism and organizing.

Please register to receive the link through which to participate using an open, encrypted, video chat platform.

No word on removing the tape from your video camera for this event. 😉

Spread the word about this video conference!

June 24, 2016

Speaking of Wasted Money on DRM / WWW EME Minus 2 Billion Devices

Filed under: DRM,Intellectual Property (IP) — Patrick Durusau @ 7:50 pm

Just earlier today I was scribbling about wasting money on DRM saying:


I feel sorry for content owners. Their greed makes them easy prey for people selling patented DRM medicine for the delivery of their content. In the long run it only hurts themselves (the DRM tax) and users. In fact, the only people making money off of DRM are the people who deliver content.

This evening I ran across: Chrome Bug Makes It Easy to Download Movies From Netflix and Amazon Prime by Michael Nunez.

Nunez points out an exploit in the open source Chrome browser enables users to save movies from Netflix and Amazon Prime.

Even once a patch appears, others can compile the code without the patch, to continue downloading, illegally, movies from Netflix and Amazon Prime.

Even more amusing:


Widevine is currently used in more than 2 billion devices worldwide and is the same digital rights management technology used in Firefox and Opera browsers. Safari and Internet Explorer, however, use different DRM technology.

Widevine plus properly configured device = broken DRM.

When Sony and others calculate their ROI from DRM, be sure to subtract 2 billion+ devices that probably won’t honor the no-record DRM setting.

Pride Goeth Before A Fall – DMCA & Security Researchers

Filed under: DRM,Intellectual Property (IP),WWW — Patrick Durusau @ 2:18 pm

Cory Doctorow has written extensively on the problems with present plans to incorporate DRM in HTML5:

W3C DRM working group chairman vetoes work on protecting security researchers and competition – June 18, 2016.

An Open Letter to Members of the W3C Advisory Committee – May 12, 2016.

Save Firefox: The W3C’s plan for worldwide DRM would have killed Mozilla before it could start – May 11, 2016.

Interoperability and the W3C: Defending the Future from the Present – March 29, 2016.

among others.

In general I agree with Cory’s reasoning but I don’t see:

…Once DRM is part of a full implementation of HTML5, there’s a real risk to security researchers who discover defects in browsers and want to warn users about them…. (from Cory’s latest post)

Do you remember the Sony “copy-proof” CDs? Sony “copy-proof” CDs cracked with a marker pen Then, just as now, Sony is about to hand over bushels of cash to the content delivery crowd.

When security researchers discover flaws in the browser DRM, what prevents them from advising users?

Cory says the anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA prevent security researchers from discovering and disclosing such flaws.

That’s no doubt true, if you want to commit a crime (violate the DMCA) and publish evidence of that crime with your name attached to it on the WWW.

Isn’t that a case of pride goeth before a fall?

If I want to alert other users to security defects in their browsers, possibly equivalent to the marker pen for Sony CDs, I post that to the WWW anonymously.

Or publish code to make that defect apparent to even a casual user.

What I should not do is put my name on either a circumvention bug report or code to demonstrate it. Yes?

That doesn’t answer Cory’s points about impairing innovation, etc. but once Sony realizes it has been had, again, by the content delivery crowd, what’s the point of more self-inflicted damage?

I feel sorry for content owners. Their greed makes them easy prey for people selling patented DRM medicine for the delivery of their content. In the long run it only hurts themselves (the DRM tax) and users. In fact, the only people making money off of DRM are the people who deliver content.

Should DRM appear as proposed in HTML5, any suggestions for a “marker pen” logo to be used by hackers of a Content Decryption Module?

PS: Another approach to opposing DRM would be to inform shareholders of Sony and other content owners they are about to be raped by content delivery systems.

PPS: In private email Cory advised me to consider the AACS encryption key controversy, where public posting of an encryption key was challenged with take down requests. However, in the long run, such efforts only spread the key more widely, not the effect intended by those attempted to limit its spread.

And there is the Dark Web, ahem, where it is my understanding that non-legal content and other material can be found.

June 18, 2016

A Plausible Explanation For The EC Human Brain Project

Filed under: Fair Use,Intellectual Property (IP) — Patrick Durusau @ 2:24 pm

I have puzzled for years over how to explain the EC’s Human Brain Project. See The EC Brain if you need background on this ongoing farce.

While reading Reject Europe’s Plans To Tax Links and Platforms by Jeremy Malcolm, I suddenly understood the motivation for the Human Brain Project!

From the post:

A European Commission proposal to give new copyright-like veto powers to publishers could prevent quotation and linking from news articles without permission and payment. The Copyright for Creativity coalition (of which EFF is a member) has put together an easy survey and answering guide to guide you through the process of submitting your views before the consultation for this “link tax” proposal winds up on 15 June.

Since the consultation was opened, the Commission has given us a peek into some of the industry pressures that have motivated what is, on the face of it, otherwise an inexplicable proposal. In the synopsis report that accompanied the release of its Communication on Online Platforms, it writes that “Right-holders from the images sector and press publishers mention the negative impact of search engines and news aggregators that take away some of the traffic on their websites.” However, this claim is counter-factual, as search engines and aggregators are demonstrably responsible for driving significant traffic to news publishers’ websites. This was proved when a study conducted in the wake of introduction of a Spanish link tax resulted in a 6% decline in traffic to news websites, which was even greater for the smaller sites.

There is a severe shortage of human brains at the European Commission! The Human Brain Project is a failing attempt to remedy that shortage of human brains.

Before you get angry, Europe is full of extremely fine brains. But that isn’t the same thing as saying they found at the European Commission.

Consider for example, the farcical request for comments, having previously decided the outcome as cited above. EC customary favoritism and heavy-handedness.

I would not waste electrons submitting comments to the EC on this issue.

Spend your time mining EU news sources and making fair use of their content. Every now and again, gather up your links and send them to the publications and copy the EC. So publications can see the benefits of your linking versus the overhead of the EC.

As the Spanish link tax experience proves, link taxes may deceive property cultists into expecting a windfall, in truth their revenue will decrease and what revenue is collected, will go to the EC.

There’s the mark of a true EC solution:

The intended “beneficiary” is worse off and the EC absorbs what revenue, if any, results.

June 7, 2016

Doctorow on Encrypted Media Extensions (EME) @ W3C and DRM

Filed under: Fair Use,Government,Intellectual Property (IP) — Patrick Durusau @ 7:17 pm

Cory Doctorow outlines the important public policy issues semi-hidden in W3C efforts to standardize Encrypted Media Extensions (EME).

I knew I would agree with Cory’s points, more or less, before even reading the post. But I also knew that many of his points, if not all, aren’t going to be persuasive to some in the DRM discussion.

If you already favor reasonable accommodation between consumers of content and rightsholders, recognition of “fair use,” and allowances for research and innovation, enjoy Cory’s post and do what you can to support the EFF and others in this particular dispute.

If you are currently a rightsholder and strong supporter of DRM, I don’t think Cory’s post is going to be all that persuasive.

Rather than focusing on public good, research, innovation, etc., I have a very different argument for rightsholders, who I distinguish from people who will profit from DRM and its implementations.

I will lay out all the nuances either tomorrow or the next day, but the crux of my argument is the question: “What is the ROI for rightsholders from DRM?

You will be able to satisfy yourself of my analysis, using your own confidential financial statements. The real ones, not the ones you show the taxman.

To be sure, someone intends to profit from DRM and its implementation, but it isn’t who you think it is.

In the meantime, enjoy Cory’s post!

May 28, 2016

Pamela Samuelson on Java and Fair Use – Test For Prospective Employers

Filed under: Fair Use,Intellectual Property (IP) — Patrick Durusau @ 8:43 pm

Pamela Samuelson has posted a coherent and compelling narrative on why the Java API victory of Google over Oracle is a very good thing.

Here’s where she comes out:


Developers of software need some simple norms to live by. One such norm is that independent reimplementation of an API in one’s own original code does not infringe copyright. That’s the law as well as good public policy. The public has greatly benefited by the existence of this norm because anyone with a creative software idea can write programs that will run on existing platforms. The software industry has thrived under this norm, and the public has a wide array of choices of innovative programs in a competitive marketplace.

Put Pamela’s analysis to good use.

Ask at your next interview if the prospective employer agrees with Pamela’s post.

It’s 877 words and can double as an attention span test for the interviewer.

Ask before you leap.

Danger! Danger! Oracle Attorney Defends GPL

Filed under: Fair Use,Intellectual Property (IP),Open Source — Patrick Durusau @ 10:49 am

Op-ed: Oracle attorney says Google’s court victory might kill the GPL by Annette Hurst.

From the header:

Annette Hurst is an attorney at Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe who represented Oracle in the recent Oracle v. Google trial. This op-ed represents her own views and is not intended to represent those of her client or Ars Technica.

The Oracle v. Google trial concluded yesterday when a jury returned a verdict in Google’s favor. The litigation began in 2010, when Oracle sued Google, saying that the use of Java APIs in Android violated copyright law. After a 2012 trial, a judge held that APIs can’t be copyrighted at all, but that ruling was overturned on appeal. In the trial this month, Google successfully argued that its use of Java APIs, about 11,500 lines of code in all, was protected by “fair use.”

I won’t propogate Annette’s rant but you can read it for yourself at: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/05/op-ed-oracle-attorney-says-googles-court-victory-might-kill-the-gpl/.

What are free software supporters to make of their long time deranged, drooling critic expressing support for GPL?

Should they flee as pursued by wraiths on wings?

Should they stuff their cloaks in their ears?

Are these like the lies of Suraman?

Or perhaps better, Wormtongue?

My suggestion? Point to Annette’s rant to alert others but don’t repeat it, don’t engage it, just pass over it in silence.

Repeating evil counsel gives it legitimacy.

Yours.

May 26, 2016

Reimplementation of an API is FAIR USE!

Filed under: Intellectual Property (IP) — Patrick Durusau @ 4:37 pm

Google wins Oracle copyright fight over Android code by Russell Brandom.

Just one civil jury’s opinion but a major one considering there was $9 billion at stake.

Not a precedent for other cases but it may discourage this type of over-reaching.

Every now and again, even random dice roll a 7 for the good guys.

See Russell’s post for the details.

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