Copyleft: the magazine

Apparently sporting one of the busiest legal departments in the music biz, Universal was in the news again this week, this time suing video sharing site Veoh with “massive copyright violation” for hosting vids that might maybe have Universal’s copyrighted audio or video. This case, not unlike the now legendary Viacom v. YouTube, has the makings of another nasty showdown between content distributors (Viacom, Google and YouTube) and those who claim to represent content creators (Universal, Viacom and the RIAA/MPAA). As with the YouTube lawsuit, Veoh claims that they aren’t responsible for what people upload since they respond to all DCMA take-down requests. Ironically, it has been relatively widely reported that Universal has never sent any take-down notices to Veoh, but instead went straight for the jugular. The way this one goes down is going to probably depend greatly on the results of the YouTube case. We’ll keep you posted.

(via Wired and Ars Technica)

Finally bowing to the inevitable, NBC has decided to freely “license” its coverage of the presidential debates for non-commercial use of coverage from this past week’s AFL-CIO Forum. The rules, according to network, go something like this: as long as you credit MSNBC and don’t show any clips of NBC personalities, you have NBC’s blessing to republish clips of the debates on non-commercial websites. NBC even made a special exemption for us blogger types, officially declaring, “The inclusion of text or search ads such as Google Ad Sense, Yahoo! Search Marketing, Microsoft AdCenter, or similar services, shall not be considered a Commercial Use.” How sweet, given that most journalism scholars (and nearly every blogger on the planet) would argue that the < a href="index.php?s=fair+use">fair use principle means that we, as journalists, could use, comment on and republish clips anyway withouth NBC’s go ahead. But, as with CNN and ABC’s announcements, this is a good sign that NBC is willing to accept that all journalists have as much right to report on the debates as it does.

(via Ars Technica and MSNBC)

Alas, we aren’t talking about Digital Radio Mondiale, but the vaunted semi-public broadcasting service’s decision to adopt Microsoft’s Digital Rights Management on its new iPlayer Internet TV platform. Groups as far reaching as the Open Source Consortium, Binary Freedom Boston and Digital Copyright Canada (that’s far reaching globally) have been attacking the British Broadcasting Corporation’s decision to encumber the service for a while now, but with the service’s launch last week, tempers in the open source community have flared once again. This time, Defective By Design has called for protest in front of the BBC’s London headquarters on August 14, 2007. While some might claim that Defective by design just has grudge for any product with a lowercase “i” at the beginning of its name (iPod, iPhone, iMac, iPlayer, iFish), the group has some legitimate complaints.

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In honor of the 30th anniversary of the first Star Wars film, Lucasfilm has launched a mash-up service allowing fans to take images and clips from all six Star Wars movies and combine them with their own content. Hosted by StarWars.com, the service also lets you post your mash-ups to the site YouTube-style and comment on other people’s mash-ups. All very Web 2.0, George Lucas, and we are almost impressed with your willingness to allow the masses to express their creativity through parody.
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While this news is sure to anger the AACS governing body to no end, SlySoft has launched a new version of AnyDVD, its optical disk copying tool designed to get around those pesky DRM features on HD DVDs and Blu-Ray disks. According to the change notes on SlySoft’s forums, version 6.1.5.1 supports ripping of “new titles”, ostensibly those that will be hitting retailers near you in the coming weeks with a new security keys. So, yeah, that whole emergency security update worked really well, AACS Licensing Authority. Looks like the general public will continue to disagree with your interpretation of its rights to copy and back up the media it has purchased.

(from Engadget and SlySoft Forums)

Digg, well known for its highly opinionated, community-based social booking marking services, took a major hit to its credibility this week after the company began systematically deleting articles with a certain code used for cracking AACS encryption on HD DVD and Blu-ray disks. Within hours of making its fateful decision (after receiving a cease and desist letter from the AACS licensing group), diggers began revolting against their favorite site by digging EVERY PAGE with the offending code they could find. After 24 hours, founder and cheif Digg architect Kevin Ross called off the censorship campaign and vowed to stand by his community come hell or major corporate lawsuit.

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After one of the shorter debates we’ve seen in recent months over fair use, Viacom has settled with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, MoveOn.org, Stanford’s Fair Use Project and Brave New Films (did we miss anyone? no? good.) regarding one or more of their use of footage in a parody film. At the heart of the issue was a short spoof of Comedy Central’s Colbert Report called “Stop the Falsiness” posted on YouTube. The offending film sampled clips of the Report as a commentary on what MoveOn.org and Brave New Films saw as Colbert’s “shrill, partisan anti-bear” extremism. Viacom (the parent company of Comedy Central) originally denied filing the DCMA take-down notice with YouTube to remove the film, which came on the heals with a much larger complaint against Google and YouTube in which Viacom has asked the courts for $1 billion in damages for what it claims are 160,000 “unauthorized clips”.

Viacom, for its part, is playing down the settlement, saying that it is simply applying its rigorous standards for protecting its copyrighted material and this all wouldn’t have happened if someone had just asked them permission first, according to the Associated Press. While we at Copyleft take no official stance on Steven Colbert’s politics, the fact that Viacom has come clean on at least one of its take down attacks. One clip back up on YouTube, 159,999 to go.

(from EFF and AP)

In a move that should surprise no one at this point, the kids over at the Doom9 forums have sent out and new set of apps to crack the AACS digital rights management system. This most recent crack in HD DVD and Blu-ray’s armor is thanks to an exploit using the XBox 360’s HD DVD external drive, which allowed these intrepid hackers to get the Volume IDs of their high definition disks without using the pesky host keys. In short, that means getting around the AACS encryption just in time for all the old host keys to be canceled thanks to the last major crack. More as this story develops, but for all of you making back-ups of your HD movies, looks like you’ll still have the capability for a while.

For a little background on AACS, check out our info page on [[DRM]].

(from DLTV and Doom9)