Copyleft: the magazine

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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As far as unsubstantiated rumors go, this one has promise. It seems that AT&T is planning on launching a $7.49 eMusic download service come next Tuesday (July 31, 2007) good for five presumably DRM-free downloads per month. While this pricing seems wicked expensive, especially given the fact that data rates would still apply on top of your $1.49 per song (way above eMusic’s standard rates), the idea of bringing DRM-free music to the mobile music market is at least promising. Looks like the service is also expected to be relatively limited, only being available on three Samsung phones and a Nokia. Of course, if you’re one of those 269,999 new iPhone owners (we are, of course, subtracting the one that was destroyed on Will it Blend?) you can just use your nifty gadget to get on the Internets and get your 35 free eMusic tracks. More to come if this rumor decides to get more official.

(via Electronista)
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Intel is tired of software not having been designed to handle multiple-cored processors and has decided to set the open source community loose on the problem. The processor giant is offering its Threading Building Blocks template library package under the GNU GPL v2 license to any programmer who wants it. The goal: get more multi-core friendly programs out into the wild so it (and presumably AMD) can convince computer makers that eight processors in one laptop is totally a good idea. As anyone with a dual-core processor knows (like us), the extra processing power is pretty much wasted without some kind of CPU controlling program telling everything where to go, so this move should be a win-win-win-win for Intel, programmers, the open source community and average Joes and Janes who want their computers to actually seem like they are going faster. The fact that Intel has given open source programmers this much power (this is by far the company’s largest open source project) stands as testament to the fact that open source development can do things commercial development can’t and that business interests and the public can do more if they work together and trust each other. Are you taking notes, music and film industries?

(via Intel and Ars Technica)

Ars Technica has written a couple of scathing articles over the last week on SoundExchange’s attempts to force digital rights management on small Internet radio broadcasters in exchange for capping the exorbitant royalty fees the Copyright Royalty Board has ordered them to pay over the next three years. This is certainly a move the music industry would love, as it would help eliminate the ability for many listeners to rip music from the audio streams. Of course, the old fashioned way of exercising one’s rights under the Audio Home Recording Act of 1992, a simple male-to-male audio cable from one’s headphone port to the mic port, still sounds like a viable option.

The basic principle of what SoundExchange is allegedly trying to do would set a dangerous precedent. The music industry has not been able to force the government to mandate DRM for Internet radio, so instead it has turned to “leveraging” royalty fees that, if enacted, would put most small operators out of business. That was the point of the Day of Silence in the first place. However, it seems clear that the music industry is desperate to find some way of regaining control of its product (which is, we might like to add, not technically owned by anyone as it is part of culture) and will destroy the only very medium that could save it from its own failed business model just to prove that it is right.

(from Ars Technica)

Street Tech recently reported that members of the iCommons project are planning on launching a service for creating and remixing t-shirt designs using Creative Commons licenses. The idea came out of a fund raising project by Creative Commons Japan that proved so popular, they decided to launch the app, called Ximer, for general consumption. No official date has been set for C-Shirts or Ximer to go live, but they are hoping for sometime before the end of 2007.

While the Web 2.0-iness of it all seems promising, Ximer’s biggest plus will be its Creative Commons licensing offerings. In the t-shirt biz, there are plenty of competitors out there, including giants CafePress and Good Storm, that have well established designers and client bases (as well as production and shipping facilities). So, as cool as the idea of easily sampled and remixed t-shirts is, the implementation and physical product quality (i.e. the print quality on said t-shirts) will have to be stellar in order for this to be a successful commercial venture.

However, the Ximer concept could be revolutionary in that it moves beyond licensing and remixing of non-physical media (text, images, music and video) and toward the ability to offer actual physical items that are remixable using the copyleft standard Creative Commons license.

(via Street Tech and iCommons)
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Microsoft is not going to be very happy about this one. Ars Technica and Endgadget are reporting this afternoon that a member of the Doom9 forums has posted a new fix for FairUse4WM that breaks Microsoft’s DRM for Vista and Zune. Ars has tested the fix and it looks like it is legit. Interestingly, the author of the new fix is going by the name “Divine Tao” which, Ars Technica’s Ken Fisher rightly notes is an anagram for “Viodentia”, the original author of the Microsoft DRM cracking FairUse4WM program (also an anagram for “deviation” and “di neovita”, if you really want to go there). However, for the moment, it looks like all you kids have a new means of liberating your music files from that pesky DRM. That is, until Microsoft puts out a fix and starts trying to sue people based solely on their user names again (which, we might point out, isn’t working too well for the RIAA).

(from Ars Technica and Doom 9)

The latest music seller to take up the DRM-free challenge appears to be HMV, the venerable UK music seller that also happens to be the parent company of the extremely successful Waterstone’s bookstores. HMV has declared that by September 2007, it will carry 1 million+ of EMI’s DRM-free tracks, as well as the obligatory indie labels. But the big story here is price. HMV is planning on charging a measly 79p (that’s around 99 cents on this side of the pond). It’s also 20p less than iTunes DRM-free tracks. We hope you’re paying attention, Amazon.com, as this is exactly the type of strategy that could help you regain your place in the top three music sellers in the United States (after having been bumped by iTunes).

(via Digital Lifestyles)

In a move that should really have surprised no one, Microsoft made claims this week that its sales of Novell’s SUSE Linux do not constitute acceptance of the Free Software Foundation’s new GNU GPL v3 licensing scheme. The argument goes something like this: coupons for SUSE Linux that Microsoft sells just won’t offer any support for GPL v3 governed code, so the software (and Microsoft) is still covered under the older GPL v2. Which is probably true if Microsoft states as much in its sales contracts, since Linux is itself distributed under the older license and the implications of new code are not entirely clear. Odds are good that there will be alot of busy lawyers over the next several months. In the mean time, Microsoft’s Linux customers appear to be in legal limbo, as it is unclear what happens when they try to get tech support for the Linux servers if they have GPL v3 code, even if the problem is with the GPL v2 parts. So if this affects you, you might want to start talking to your copyright lawyer right about… now. As always, more on this as the story develops.

(via Engadget and Microsoft)

It has been a busy week or so since the launch of iPhone, with apparently every media outlet, corporation, non-profit organization, hacker, nerd and average schmuck on the planet clambering to say something about the device. Coverage has definitely been mixed, particularly in the open source and fair use communities. Some, like the Free Software Foundation and their militant Apple-hating wing Defective By Design (we joke, they’re a fun bunch of guerrilla marketers) have come out firmly against the iPhone on DRM and end-user licensing agreement grounds. The hacker community, on the other hand, has been on the all over the device like ants on a picnic. Apparently highly educated, determined, individualist and extremely willing-to-void-warranties ants, but we stand by our metaphor. Click the read link for all the gory details.

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