No Defense for MediaDefense

06-02-2008 | 08:33 PM EST | 0 Comments

When a couple of teens recently knocked Comcast.net offline, the FBI went into overdrive to bring the criminals down. When a systematic attack by the recording and motion picture industries' corporate goons-for-hire brought down a large new media company, the FBI says we're dealing with a "gray" area of the law. And, when some of us hear about these stories, we just hope that more people finally start to care.

BitTorrent is a peer-to-peer file sharing communications protocol. That means, it gives individuals the ability to easily share electronic files of any sort with each other over the Internet. Scientists and other researchers at universities throughout the world use it to share academic information, large corporations use it to share data throughout multiple offices, musicians use it to provide their music to the public, and, yes, media pirates use it to illegally trade movies, music, and other things that aren't licensed to be freely traded in that way.

One corporation that's been very successful at using BitTorrent as the centerpiece of its business strategy is San Francisco's Revision3 which describes itself as:

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

The content is "aired" to viewers via the BitTorrent technology and is supported by advertisers ranging from Sony, Netflix, Dolby, Microsoft, IBM, and HP to Southern Comfort, Virgin America, Verizon and FX Networks. Over Memorial Day Weekend, 2008, though, the Revision3 broadcast went silent.

It seems that in an effort to stop some illegal trading of files that found their way onto Revision3's BitTorrent network, MediaDefender, Inc., an anti-piracy solutions provider contracted by "every major record label and every major movie studio, video game publishers, software publishers, and anime publishers" (according to their website) took it upon themselves to initiate a Denial of Service attack to shutdown Revision3. In very simple terms, a Denial of Service (DoS) attack is a way of overwhelming a computer on the Internet with so many requests, that it can't possibly respond to them all. As a result, people who are trying to reach the service are denied access. Interestingly, Denial of Service attacks are even listed in a CNN article as a tool of the cyber-criminal trade.

The details of the attack are listed in full detail on Revision3's website, so I won't go into them here. On a side note, the write-up on Revision3's website is a rare instance of something very technical being written clearly enough that any lay person could understand. I highly recommend reading it.

What I want to point out here is the very scary precedence this sets. In short, this is a case of vigilante justice at the hands of the big media conglomerates. They perceive a threat to their money-making models, they hire a company like MediaDefender to dole out their own brand of heavy-handed justice, and then they use their corporate and political sway to spin the whole thing as an honest mistake and necessary in the battle to ensure their intellectual property and copyrights aren't infringed upon. In my mind, this isn't even a matter of the restrictive versus non-restrictive licensing debate that so much of this blog is based on. I don't have a problem acknowledging that the licenses that govern some of the movies, music, and other digital content that was being traded did not allow for that type of sharing and re-distribution and, as such, it was illegal to trade it. But, I absolutely don't think that gives any content owner carte blanche to take the law into their hands. As Revision3 rightly asks, why didn't MediaDefender just give Revision3 "a quick call or email?" And, as other people around the Internet have rightly asked, what if MediaDefender's "honest mistake" had shut down the flow of medical data or something else where lives were at stake? Do we really want to allow corporations to do whatever they want in the pursuit of preserving their antiquated business models, copyrights, and bottom lines — no matter who gets hurt in the process?

Patently Absurd

05-29-2008 | 10:37 AM EST | 0 Comments

What if I told you that someone had invented a device that will completely revolutionize society? It will make a number of other products completely obsolete, and it will make day-to-day living so much easier for many of us. Now what if I told you that you're never going to see the device, because the companies whose own products would be displaced and made irrelevant are using abusive litigation techniques to stop the device from ever coming to market? Would you believe this could happen? Would you say, "But that's exactly what the patent system is supposed to stop?" Well, at least one group says it's not only possible, but that it's happening as we speak.

In a perfect world (at least in my opinion), the products available to us, the music we listen to, the movies we watch, and everything else that society produces and consumes would be governed by merit alone. It's the old Emerson mousetrap quote, "Build a better mousetrap, and the world will beat a path to your door." And, while this is exactly the type of pro-innovation sentiment the United States' patent laws were created to reflect, organizations like the Coalition for Patent Fairness question whether the laws and processes as they currently stand are still up to the challenge.

The Coalition views "baseless patent claims" solely made "for the purpose of exploiting loopholes and imbalances in the patent system" as the root of the problem. Specifically, the Coalition members want to see a patent system that promotes "innovation for the good of inventors, consumers and the economy," and they believe that our system can be reformed to do just that. They argue that these baseless patent claims not only move us away from the innovation goal, but they even deter innovation. The Coalition writes:

"Business must redirect valuable financial resources that might otherwise go toward innovation and job creation. Engineers are spending time in depositions and doing defensive patenting, instead of creating the next great invention. Companies are increasingly becoming risk averse in this environment; they may decide not to bring new products or services to market because they do not want to incur the additional costs that result from an abusive patent claim. And all of these costs are eventually shouldered by consumers buying the products we use everyday in the form of a hidden 'innovation tax.'"

This concept of "risk aversion" is one I've mentioned several times now in previous posts. Essentially, when an aspect of the legal system (like patent or copyright law) develops a reputation for being used as a weapon where no real offense has been committed, individuals and small groups and organizations (the places where so many innovations seem to come from) get afraid to innovate. If you're an individual that came up with a terrific invention, wrote a great song, took a fantastic photograph, or created anything else, but what you produced is similar in any way to something already publicly available through some large corporation, you might think twice about ever going public with what you've done. You might simply decide that the costs, time, and stress of being in a lawsuit are just too great. It's unclear that anyone would ever sue you, but that threat just makes the whole thing not worth it. At that point, innovation truly is being stifled.

So, if you agree that merit really should determine what innovations, art, and other creations make it into the public market and become popular and if you agree that the patent system really should be promoting rather than stifling innovation, what can you do? One thing you can do is take a more thorough look at all the great information and ideas on the Coalition for Patent Fairness' website. If you're a software developer, you could consider releasing your work under the GPL license. By doing that, you'll help promote a more level playing field and you'll remove the "litigation risk" for people who would use your work in their own. If you're a photographer, musician, painter, or artist of any sort, you could consider making your work available under a Creative Commons license. Like the GPL, the Creative Commons' licenses will tell people who would use your work exactly how they can. Again, less fear equals more innovation. But, whatever you do, I hope that you'll consider how the companies you support through the products you choose, along with the example you set by how you make your own creations public, affect the role of innovation (and in turn the health) of your society.

Too Many Chefs

05-28-2008 | 02:32 PM EST

There's a discussion taking place in the international arena these days that will ultimately determine (in part) how businesses communicate, how people interact with their governments, and even how school children do their homework. To many people outside the technology development field, the topic is about as boring as they come. To mainstream news outlets, the headlines would be so unsexy that any mention is relegated to the deepest recesses of newspapers and most off-peak hours of TV viewing. But, the ramifications of the decisions being made today will not only be far-reaching but they'll also be relatively long-lasting.

When most people hear the phrase "document format standards" they probably either tune out, go off on a daydream, or simply walk away. I've got to admit that even just looking at that phrase is pretty daunting. Outside of the people who actually develop technology for a living (and people who work in law), I wonder how many people even refer to files of any sort as "documents?" Well, in the interest of not losing anyone whose already managed to get this far into the post, let me quickly say that what we're talking about here are the agreed upon rules and conventions that go into making a computer file a certain type of file. Just like there are different ingredients that go into making a cheesecake versus, say, a carrot cake, there are different ingredients that go into making different types of computer files. Moreover, when we order a cheesecake, we assume certain things about the base ingredients that will be used and what the cake will taste like. When a computer program (or programmer) encounters a certain type of file, they can make certain assumptions about the rules and structures that make up that file and how it will work. The big question these days is who gets to decide on the ingredients and what recipe should even be used?

ODF (OpenDocument Format) and OOXML (Office Open XML) are the two types of file at the heart of this matter. Both types can be used to store information created in word processing programs (like Microsoft Word and Sun's Open Office) along with spreadsheets, charts, presentations and more. ODF is (and has been for some time) an ISO/IEC International Standard. This means that representatives from various national standards organizations from around the world have thoroughly reviewed and agreed on the ODF "recipe." OOXML is a competing type of file created by Microsoft. In April, OOXML received approval as an ISO/IEC Standard only to have it formally protested this month by the South African Bureau of Standards. Currently, OOXML's ISO/IEC approval is dependent on the protest being resolved.

Groups like the Shuttleworth Foundation see this as a problem. Standards, particularly in technology, are designed to make life easier for everyone by having one agreed upon way to do things. But, by introducing two separate "standard" ways to do things, the complexity in making things work together goes up exponentially — which means more time and money are spent trying to do anything. This is particularly a problem for organizations like governments where there's a real need to have a reliable way to publish and receive information from the people being governed without spending a ton of (taxpayer) money creating many different versions of the same information. (See Massachusetts' Open Initiatives information for more on how that state is addressing this problem.) This leaves some people asking, why even have a second standard? If it's because you feel the first standard is missing something important, why not just use the standard in its current form and then work with the governing bodies, like the ISO/IEC, to get everyone to agree on the best way to implement the next round of improvements to the standard?

Well, it turns out that Microsoft actually has announced that Microsoft Office 2007 SP2 will include the ability to work with ODF files along with the ones in the OOXML format. So, does that mean the problem will be solved? Will people who use Microsoft Office will be able to create ODF files that can be shared with and used by everybody else, including non-Microsoft Office users? It's hard to know for sure. But, I guess that type of confusion is exactly what sticking to a single standard is supposed to avoid.

In the end, you're probably going to need to start saving all of your word processing and related files in one of these formats in the near future. Likewise, you're going to start seeing some new file formats coming from your local and federal government and other official organizations. How many of your tax dollars will be spent making these new technologies work? That'll depend on how many standards we come up with and how well they work together — let's hope all these chefs don't spoil the tech broth.

Free to Change

05-27-2008 | 11:59 AM EST

It's been nearly six weeks since I started this blog, and I'm already announcing a major change to its focus!

When I first started posting here, I had a somewhat vague idea about what exactly I'd talk about. In general, I knew I wanted to write about the ways that culture (particularly digital content) is being produced, consumed, regulated, and distributed. I knew that more and more people were applying the ideas behind free/open source software to everything from education and music creation to medicine and photography, and I thought I would use this blog as a place for me to learn more about that and to share what I was learning.

Well, it didn't take too long for me to realize that there are already a ton of fantastic blogs and websites on precisely this topic. Honestly, I just didn't see how blogging on the same things in the same way would do much good. But, in reading other blogs and websites I noticed that most of them are written for the people who already care and know a lot about the topic. When I would tell people offline about my blog, though, they often had no idea that these things were going on. They were genuinely interested, but the terms and ideas that seem so familiar to me (and that show up in most posts online) were completely foreign to them. This gave me the idea for Mine all Mine's new direction.

Moving forward, I'm going to focus on a smaller set of key concepts, I'm going to explain the jargon and key concepts in my posts, and I'm going to write each post trying to answer the question, Why should I care? I'm hoping that by purposefully trying to reach the people who are directly affected by all of this (consumers of any sort, artists, musicians, software developers, etc.) but don't know it yet, I can reach a new audience. An audience that would care, if the information were put into more familiar terms to them.

On a side note, if you've been following this blog, you may notice that some of the keywords used to describe post topics have changed. The posts themselves are the same, but in an effort to focus more tightly on a key set of ideas, I've re-labeled the tags used to describe the posts. And, actually, I think the new keywords are probably more relevant to the content anyway.

One From the Vault

05-21-2008 | 08:27 PM EST | 0 Comments

Ever wonder why some videos on YouTube are here today and gone tomorrow? Well, there are several possible reasons, but the one that an MIT student group is taking exception with has to do with copyright-related takedowns. Don't worry though, their new website is breathing life back into the fallen clips.

YouTomb is a product of the MIT Free Culture student group that, according to their website, seeks to track "videos taken down from YouTube for alleged copyright violation." And, by track, they also mean make available for viewing on the YouTomb website.

Officially, a footer on the website explains:

YouTomb is a research project of MIT Free Culture. The purpose of the project is to investigate what kind of videos are subject to takedown notices due to allegations of copyright infringement with particular emphasis on those for which the takedown may be mistaken. Although our initial focus is on videos hosted by YouTube, we are interested in other video collections as well.

When you consider how easily an individual content producer can be intimidated by a takedown or cease and desist letter (even when no real infringement has taken place) and how easily a perfectly legitimate movie clip could get misidentified and removed by YouTube's automated copyright-infringement filters, I think it's great that this group is doing something to publicly comment on the process and the rate of false positives.

Since I started this blog I've come to realize how much the threat of legal action alone can stifle perfectly legitimate creativity. Likewise, heavy-handed, broad technological solutions can do an equal amount of damage through dragnet-like policies. But, whether you agree that the current copyright system in the United States needs a massive overhaul, minor tweak, or no change at all, it would seem to me that if you truly come down on the side of a healthy and creative society, you'd have to agree that using threats to stifle innovation and art are a very bad thing. I hope more people start watching this new watchdog.

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