explodedlibrary.info

using the shift key to rip certain copy-protected CDs

Today I had my first experience of a seriously copy-protected CD, Radiohead's Hail to the Thief, released by EMI. I didn't have much luck ripping it onto my Mac - I ended up having to force quit out of iTunes. Apparently there are a number of different copy-protection methods. One method can be circumvented with a magic marker. I didn't think that this method would work on this particular CD, so I looked for other methods. Then I saw this reference to hold down the shift key on a Windows computer for 5 seconds after inserting the CD. This stopped the CD from automatically launching the program which would interfere with the copy protection. I then copied the CD with iTunes, and soon I'll have it in my iPod.

As I've written before, I believe that creators should be fairly compensated for their work, but that copy-protection technology goes way too far, and I have no moral qualms about circumventing it. I've never been interested in downloading music from file-sharing sites. The only thing which would tempt me would be if I wasn't able to rip a CD which I had lawfully purchased. Then I would feel entitled to download an illicit copy.

When will the record companies realize that people like to listen to music on their computers and mp3 players, and it is manifestly unfair to prevent this from happening? It is simply such a stupid thing to do - piss off your paying customers and drive them into supporting your real target, the file-traders.

I'm about to really start ranting, so instead I'll link this detailed explanation of how the shift method works.

movie promotional blogging templates + digression on illegal art

I remember the controversy when film studios and other intellectual property owners forced numerous fan sites off the web. I'm thinking particularly about Star Trek and Harry Potter - which was a particularly mean-spirited example, seeing that most of the fansites were created by children and were about the books, not the film version.

So it's now very interesting to see that Sony is providing free templates to bloggers that promote Spiderman 2. These promotional templates are available for Blogger and LiveJournal. There are also RSS feeds on the movie's website.

In addition, LiveJournal users can download animated icons with characters from the movie.

I wonder if this is a new trend and an advance in the mainstreaming of blogging, or if it's just a quirky marketing idea which is just a dead end. A number of LiveJournal users already have icons which promote particular movie & TV characters, singers and other personalities. Of course, all of those icons are unauthorized. So is this one Hollywood studio thinking, "if you can't beat them, join them" and attempting to get some good-will from bloggers as well as free advertising? It's also a sign that the business side of big media is starting to notice the blog medium. One implication of this is that they will try to work with us and use us - and maybe there is some chance of a win-win situation here. But does this mean that bloggers will need to be more careful about recycling intellectual property? For example, I can imagine that some bloggers might download these Spiderman templates and alter them in a way which subverts their marketing purpose. What would Sony do then? Would it follow Starbuck's example in suppressing the Corporate Whore parody?

Incidentally it is a lot more difficult to find the Corporate Whore logo than it used to be. Go to the Illegal Art website, take a glance at the hilarious click-through agreement, and go into the Visual section. Salon also wrote an article about illegal art, which is well worth a read.

open source legal research

I was going to write about the recent Salon article about Groklaw and open source legal research on the SCO case, but Copyfight's Jason Schultz has already written about it, so I'm just going to link to that and post a brief excerpt from the Salon article.

[Pamela] Jones [of Groklaw] has been praised by just about everyone in the open-source world for her efforts to undermine SCO. Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, has said that Groklaw shows "how the open-source ideals end up working in the legal arena, too, and I think that has been very useful and made a few people sit up and notice." Bruce Perens calls Jones "paralegal to the world." Clay Shirky, the influential tech pundit, points out that "Groklaw may also be affecting the case in the courts, by helping IBM with a distributed discovery effort that they, IBM, could never accomplish on their own, no matter how many lawyers they throw at it." [hypertext from original not included]

please sign this petition against the IP provisions of the Australia-US free trade agreement

Kim Weatherall has written about how the FTA will affect Australia's intellectual property laws. To summarize, if Australia signs onto this, we're going to be stuck with - copyright term extension a la Sonny Bono & Mickey Mouse, strengthening our anti-circumvention laws, weakening exemptions including ones granted to libraries, and the creation of some sort of ISP take-down rule.

It is a horrifying prospect to be saddled with the worst of US intellectual property law. But the most pathetic thing is the way that it's been imposed on Australia. The DMCA is an awful law for the US, but at least it was a genuine product of the American legislative process. At least it went through the various committees and was debated, and voted on as to whether that particular law was good for the country or not. It is pathetic that Australia is poised to rubber stamp elements of this law at the behest of another country.

These are significant changes to our intellectual property laws. Whether you support them or oppose them, these changes should be fully debated by the Australian people.

But there is not going to be a debate about the proposed changes to intellectual property laws in isolation. The negotiation is finished and now the only choices are to ratify or reject the FTA. Now we have the situation where our government is forced to consider all of these disparate issues which have bundled together. How can one weigh the restrictions on Australian creativity and freedom that will be caused by these IP laws, against protecting Australia's Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme which gives us affordable medicines, against the livelihoods of Australian sugar cane farmers, against the benefits which we would gain from otherwise free trade with the US?

Enough ranting for now. The Age has reported that Australian open source advocates are sponsoring an online petition against the IP provisions of the FTA. Please sign it - especially if you are Australian or American (if you dislike US intellectual property laws and would hate to see them exported and imposed on other people).

moral rights and the grey album

Well this is what happens when I skip checking my aggregator for a day - I miss Grey Tuesday! See synapse's informative post about this. The New York Times also covered this.

Other than missing out an opportunity for changing this blog's colours to grey, I guess that there isn't much that I could have done *sigh* Being on a dial-up connection, it's too painfully slow to download an album, let alone host it.

It seems that today copyright is about two things: money and control. I am not so concerned about the money side of it - within reason. Artists, like anyone else, deserve to fairly compensated for their works. I will be so presumptuous to say that this part of the debate is almost over. Of course there are disagreements about what fair means in this context.

My real difficulty lies in the controlling aspect of copyright law. Like not being able to hear something like the Grey Album just because the suits at EMI don’t like it.

To play devil’s advocate for a moment, there is a reason why a copyright holder should be able control their creations and be compensated when their work is sampled or otherwise incorporated into someone else’s work.

Remember DNA’s remix of Suzanne Vega’s Tom’s Diner? Suzanne Vega deserved to get a cut of DNA’s very successful remix. Really, all DNA did was add some beats, and a few sound effects. If Suzanne Vega hadn’t got any money or attribution for that use of Tom’s Diner, that wouldn’t seem fair.

On the other hand, it wouldn’t have been fair if her record company had arbitrarily forbidden DNA from selling and broadcasting the remix.

joining ALIA

Well I’ve decided to join ALIA, the Australian Library and Information Association. This is Australia’s answer to the ALA. I never joined the ALA, but am a member of AALL (American Association of Law Libraries) and was once a member of the SLA (Special Libraries Association).

Why would I spend my limited funds on something like this? The pragmatic reason is that this will help me in my transition from being an American librarian to an Australian one. It’s very strange – although I went to library school in Australia, over 99% of my work experience as a librarian comes from my time in the USA. This is why right now I feel that I am an American librarian rather than Australian – insofar as there are differences in the profession between Australia and the US.

I can put my ALIA membership on my resumé. It may open doors for networking :P and give me a chance to learn some useful information about the profession here.

There is an idealistic reason too. Although professional associations can be ineffectual and usually fail to live up to their potential, I really think that we need them and have to try to make them work. For example, somebody needs to convince the Australian people – and particularly the Senate – that the Australia-US free trade agreement would have a disastrous effect on their rights as information consumers (see Kim Weatherall's post about this). The best A-list blogger could only have a minor role in this debate. There is no substitute for the experience and collective legitimacy which a good professional association could bring to this issue.

I don’t yet know how effective ALIA might be as an organization. Well, even if they roll over on the FTA issue, I can be consoled that at least their website supports RSS :)

hoping that the Australia-US free trade agreement founders in the Australian Senate

I was planning on writing about this, but misseli beat me to it with the following fine summary (below in the Arial font).
The only reason why I'm not totally dismayed by this is not a done deal. It still needs to be ratified by the Australian Senate, which the Federal Government does not control. I'm sure that the Greens and Democrats will oppose most of this and the main opposition party, the Australian Labor Party has indicated it may oppose this as well. It's interesting how the electronic news media has portrayed the deal as being good for Australia, with the exception of the sugar industry. "It could have been a lot worse" is the main sentiment. True, at least the US is not yet forcing us to pay more for medicines, but if people knew more they'd realize that this is a lot worse than it appears.

Australia Joins the Mickey Mouse Club

Australia and the United States signed a Free Trade Agreement agreement on February 9 (Feb. 8, in this hemisphere). A lot of the press (here and abroad) is focused on opposition within Australia's agricultural sector (particularly sugar and dairy farmers) and the proposed benefits to its manufacturing sector.

However, warning bells have sounded regarding changes in copyright/IP laws and their effects on libraries. Like the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, Australia's copyright terms have been raised an additional 20 years. It's set to go into effect on Jan. 1, 2005.

From The Age's article:

"The outcome is bad for libraries," said Colette Ormonde, copyright adviser for the Australian Library and Information Association. "It is bad for students. It is bad for researchers. It is bad for all information users."

The terms of the agreement seek to harmonize IP protections in regards to material, including digital formats ... which suggests that DMCA-type legislation is next on the agenda, if not already so.

Thanks for the 411 from /. and the chattylibrarians list-serv. [Confessions of a Mad Librarian]

has the intellectual property world gone mad?

I don't really have anything to add to this - I'm speechless.

There is something very wrong with the copyright industry when we have this discussion [about English postal workers humming/whistling tunes] as part of the question of what needs licensing. Displacement of Concepts has an analysis of this post by Cory Doctorow who saw this article from last February ("We Can Work It Out" - Kim Howells Invites Musicians To Work With Government On Delivery Of The Licensing Bill), which Cory describes as: A new business-licensing scheme in the UK will allow... [bIPlog]

how academic libaries are under pressure to exclude the general public from basic services

One of the things that I like about TypePad is its draft posts feature. If I see something worth writing, I can paste in the reference from Net NewsWire and jot down a few ideas. If I don’t have the time or energy to make it into a full post, I can save it as a draft. Then nobody can see it except for me. It’s easy to locate in case I want to revisit the topic later.

The following is from something I read in September on the Virtual Chase.

The problem mentioned in that Scientific American article is just one symptom of a greater disease. Our academic libraries are becoming less open and friendly to people who are not in the inner circle of patrons. Libraries, usually coerced by their vendors and campus IT departments, are under pressure to lock down all their electronic collections and equipment so that they can only be used by that academic institution's students, faculty and staff.

how I changed my iBook's DVD player into a region-free player

I decided to do a little more research into how I might be able to turn my iBook’s DVD player into a region free DVD player. Then on an impulse, I implemented what I learned – and it worked!

So in case I forget what I did, I’m going to write down the steps involved in this.