1)  "If it doesn't have a copyright notice, it's not
        copyrighted."

        This was true in the past, but today almost all major
        nations follow the Berne copyright convention.  For example,
        in the USA, almost everything created privately after April 1,
        1989 is copyrighted and protected whether it has a notice or not.
        The default you should assume for other people's works is that
        they are copyrighted and may not be copied unless you *know*
        otherwise.  There are some old works that lost protection
        without notice, but frankly you should not risk it unless
        you know for sure.

        It is true that a notice strengthens the protection, by
        warning people, and by allowing one to get more and
        different damages, but it is not necessary.  If it looks
        copyrighted, you should assume it is.   This applies to pictures,
        too.  You may not scan pictures from magazines and post them
        to the net, and if you come upon something unknown,
        you shouldn't post that either.

        The correct form for a notice is:
                "Copyright <dates> by <author/owner>"
        You can use C in a circle instead of "Copyright" but "(C)"
        has never been given legal force.  The phrase "All Rights
        Reserved" used to be required in some nations but is now
        not needed.


        2) "If I don't charge for it, it's not a violation."

        False.  Whether you charge can affect the damages awarded in
        court, but that's essentially the only difference.  It's still a
        violation if you give it away -- and there can still be
        heavy damages if you hurt the commercial value of the
        property.

        3) "If it's posted to Usenet it's in the public domain."

        False.  Nothing is in the public domain anymore unless the
        owner explicitly puts it in the public domain(*).  Explicitly,
        as in you have a note from the author/owner saying, "I grant
        this to the public domain."  Those exact words or words very
        much like them.

        Some argue that posting to Usenet implicitly grants
        permission to everybody to copy the posting within fairly
        wide bounds, and others feel that Usenet is an automatic store and
        forward network where all the thousands of copies made are
        done at the command (rather than the consent) of the
        poster.  This is a matter of some debate, but even if the
        former is true (and in this writer's opinion we should all pray
        it isn't true) it simply would suggest posters are implicitly
        granting permissions "for the sort of copying one might expect
        when one posts to Usenet" and in no case is this a placement
        of material into the public domain.  Furthermore it is very
        difficult for an implicit licence to supersede an explicitly
        stated licence that the copier was aware of.

        Note that all this assumes the poster had the right to post
        the item in the first place.  If the poster didn't, then all
        the copies are pirate, and no implied licence or theoretical
        reduction of the copyright can take place.

        (*) Copyrights can expire after a long time, putting someting
        into the public domain, and there are some fine points on
        this issue regarder older copyright law versions.  However, none
        of this applies to an original article posted to USENET.

        Note that granting something to the public domain is a complete
        abandonment of all rights.  You can't make something "PD for
        non-commercial use."  If your work is PD, other people can even
        modify one byte and put their name on it.

        4) "My posting was just fair use!"

        See other notes on fair use for a detailed answer, but bear
        the following in mind:

        The "fair use" exemption to copyright law was created to allow
        things such as commentary, parody, news reporting, research and
        education about copyrighted works without the permission of the
        author.  Intent, and damage to the commercial value of the
        work are important considerations.  Are you reproducing an
        article from the New York Times because you needed to in order
        to criticise the quality of the New York Times, or because you
        couldn't find time to write your own story, or didn't want your
        readers to have to pay to log onto the online services with the
        story or buy a copy of the paper?  The former is probably fair
        use, the latter probably aren't.

        Fair use is almost always a short excerpt and almost always
        attributed.  (One should not use more of the work than is
        necessary to make the commentary.) It should not harm the
        commercial value of the work (which is another reason why
        reproduction of the entire work is generally forbidden.)

        Note that most inclusion of text in Usenet followups is for
        commentary and reply, and it doesn't damage the commercial
        value of the original posting (if it has any) and as such it
        is fair use.  Fair use isn't an exact doctrine, either.  The
        court decides if the right to comment overrides the copyright
        on an indidvidual basis in each case.  There have been cases
        that go beyond the bounds of what I say above, but in general
        they don't apply to the typical net misclaim of fair use.
        It's a risky defence to attempt.

        5) "If you don't defend your copyright you lose it."

        False.  Copyright is effectively never lost these days, unless
        explicitly given away.  You may be thinking of trade marks, which
        can be weakened or lost if not defended.

        6) "Somebody has that name copyrighted!"

        You can't "copyright a name," or anything short like that.
        Titles usually don't qualify -- but I doubt you may write a
        song entitled "Everybody's got something to hide except for
        me and my monkey." (J.Lennon/P.McCartney)

        You can't copyright words, but you can trademark them,
        generally by using them to refer to your brand of a
        generic type of product or service.  Like an "Apple"
        computer.  Apple Computer "owns" that word applied to
        computers, even though it is also an ordinary word.  Apple
        Records owns it when applied to music.  Neither owns the
        word on its own, only in context, and owning a mark doesn't
        mean complete control -- see a more detailed treatise on
        this law for details.

        You can't use somebody else's trademark in a way that would
        unfairly hurt the value of the mark, or in a way that might
        make people confuse you with the real owner of the mark, or
        which might allow you to profit from the mark's good name.
        For example, if I were giving advice on music videos, I
        would be very wary of trying to label my works with a name
        like "mtv."  :-)

        7) "They can't get me, defendants in court have powerful rights!"

        Copyright law is mostly civil law.  If you violate copyright
        you would usually get sued, not charged with a crime.
        "Innocent until proven guilty" is a principle of criminal
        law, as is "proof beyond a reasonable doubt."  Sorry, but in
        copyright suits, these don't apply the same way or at all.
        It's mostly which side and set of evidence the judge or
        jury accepts or believes more, though the rules vary based
        on the type of infringement.  In civil cases you can even
        be made to testify against your own interests.

        8) "Oh, so copyright violation isn't a crime or anything?"

        Actually, recently in the USA commercial copyright
        violation involving more than 10 copies and value over
        $2500 was made a felony.  So watch out.  (At least you get
        the protections of criminal law.)  On the other hand, don't
        think you're going to get people thrown in jail for posting
        your E-mail.  The courts have much better things to do than
        that.  This is a fairly new, untested statute.

        9) "It doesn't hurt anybody -- in fact it's free advertising."

        It's up to the owner to decide if they want the free ads or
        not.  If they want them, they will be sure to contact you.
        Don't rationalize whether it hurts the owner or not, *ask*
        them.  Usually that's not too hard to do.  Time past,
        ClariNet published the very funny Dave Barry column to a
        large and appreciative Usenet audience for a fee, but some
        person didn't ask, and forwarded it to a mailing list, got
        caught, and the newspaper chain that employs Dave Barry
        pulled the column from the net, pissing off everybody who
        enjoyed it.  Even if you can't think of how the author or
        owner gets hurt, think about the fact that piracy on the net
        hurts everybody who wants a chance to use this wonderful new
        technology to do more than read other people's flamewars.

        10) "They e-mailed me a copy, so I can post it."

        To have a copy is not to have the copyright.  All the E-mail
        you write is copyrighted.  However, E-mail is not, unless
        previously agreed, secret.  So you can certainly *report* on
        what E-mail you are sent, and reveal what it says.  You can
        even quote parts of it to demonstrate.  Frankly, somebody
        who sues over an ordinary message might well get no damages,
        because the message has no commercial value, but if you want
        to stay strictly in the law, you should ask first.  On the
        other hand, don't go nuts if somebody posts your E-mail. If
        it was an ordinary non-secret personal letter of minimal
        commercial value with no copyright notice (like 99.9% of all
        E-mail), you probably won't get any damages if you sue them.


        -----------------    In Summary   ---------------------------
        
        These days, almost all things are copyrighted the moment they
        are written, and no copyright notice is required.

        Copyright is still violated whether you charged money or not,
        only damages are affected by that.

        Postings to the net are not granted to the public domain, and
        don't grant you any permission to do further copying except
        *perhaps* the sort of copying the poster might have expected
        in the ordinary flow of the net.

        Fair use is a complex doctrine meant to allow certain valuable
        social purposes.  Ask yourself why you are republishing what
        you are posting and why you couldn't have just rewritten it
        in your own words.

        Copyright is not lost because you don't defend it; that's
        a concept from trademark law.  The ownership of names is
        also from trademark law, so don't say somebody has a name
        copyrighted.

        Copyright law is mostly civil law where the special rights
        of criminal defendants you hear so much about don't apply.
        Watch out, however, as new laws are moving copyright
        violation into the criminal realm.

        Don't rationalize that you are helping the copyright holder;
        often it's not that hard to ask permission.

        Posting E-mail is technically a violation, but revealing
        facts from E-mail isn't, and for almost all typical E-mail,
        nobody could wring any damages from you for posting it.

        -----------------------------------------------------------

                Permission is granted to freely copy this
                document in electronic form, or to print for
                personal use.  If you had not seen a notice
                like this on the document, you would have to
                assume you did not have permission to copy it.
                This document is still protected by you-know-
                what even though it has no copyright notice.

        It should be noted that the author, as publisher of an
        electronic newspaper on the net, makes his living by
        publishing copyrighted material in electronic form and has
        the associated biases.  However, DO NOT E-MAIL HIM FOR LEGAL
        ADVICE; for that use other resources or consult a lawyer.
        Also note that while most of these principles are universal
        in Berne copyright signatory nations, some are derived from
        Canadian and U.S. law.  This document is provided to clear
        up some common misconceptions about intellectual property
        law that are often seen on the net.  It is not intended to
        be a complete treatise on all the nuances of the subject.  A
        more detailed copyright FAQ, covering other issues including
        compilation copyright and more intricacies of fair use is
        available in the same places you found this note, or for FTP
        on rtfm.mit.edu in pub/usenet-by-group/news.answers/law/copyright/faq.
        Also consider gopher://marvel.loc.gov/11/copyright for
        actual statutes.  Another useful document is
        http://www.eff.org/pub/CAF/law/ip-primer

        This FAQ can be found at http://www.clari.net/brad/copymyths.html

Sony, like the other disc producers/distributors, finally figured it out: Consumers are actually ready to pay MP3 files to Apple and Amazon if the protection is not included (or very limited). Instead of staying behind (and off the sales increase for online music) disc producers come back to reason.

About Sony, I don’t know yet if the move will immediately cover the full catalog or a part only, but this is already going far enough to say that this is only a matter of time.

The door is opening wide onto the online sales of legal MP3 files but without silly protection.

Source: Business Week.

EMI and Universal had already gone this way. The only big one missing is still Sony BMG (Do you remember? They were the authors of the famous rootkit installed on some of their CD to protect them and that breaking havoc on their customers’ PC machine).

Complementary information: With this annoncement, Amazon will reach nearly 3 million DRM-free MP3 files (up to now, the record was held by iTunes with -only- 2 millions).

Also, Deutsche Grammophon (a subsidiary of Universal Music) has decided to open its DRM-free online music store.

And in a parallel thread, Amazon and Pepsi are teaming up to give away 1 million DRM-free songs in 2008.

Then, we learned that Paramount started selling DVDs at a bargain price (3 US$) in China in an attempt to reduce the impact of rampant piracy in this country. Cheap discs mean that consumers may buy more (you have to admit that pricing the discs at the same level as the bootleg copies easily available makes a good selling point).

It could be a marketers’ last attempt, but there is a near simultaneous announcement that has shed a significant light onto this issue: UK-based music store 7 Digital tells us that DRM-free MP3 tracks outsell their DRMed counterparts by a factor of four to one. This should help music producers understand that the market is requesting DRM-free products. But will they hear?

For the first time, they use a virtual machine technology that allows to load code at the same time as the video data. It is thought to be a way to run code that would check if the BluRay players has been hacked. However, the discs do not play on Samsung’s BDP-1200 and LG’s BH100, and most other players (including the PlayStation 3) have longer-than-usual load times (up to two minutes). Samsung’s BDP-1000 also has problems of stuttering and error messages.

Some of the manufacturers announced software updates, but remember that now that DRM is on us, we may have to upgrade the player firmware just to play a DVD…

SpiralFrog

Did I speak about its legal status? It is legal. However, everything is protected by DRM, you need to use Windows and Windows Media Player 10+, and if you don’t watch the ads at least once in 30 days, the movie and the music is out…

As if this had any impact on pirates. As if it was good practice to annoy 100% of your customers.

This is a new example of why I am against copy protection and DRM. Pirates will obviously not notice the event and won’t even be annoyed. But legal customers of Microsoft are stuck waiting for the repair of these servers in order to come back to normal use of their software. Clearly, copy protection is not a customer service, only a mean to a sales end.

The game is using SecuROM protection. Unfortunately, on top of requiring an active Internet connection, it limits the number of installation or re-installations on a machine if you change the hardware. It started by allowing only two installations (if you have to upgrade your PC to run the game, you’re quickly out of legal installations; You must uninstall before upgrading your PC!).

Furthermore, AMD and nVidia had to publish last-minute patches and new versions of their drivers.

Finally, it seems that the management of wide-screen 16:10 displays is insufficient: You get black bands on the side of your lovely LCD display. 2K Games says that a patch/correction will come soon.

All that leads to two comments:

• Even if most video games run to the market with bugs in them, Bioshock is just not ready yet. It is probably better to just wait for it coming out of beta-stage.
• When I buy a $50 video game, I expect it to work onto my machine without having to call secuROM to explain that I am the rightful owner. This is not a $2 song for my Sony MP3 player (and I already consider that DRM on MP3 songs is a pain in the neck). This is just going to push legal players to downloading unprotected versions from BitTorrent or DirectConnect. When copyright-minded marketoids push users to illegality, things must have gone too far…

Update: If that was not enough, it seems that SecuROM is having trouble running when you use AVG antivirus (one of the vest free antivirus software programs for Windows, that I also happen to be using) or Mircosoft’s own Process Explorer (info from The Inquirer who suggests that you should avoid Bioshock like the plague for those problems – I am no longer decided to buy the game; Maybe later…).

First, the Internet users start to find again -in Europe- some protection since a decision from the European Justice Court: the ISPs will not be obligated to deliver the name of Internet users associated to an IP address when merely requested by copyright owners like we see in the US of A (the case was opened when Telefonica denied this right to deliver the name and address of some of its subscribers accused by a Spanish copyright owner of using Kazaa to exchange MP3 files). It means that the legal actions to attack indelicate Internet users copying songs, music or videos will be limited far below the level reached in North America where tens of thousands of such actions have been started. There will be the need to open not only a civil case, but a criminal action.

Furthermore, BitTorrent, the most easily recognized software program running on the BitTorrent network, will no longer be free. This is most probably a consequence of the intent of its developers to entter a new phase where they want to reap benefits from more commercial activities (including less risks of legal actions, too). Nothing new under the sun, since many Internet users already prefered BitComet, Azureus or uTorrent.

You may also remember that AllOfMp3, a Russian web site distributing MP3 files without any trace of DRM protection, had to stop its activities a few months ago after police action and the beginnning of legal procedure. It appears that Denis Kvasov, founder of AllOfMp3, has been cleared by the Russian justice (he was insisting on the fact that his sales were including author’s right compensation even if some Euopean and American companies were after him for selling at low prices and without DRM).

Add to it that PirateBay (BitTorrent files search site) have been authorized a few months ago by the Sweedish justice to restart their activity and that they now want to give a new life to the SuperNova web site that closed a couple of years ago, I would try to say that the pendulum is swinging back toward the side most favorable to the Internet users. During months, it seemed that the media producers would be able to force anything they wanted into our throats under the pretense of protecting artists rights. Now, they start experimenting with low-cost without-DRM legal alternatives for music download (even in always-easily-scared France, Neuf-Cegetel intends to start an ISP offer including that kind of possibility: unlimited music and triple-play (Internet+TV+telephone) for 29.90€). Even better, the development of Video on Demand should help film producers and distributors to think in a parallel line.

There is only to find a way to balance the ease of use (requested by Internet users) and artist earnings (naturally expected by the authors). We should find this middle way for the best of consumers and artists, even if it measn suffering for some producers and distributors.

This is so abnormal, that I start to kick the paranoid mode in. One of the explanations I heard is that if Microsoft is unable to go into details and does not bring a solution is because this is not a bug but a side-effect of an intended feature. The most probable thing coming to mind: Windows Vista includes an extension to the file system that allows to handle more directly Rights Management (DRM and similar). In order to do this, they have to pay a price in performance whenever we want to access to a file.

So, is the long-copy/long-delete bug actually an intended feature of an Operating System hiding more and more anti-user devices? It is the more possible if you remember that before Vista launch Microsoft touted the feature allowing to add a peremption date to files (“file auto-destruct on 31st December next year”) or to limit access to only a limited set of users.

See also: The Register.

I admit easily that I am not surprised to see a politician posturing as is expected from his image and adopt an attitude that is based on perceptions but ignoring technical and commercial realities. Nicolas Sarkozy is playing his part in the show as a right wing leader decided to fight all kinds of illegal activities. Nobody should be surprised here. But I contend that this is already an echo from the past and he is missing the light of the future.

Exactly on the opposite, Amazon recognized the commercial reality: Customers do not want those technical anti-copy measures. They go against the legal user (the illegal one does not even see this in the illegal but free MP3 files, of course); They do not stop industrial copy and intense distribution on the P2P networks for example, but they stop the buyer from playing the music title on a player that is nto pre-aprpoved or on the PC of the son’s bedroom, or on the CD-player of Mom’s car, etc.

Amazon, understanding this reality -and certainly also aware that online stores without DRM have better sales/user figures than the others- decided to go and fight directly the current leader of eMusic, Apple iTunes.

Wish them luck! If there will always be poor teenagers ready to sacrifice quality, ease of use, ease of purchase, elegance of the package, etc. (didn’t we copy LPs on dirt cheap tapes when we were young?), a good product will always be a hit.

And if some people insist on telling that the competition of a free product (illegal downloads) can only kill paying products (online music stores), I invite them to consider the tough/relentless competition between a product with a (very very high) price as bottled water and a product (nearly) free like tap water available in nearly all homes (at least in the developed countries). As far as I know, Perrier, Dasani, San Pellegrino, Vittel, Volvic et al. do not petition for a law prohibiting tap water. Those companies and brands offer a product with very notables advantages and make a nice profit out of it.

The MPAA tries to ban this famous key number from the Internet while it keeps popping up everywhere. This week, it’s the rage all other the web: Let’s publish the key.

09 f9 11 02 9d 74 e3 5b d8 41 56 c5 63 56 88 c0

Internet users visibly do not want to be stuck again with one of those technical measures that do not (and cannot) stop real pirates and are creating more problem for loyal users/buyers. So, this is quite a large movement we are participating to.

One of the sources: The Inquirer.

That could quickly become one of the most interesting development in video games for Windows this year.

Cody Brocious official Project Alky blog.

From the Inquirer.

Coming from a company that is living from the sale of legal MP3s, it has a lot of weight. Up to now, that was repeated in many circles, but the music major producers where denying it or downplaying it. Now, it comes from one of the inner circles.

We told you that DRM is annoying (or more) the legal-minded user who bought a DRM-infected file, but leaves the pirates able to plainly use the files in the most usual and natural way. More than one user decided to download the file from P2P just to get rid of the annoyance.

I have at home an “English patient” DVD that repetetively refuses to start in my Home Cinema PC (I don’t have any other DVD player). Maybe I should download a copy from BitTorrent, leave the DVD box on its shelf and watch the movie.

My suggestion is not “go and pirate!”, but it’s call to arms for the marketing departments of these music producers. The customers want music, they are ready to pay for it (look at iTunes and MusicLoad, to name two), but they don’t want the hassles of those protections. Being blind to customer needs is a doomed approach to business. Start listening and P2P will become less of a problem (being free is not an overwhelming advantage: Perrier is selling bottled water and does not complain about the virtually free water on tap).

The solution (according to Steve): A re-inforced fight against piracy and a stricter WGA system. It’s only the beginning…