GLUG: [Fwd: SuitWatch - January 5]
Stefano Canepa
sc@linux.it
Gio 5 Gen 2006 12:49:24 CET
Vi inoltro questo messaggio che mi sembra contenga spunti di
riflessione.
Ciao
sc
------- Messaggio inoltrato -------
Da: Linux Journal News Notes <newsletter@linuxjournal.com>
A: suitwatch@ssc.com
Oggetto: SuitWatch - January 5
Data: Wed, 04 January 2006 15:48:01 -0600
SuitWatch--January 5
Views on Linux in Business
--by Doc Searls, Senior Editor of Linux Journal
_________________________________________________________________
On the Front Lines in Las Vegas
In 1987, after a Spring Break week of camping and exploring in Arizona
and Utah, my teenage son and I were driving down the I-15 from St.
George to Las Vegas. It was dusk when the City of Sin appeared in the
valley, sparkling against purple mountains in the distance.
"Wow", my son said, as the lights grew brighter. "Think of all the
money people have made here." It was the perfect set-up line.
"Dude, everything you see was paid for by losers."
Almost two decades later, I'm thinking about losers again. Only this
time the losers I'm worried about aren't gamblers. They're everybody.
Starting with us.
I'm writing this on the eve of CES, the Consumer Electronics Show, a
trade event of monstrous dimensions. I enjoy coming to CES. It's
always fun to see where Linux pops up and where this large and often
wacky industry is going.
But this time, I'm concerned about signs that the computer
industry--which at least to some degree values openness,
interoperability and freedom--is turning into a category of consumer
electronics, which has never been friendly to those virtues.
A few days ago I asked, "Is Intel Going Hollywood?":
http://www.linuxjournal.com/node/1000028. Of particular concern is
Intel's new Viiv chip, which reportedly will allow DRM (digital rights
management) at the hardware level. In Hardware Analysis, Sander
Sassen:
http://www.hardwareanalysis.com/content/article/1811/ describes a
creepy scenario:
Intel's Viiv is the proverbial icing on the cake, a home
entertainment concept adding the needed hardware support to
supplement the features as found in Windows Vista. And unlike the
concept platform Intel has shown us in the past, Viiv Fork will
start shipping in the first quarter of 2006, quite in time for the
release of Windows Vista. The combination of the two will mean that
you, the end-user, will be royally screwed in every way, shape and
form. That's right, once Viiv Fork and Vista ship you can forget
about exercising your fair-use rights, no more converting songs to
MP3, no more music downloads to and from friends and family, no
more DivX movies, and the list goes on. But more disturbing is the
fact that new content will only be able to playback on the new
platform, there, for example, will be no (legal) Linux support or
support in other operating systems. Simply because any such media
player, able to playback this content, will circumvent the
protection scheme that is DRM, which is illegal. Basically fair use
and your rights as a consumer are out of the window when Viiv Fork
and Vista arrive.
He adds:
With Viiv Intel has given the music and movie industry the tools to
force the consumer to give up its rights and abide by their rules
and has handed the keys to unlock the protection scheme to
Microsoft. Looking at the track record of the music and movie
industry and their watchdogs the RIAA and MPAA you can rest assured
that when this platform is introduced they'll use any possible
legal avenue to further limit how you can use their content. And
more importantly they'll also make sure you pay a substantial
amount of money for any use of their content that before was
labeled as fair use, such as converting songs to MP3 for example.
I left out the more hyperbolic stuff. But you get the picture. Paul
Otellini, Intel's CEO, was not encouraging in an interview with
BusinessWeek:
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_02/b3966009.htm, timed
precisely to coincide with both CES and Macworld, where Apple will be
talking up new Intel-based gear. When asked, "Which technologies,
platforms, most excite you personally?", Otellini replied:
I actually think Viiv is a world changer. Independent of the
hardware as it evolves, it's DRM-agnostic, but it protects
everything. It allows you to move things in a free fashion, but
still maintain the desire of the content owners to get paid for
what they do. It will change the business models of entertainment
and theaters and Hollywood, and it will be for the benefit of
consumers.
Kinda gives me the cold scuzzies.
Speaking of consumers, the Consumer Project on Technology has sent an
open letter to Yahoo:
http://www.cptech.org/ip/wipo/bt/yahooletter.html, asking that
company--which could hardly be more Net-native--to stop siding with
WIPO (the World Intellectual Property Organization), which is pushing
a Broadcasting and Webcasting Treaty. The treaty is designed to give
content producers the rights and abilities to control everything that
happens to "content", all the way to the playback, display and (yes)
production technologies being vetted these next four days at CES.
A year earlier, the Electronic Frontier Foundation sent a similar
letter, signed by 19 leading voices in technology, starting with Mark
Cuban, owner of HDNet, the Dallas Mavericks and over a half-billion
dollars' worth of copyrighted video works. Other letters opposing the
treaty can be found in the link pile below.
James Love wrote A UN/WIPO Plan to Regulate Distribution of
Information on the Internet:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/james-love/a-unwipo-plan-to-regulat_b_11
480.html in the Huffington Post recently. The headline says it all.
But here's one excerpt, just to put you in a fighting mood:
The European Commission is also not trying to impose current
European legal traditions on the rest of the world. Both the US and
the EC negotiators are trying to create a brand new and untested
regime of Internet regulation that they have never even attempted
to adopt in their own Congress or parliaments.
Many other voices are chiming in. James Boyle, who teaches
intellectual property law at the Duke Law School and is co-founder of
the Center for the Study of the Public Domain, recently wrote More
rights are wrong for Webcasters:
http://news.ft.com/cms/s/441306be-2eb6-11da-9aed-00000e2511c8.html, in
which he said:
In the funhouse world that is intellectual property policy, WIPO is
considering a proposal to expand the length of the right by 30
years and a US-backed initiative to apply it to webcasts as well.
After all, we know that the internet is growing so slowly. Clearly
what is needed is an entirely new legal monopoly, on top of
copyright, so that there are even more middlemen, even deeper
thickets of rights.
What is the rationale for this proposal? Parity: "If the
broadcasters have the right, we should too." But wait. There was
never any evidence that even broadcasters needed the right. And the
capital requirements and business models of the two industries are
entirely different. And the reach of the webcasts would in effect
be global. And there is no evidence at all that webcasters need any
kind of protection. And, and...
But to make these arguments is to be naive. WIPO is in the grip of
the belief that more rights are better. Yahoo and a few other
webcasting entities have very slick lobbying operations. The US
representatives have, shamefully, caved in to them. To their
credit, not many countries have yet accepted the need for a
webcaster's right, but it is unclear if their resistance will last.
The "affected industries" have loud voices.
What's especially creepy about the WIPO mess is that Yahoo is in on
it. Is Intel, too? A lot of us like Apple's gear, me included--it's
hard not to. But on the DRM issue, Apple is no friend of openness and
freedom. Who else do we have? IBM? Dell? Hellooooo?
"Saving the Net":
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/8673, which I wrote two months
ago, expressed similar freedom-threatening concerns about what the
carriers want to do to the Net. One of the best pieces of push-back I
got afterwards was from Chris Nolan, who has forgotten more about
politics than most of us will ever know. She wrote:
http://www.spot-on.com/archives/note_to_self_get_real.html:
The tech community's approach to legislative initiatives is--to be
polite--inconsistent. So far, most of the talk has been a bitter,
faux-knowing resignation that of course the big corporations will
triumph and the poor, farsighted Geeks of the tech world
will--sigh--once again be seen as kooks who are trampled by greedy
corporations. And as necessary and timely as Doc Searls' call to
action on this issue is right now, his attitude toward what will
happen and how is based, I am sorry to say, in unrealistic thinking
about how Washington operates. It is a reflection of how tech has
historically fared, not a contemplation of how things have changed
since 1996.
Searls calls on EFF and Larry Lessig, not on TechNet or John Doerr.
He ignores the role that campaign contributions...(Shedding their
civics book aversion to political reality, Doerr and TechNet have
given often in recent years)...
Her point: play harder, and better, ball.
We need to borrow some muscle here. Some organizations outside of
tech. Who? How about the AARP? How about the NRA? Let's think
creatively here.
Let's also think about what we're saving. I believe it's two things,
basically. One is the right to make and do what we want with whatever
we want, respecting laws that already exist. (And without which we
wouldn't have Linux.) The other is to save the environment where our
freedom to produce is far more important than is our ability to
consume. That environment isn't just the wide open frontier we call
the Net. It's the open marketplace growing on that Net and on which
countless economies depend.
Keeping markets open isn't a left vs. right issue. It's a rights vs.
wrongs issue.
We need to make these issues as clear as we can. And we need to go to
battle with whatever allies we can find.
I'll let you know what--and who--I find here at CES and then at
Macworld next week.
Resources
Joho the Blog:
http://www.hyperorg.com/blogger/mtarchive/wipo_and_the_war_against_the
_i.html
Sign-on Letter asking the leadership of the House and Senate to block
US support for a diplomatic conference at WIPO until the public can
comment on the proposal.:
http://www.cptech.org/ip/wipo/bt/bt-signon.html
The proposed WIPO Treaty for the Protection of the Rights of
Broadcasting, Cablecasting and Webcasting Organizations:
http://www.cptech.org/ip/wipo/bt/index.html
--
Doc Searls:
mailto:doc@ssc.com is Senior Editor of Linux Journal. He writes the
Linux for Suits column for Linux Journal. He also presides over Doc
Searls' IT Garage:
http://garage.docsearls.com, which is published by SSC, the publisher
of Linux Journal.
_________________________________________________________________
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_________________________________________________________________
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_________________________________________________________________
--
Stefano Canepa aka sc: sc@linux.it http://www.stefanocanepa.it
Three great virtues of a programmer: laziness, impatience and hubris.
Le tre grandi virtù di un programmatore: pigrizia, impazienza e
arroganza. (Larry Wall)
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