DMCA 2.0 - Just Steal CDs

First published here.

Ed Felton recently pointed out that under the proposed extensions to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (or DMCA 2.0 as it is becoming known as), non-commercial copyright infringement such as file sharing would carry a bigger penalty than manslaughter - up to ten years in the big house.

Compared to the average sentence for manslaughter (33 months in jail), one really does have to wonder if Lamar Smith has actually thought about his proposed bill, or if the rush of campaign contributions from Hollywood has gone to his head, because under the DMCA 2.0, you'd be better off going old school and just stealing CDs from Wal-Mart.

That's larceny and will get you a whopping 8.3 months in jail if the Wal-Mart rent-a-cops catch you on the way out.

The same goes for the increased anti-circumvention provisions that are on the table. DMCA 2.0 would make it illegal to simply have anti-circumvention tools in your possession with intent to distribute them, and it's easy to imagine a federal prosecutor arguing an internet connection serves as proof that an unlucky researcher was planning to share their 133t h4xor tools with the world.

I can see the headlines now: "File sharing Down 2%, Petty Theft up 862%", followed closely by "IP Laws Backfire On U.S., Smart Yanks Flee Country".

So what happens if you can't be bothered cracking it yourself and just go find the guy who designed the copy protection and point a shotgun at him until he posts the source code online? Well, that would add up to about 20 years. So you'd be better off just sending anonymous threats about his family - that's only worth about seven years on average, and it'd be easier to argue you weren't actually serious about the whole thing if you were to be caught.

Even if you did get sent down for it, you'd still come in three years under the sentences being handed out to geeky researchers.

And hey, if you only get five months inside for telling eBay's ceo you're going to "haunt and hurt you and your family," I'm sure there will be some one out there willing to sacrifice themselves so that everyone can enjoy unencrypted HD movies.

Or more likely, someone driven to insanity by overly restrictive DRM (and I understand "temporary insanity" goes down well with the judge). Just. Copy. Damn. Thing. To. Ipod. Ahhhhhh!

It's also easy to imagine a scenario where the author of a virus and the guy who develops a patch for it end up sharing the same cell. All the virus writer would need to do is include some rudimentary encryption in his code to ensure no anti-virus researcher would be keen to write a fix if the only way to do so would be to crack the encryption.

I wonder how many anti-virus providers would be ready to step up and fight this in court? I wonder how many of their employees would agree to work on a fix in the first place, considering they themselves would be in the dock facing a federal prison sentence?

Perhaps Lamar Smith believes some intellectual property is more worthy of protection than other intellectual property? If intellectual property is an absolute right, as some misguided people seem to think it is, we should remind them that an individual's rights don't suddenly disappear when they break the law. (Well, Guantanamo Bay aside, an individual's rights don't suddenly disappear when they break the law).

The author of an annoying, but harmless, mass mailing worm should get the same protection for their work as anyone else. Right?

What if the worm was genuinely written to explore and evaluate security holes, like to find out how many copies of a dodgy mail server are in operation? A very black hat way of going about things, but the intention behind the act may be as worthy as the corporate anti-virus researchers (and also the most practical way of fixing the problem if your warnings about security holes have been ignored previously).

Pfft! Who cares? Let the courts figure it out. They're the ones who're experienced in dealing with ill-conceived laws after they've been passed.

It seems that the entertainment cartel's men in Washington have gotten a little carried away with protecting their interests online 'cause if the DMCA 2.0 passes, you be better off giving up p2p and taking a full time job as a heroin dealer - you'd actually be able to afford the CDs and good lawyers then.

Machinima License Machinations

First published here.

My first experience with machinima was watching some films made in the game Myth: The Fallen Lords. The game's "Save Film" feature had been used to record some short vids of dwarves blowing themselves up with Molotov cocktails.

Not usually riveting viewing, you'd think, but the film-makers had been hacking the game's hex code and were able to get the dwarves heads' to morph onto half a dozen flapping chickens at the moment of detonation.

From then on, I spend many hours on a crappy dial-up connection searching for and downloading other short clips made inside computer games. As the art of machinima is based on games, the look and feel is as technologically up-to-date as the games are, which nowadays is pretty spectacular: water shimmers, clouds drift slowly across the sky and blood spatters are so good that you feel queasy just looking at some very well arranged pixels.

The biggest problem with machinima now, though, is the legally gray area it falls under.

Game companies own the intellectual property behind the game and most of the artwork too, so just about any film made using computer games infringes on the game developers' copyright in some way.

Watching the machinima community from a distance, I see a lot of frustration. There are film makers out there just dying to push the envelope and explore the limits of the technology at their disposal, but anything they do that might bring them any kind of publicity (and popularity) will probably get them in a lot of legal trouble as well.

I imagine it would be like some bastard owning the rights to any music made by a guitar: you only play for your mates at parties and occasionally someone makes a "live" bootleg recording of it, but anything you do that might make you a rich and famous guitar playing hero will result in the aforementioned bastard being awarded the shirt off your back by way of statutory damages.

This is something that has stumped me for a while: Why aren't the game developers licensing their games to machinima film makers? As it stands, the game companies get no money from fan-made machinima, but plenty of free advertising ("Wow! Look at the graphics in that!") Value-adding is a well-known and often-used business practice - just take an existing product and get it to do something that will make more people buy it. It's not like the game developers have any extra work to do anyway, as there are people making films using their stuff right now.

It would however, be easy to increase a game's attractiveness to film makers by putting in some extra functionality, like releasing the level editors the game designers themselves use - virtual set designing tools in fact.

How does this sound? You buy a game with the regular $69.95 price tag. For $10 extra, you get a non-commercial Machinima License too. Using your (legitimate) product key, you go to the game developers' site and purchase an additional license for, say, $200 that allows you to get commercial sponsors for your machinima film, so you can make a small profit if your project comes in under budget. $600 buys you the right to ask for donations if people like your work. Five grand gets you the ability to stamp 10,000 DVDs and sell them in K-mart.

It might sound silly, but in comparison to the tens of millions of dollars it (apparently) costs production companies like Pixar to make their films, I wonder how many people would jump at the chance to put their creative efforts behind a legally sound machinima project? Perhaps not many, but again, how much work is involved on the game developer's part?

It's also worth thinking about how many people will start off on a cheap license and then purchase upgrades as their skill and confidence increases. Mmm...residual sales! Yum!

Perhaps game companies could even offer basic e-commerce facilities for machinima makers to sell their work. Even being legally able to stick a Revver tag in your film would benefit a lot of people. Games like The Movies and productions like Red Vs Blue (who got a special deal with Microsoft, whereby the makers didn't get massive fines and MS got free publicity) are already pushing this exciting new art form into the public consciousness.

With the game industry already a-twitter over wonderful new "episodic gaming" (or smaller games being released more often in PR-free speak) it seems remiss of this enormous industry to be ignoring the shift towards consumer generated content which, by the way, is an oxymoron if ever I heard one 'cause nobody works in complete isolation, especially script writers or directors. Perhaps the PR-free translation of "consumer generated content" is "content we don't make any money from".

Well, if that's the perceived problem, try opening up the technology to people who want to use it and will pay for the privilege.

Or sue them. That goes down really well.

.xxx Shelved. Again.

First published here.

It looks like the .xxx Top Level Domain (TLD) has been side-lined again.

It seems ironic that while the U.S. is regarded (by Americans anyway) as having invented the internet, the U.S. controlled Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICAAN) has been so slow in developing and authorizing new TLDs. The .xxx domain was previously shelved last year after a prolonged campaign by conservative Christian groups and last week it was delayed again at an ICANN meeting in New Zealand.

"This is a great example of the success of the public policy advice process at work, which demonstrates that ICANN takes governmental input seriously. The ICANN Board is committed to continuing to enhance the integration of the [Governmental Advisory Committee]'s public policy role to ICANN's decision processes", said president and ceo of ICANN, Dr Paul Twomey.

Well. Nice to know that ICANN bows to U.S. government "input" anyway. I wonder why they even bothered going to New Zealand? It's not as if the rest of the world has any real influence on ICANN. I don't know: perhaps the ICANN board wanted to see Middle Earth for themselves, or go hang-gliding or something.

The Australian government has spoken out against a sexy internet address in the past, but then this is the same government that banned internet casinos from operating here in Australia and lost all their tax revenue when the sites relocated offshore within hours of the law being passed.

I've stopped taking the Oz government seriously whenever they talk about the internet because it's obvious the people who write the policies are the kind of people who open email attachments called really_funny.pic.of.u_and_me.exe. You know, those "what's a linux?" kind of people?

They probably run your government too.

There are many views on the subject of a .xxx domain, but they can be summarized pretty easily:

a. No! Bad idea!
b. Yes! Great idea!
c. Who cares?

Here's a quick breakdown:

No! Bad idea!

This is the view of onservative Christian groups who hold a lot of political clout in the US. The cynical among us say this is because those groups actually like being outraged by obscene content because it allows them to continue holding the "moral" high ground when trying to ban or restrict pornography. If pornography is everywhere, it's a lot easier to point to when making an argument against it.

That's it really.

Yes! Great idea!

This is my personal view and it's based about half on logic and half on my philosophical beliefs, which often seem to overlap.

The logical part of the argument is basically that there are Top Level Domains for a reason. That reason is to divide up the internet into usable chunks that can be categorized for the benefit of people creating content and for people consuming the content. For example, www.random-research-institute.EDU is a government funded teaching institute that researches how people process information in their daily lives. www.random-research-institute.org on the other hand is a fascist think tank that encourages the study of eugenics to breed out the weaker members of society and create a super race to colonize the moons of Saturn.

Which is fine, because the only way we know that we have free speech is if we allow every wacko out there to say what they like as well, and if they want to set up a private organization to help them say it, great. But put it under a .org domain so I can distingush it from infromation that may be politely described as more useful.

So that's why we can't and shouldn't try to bung everything under the regular old .com domain - humans need to organize stuff. We do it unconsciously and after a little bit of experience, we tend to follow the same organizational patterns as everyone else seems to. Then every so often someone comes along and suggests formalizing an ad-hoc system that has been in use for a long time.

Like how to tell people that you've got smut on your web site, for instance.

Punch "glasses for women" into Google and you'll get a variety of results. Some of the sites offer a ranges of specs with feminine designs and attractive prices and some will offer you an insight into the strange world of myopic paraphilia. Luckily, Google can filter out most of the fetish sites with the SafeSearch option, but that isn't something you can use to block these sites completely. You'd need to block them at network, or ISP, level if you wanted to do it properly, which is why a lot of porn sites wanted the .xxx domain in the first place.

From the pornographer's point of view, they want people visiting their site to become customers. To do that, you need a credit card.

Minors typically don't have credit cards, ergo having minors visiting your web site is a waste of time for them and bandwidth for the site owner. Couple that with the all the horror stories of stolen credit card info and trojan horses, and you come to realize porn site operators have their work cut out getting people to actually trust them enough to pay for the hot stuff in the first place. Then there's the whole compliance with Title 18, Section 2257 of the U.S. Code, and the various Age Verification Systems. Wouldn't it be nice of you could voluntarily have your raunchy site regulated up to the eyeballs as proof that you want to do the right thing and keep the kiddies out?

Had the .xxx domain been allowed, what probably would have happened is that a large number of adult sites would have kept their .com names and used them as the entry page (with the standard "I Agree to the terms, etc") and redirected visitors to their main site hosted under a .xxx domain. This would have provided an extra layer of verification, especially in the corporate environment, where the network admin could simply block access to the entire .xxx TLD.

Click on "Enter HardcoreHeaven.xxx" at work and you get a great big screen telling you to get your kicks on your own time, buddy! It would be pretty simple to do at an ISP level too. Got kids? Call up your ISP and get them to block the .xxx domain. They usually offer filtering software anyway (sometimes by law) so from the ISP's point of view it would be much easier to just stop people going to certain domains than create block lists of every adult site they can find.

This leads to the I-have-no-opinion opinion. There are a lot of people with a lot of reasons why a .xxx would be a good idea. Some of them are even the porn sites who want a nice, quite little corner of the net where nobody will bother them with hysterical "won't somebody think of the children" rantings 'cause they did think of the children and asked for a space the children can be kept out of to prove it. The people who don't want a .xxx domain can only offer feeble excuses such as, "it will legitimize pornography".

Does it need to be "legitimate"? I mean, it exists doesn't it? Should we be having a discussion on the fundamental nature of reality and our place in the space-time continuum instead?

So if you don't have an opinion, get one.

One of the main arguments for a .xxx Top Level Domain is that the individual can choose whether they want to visit those sites or not, so check out the (still hopeful) registry operator and the sponsoring organization, see what they have to say and make up your own mind.

http://www.iffor.org/ - International Foundation for Online Responsibility
http://www.icmregistry.com/ - ICM Registry