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Archives for August 2002

More on Apple’s iDVD crackdown

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Eric Albert says I got the Apple/Other World Computing DVD story wrong (thanks to Dave Winer for the link). Eric says Apple was right to invoke the Digital Millennium Copyright Act because Other World Computing was distributing a “patch” to Apple’s iDVD software, and therefore Apple was protecting the copyright on its software.

Well, based on the original CNET story I think I need to stand by my interpretation. (I can find no other coverage — anyone else see more details elsewhere?) If Other World’s product was actually a modified version of iDVD, if Other World was itself redistributing Apple’s software, then Apple has a case that Other World was violating its copyright (though not that Other World was violating the DMCA — see below). But that’s not what a “patch” typically is; usually it’s a piece of code that a user installs that modifies how a program functions.

If Other World was distributing a separate piece of software that users can install that interacts with iDVD then I don’t see how this violates Apple’s copyright. If that’s a violation of the DMCA then every single software “add-on”, every single software program that interacts with another software program, is in violation of the DMCA. And that’s patently absurd. But this is the kind of craziness the DMCA is moving us towards.

In any case, the DMCA doesn’t prohibit companies from distributing software that modifies how another company’s software works. The language used outlaws anything that “is primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing protection afforded by a technological measure that effectively protects a right of a copyright owner.” In other words, DMCA wants to stop you from creating a tool that’s primarily for the purpose of circumventing copyright protection technology. There is no way under the sun that Other World’s iDVD patch falls under that prohibition.

Syndication perturbation

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Salon blogger J.H. Farr was upset to find that the entire current contents of his blog were mirrored on another site that picked up the RSS syndication feed from Radio and reposted the contents.

I understand where he’s coming from: He’s a writer trying to build a career, trying to get people to pay for his stuff some of the time, and I think he feels like he’s being ripped off. (We contacted that other site — I’m not linking to them because I don’t particularly like their approach either — and they’ve removed Farr’s stuff.)

RSS syndication of blog postings is mostly used by Radio and other blogging software tools as an alternate distribution of your material — Radio collects these in its “news aggregator,” and that’s what lets you grab a post from another blogger and, with one click, repost it with your own comments. It’s one of the backbones of this new Web publishing model and in general, I think, it’s a great thing. (Here’s Dave Winer’s explanation of how it works and why it’s a good thing.)

I also think that, legally and morally, it falls in the category of “fair use” — which means that it becomes increasingly more problematic when others take and reuse more and more material. In the case of Farr and other blogs that are reposted on this other site, the postings are resupplied by a third party without any value added — there are no new comments from the site’s proprietor — and in fact with value subtracted, since many of the features of the original blogger’s site (layout, comments, whatever else the blogger has done to personalize the page) are gone.

Radio lets you turn this syndication on and off, so it’s ultimately up to each blogger how to deal with this issue. (I’m also pretty sure that you can reduce the amount of content in your syndication feed under “Prefs: RSS Configuration.) I tend to feel that the Net is pretty good at self-correcting these kinds of problems. The site in question is, in truth, not a particularly great one. I doubt it gets a lot of traffic and I don’t think it will have much impact on anyone’s life.

PS If you want to keep your RSS feed going with Radio but want to truncate the posts (providing only the first sentence) there’s some instructions here.

Apple’s DVD lockdown

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For an example of the kind of insanity we’re in store for as Hollywood (the “content lobby”) hooks up with Silicon Valley (the “hardware industry”) to clamp down on intellectual property controls, consider this story from News.com’s Declan McCullagh. Apple has told a third-party software provider that it can no longer distribute software that lets Mac users use their Apple-supplied DVD-burning software with external recordable DVD drives. Users can still burn DVDs on their internal, Apple-supplied drives. Apple’s lawyers used the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) of 1998 as their rationale.

But this isn’t about protecting copyrighted movies from being duplicated (you can do that with the same ease or difficulty whether your DVD drive is internal or external); it’s about Apple wanting to force people to buy new computers with Apple’s own recordable DVD drives, rather than upgrading their older Macs with external drives supplied by third parties. In other words, Apple found the DMCA to be a pliable tool, easily adaptable for its own ends that have nothing to do with protecting intellectual property.

As “the content lobby” pushes “the hardware industry” to build more and more copyright control directly into computer hardware like hard drives (as chronicled by Salon’s Damien Cave here), we can expect this kind of rule-repurposing to happen more and more frequently.

Don’t miss…

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…the new Salon cover story, which provides a fascinatingly detailed account of exactly how Thomas White — Bush’s secretary of the Army — inflated the dubious profit claims of his division at Enron in spring 2001, immediately before leaving for government service. White has said he was operating his division of Enron as a separate fiefdom, and that he shouldn’t be tarred with the same brush as Enron’s rogue’s gallery of corporate scoundrels. But if you read Jason Leopold’s story you will have a hard time believing that. Is anyone in Congress listening? Why is this man still serving in what is presumably a highly important position during wartime?

Digital camera blues

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I love my digital camera — or rather, I loved it until it broke and I couldn’t fix it.

My father, a much more serious photographer than I have ever been, had a wonderful Nikon camera, now about 40 years old, and he gave it to me several years ago. It hadn’t been used in a long time, some of its controls were stuck, and the little battery for its viewfinder had corroded. No problem — nothing that a toothpick, some solvent, and some work at a table couldn’t fix. So when I went looking for a digital camera a year ago I stuck with Nikon and invested in its Coolpix 775. The camera has taken many wonderful photos of my family, but on our camping trip last weekend it just went on the fritz: the LCD screen read “SYSTEM ERROR” and the zoom lens would not retract.

The frustrating thing was, there was nothing I could do. “SYSTEM ERROR” was not even listed in the instruction manual’s “troubleshooting guide.” I plugged “coolpix 775 system error” into Google and found this depressing list of user complaints on the Reviewcentre site. Seems that this problem is endemic to this camera. Nikon’s advice is to “leave the battery in for six hours” and hope that this fixes the problem, but that didn’t work for me. So now I have to send the camera back to Nikon and hope that they will fix it under warranty, even though — lucky me! — I have actually owned the camera for one week beyond the one-year warranty limit.

This is yet another example of a fundamental principle of digital gadgets: They’re great until they break which is true of some of the best car dvd players. Once they break, more often than not, there’s little the hapless consumer can do. Mechanical gadgets are susceptible to mechanical fixes. Digital devices are opaque black boxes, manufactured under the assumption that the consumer will replace them every 2-3 years so there’s no sense making them too durable. But I think next time I’ll buy a Canon.

The Javascript mess

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My primary browser is Opera, on Win2000. But I find that some sites — mostly commercial sites (we’re shopping for a car so I’m spending some time on auto manufacturers’ over-designed pages) — don’t work well on that combination. No problem, that’s why I keep IE on my computer too. Fire up IE and the sites should work, right? Only lately I’ve noticed that virtually every site that uses a Javascript popup window of any kind breaks my IE. OK, time to upgrade, I figured — I’d been resisting going from IE 5.5 to IE 6 but I took the plunge. No go; I’m having the same problem. Today I downloaded Mozilla and I’m finding that, well, some sites work OK but others are even less compatible than they were on Opera.

Something is badly wrong here. I’d always assumed that the problem was that sites were being designed not to the rules ordained by Web standards codes but instead to the workings of IE, Microsoft’s monopoly browser. But these sites crash IE and don’t work on the standards-compliant Opera, either! If anyone out there has any insights into this mess, send them to me and I’ll share them.

Safire aims, fires, misses

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William Safire’s voice is generally one to be reckoned with. His arguments on behalf of the case for war on Iraq tend to be more nuanced and more detailed than those of others on the right — and certainly than the administration’s. But today he overreaches in a big way.

For the U.S. to attack Iraq, we need evidence of an imminent threat from Iraq, or, failing that, Iraq’s direct participation in global terrorism. As evidence of the latter, Safire cites the name of an Iraqi intelligence officer who “headed a force of some 120 Arab terrorists backed by about 400 renegade Kurds who were remnants of a defeated separatist group.” This force “was sent by Saddam into the portion of northern Iraq under U.S. aerial protection to assassinate the democratic Kurdish leadership and to establish crude chemical warfare facilities in remote villages near the Iranian border.” This force was aided by another figure Safire names, an Al-Qaida officer who helped organize Saddam’s anti-Kurdish force. Safire reports that both these men were captured by the Kurds and are now talking to “American counterterror agents,” providing evidence that Saddam has developed a “cyanide cream” that kills on contact and that he tried to ship out to the West through Turkey (where it was intercepted).

So what does the prove — aside from what we knew already, that Safire has really good sources among the Kurds? We already know Saddam has used chemical weapons in the past and is probably doing everything he can to develop them further. We already know that Saddam would like to wipe the Kurds off the face of the earth. What we don’t have, and what Safire’s detailed information does not further provide, is any conclusive evidence linking Saddam directly to the 9/11 attacks or any other indication that he is presently an active international threat on a scale that demands massive military intervention.

Saddam is an evil dictator. But what strategy will best protect the West from terrorism and lead Iraq toward a more democratic future? The harder the go-it-aloners struggle to make their case, the more it looks like they have chosen their martial course in advance, and are now working overtime to assemble scraps of evidence that might, kinda, sorta support that course. If the U.S. is to launch a pre-emptive, unilateral strike against a nation halfway around the world we’d better know why we’re fighting.

Safire writes: “The need to strike at an aggressive despot before he gains the power to blackmail us with the horrific weapons he is building and hiding is apparent to most Americans, including those who will bear the brunt of the fight.” Since much of the U.S. public and the U.S. military has big questions about Bush’s Iraq war plan, this statement sounds like wishful thinking.

Paint it Black

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Interesting link found on Tenorman.Net: EMUSIC OFFERS TWO NEW FRANK BLACK ALBUMS IN MP3 — Former Pixies Leader was the First Artist to Partner with Pioneer Downloadable Music Service. (This page is from the new Blogcritics project, which looks like it’s off to a great start.)

Now, here’s the thing — I subscribe to EMusic’s service. I also just bought those two CDs at Amoeba here in Berkeley. Now, theoretically, I should be upset, right? I just paid about $28 for music that I could have downloaded, legally, as part of an online service I already pay for. But guess what? I’m not upset. I’d have bought these CDs anyway. I’m a Frank Black fan, I buy all his CDs, and that’s that.

The point here is simple: Some music you want to own. Other music you just want to try out, sample, see whether you want to own it. The problem with the current music industry position is that they don’t provide us with enough options for trying stuff out, on our own terms.

Salon Blog watch

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Andrew Bayer has some interesting thoughts about blogs in response to Steven Levy’s Newsweek piece: Since most blogs aren’t anonmyous, the ideal that you can be totally honest and open runs into the inevitable wall when people start to criticize their own companies. In the utopian scenario, even the CEOs become bloggers, everyone’s in the same boat, and the blog-space becomes an open forum for companies to work out their problems. Today, though, there are very few companies that are willing to do so in full public view. And the legal issues for public companies become pretty gnarly.
Kat Donohue has a passel of uses for a pashmina shawl.
Toby’s Political Diary imagines the scene at Dubya’s ranch as news of the Iraqi embassy takeover in Berlin gets a little garbled in transmission.
Recently on Ken Schellenberg’s book blog: Reviews of a Miles Davis reader and “The Secret Life of Bees.”