The Substantially Similar Weblog

The Electronic Frontier Foundation· and the Center for Internet and Society· are seeking an injunction against Diebold to halt its campaign against sites linking to its internal documents·.

I wrote about this total misuse of copyright law last week.

Is it just me, or are the numbers in this article all entirely made up?

In August more than a million households deleted all the digital music files they had saved on their PCs, according to new information released today by The NPD Group. NPD credits the ongoing RIAA anti-piracy campaign and related media attention as having had a measurable effect on the actions of many consumers in regard to the illegal sharing of digital music. In a related survey of consumer perception, however, NPD found that consumers’ overall opinion of the recording industry is suffering as a result of the record industry association’s well-publicized legal tactics.
In August 1.4 million households deleted all the digital music files saved on their PC hard drives. Prior to August, deletions were at much lower levels. For example, in May of 2003 when NPD first began to track music file deletions, 606,000 households deleted all digital music files from their PCs. Eighty percent of the consumers who deleted files had fewer than 50 files saved; just 10 percent had more than 200 files.

First, one should be inherently skeptical about news originating over Business Wire—someone (in this case, presumably NPD) is paying money so that whatever they want to say will enter the media echo chamber.

Second, the methodology just seems impossibly screwy. I would put as much faith in it as an article claiming, “41% of people have rearranged the icons on their desktop so they’re more evenly spaced.”

Finally, this makes no sense. Unless people don’t understand the RIAA lawsuits at all (a possibility to which I’ll admit), there’s no relation. RIAA isn’t suing people for having media on their hard drive, they’re suing them (often mistakenly) for providing them to a P2P network—particularly kazaa. If people are genuinely afraid of being sued, I would expect them to either (1) stop running Kazaa or (2) at least move their media off out of the “shared” folders. But not delete the files!

Update: Apparently, this story was just posted on Slashdot. I tend not to post things here that are on the front page of Slashdot, as I figure people looking for that stuff will find it there. But my entry went up first, so I’ll keep it here. Somebody did link this great comic on the topic, though.

Digital Spy reports that the FCC will require the broadcast flag to be included in all digital television sets manufacturered after July 2005. See the FCC announcement (PDF), FCC Chairman Michael Powell said in a statement Chairman Michael Powell’s public statement (PDF)that the commission’s decision “strikes a careful balance between content protection and technology innovation in order to promote consumer interests,” and accompanying press release the accompanying press release (PDF). Notably, the rule does not bar broadcasters from marking news and public affairs shows with the flag, considered by many to be an important “fair use” exemption. I’ve always felt that we shouldn’t allow the idea of fair use commentary on issues of public importance to be limited to news shows alone, but under this system you may be technologically barred from redistributing excerpts of bona fide news programming for commentary purposes.

At EPIC, I drafted comments to the FCC on the privacy invasive implications of the broadcast flag. See also the excellent Broadcast Flag Blog maintained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Sadly, I don’t think the FCC seriously considered any public policy issues other than that of propping up the market for digital content.

See also Commissioner Copps’ partial dissent (PDF), which does mention privacy implications, and Commissioner Adelstein’s partial dissent (PDF).

Perhaps the most frustrating thing about all of these weak digital rights management schemes is that they’re unlikely to prevent any “piracy” at all, yet will inconvenience millions of consumers and limit free speech/fair use rights.

There have been an awful lot of comic strips lately about the Recording Industry’s copyright lawsuits and related issues. I always find the comics page to be a good predictor of the nation’s temperament, and comic strips historically have served as a potent political force. For example, in the late 1800’s, William “Boss” Tweed, a notoriously corrupt New York City politican, was finally defeated by Thomas Nast’s political cartoons.

Tom the Dancing Bug is one of my favorites.

In case you haven’t seen it elsewhere, you should check out Targeting Diebold with Electronic Civil Disobedience and the internal memos from Diebold Voting Systems. Swarthmore has been cracking down on students who link to these sites in response to threats from Diebold. Diebold makes electronic voting systems that are widely deployed and terribly flawed, and is attempting to use copyright doctrine to shut down critics.

Please link widely, e.g.:

 Diebold Election Systems 

Which will appear as Diebold Election Systems.

I genuinely hope that Diebold sues someone here—not for that person’s sake, but for the sake of our democracy. You couldn’t ask for a better DMCA test case to balance constitutional principles vs. misguided and misinterpreted copyright statutes.

SunnComm Technologies says it will sue Alex Halderman, the Princeton University graduate student who recently published a paper showing how SunnComm Technologies’ MediaMax CD-3 Copy Protection could be defeated by pressing the “shift” key. Says Halderman:

“I’m still not very worried about litigation under the DMCA, I don’t think there’s any case. I don’t think telling people to press the ‘Shift’ key is a violation of the DMCA.”

This just in from BNA’s Internet Law News:

NO SHIFT IN CD COPYING
A Princeton graduate student says he has figured out a way to defeat the MediaMax CD3 software, which is supposed to keep music CDs from being copied on a computer. John Halderman said the MediaMax CD3 software could be defeated on computers running the Windows operating system by holding down the Shift key, disabling a Windows feature that automatically launches the encryption software on the disc.

More details from news.com and Wired. Pretty amazing stuff—defeat DRM with the “shift” key!