I would much rather have 500,000 downloads than 5,000, although our distributor may feel differently. The worst thing that can happen to a small film, any film for that matter, is to fall into obscurity. 500,000 people could download it and hate it, but in my mind that is better than then not seeing or hearing about it all.

Diestler is correct as far as this goes. Setting aside for the moment the poor choice in wording with “piracy“: Tim O’Reilly said, “Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy.”. But Diestler doesn’t go far enough—”The Inner Room” is not licensed to share. Or, as TorrentFreak.com puts it, “When the “The Inner Room” was released the people behind the movie even toyed with the idea of pirating the film themselves to gain exposure. But eventually they decided to leave that up to the pros.”.

Without licensing the work to be shared, Diestler could drag any sharer into court on copyright infringement. The poor defendant would have to point to articles like TorrentFreak’s to convince a judge that Diestler doesn’t mind the sharing when it suits him.

A more honest approach is to license the work to be shared and benefit from the publicity that comes from working with your audience as partners rather than holding the legal sword of Damocles over your audience.

We’ve seen this kind of behavior before: the Winans and their movie “Ink” treated the public in the same way: the copyright holder wants the free promotion that comes with illicit sharing and the power to sue anyone who shares the movie illicitly.

If any work could be easily relicensed to allow sharing with no foreseeable reduction in income, it’s works like these. People who pay aren’t paying because they can’t get the work any other way. They’re paying because they were treated properly; part of treating your audience well means your audience does not have to fear losing a copyright infringement lawsuit.

To avoid being found, some users use a VPN or “virtual private network” that can effectively mask a user’s identity by passing the user’s data through another computer before the data is fed to the file sharing network. VPNs are essentially intermediaries that sit between one network and another or different sets of computers.

So TorrentFreak.net posed some questions to some VPN service providers who ostensibly provide some anonymity for their customers, and TorrentFreak.net reported the answers. But there are a few things you should know when you interpret these answers (or any other claim of online anonymity):

• All of their claims are unverifiable. No service provider verifiably gives all comers access to all of their logs. Some providers claims to log nothing. But how would you determine whether they’re telling you the truth? How much trust can you put in a service provider with no real information about them? We face this challenge all the time: how would you know if that restaurant’s dishes are clean enough to eat from? Will your therapist really keep the details of your session a secret? It’s another gamble you’ll have to decide on your own using whatever information you choose to trust.
• One-time verification attempts are useless without complete source code under a free license. If a service provider attempts to prove their trustworthiness by releasing some of their alleged source code, there’s no way to know if they use that code at all. Even a one-time dump of complete corresponding source code under a non-free license (such as one that allows inspection but not making derivative works) is insufficient to prove anything because code rewrites are easy enough that one could put in new code not listed before.
• Even if you get great service today, will the service provider deliver that level of service in the future? Terms of service change. Seemingly small obscure technical decisions made by system administrators have a dramatic effect on your service. People steal equipment: is sensitive information stored anywhere such that stealing the server hardware would reveal what’s really going on? Service providers can sound promising until there’s real pressure on them from bullying nations like the United States.

Also consider the problems you’ll face with intermediaries you don’t directly do business with: the Internet is a network of networks and your VPN is only one host in the chain of computers that route your data between your computer and your intended destination. What about all of those computers that aren’t run by your trusted VPN provider? Do they log information? If so, what is logged? Who would report data in those logs to others?

It’s not easy to securely anonymize data and determine whom to trust.

On October 6, 2011, one day after Steve Jobs died, Richard Stallman (rms) posted his reaction to Jobs’ death:

Steve Jobs, the pioneer of the computer as a jail made cool, designed to sever fools from their freedom, has died.

As Chicago Mayor Harold Washington said of the corrupt former Mayor Daley, “I’m not glad he’s dead, but I’m glad he’s gone.” Nobody deserves to have to die – not Jobs, not Mr. Bill, not even people guilty of bigger evils than theirs. But we all deserve the end of Jobs’ malign influence on people’s computing.

Unfortunately, that influence continues despite his absence. We can only hope his successors, as they attempt to carry on his legacy, will be less effective.Richard Stallman, October 6, 2011

My thoughts

I find Stallman’s reaction to be very well written: clear, respectful, concise, but most importantly it has its priorities straight:

• Nobody deserves to have to die. No matter what people do, the dead cannot learn and become better people. Stallman’s words brought to my mind the death penalty, not because it applies here (Jobs died as a result of his pancreatic cancer) but because America has many states which do kill “people guilty of bigger evils than theirs” and Stallman’s phrasing somehow reminded me of recent state-sponsored murders (a topic which strikes me as far more important than Jobs’ death).
• Everyone deserves software freedom. Whether Apple was building proprietary derivatives from FLOSS, supporting patent pools that threaten FLOSS users (Apple contributes patents to MPEG-LA which spreads FUD about Theora and VP8, Apple wants to patent spyware), trying to dissuade people from controlling their own computers (see also FUD), or setting up services aimed at locking users in (iTunes service has many titles with DRM): Jobs’ life work was proprietary computing. A less effective proprietor means a chance that more users will enjoy software freedom.

I feel compelled to consider death as Peter Tosh said: (but Tosh was talking about matters far more important than consumer electronics)

Let the dead bury the dead now
And who is to be fed, be fed
I ain’t got no time to waste on you, no, no
I am a livin’ man, I’ve got work to do, right nowPeter Tosh, “Burial”

I think it’s unfortunate Jobs died, but the US kills a lot of people who lived lives filled with struggle. We don’t know their names, we are encouraged by corporate media to think of them as collateral damage and not-quite-people. Jobs’ life was too short but I think it’s safe to assume he wanted for nothing and got as much treatment for his cancer as anyone can.

Reactions to rms’ post

Of all the disagreements with rms’ post I’ve read, none were written well. The best of the lot is Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols’ criticism, to which this post is mostly a response.

Regarding Vaughan-Nichols’ grandmother’s aphorism If you don’t have anything good to say, then don’t say anything at all.: Apparently she was a fan of censorship (though her rule seems to apply only selectively as Vaughan-Nichols apparently feels quite free to violate the rule by criticizing rms). I am not a fan of censorship. One of the followups to Vaughan-Nichols’ article mentions Voltaire’s quote which is far better:

To the living we owe respect, but to the dead we owe only the truth.

It’s more important to put Jobs’ life work in its proper place; Stallman did that far better and more concisely than anyone else I’ve seen.

Vaughan-Nichols says I’m glad to say that the vast majority of open-source developers don’t agree with Stallman’s myopic views: Stallman was never and is not now an open-source developer. His movement is the free software movement which is older, philosophically different, and at heart a social movement. Stallman talks about this distinction at every talk he gives as well as writing about it in multiple essays. Vaughan-Nichols isn’t alone in trying to co-opt Stallman into the open source movement but no matter how many people do it, it’s still wrong.

Vaughan-Nichols favorably compares Jobs to Walt Disney and Henry Ford: Disney is widely known for proprietary derivatives of works in the public domain. The Disney corporation is known for following suit by backing copyright extension efforts to disallow the public from doing to Disney’s movies what Disney did with the Brothers Grimm stories. Apple is currently switching compilers from GCC (licensed under the GNU GPL) to LLVM (licensed under a permissive FLOSS license). If Bradley Kuhn of “Free as in Freedom” is correct—Apple will be making their own proprietary LLVM derivative when that compiler gets to a point where it’s more useful. Apple’s entire compiler switch to LLVM is part of a larger strategy to get away from GPL’d programs. This strategy probably has roots in Apple’s GPL hatred after NeXT got caught committing copyright infringement illicitly distributing their GCC derivative years ago. Apple would later make copyright infringement against free software a habit with their app store (1, 2).

I don’t recall what Jobs did that would make him comparable to Henry Ford. The article Vaughan-Nichols links to compares Jobs and Disney. One of those points is “Disney knew about land grabs” well so did Ford—Fordlândia—Ford’s billion-dollar Brazilian rubber plantation where he could more efficiently exploit the natives through what Greg Grandin described as a combination of intense paternalism and intense surveillance. Intense surveillance is one thing that would fit Apple as proprietary software gives any proprietor an opportunity to closely track what their users do. But Ford was a nastier man than people commonly credit: he mistreated his workers and he sympathized with nazis, nazi sympathizing is something I don’t associate with Jobs. As for Ford’s chief invention, the assembly line, I can’t imagine how Jobs’ computers or his animation company are an apt comparison. The assembly-line was far more culture-changing than anything Jobs’ companies ever made.

Lots of people are poor at critical thought when they’re feeling sad. It should be an adults responsibility to see things as they really are and keep perspective, not maintain an atmosphere where people are too afraid to speak freely (like how Apple treats app store users by keeping so many things out of that store). The limits Apple and proprietary software impose will adversely affect people far longer than any malaise brought on by Jobs’ death. As people get some more time to let this pass they’ll be more willing to part with their indignation. In so doing perhaps they’ll re-read Stallman’s words and come to see how reasonable, well-worded, and appropriately respectful Stallman’s assessment was while simultaneously keeping his eye on the prize: all users deserve software freedom.

Related Links

• Labor issues at Apple and Apple’s suppliers
  • Apple’s Rotten Core mistreated workers from Apple’s own employees to the workers of upstream suppliers with “aggressive anti-union strategy”.
  • Blood on the Trackpads discusses Mike Daisey’s monologue “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs” wherein Daisey poses as an investor, travels to the “Special Economic Zone” of Shenzhen, China, and gains access to Foxconn workers who are eager to share their stories. One story was about an “employee [who] mangled his hand in a factory accident and was fired instead of compensated” and another where “[s]everal workers speak of an employee who died after working a 32-hour shift”. Sadly for human rights sake, not everything Daisey said was an exaggeration. It is telling that many Westerners are so concerned with Daisey’s exaggerations than with the suffering of Chinese laborers.
  • Three Strikes Against Apple about Apple’s response circa the time of the multiple Foxconn suicides of 2011.

You can also download the soundtrack online and share it with anyone you choose (not all the tracks are sharable, but that’s not Nina Paley’s fault, the copyright holder for some music is not willing to share).

“Ink” is an independently produced movie that is widely illicitly copied on the Internet. Ink stands out because unlike chiefs of more famous movie studios, Ink’s writer/director Jamin Winans and producer Kiowa K. Winans wrote to TorrentFreak to thank them for promoting the movie and to say that the illicit sharing has made the movie far more popular, including increasing sales of home video copies.

But how do these movie makers treat you, the audience?

• Paley shares with her audience by licensing her work to be shared (and built upon). If you share/build upon Sita in accordance with her license, you need not fear a copyright infringement lawsuit. Paley contributes something to our culture that treats us fairly and encourages us to do the same.
• The Winanses are knowingly allowing their restrictively-licensed movie to be shared illicitly. Even as they celebrate the popularity and sales brought to them by sharing, they retain the power to win a copyright infringement lawsuit even for non-commercially sharing a verbatim copy of their movie. Enforcement of their copyright against anyone who shares the movie can come at any time.

Metaphorically, the Sword of Damocles hovers above anyone who shares a copy of Ink; losing a copyright infringement lawsuit could cost someone a lot of money. There is no such threat for those who share copies of Sita. The terms under which we may share and build upon Sita are very easy to comply with. There are no terms under which we may legally share Ink.

I think it’s important to keep this in mind as you read TorrentFreak’s glowing letters of support about Ink. We can all appreciate a good movie, but not all good movies are licensed to treat us the well. This is why I gladly bought an artist-signed copy of Sita (and would consider buying have bought Sita chotchkes from Nina Paley). I have no plans to do business with the Winanses.

Let’s hope that Ink’s copyright holders come to realize their movie should be licensed to us to share (at least non-commercially and verbatim).

Jennifer Granick of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital civil liberties organization based in San Francisco, wrote about how Microsoft’s announcement is right in line with their end-user license agreement or EULA.

When active, MSN Music’s webpage touted that customers could “choose their device and know its going to work”.

But when customers went to purchase songs, they were shown legalese that stated the download service and the content provided were sold without warrantee. In other words, Microsoft doesn’t promise you that the service or the music will work, or that you will always have access to music you bought. The flashy advertising promised your music, your way, but the fine print said, our way or the highway.

Granick explains how Microsoft, and other publishers, use licensing terms that leave customers vulnerable to discontinued service for whatever reason the publisher deems necessary.

Has this happened before? What’s going on with DRM? What are the dangers to users?

Major League Baseball

Major League Baseball recently did something similar with their DRMed copies of baseball games. Baseball fans bought into a service which would let them see recorded games online. The recordings were encumbered with digital restrictions management so they’d only play with a specific proprietary player program MLB distributed. Some time later, the DRM stopped working (it hardly matters why). This meant that customers were left with no way to see the recordings they had paid to be able to see. Many other fans had been left with no pro-rated refund and no independent means to replace this service (say, by being given a keycode that would unencumber the recordings they had already paid for and let them see those games).

MLB’s chosen DRM was thorough enough to stymie fans who had recorded the games to their own media. Red Sox fan Allan Wood blogged about his experience. In 2003 Wood downloaded recordings at $3.95/game and burned them to CD-R. When he went to watch one of the games, he was told he needed a license; the DRM provider was unreachable so the MLB system didn’t know if he was authorized to view this recording. The website he was directed to login to didn’t exist, so he was left with no way to watch what he had paid to see and MLB wasn’t going to issue a refund. Wood unwittingly treated a corporation like a charity, contributing $280.45 to MLB.

MLB’s spokesperson told Ars Technica that MLB has “provided detailed communications to the affected customers” and that “It was an inelegant transition period and we didn’t anticipate the problems it would cause.”. Ars Technica reports that “With the exception of postseason footage, customers will be able to redownload all of the now-unwatchable videos. Postseason content will be made available at an unspecified later date, according to the spokesperson.”.

Google

Google did the same thing with its video store telling customers that after 15 August 2007 they would “no longer be able to view your purchased or rented videos”. Google later offered refunds to the adversely affected customers.

Electronic Arts

Electronic Arts skillfully convinced the public to accept DRM in their proprietary video game called “Spore”. Spore uses DRM ostensibly to determine if the player is running an authorized copy of the game. But since the program is proprietary, we have no real idea what the game program does when it runs. Just before the game was released EA tested the reactions from their potential customers by announcing that their DRM would check for proper authorization every 10 days. Game players widely rejected this proposed approach, but one point seems to have escaped the public debate: EA had their foot in the door. Rarely did you see an objection to the existence of DRM. Instead the debate centered around whether 10 day checks were too frequent, too onerous on the player. EA was reported to have reprogrammed the game to only check the DRM when the software was updated. Again, players confirmed EA’s public relations victory here, patting themselves on the back for convincing EA that 10 days was too frequent instead of questioning the validity of DRM at all. As a distraction measure, EA was reported to have been dissuaded from 10 day DRM checks by players in the military who claimed that they couldn’t access the Internet every 10 days, so they’d be unable to comply with that DRM scheme and thus unable to play the game. The follow-up discussion shifted further away from questioning the validity of DRM as participants in forums such as Slashdot asked why soldiers are playing video games at all. The ethics of proprietary software and DRM were effectively outside the allowable limits of debate. A user’s software freedom—the freedom to inspect, share, modify, and run the program whenever they wish—concepts which, when consistently practiced, effectively challenge DRM, is simply not brought up.

Lessons for everyone

But for those who examine the system, the forest, rather than the trees of a particular example here or there clearly see the most important themes:

• With DRM, you are not in control. The DRM provider controls your media after the sale and, therefore, they can change the terms of the sale at any time (including not letting you see what you thought they sold you). The future will be determined by what you value; do you value being told under what circumstances you may enjoy some copyrighted work? Or do you value freedom to determine this for yourself? This choice should inform how you think about these examples and how you react.
• The freedom of older media is being replaced with newer lock-in, locked-up media. Paper books, for example, don’t dictate where or when you can read them. Other circumstances may determine that, but the book and its publisher have already had their say. eBooks are different; the publisher can determine ad-hoc when you’re allowed to read any particular work. All the information the eBook reader can gather (including physical location, network location, time of day, and user ID) can used to curtail when you can read the eBook. It’s not hard to implement such controls so they continue to control you offline as well.
• Contrary to what so many in the progressive Left believe, one cannot explain away all of this behavior in terms of avarice. MLB didn’t stand to make more money by failing to negotiate a means to see the recordings without interruption. MLB opened a lot of people’s eyes to the power of DRM, earned a bad reputation along the way, and now serves as a warning not only to never do business with MLB but to avoid all DRM you can’t crack.
• All too often the price one pays for DRM-riddled works is so low people don’t think to sue. This leaves publishers with little to compel them to behave better. It’s unlikely these stories and critical examination of the lessons learned will reach the mainstream media, so publishers don’t have to fear many people knowing about any publisher’s “inelegant transitions”. More powerful publishers can afford to simply drop customers leaving them with unplayable files they might not be able to legally crack.

People who make their own unencumbered recordings and share them (even illicitly) have no problem playing back any of their recordings at any time, on any device, anywhere they want, using any player program they wish (including free software like VideoLAN Client), even offline.

Related articles

• Ars Technica’s article on the dangers of DRM explains the context and some history on this issue.
• My response to Wil Wheaton about Apple’s DRM where Wheaton said he thought Apple was being “more than generous” in how they treated him after upgrading to the then latest version of the proprietary iTunes music player program left Wheaton with no access to any of the music he paid Apple to hear.
• Richard Stallman’s essay on DRM clearly illustrates a proper frame for debating this issue because Stallman takes the side of the user who is adversely affected by DRM instead of the publisher who benefits from the control DRM gives them.

Update: Matthew Garrett tells more about his dealing with the MPAA.

Background

The MPA has customized and distributed a GNU/Linux operating system that came with network monitoring tools. This particular GNU/Linux system came with a number of programs that are licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL) which requires that if anyone distributes a GPL-covered program, one must share and share alike—one must also distribute the “complete corresponding source code” for that program or a written promise (valid for up to 3 years) to get that source code any time.

The GPL says this because it is this license’s goal to give every user of covered software certain freedoms with the software. When people have the freedom to share and modify the programs, they can make the programs do what the user wants them to do. By contrast, proprietary software denies users these freedoms—proprietary software does what the proprietor wants it to do.

The MPA is free to use, share, and modify GPL-covered software to suit its desires. So are you.

But the MPA distributed GPL-covered software without complete corresponding source code or a written promise to get said source code.

The organization which decries “piracy” did not abide by the license for the copyrighted works it distributed.

Recent events

And the MPA has been called on their illicit distribution by Matthew Garrett, a copyright holder to some of the software the MPA distributed.

The Motion Picture Association are the defenders of harmful maximalist copyright law. They are major proponents of periodically and retroactively increasing the term of copyright thus achieving an unconstitutional infinite copyright term. The MPA is a major proponent of increasing the scope of copyright law with laws like the DMCA. The DMCA allows copyright holders to control any published work through copy restrictions which never expire (like the encryption found on DVDs). Even if the underlying work is in the public domain, it’s illegal to break the copy restriction, so the work is less accessible. The MPA is a major proponent of pushing American copyright law abroad in trade agreements.

And the MPA could have easily complied with copyright law in this case and achieved their ends by obeying the GPL. Garrett is working with everyone by licensing his work to share and be modified so long as some easy conditions are met. By licensing under a free software license, he’s making it easy to work with him.

Not surprising

This is hardly new behavior for the MPA’s clients. The movie “industry” (they churn out movies to consumers like a factory) the MPA represents got its start by violating a different law—patent law. Edison’s patents on movie-making equipment covered machines used by early Hollywood movie pioneers Warner Bros., Fox (William Fox), and Paramount studios (Adolph Zukor). These movie makers fled west to illicitly and commercially make and project movies. Edison’s patent enforcers didn’t catch up to them before the patents were unenforcible.

Like so many of the largest businesses today, a bit of ill-gotten gain goes a long way. Somehow the checkered history of the MPA’s clients didn’t make a starring role in the MPA’s representatives talks, like when Jack Valenti spoke some years back at a film festival hosted by movie critic Roger Ebert in Urbana, Illinois. Fortunately there were many speakers at the audience mic ready to amend Valenti’s talk. I was one of those speakers and I also fielded questions from interested audience members looking for more analysis of the public impact of copyright law, copyright term extension, the example set by the free software movement, and how we can challenge corporate copyright dominance.

It’s not the first time the MPA committed copyright infringement either. While reviewing the movie “This Film Is Not Yet Rated“, a documentary critical of the MPAA’s movie rating process, the MPAA committed copyright infringement by illicitly making copies of the movie. The DVD release of the movie has a recording of the MPAA assuring Kirby Dick, the movie’s director, that no such copy would be made.

We can’t be surprised of the MPA’s behavior given their past, but this instance is particularly shameful because the copyright holders of all of that software are so nice to us by licensing their work such that we can treat one another like neighbors.

Update

Ars Technica quotes the MPAA saying their staff was unavailable during the Thanksgiving holiday when they received Garrett’s takedown notice and that because they “take copyright very seriously” they acted quickly after Thanksgiving.

But they didn’t act quickly. And more importantly, the MPAA doesn’t explain why they didn’t read and comply with the GPL straight away.

And what about after Garrett issued the takedown notice? Garrett notes:

The infringing material was still available the best part of 9 days after the original notification was sent. At least 4 of those 9 were business days. The material was not removed until after I had contacted the ISP and they had informed me they were going to contact the MPAA.

The MPA could have avoided this embarassing mess by simply distributing complete corresponding source code right along side the executable programs. I’m sure the MPA expects all of us to read their client’s terms; their clients put those terms on DVDs in unskippable sections, their clients use another DVD feature to make sure you play these sections at least once per playback before the feature plays (users of free software DVD players like VideoLAN Client probably never noticed this). By contrast, Garrett’s text file license and source code comments are downright unobtrusive. The MPAA’s hypocritical behavior is not what one expects from an organization so strident about so-called “piracy”.

But why would anyone want to use Linux, an open-source operating system, to run a PC? “For a lot of people,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, “Linux is a political idea — an idea of freedom. They don’t want to be tied to Microsoft or Apple. They want choice. To them it’s a greater cause.”

That’s not the most compelling reason for consumers. There is the price: Linux is free, or nearly so.

The same could be said of a copy of Microsoft Windows or MacOS X that comes with a computer (the cost of either when purchased with hardware is quite low). An illicit copy of the software costs no money at all, and Microsoft and Apple will probably do nothing to you if you get a copy from someone illicitly. Both companies agree with the implied message of this article that popularity is king, so why stifle people who are helping others become dependent on their favorite proprietor? The only way you can respond to this is if you learn to value software freedom for its own sake.

When all you see is price, you throw away something more valuable. Proprietors know this and are eager to get you into their thrall. Talk about knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing.

To explain to people what freedom means (and how “choice” is a profound misreading of freedom–after all, Microsoft and Apple give you “choice” all by themselves, pick your master!) you have to be willing to say the things the Times apparently isn’t willing to say. You have to be willing to mention that bringing users into the free software community without teaching them about freedom isn’t helping the cause of freedom as much as teaching them about freedom because these new users have no reason to reject proprietary software. If all one values is price, then there is no reason to reject low-priced proprietary alternatives. When a proprietary alternative functions in a better way than the free program, users need a reason to actively choose their freedom. The free software movement provides that reason—social solidarity and helping oneself, one’s neighbors, and one’s community—and the open source movement doesn’t.

And there is a lot more than just an operating system. Ubuntu, like some other Linux distributions, comes with a lot of free software, including OpenOffice, an alternative to the Microsoft Office suite with a full-featured word processor, spreadsheet, database and presentation program. It also comes with the popular Firefox Web browser as well as an e-mail program, an instant messaging program, a graphic image editor, music player and a photo manager.

In the past, claims like this only drive the proprietors to bundle more proprietary programs. This is how people negotiate better prices for proprietary software, handily illustrating my point above. This is also how Apple and Microsoft get people to use their programs which don’t support open standards (witness Apple and Microsoft’s office suites which don’t read or write OpenDocument files. Both support Microsoft’s “OpenXML” which is not an open standard).

One challenge for Linux users is finding media players that work with encrypted music and DVDs. Ubuntu comes with a movie player, but it is not automatically configured to play copy-protected commercial DVDs. To watch a movie, the Linux user must install necessary codecs, or decoders. One way to do that is to first download a program called Automatix from www.getautomatix.com.

This is bad advice on a technical level as well; Automatix will install a bunch of proprietary programs (which is bad enough to reject it outright) and modify system files such that it is difficult to upgrade one’s system further (one of the reasons why Ubuntu recommends against installing Automatix).

Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux [...]

If you want to give Linux kernel hackers a share of the credit (as they surely deserve) but not all the credit (as is also fair), read what the Free Software Foundation has been talking about in its articles on the “GNU/Linux” name. Torvalds did not write an entire operating system. Torvalds wrote the initial versions of a small portion of an operating system called a “kernel”. A kernel makes it possible to harmoniously share the resources of a computer. Harmonious resource allocation is a critical task, to be sure, but not the entirety of an OS. Furthermore, one runs the risk of associating the system’s existence with his philosophy whilst giving absolutely no credit or mind to GNU or the reason so many other programs also in the system exist–respecting the user’s software freedom so they can build and defend a community of cooperation.

After using the operating system for writing, Web surfing, graphic editing, movie watching and a few other tasks, it is easy to conclude that Linux can be an alternative to the major operating systems. But since common tasks like watching a movie or syncing an iPod require hunting for and installing extra software, Linux is best for technically savvy users or for people whose needs are so basic that they will never need anything other than the bundled software.

Watching a movie from another region requires “hunting” on every operating system, due to digital restrictions management (DRM) which go unmentioned in this article. Some of my younger (ostensibly more likely to have heard of DRM) clients bump into this limitation often; it’s far more common amongst the allegedly digitally literate than people realize.

And Ubuntu’s add/remove software program makes it super easy to type in “ipod” or “dvd” and install iPod syncing software or VideoLAN Client which plays DVDs with remarkably little hassle.

Turning on a computer is a political act. It’s time we stop believing the myth that computers are only tools, apolitical instruments with which we help make our lives better. This tends to lead us to believe that price is a chief means of discerning one program from another and dissuades us from asking more important questions like how can we maintain control our lives and help one another without becoming dependent on a proprietor. Relevant social and ethical questions are pushed aside if we let the market have its way with us.

1. Get a stern talking to by Edgar Bronfman, parent of 7 and Warner Music Group CEO who just admitted that he’s fairly certain that at least one of his kids have engaged in illicit downloading. As of yet, somehow these children have avoided being sued by the RIAA. Their punishment?

   I explained to them what I believe is right, that the principle is that stealing music is stealing music. Frankly, right is right and wrong is wrong, particularly when a parent is talking to a child. A bright line around moral responsibility is very important. I can assure you they no longer do that.

   Stealing isn’t the issue here, copyright infringement is.

   Maybe these kids learned about infringement from the Warner Brothers movie studio which got started when the Warner brothers fled west to illicitly make and commercially show movies out of the reach of Edison’s patent police. Or maybe the kids picked up the idea of selectively obeying copyright law in their history class by recalling that the US didn’t initially honor foreign copyright, thus allowing American publishers to reprint works under copyright in other countries (much to the chagrin of Charles Dickens, whose work was being distributed commercially without remuneration).

   Warning: Bronfman lectures are limited to first 7 applicants.

2. Keep the infringing copy “safe in your vault” and you’ll be okay. Boing Boing has the scoop about a screening which took place on 2006-11-30:

   During the Q&A at last night’s screening of Kirby Dick’s “This Film is Not Yet Rated,” Dick recounted the story of how his film was unlawfully duplicated by the MPAA’s ratings board. He submitted one copy of his movie to the MPAA, extracting a promise that no more copies would be made — the MPAA’s own anti-piracy materials describe making a single unauthorized duplication as an act of piracy.

   Once it got out that the MPAA had made its “pirated” copy of Dick’s movie, one of the MPAA’s lawyers called Dick up to admit that the cartel had indeed made an infringing copy, but not to worry, “The copy is safe in my vault.”

   At this point, I raised my hand and asked if Dick thought anyone caught downloading movies from the Internet could get off the hook by saying, “Don’t worry, I keep my copies safe in my vault?”

   I still don’t think it’s wise, fair, or appropriate to use the term “piracy” in this context no matter how popular its use may be. Also, we have to consider the difficulty of avoiding infringement if the MPAA can’t manage to keep themselves inside their view of the law. But of course the larger issue remains how much deference we ought to give to any business model built on disallowing treating friends like friends.

Of course, “genuine” is the wrong word to use here. Microsoft’s issue concerns whether the license is issued to the user and legitimately obtained (again, according to Microsoft’s records).

So what happens if Microsoft’s software is wrong? Apparently what happens is you either decide to continue to be treated this way by your proprietor, or you decide to switch to free software instead.

Microsoft knows their Windows Genuine Advantage software is broken. They admit that Windows Genuine Advantage problems are coming up more commonly now..

But this is all to be expected when you give up your freedom. If you had the freedom to share the software, nobody would need to check up on where you got your copy. So the question becomes will you switch to running free software?

Perhaps it’s time for you to try OpenOffice.org, Gnumeric (a spreadsheet program), Firefox and Thunderbird, or even switch to a GNU/Linux operating system? There are some easily installed and easily tried choices from Fedora GNU/Linux, Ubuntu GNU/Linux, and Ututo GNU/Linux.

Making copies for your friends, or giving it to them to copy, or e-mailing it to anyone is just as illegal as free downloading

which contradicts language in their online FAQ, a copy of which accompanies the video. The online version of the RIAA “Campus Downloading” FAQ mentions fair use exceptions which is particularly interesting to campus users because scholarly examination of copyrighted works happens every day.

But CNet doesn’t mention the worst part of the FAQ which completely misrepresents theft and copyright infringement.

One can stand against copyright infringement and do so without lying about relevant laws, but the RIAA is apparently unwilling to do this. Consider these Q&As from their FAQ:

Doesn’t the First Amendment give me the right to download and upload anything I want, including copyrighted music?

The answer is, no, it does not. What copyright law prohibits is theft, not free expression.

Is downloading and uploading music really stealing?
If it’s done without the permission of the copyright holder, it’s legally no different than walking into a music store, stuffing a CD into your pocket, and walking out without paying for it.

Neither of these responses is entirely true. What copyright law prohibits is not properly known as “theft”. There is a significant legal and physical difference between copyright infringement and stealing. Stealing works for physical copies but not to describe copying where the previous copy is left intact. The law differentiates between copyright infringement and theft. These laws also carry different punishments. Corporate copyright holders and their representatives have been pursuing more punitive copyright infringement punishments while trying to place new law under the rubric of copyright so that breaking any of those laws will constitute violation of copyright; the Digital Millennium Copyright Act is a fine example of this. The DMCA has been called a “technology control law” by Prof. Eben Moglen in a panel discussion of the DMCA:

The fact that they put the word copyright in the title doesn’t make it a copyright law folks. It’s actually a technology control law designed to build a leak proof pipe from any production studio that the five companies that make music and the eight companies that make movies care to make. A leak proof pipe that goes from there to you eyeball or eardrum, and anything that provides a droplet worth of leak in that pipe is now some sort of terrible legal controversy that is threatening to bring civilisation to an end. It’s total bullshit.

According to CNet news, the RIAA’s reaction to critics of their video:

“First, we were told we should not enforce our rights,” said an RIAA representative responding to critics of the video. “Now we are told education is wrong, too. We won’t accept such a do-nothing approach. We’ll continue to work with respected higher-education groups to engage students to think critically about these issues.”

Thinking critically about the video will lead to students seeing this as a multinational corporate lobbying effort, not something most people can and spur discussions on how artists are routinely treated poorly by the studios when the system even if there were no copyright infringement. I know that people have told the RIAA what they’re saying here is wrong, so since they’ve staked out two other positions, when do we get to see them do things legally, fairly, and correctly? Keep in mind, this is the same organization that chose a sue-them-all approach which routinely means suing people who don’t infringe (like a professor with the same name as popular hip-hop artist Usher), people who don’t use computers, and threatening the family of an alleged copyright infringer who recently died. Is this really the kind of people you want to do business with?

If you’re a copyright holder looking for fair and effective enforcement of exclusion power, don’t let the RIAA speak for you. I encourage you to work with your customers and give them reasons to enjoy your copyrighted work in the way they want to (which sometimes means copying it from one device to another).