Smalltalk with James Robertson

The copyright kings don't want you to know just how bogus their claims are - a lawyer who sells a $20 package of "FYI" documents, telling you how to defend against one of the fishing expeditions, is now being sued:

On November 22, Syfert received another email from attorney Jeff Weaver informing him that he had made a formal request for sanctions against him on behalf of the production company behind The Hurt Locker, one of the driving forces behind the USCG lawsuits. Weaver is apparently claiming that the 19 cases filed using the self-help package have cost his firm $5000 and he wants Syfert to pay.

How dare people find an inexensive way to deal with a bunch of overpaid lawyers with way too much time on their hands...

As I said earlier, the slow learners over at DHS apparently aren't aware that they don't have jurisdiction over the entire internet. Market Ticker is quoted by TechCrunch:

That’s a lot of staff attorney time and trouble to get a big fat nothing out of it, which is exactly what they get going down this road. Why? Because all they can do is redirect the domain pointers which will do exactly nothing when the sites re-register under a top-level domain not under the US Government’s jurisdiction and there are lots of them.

Now we just have to wait for the coming justification for the "Great Firewall of the DHS". I'm sure that it will be "for the children"

Technorati Tags: stupidity

Update 4: Now there's confirmation - it looks like it is a government operation, with Immix doing the work. I'll return to my original question: how the heck is this the business of DHS?

“ICE office of Homeland Security Investigations executed court-ordered seizure warrants against a number of domain names,” said Cori W. Bassett, a spokeswoman for ICE, in a statement. “As this is an ongoing investigation, there are no additional details available at this time.”

Update 3: This may be the missing piece of the puzzle. Go back to this story from May 18, where we find out what Immix is up to:

DHS has selected immixGroup Inc. to provide software applications, network and cybersecurity systems support services. Virginia's information technology solutions provider immixGroup received the award to support the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Cyber Crimes Center, or C3, including agency's Child Exploitation, Cyber Crimes, Computer Forensics and Cyber Training divisions. UPI reports ImmixGroup says its Information Technology Solutions unit will be expected to provide C3's software applications, network and cybersecurity systems with operational support and maintenance among other requirements.

So.... it looks like it's a federally backed operation, but run by the "cyber security" people at Immix Group. The only question is, how high up in DHS/ICE did the OK for this go? Did they have a bunch of pre-ok'd warrants about that they acted on, or did some kind of legal action take place late Friday? At this point, I'd like to see some real reporting done on this.

Update 2: - A look at the registrar information turns up a immixGroup IT Solutions - and it looks like they do a lot of work for the government. So.... is this some kind of pseudo government operation that jumped the gun? That would explain the ability to get the DNS redirected (the sites in question are being redirected via seizedservers.com DNS services), while also explaining the lack of any PR push. If you go to the whois lookup for seizedservers, you can get all of that info. Curiouser and curiouser...

Update: Ok, this now looks more interesting. Have a look at the source of one of the sites that's been taken down, like torrent-finder.com. The source doesn't have any of the "official government" stuff you would expect - and there's a script being loaded from 74.81.170.107 - which is located in North Carolina, and doesn't look at all like a government run operation. Or, if it is government, it's some kind of second hand contract sort of thing that could be denied. Since I'm not really in the conspiracy business, let's take the more obvious tack: it's likely that the RIAA or the MPAA (or possibly both) are paying someone else to do the dirty work that they couldn't get the government to do for them through the proposed COICA law. Or heck, it could be a set of pranksters out having a good time - right now, there's no telling. I think Drudge needs to dig a little deeper on this one.

Another thing - there are no press releases out from DHS or ICE. Typically, when a government agency does something like this, they announce it with great fanfare as an example of "protecting the country". Since there's none of that here, it makes me really wonder.

Hat tip to Michael, for prodding me on this and doing a bunch of the research.

Why any of this is an issue for the DHS is beyond me:

The investigative arm of the Homeland Security Department appears to be shutting down websites that facilitate copyright infringement.

So what happens when the slower class at DHS figures out that domains can be set up beyond their jurisdiction? Does the US build its own version of the "Great Firewall of China", with the DHS acting as the muscle for the RIAA and MPAA?

It doesn't seem to matter who's in the Oval Office or the Congress; on copyright matters, the stupid never stops. Oh, and if you don't think this kind of siezure isn't open to easy abuse - you're not thinking hard enough. Just imagine that (insert partisan forces you distrust here) is in power, and apply the rhetoric you usually use on other issues...

Technorati Tags: stupidity

The latest stupidity in the ongoing copyright wars is the COICA - a proposed law (just got through the Senate Judiciary Committee) that would give the Attorney General the ability to censor websites based on his office "deeming them to be primarily for infringing activity". Well. I'm sure that a lot of the activity in DropBox qualifies; on the other hand, DropBox is a really cool service for easily passing documents around. Would that be something that got shuttered? Who knows?

And what about the possible political impact? It's not a stretch to imagine a politically oriented White House (insert whichever political persuasion you fear most here) deciding to shutter an opposing set of websites based on some infringing material that landed there via end user upload. The number of ways that this sort of thing could be abused simply boggles the mind.

It's time to completely rethink copyright law. What we have now isn't working, and attempting to tighten the screws - while simultaneously extending the timespan of content owner monopolies - isn't the best way forward.

Technorati Tags: censorship, stupidity

The endless campaign against the supposed losses from piracy have bitten me. I'm teaching a training class in a couple of weeks, so I wanted to set up an existing LCD monitor as a second screen - the class is being given via webcast, and I wanted the main screen for the slides, and the second screen for watching the class chat channel. Seems reasonable, right?

Well, the copyright posse has made sure that I can't (easily) do that. I have a mini-dvi to dvi adaptor I got with my new 13" MBP. I have an older LCD screen and a dvi to vga adaptor. Seems like it should all work fine, right? Nope - the older plugs have wires to carry analog, and the jerks at the MPAA (et. al.) are convinced that those are only there for nefarious purposes. Likewise, I wanted to plug my mac into the TV via an adaptor I bought a few years back - dvi to s-video. Same problem. In that case, I wanted to stream from a network site to my Mac, and display on the TV. Terrible, right?

Sure, I can buy a new set of cables for all of this, but the reason that I need to is just stupid. I'm not pirating anything - I'm trying to work or display content from a content provider on a bigger screen. Making this harder on me simply makes me less likely to bother.

Technorati Tags: stupidity, analog hole

If this article doesn't lay out just how stupid our current copyright system is, nothing does.

The Library of Congress tells us:

"Were copyright law followed to the letter, little audio preservation would be undertaken. Were the law strictly enforced, it would brand virtually all audio preservation as illegal," the study concludes, "Copyright laws related to preservation are neither strictly followed nor strictly enforced. Consequently, some audio preservation is conducted."

That sounds like hyperbole, but keep going:

The consequence is that all sounds recordings made before 1972 will have their copyright expire in 2067 - 95 years after the placement of these recordings under federal protection in 1972. This means that the oldest sound recordings in the US dating from 1890, will only enter the public domain after 177 years.

So something that gets recorded now is locked up for - literally - generations. It's beyond stupid and straight into the absurd. Truth really is stranger than fiction....

The Commerce Secretary sees danger from.... file sharing:

“This isn’t just an issue of right and wrong,” Locke said in a speech at Belmont University in Nashville, Tennessee, one of the nation’s musical focal points. “This is a fundamental issue of America’s economic competitiveness.”

In a (very small) sense, he's correct about it being an issue of competitiveness. Sadly for him, he's on the wrong side. Adding another layer of rules and bringing back DRM won't stop the large scale pirates, but it will make life miserable for the rest of us.

The draconian DMCA and absurdly long copyright periods aren't enough - the RIAA wants more:

"The DMCA isn't working for content people at all," he said at the Technology Policy Institute's Aspen Forum here. "You cannot monitor all the infringements on the Internet. It's simply not possible. We don't have the ability to search all the places infringing content appears, such as cyberlockers like [file-hosting firm] RapidShare."

What they want to see is safe harbor removed - which would make the birth of anything akin to YouTube impossible. The RIAA needs to die, yesterday.

There's some research into how Germany advanced so quickly - especially compared to the rest of Europe - in the 19th century. One possibility: lack of strong copyright law:

In Germany during the same period, publishers had plagiarizers -- who could reprint each new publication and sell it cheaply without fear of punishment -- breathing down their necks. Successful publishers were the ones who took a sophisticated approach in reaction to these copycats and devised a form of publication still common today, issuing fancy editions for their wealthy customers and low-priced paperbacks for the masses.

I'm pretty well convinced that copyrights, as we apply them in the US at least, are a net negative. They tie material up for ridiculous amounts of time, and they benefit big businesses (Disney comes to mind) far more than they benefit individual authors. I think it's well past time for a change.