Author: Aaron Weber

You Don’t Have The Right

Someone asked recently:

If you buy a DVD movie, and then buy hardware (a DVD player on your computer) to play the DVD, don’t you have a legal right to watch it? There is open source software that allows you to watch DVDs, and also copy DVDs. If you are using the software to do legal activities (i.e. watch the DVD), and not to copy DVDs, isn’t that okay?

You’d think so, wouldn’t you. But it’s not. It’s legal to watch that movie. It’s legal to access that data. Just not with any tool you please. It’s like you’ve bought a car from Ford, but you are only allowed to use a Ford-approved wrench to open the hood. It won’t just void your warranty– they’ll track you down and sue you like the little rat you are. How dare you break into your property?

It’s been pointed out to me that it is possible to create a legal Linux-based software DVD player: you’d write one (closed source of course) and then pay the DVD Copy Control Association (DVD-CCA) a per-customer or per-year license fee to manufacture it. Then, you’d sell it. This is possible, but it hasn’t been done. There is not currently a legal way to watch a DVD on Linux. I guess you could use Crossover Office or some emulation layer and do it that way, but that’s not exactly the same.

And you can’t ever have a legal open source DVD player. Nope. No way. Same with MP3 players. Say what? A German consortium owns the rights to the MP3 encoding and decoding algorithym. Playing or ripping mp3s costs money. Try OGG instead.

Once, Mister Jack Valenti, the MPAA’s head lobbyist, tried to squash a popular piracy technology. He said it was “as dangerous to the motion picture industry as the Boston Strangler is to a woman alone.” What technology was that? The VCR. Because overwhelming consumer outcry forced it, it became legal over the objections of the industry, and the industry now makes billions just from videotape rentals.

Shortsighted? Yes. But he’s got the law on his side. Not justice, mind you. Not truth or the American way either. Just the law, and plenty of cash.

Naming, Branding, Marketing

Did I mention the KFC article? Well, read it. It’s good. It makes me think about the job of marketing, of presenting. Kitchen Fresh Marketing. Now that I’m being absorbed by marketing, I wonder sometimes if I’m going to turn into one of those pointy-haired bosses.

I’m certainly working on it. My reading list now includes things like “Positioning” and “The Product Manager’s Handbook.” I’ve started wearing shirts with collars to work. I’ve taken out my earrings. I’m going to go get a haircut during lunch, too.

Hippies sell out. Punks just grow up eventually. Not sure what I was when I was younger, aside from a bitter, self-absorbed, teenager. But I guess I’m growing up into a bitter, self-absorbed adult. Totally different kind of bitter and self absorbed of course. But nonetheless… it might be time to read Nick Baker’s “The Mezzanine” again.

Combination Platter

More on how bariatric surgery is often done badly and causes huge complications. Gastric bypass is a surgical answer to a problem with huge psychological components, it needs to be accompanied by huge amounts of counseling, exercise, and dietary changes. Otherwise, you’re treating the fatness, but ignoring the root causes of overeating.

Is the medicine worse than the cure?. Depression can feed on emotional detachment– it prevents you from forming real bonds, it drives people away… and not having those bonds can drive you deeper. So, the medication weakens those links. It’s treating the unhappiness, but it’s not solving any emotional problems that might have gotten the patient into the mess to begin with. Of course if it’s just a chemical issue, then it makes sense. But that sounds like a rare patient who’s just got a chemical imbalance and won’t benefit from counselling.

Let Me Remind You of Our Laws

People often ask me about the availability of particular pieces of software on Linux. They’ll say, “I have a .DOC file, how can I open that on Linux?” and I’ll say, “OpenOffice.org makes a great word processor for Linux, Windows and OS X!” Or they want to know how to edit photos, or use a web browser, or play music.

But when they say they want to watch DVDs, I have to tell them it’s illegal and they get confused. Maybe you didn’t hear the nerds screaming about it five years ago when the Digital Millenium Copyright Act passed, or when the Motion Picture Association of America arranged to have a 14-year-old Norwegian boy arrested (he was eventually freed after a three-year legal battle that destroyed his father’s business). Maybe you didn’t hear when the Russian cryptographer Dmitri Sklyarov was arrested in Las Vegas, or when the Harvard professors got a letter threatening them with legal action and hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines if they published their most recent work.

Well, now you know why it mattered five years ago: you don’t own that DVD. You own a limited license to access the data on it from certain licensed players. You may not use still images. You may not skip to an arbitrary portion of it without watching certain advertisements and notices. You may not make backup copies. You may not transfer it to another medium. You may not edit out the dirty parts if you think your kids would be better off without them

It’s theoretically legal, under fair use rights, to do any of those things. It’s just that constructing an unlicensed player is a crime. You can build an unlicensed player, of course– the key bits are simple enough for any 14-year-old computer whiz with a good knowledge of software compilation and encryption technologies. Not brilliant? You’re SOL.

Write your senator. Give to the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Or give up.

Department of the Obvious

Obese children more likely to be bullied, says study.

The article does point out that these kids also become bullies more often than skinny kids, but doesn’t establish which way the correlation runs: are bullies likely to become fat from eating all the candy they take from their smaller peers? Do bullied children seek solace in food, and refuse to exercise, and get heavy, in a self-perpetuating cycle of shame and regret?

No, they don’t ask any of the really interesting questions.

Logic, logic, logic

The rightist wingnuts over at the American Family Association, are not known for logic, but their latest campaign is a real winner: trying to stop the USPTO from recognizing a trademark for the French Connection UK acronym. They seem to think that if it’s not a recognized trademark, it won’t appear on clothing or advertising, despite the fact that it’s been in both for quite some time now.

It’s a stupid ad campaign with a juvenile appeal, and the clothes aren’t both ugly and poorly made, but why on earth it should be denied trademark protection, and why the lack of trademark protection would stop them in their tracks escapes me.

Catchup-linkage

Censorship, the nature of ickiness, a great summary of Woodward’s new book, one of the many reasons classrooms don’t have windows these days, the deliberate denial of medical service to people you disagree with politically, the return of Country Joe and the Fish, celebrated 60’s antiwar band, a paper on how the author and publisher are really going to get the reader this time, the end of logic, the end of freedom of thought, the end of wilderness and numerous species, the end of medical research, the end of your life, by way of heart disease, and the end of this post, finally.

Oh wait, this looks like a cool photo app. I’m sure it’ll be misused almost immediately.

Value and Price

Great post over on Crooked Timber about Google, and how some things of great social worth are not worth buying… and how even some things of great economic worth are not necessarily worth buying. Google, for example, provides a heck of a lot of economic value to its users… but that doesn’t make Google any money, so that may not increase the monetary value of the company.

The general problem is that, in an economy dominated by public goods, like that of the Internet, there’s no reason to expect any relationship between economic value and capacity to raise revenue. Things of immense social value (this blog, for example!) are given away because there’s no point doing anything else. On the other hand significant profits can be made by those who can find a suitable choke point, even if they haven’t actually contributed anything of value. Assuming for the moment that SCO prevails in its attempts to extract revenue from Linux users, it won’t be because SCO’s code was better than some free alternative but simply because it was widely distributed before anyone found out it was copyrighted.

If the Internet continues to grow in economic importance, the central role of public goods in its formation will pose big problems for capitalism, though not necessarily to the benefit of traditional forms of socialism.