Xray Dubs - copyright tag

Google asserts song writer owns no right to his own songs.

Sat, 17 Feb 2007 01:39:30 GMT

Fellow Clan Analogue member APELL posted a message this morning to the clan-l mailing list. It seems that Google's subsidiary You Tube has decided that a video of an APELL performance, playing his own music, filmed by another Clan Analogue member is actually owned by Viacom! Of course this idiotic mistake is actually compounded by an equally idiotically byzantine procedure to get the video restored:

Due to Google buying YouTube for 2 billion $$$ with the plan to use it to further its massive advertising revenue through the site, it is now attempting to clean up the copyright infringements throughout the site and has recently struck a deal with Viacom who control a large of film and TV content to remove all Viacom content from the site. Unfortunately they have mistakenly removed my clip with the Viacom purge...

Here's what the clip actually is:

http://www.apellmusic.com/mm/apell_fringe2005_kazum_slap.wmv

Which is me playing bass with my own original music filmed by Jeremy from Windup Toys.

I had a look to see how I could get my clip viewable again and I have to go through the legal process of filing a counter notice to their Californian office

http://www.google.com/support/youtube/bin/answer.py?answer=59826

I faxing them on Monday when I get to work - wish me luck!

This is the problem with the whole corporate copyright regime nowadays. Even when there is a genuine mistake (as opposed to say the totally malicious behaviour of the RIAA and MPAA) which should be easily rectified, for the individual artist, it's a huge burden for the small independent to deal with such bureaucratic systems.

Sony's DRM hacks your computer

Tue, 01 Nov 2005 21:12:30 GMT

Basically, Mark Russinovich reveals how he discovered that Sony's inept DRM puts a root kit on your Windows machine. Although I am not a lawyer, I feel this is an illegal modification because you don't agree to such an install. Sony should be sued for this and provide a free remedy to any affected computer user. Read it, it's another nail in the coffin of Big Music and their immoral DRM fantasies.

At that point I knew conclusively that the rootkit and its associated files were related to the First 4 Internet DRM software Sony ships on its CDs. Not happy having underhanded and sloppily written software on my system I looked for a way to uninstall it. However, I didn’t find any reference to it in the Control Panel’s Add or Remove Programs list, nor did I find any uninstall utility or directions on the CD or on First 4 Internet’s site. I checked the EULA and saw no mention of the fact that I was agreeing to have software put on my system that I couldn't uninstall. Now I was mad.

Read in full at: Mark's Sysinternals Blog: Sony, Rootkits and Digital Rights Management Gone Too Far

DRM snippets

Tue, 23 Aug 2005 11:25:04 GMT

Interesting series of blog posts around the traps recently on DRM technology and the seemingly in-built wrongness of the enterprise.

First up over the weekend, Jonathan Schwartz, CEO of Sun Microsystems, told an interesting little story on his blog. He was visiting a media company and its executives were asking him to support their watermarking initiative. His response was illustrative;

Rather than provide a response in the room, I turned a question back to him. First, the network you're supposing will deliver a movie to a theater or a camera to a file server is the same network I'm presuming will run throughout your datacenter. On the internet, it's tough to distinguish a feature length movie from a data warehouse application (bits is bits) - so would your datacenter folks support the tech industry certifying content behind your firewalls with a digital watermark? In running business systems?

But even more illustrative was the response the media company gave to him;

On the former question, related to DRM in the datacenter, he said he'd run it up the flagpole with his IT folks and get back to me.

After a few days, I got a response. He'd spoken with their CIO, who dismissed the relevance of my proposal to manage all digital assets under the same scheme. "You'd have to start by proving I've stolen something."

Well, duh. Media companies are crapping in their own nest in one. They can't even see what their own executives can tell them. People hate being treated as criminals when they are not.

On that very note, Tim Bray of Ongoing fame (and also of Sun Micro) wrote an entry today about DRM. He mentions the Schwartz article, but more importantly links to a Cory Doctorow talk to the Microsoft research unit. Full of interesting ideas, I found it hugely enjoyable and I can only urge you to read all of it now. I certainly hope someone at Microsoft was listening to him.