“When there are two computers in the same room, it doesn’t make sense that they must go out to the Internet to communicate. WiPeerâ€s main added value is the ability to keep things local.”

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• LIMIT the scope of IPRED2 to true criminal enterprises, involving copyright piracy and trademark violations done on a commercial scale, with malice and the intention of earning a profit from the enterprise, rather than criminalizing all intellectual property infringement as the current directive does;
• AVOID creating an unprecedented scope of secondary liability for Internet intermediaries, ICTs, software vendors and a range of legitimate business activity, by removing the words “aiding or abetting and inciting” from Article 3.
• PROVIDE LEGAL CERTAINTY by adopting precise and appropriate definitions of “on a commercial scale” and “intentional infringement” in Article 2 as commercial activity done with the intent to earn a profit directly attributable to the infringing activity.

If you agree with them you should write your MEPs and ask them to support these amendments. ASAP as they will be voting on the 24th April!

One area that concerns me is how many P2P technologies might come under the heading of ‘intermediaries’ and might be inhibited because of fears of secondary liability.

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FSF defines Free Software as giving the user has four essential freedoms:

• Freedom zero is the freedom to run the program as you wish.
• Freedom one is the freedom to study the source code and change it so that the program does what you wish when you run it.
• Freedom two is the freedom to help your neighbour; that is, the freedom to distribute exact copies to others, when you wish.
• Freedom three is the freedom to contribute to your community; that’s the freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions, when you wish.

I believe there needs to be a fifth freedom added to this list:

• Freedom four is the freedom of the author to identify his or herself as the author of the original work.

Authorship, of course, is implied in that the license is created under the powers of the copyright regime and that in turn implies that there was an author who claims the copyright and places the copyright notice on the work but if the ‘authorship identity freedom’ was explicitly stated it might clear up at least one important issue:

Section 3. of the draft refers to “No Denying Users’ Rights through Technical Measures” and the aim of this section is to prevent content from being locked up with technical protection measures thus potentially inhibiting access to content that should be legally or morally available to the user. However, as I read this section, it also prevents free software from being used to technically protect information linking the author to an intellectual work they have created and to which they own the copyright.

Protecting the fifth freedom of author by protecting information on their rights would have no impact on the other four freedoms of the user; protected metadata does not inhibit access to the content. And, protecting authorship can fulfil an important role of keeping an intellectual work free by preventing a third party illegally claiming the work as theirs and thus restricting access.

I believe that in a P2P environment there needs to be a balance between author and user freedoms and although the FSF is doing a good job protecting users it should not unnecessarily limit protection of author rights. If you feel the same please comment on the draft.

The post GNU draft GPLv3 needs a Fifth Freedom appeared first on P2P Foundation.

“Second, a more radical rights model could be designed specifically for an organisation delivering public purposes in new ways. Overall, we believe that the PSP should be “share-aware” – meaning that the rights exploitation model should embrace the reality of a participatory media environment, and not struggle against it. In particular, this means that alternative open licensing models – which allow content to be re-used and modified by others – are likely to be more appropriate for the PSP than traditional rights models.”

Could all this lead to peer to peer public activities in the future supported by public services?

Nicholas

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“By now, you’ve probably read Steve Jobs’s essay, “Thoughts on Music” and had the same warm, fuzzy reaction we did. We’re back to our senses (somewhat) and we’re here to cut through the afterglow and examine his treatise in detail, since every single word was undoubtedly carefully chosen.”

Having read that and other commentaries [1][2] I wonder if it’s not all politics and PR. Do you see Jobs freeing up any of Apple’s ‘property rights’ while calling on big media to drop DRM? Do you see any call for open DRM that is another widely discussed option?[3] Do you see any call to promote the benefits of the P2P infrastructure?
My feeling is that Jobs’ thoughts are still very private – that is private, proprietary, property not public peer participation.

p.s. Fortune’s Brent Schlender also brings iPhone and video content into the political equation.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/07/technology/07music.html?pagewanted=1&ref=technology

[2] http://www.michaelrobertson.com/archive.php?minute_id=231

[3] http://camorra.org/swann/2007/02/09/skin-an-apple/

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• Bitmunk provides a secure base for the business of exchanging digital goods and money. All users are authenticated.
• Artists can register their work directly and set their own prices.
• Others are encouraged to sell the work and even earn a fee for doing it thus encouraging support for the artist and distributing bandwidth requirements.

Bitmunk says they don’t use DRM but what they mean is they don’t use ‘strong’ Technological Protection Measures (TPM) that technically control what a consumer can do with their copy. The do use soft DRM though. Each traded work is uniquely watermarked and so can be identified if it starts being distributed in the wild. If this happens the consumer who originally purchased the work can be penalised by Bitmunk and possibly sued by the artist for copyright infringement. I wonder if this responsibility will be too onerous for the consumer? An honest consumer could accidental loose track of a copy and be penalized when an unknown third party illegally distributes the content.

Bitmunk also describes itself as a P2P service but again this only partly true. It does encourage a certain amount of distributed distribution where anyone can set up as a seller and earn a fee for the distribution of the content thus potentially relieving the load on the central Bitmunk service but here is the rub. Bitmunk centrally controls all transactions and charges 15% for doing it. This may be a valid, essential and worthwhile service but dose it fit a pure P2P model?

Watermarks are becoming popular:

Another company, Infoflows, has also announced digital object recognition by the use of unique watermarks. The trick this time is that the watermarks provide a link to the Handle system that in turn provides persistent links to the source of content, licenses or meta-data.

The post Bitmunk – P2P distribution? appeared first on P2P Foundation.

There have been other recent articles that predict the demise of DRM: DRM Fading for Music: The Year in Review form the EFF and Ailing music biz set to relax digital restrictions at Yahoo News.

It appears to me that the one thing that all consumers want is to be able to play their music when they want, where they want and on the equipment of their choice. So the producers are either going to have to come up with an omnipresent DRM that is totally interoperable and transparent or abandon all DRM.

Business Week reports RIAA President Cary Sherman as saying, “We are focused on interoperability” however there is no mention of enterprises such as the Digital Media Project that have spent the last three years working towards an open, interoperable, DRM platform. So how focused are they? I can’t help wondering if any one DRM system will ever achieve ubiquity and this, by default, will make the alternative, a DRM-free world (the P2P solution?), a more likely reality.

The post DRM – all or nothing? appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Splogs, in this case, are defined by Mark Cuban as a “blog whose creator doesn’t add any written value.” although others have defined them as, “Splogs are blogs where the articles are fake” but it is not fake content that we are considering here. Coban also expresses his view of the value of these splogs, “I’m sure some might argue that packaging data, such as news feeds or the blog posts of others is added value. I don’t think it is.”

Walk poses these questions:

“Either way, the question is really one about RSS. Is content offered on your site via RSS “free” for the taking by other sites? Any feed can be distributed by any site. What are the legal ramifications? If you offer your content in RSS form, are copyright issues mitigated?”

and, “Who, if anyone, owns a feed?”

First, a few observations:

• Making the content available at an Internet location does not mean that the rights holder is giving up their copyright to the work even if it is generally available for viewing. It is there for viewing, not for copying and secondary distribution, unless the rights holder says this is the case (e.g. Creative Commons license)
• Traditionally in the analogue world information about the location of content (the location of a book in a library say) was not a copyright issue. Copying the book was an issue, information on its location was not.
• In a simple case the RSS system just provides a convenient means for someone to view (render) the content once they know its address. No copyright rules are broken assuming that the rights holder has agreed to make the content available for public viewing.
• Also, making a directory list of addresses on a web page with instructions on how to copy the address to your own feed reader to view the content does not appear to break copyright rules either. If these addresses are categorised or selected for quality in some way the web directory could be viewed as providing a service.
• However, if the directory page actually takes copies of the original content and redistributes this content when the customer selects the address this is a different matter. This in my view is definitely copyright infringement unless, of course, the rights holder had given her permission.

Feed Components:

Next, we need to define three components of this system of ‘distribution’; namely, the creative content itself (the digital words, music, or video), the address (URL) of this content, and the RSS protocol:

1. The content is a file containing the creative work and usually this content is protected by the rules of copyright. The author or right holder can choose how and who can distribute it until the copyright term is up and the work passes into the public domain.
2. Immediately the content is made available on the Internet it has a location in digital space and this location is addressed by an universal resource locator (URL); a portable link to the content.
3. The RSS system and protocol provides a standard means to render the content to anyone who knows the address URL.

It is the combination of the content, the RSS protocol, the location address, and the RSS rendering software that makes up the feed.

The complication:

Some of these feed directories referred to by by Anne Walk don’t host or hold a copy of the copyrighted content itself, thus avoiding direct copyright infringement, however they post more than just an address link to the content and they become an active link in the RSS feed rendering system. The consumer views the content streamed directly from the original site location but it is often rendered alongside additional content originating from the directory site. This additional content could be advertising that is earning revenue for the directory site and none of this revenue necessarily gets passed on to the original content owner. This is the issue.

I would say that this activity was non-infringing because the consumer can always take the address and view the content on their feed reader of choice. In addition some consumers will search out the original to see what else is available from the source of the creativity. In my view any gain by the directory site will be balanced (always an important term when discussing copyright) against increased numbers of consumers going to the original site.

A further complication is that some content is made available under licenses, such as Creative Commons non-commercial license, that specifically state that no commercial use of the content is allowed. However, I still think the balance argument above holds because the content is still not being copied by the directory site.

So to answer Anne Walk’s questions:

• Is content offered on your site via RSS “free” for the taking by other sites? – The content is not free for the taking but address to this content can be posted and any RSS system can stream the content even if it does add other content and advertising.
• Any feed can be distributed by any site. – Any rendering system can stream any feed.
• What are the legal ramifications? – None in my view, copyright does not change or need to change, although courts might take a different view.
• If you offer your content in RSS form, are copyright issues mitigated? – Content in RSS form has no less copyright protection.

Who, if anyone, owns a feed? – Many people and hence no one person.

Many people own different parts of the feed:

• The author has rights to the original content.
• Telecom companies own the transmission lines.
• Directory sites own their pages (structure, rating systems, advertising revenue.)
• Rendering software creators own their viewing products.
• Consumers own any display equipment and rendering software they have purchased.

What is required is clear rules and understanding so that no one takes control / ownership of a part of the system that does not belong to them. Maybe this is the challenge for P2P; to provide a fair, balanced, system where everyone can contribute, have their contribution recognized, have others share access to this contribution, but no third party can claim another’s contribution as their own.

Nicholas

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