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Digital Rights 101

14:44 / 01.08.06

Based on the Open Right Group banner now adorning our home page, I thought it might be nice having a Q/A space about what that's all about.

Especially since I barely understand it myself.

So, here's the space for people like me to ask, "What ARE digital rights?" and "Why does this stuff matter?"

Anybody want to answer those questions?

Also, any "What does this new law or strange gizmo have to do with privacy/copy protection/digital distribution or whatever?" questions or observations should probably go here.

14:49 / 01.08.06

For starters, besides the questions I asked above (which I promise were not simply for rhetorical effect), I'm interested in this news item about an experiment Yahoo! is making with popular music:

Yahoo for the first time is offering a popular song for sale unprotected by anti-copying technology. It's a one-time deal with record label Epic that the web giant nevertheless portrayed as significant progress toward its goal of eventually selling all music downloads with no restrictions.

On Wednesday, Yahoo Music announced it is selling Jessica Simpson's latest single, "A Public Affair," as an MP3 with no digital rights management, or DRM, technology. That means the tracks will play on any device and can be copied any number of times, including on CDs.

The offer is a major break from how most music downloads are sold today. For example, tracks purchased through Apple Computer's iTunes Music Store and RealNetworks' Rhapsody service include DRM locks that prevent songs from playing on some devices, and limit the number of copies consumers are allowed to make.

They're charging $2 for the song, and they're adding a few extra features (which I don't entirely understand).

I'm wondering if this matters -- will it really change anything? Will it work? Why try this anyway?

23:46 / 01.08.06

while i'm not sure i understand the features of selling songs digitally, either, it seems like they have got the 'experiment' wrong!

shouldn't they be trialling the song as a 'full version free' $2 one alongside a 'regular restrictions' $1 offer; and let the market decide if the restrictions are actually pissing anyone off enough to pay double for their music??

or is it a marketing ploy, to get suckers to pay double for their music?

or is astro in a cynical mood today?

22:55 / 17.08.06

I found this ChangeThis manifesto by Cory Doctorow (of the EFF) very helpful in getting my head round some of the arguments.

13:04 / 31.08.06

Billy Bragg just wrote about social networking & song ownership for the Guardian:

On August 1, MTV launched a new social networking site called MTV Flux and invited users to post songs and videos to share with other members. Those clips which are the most popular will be aired on the MTV Flux TV channel, which comes on air on September 6, giving unsigned artists access to a medium that has previously been the sole preserve of the record companies and their stars.

Artists wanting to see themselves on MTV are unlikely to read the terms and conditions with which they are required to agree before joining the service. That is unfortunate; a close reading suggests that MTV wants to own their work.

In order to get on to MTV Flux, users have to grant MTV the right to transmit their material on the network "in perpetuity and gratis". They also claim "the right to commercially exploit, host, store, copy, distribute, modify, edit, incorporate into other material, and/or otherwise treat in any way your Material at (MTV's) discretion without any payment" to the artist.

It seems that MTV Flux will be a TV channel comprising solely user-generated content, the commercial exploitation rights of which are owned by MTV. Just so no one should be in any confusion about what such an agreement might involve, MTV's content submission conditions states: 'In particular, you agree to waive all moral rights to the Material.'*

Such terms are unprecedented in the music industry and could have serious long-term implications.

Hmmmm.

15:43 / 31.08.06

I'm not sure if this is technical, properly, but it's definitely about the new systems of distribution & content (the idea of a wide base of content providers being chained somehow to a distributor or linked to a network seems to be kind of central to this stuff).

23:18 / 31.08.06

More generally, I think you should consider 'digital rights' to be normally the protection of your existing rights in law as it becomes easier for companies to deny you those rights and freedoms that you've taken for granted through code and technology, and also the protection of rights from new abuses. So for example, the fact that it's now practical for a company or a government to connect all the data about you together and keep it without giving you any way to check whether it's accurate or fair is a new problem at scale (ie for it to affect all of us, rahter than just a tiny minority under surveillance). this is an effect of the technology which needs to be mitigated. You also have rights in law to 'fair use' of copyrighted material, which (while you may still have) is being rendered practically useless by the fact that (1) entertainment companies want to stop you being physically able to sample music / video or whatever and (2) making it a crime to break the systems that would enable you to do those things. There's nothing in law to stop them doing these things, but it's clearly against the spirit of the laws in question. Another area that is worth protecting is the market itself. DRM encourages monopolistic practices (try playing your iTunes song on another player for example - they have lock-in once you've bought a bunch of stuff) which in turn limits your consumer rights to buy things and use them as you see fit. And then there's basic stuff like whether or not there are protections in law to stop you being surveilled by absolutely everyone, your right to privacy etc. etc. that take on new implications in a different landscape.

02:22 / 01.09.06

Does anyone else have a white box displayed on the home screen where 'protect your bits' should be? My employer seems to have decided that it is not suitable reading.
Digital rights no, barbelith yes the mind boggles.

When purchasing from iTunes, and I assume realplayer etc, just wait until you have around a cd's worth, burn it as an audio cd and then import as you would any other cd. Delete the original irritating iTunes protected downloads. It does cost the price of a CD and takes a few minutes but I don't really mind as I need CD's to play in the kitchen anyway and prefer to have my tunes as mp3. Is this likely to be a problem legaly? Although iTunes have technology in place to prevent making any more than a few copies of each tune am I breaking the law by working round this technology. I'm not doing this for grand scale music piracy I simply would like to play the tunes on something other than iTunes on occassion and don't really like the idea of being informed that I can no longer listen to a favourite album in the kitchen anymore as I've exceeded my burning limit.

I though the great part of digital media was that I would never have to buy a cd twice just because the original copy went for a beer bath. Are they now to penalise me for repeated carelessness and stupidity?

13:15 / 01.09.06

The Cory Doctorow piece I finally read yesterday -- it's a very good overview of this stuff.

Tom's mention of *scale* above is very apropos... that seems to be the real issue here: the way things scale (millions of downloads, the way iTunes hassles build up over time & loss-of-systems (three hard drives).

Tabitha Tickletooth

13:08 / 20.09.06

I don't normally wander in here, so please tell me if this is inappropriate for this thread/forum but...

Just came across this story about the Torpark browser, which sounds really interesting. The article says that the technology is not new, but has been conveniently packaged together, as it were. The Torpark website is here.

Are there other bits of software like this that do the same thing? How well does it work? The BBC article says that ...it could be possible to identify users if they visit sites that do not encrypt login sessions. Is there any way of knowing whether a site that you visit does encrypt?

If this kind of software is effective at blocking this kind of exchange, I would have thought it would have implications for authorities that are constantly trying to use the internet as a tool for monitoring. Is there any hostility toward this kind of stuff? Any actual resistance from authorities?

With specific regard to rights, could this be used to take material from rights holders off encrypted sites - ie could a person using this steal stuff and be untraceable. Or am I just completely barking up the wrong tree here.

16:02 / 20.09.06

I can't answer most of those questions, but this one:

With specific regard to rights, could this be used to take material from rights holders off encrypted sites - ie could a person using this steal stuff and be untraceable. Or am I just completely barking up the wrong tree here.

is pretty clearly "Yes."

The whole point is in keeping your movements secret.

I kinda doubt there's not someone out there already who can break all these encryption methods packaged in this browser, but that someone is probably pretty rarified and narrowly focused on something a government deems top priority.

Like, the NSA monitoring Al Qaeda suspects more so than some Warner Brothers security exec tracking Movie Pirate Fu Xiaolong. Although what one can do, the next one can soon enough figure out how to do.

21:58 / 21.09.06

With specific regard to rights, could this be used to take material from rights holders off encrypted sites - ie could a person using this steal stuff and be untraceable. Or am I just completely barking up the wrong tree here.

Well, if the information is available publicly on the site, the rights holder is pretty much hosed regardless. If the content is encrypted, though, it doesn't matter whether you get it using a regular browser - current strong encryption is essentially unbreakable using existing computing resources unless there's a major breakthrough in the factoring of large prime numbers. And, if that happens, *nothing* will be secure.

The Torpark browser doesn't have any capacity to break encryption; it is designed for anonymization of the user. So, it's potentially useful for political dissidents in repressive countries (if they can get through the national firewall to the TOR network at all.)

14:44 / 02.11.06

This is barely relevant, but awfully amusing (and amusingly awful): Shawn Hogan vs. Meet the Fockers goes FUBAR.

In brief: MPAA sues Hogan for obtaining illegal digital copy of MtF.
Hogan doesn't actually own an illegal digital copy of MtF, but a legal DVD. He decided to fight the claim.
The MPAA said, OK, tell you what, we'll just settle if you pony up $2,500. Hogan says no.
And now, thanks to discoveries made during the court case, it looks like the studio represented by the MPAA might not even own the rights to the movie.

The explanation is a little confusing, but it appears that there are two separate organizations involved: Universal City Studios Productions LLLP and Universal City Studios LLLP (you can see why this gets confusing). The first (we'll call them "Productions") is the one who sued Hogan. However, it was the other ("plain old Studios") who filed the copyright registration. So, in preparing for the case, Hogan and his lawyers went looking for proof that plain old Studios had transferred the copyright to Productions -- which they got. The problem, however, is that the notice transferring the rights happens to occur two months before plain old Studios actually registered the copyright. In other words, they handed over the rights before they even got them -- making the whole thing a bit of a mess.

File this story under "why we fight," I suppose.

17:16 / 02.11.06

I just noticed that I'd missed this earlier:

When purchasing from iTunes, and I assume realplayer etc, just wait until you have around a cd's worth, burn it as an audio cd and then import as you would any other cd. Delete the original irritating iTunes protected downloads.

The problem here is that AAC is a lossy codec, so when you burn the music to CD you're getting a downsampled version of the original waveform. When you reencode it as MP3, the MP3 compression algorithm takes different parts of the waveform, so you end up getting a lower-quality product. This is known as transcoding and is generally considered a bad thing as far as audio quality is concerned.

'Course, if you're just listening to whatever it is on crappy computer speakers, you may not notice the difference. In any case, it doesn't make any sense to delete the stuff you bought from ITunes (provided that you can actually play it in your player of choice.)

17:49 / 02.11.06

In the news today;
Shockingly, Britain currently is the third most surveilled country in the world, behind Russia and China.

00:07 / 04.11.06

The problem here is that AAC is a lossy codec, so when you burn the music to CD you're getting a downsampled version of the original waveform. When you reencode it as MP3, the MP3 compression algorithm takes different parts of the waveform, so you end up getting a lower-quality product

I appreciate this, as a cheapo hi-fi enthusiast it hurts, would it help matters to convert from aac to cd and than back to aac? My problem with this is that I'm not as convinced as Apple that the aac format is going to last longer than my love of the tunes I've bought from them and that there is a possibility I may want to use something other then iTunes to access my music at some point in the future.

I'd happily pay an extra "very modest amount of money" for the lossless files.

julius has no imagination

06:40 / 04.11.06

I appreciate this, as a cheapo hi-fi enthusiast it hurts, would it help matters to convert from aac to cd and than back to aac?

I'm not an expert on digital audio, but it probably wouldn't help much, if at all.

My problem with this is that I'm not as convinced as Apple that the aac format is going to last longer than my love of the tunes I've bought from them and that there is a possibility I may want to use something other then iTunes to access my music at some point in the future.

Well, the AAC format is a standard - it's not something that Apple have just cooked up for their own use. Various other applications (including Free ones like VLC or mplayer) can play unencrypted AACs, and basically, in 10 years (or whatever) you're just as likely to be able to play your AACs as your MP3s. The iTunes Music Store encryption wrapped around them is essentially a separate problem.

And before you go doing the lossy burn-rip procedure, you may be interested to know that (if you're using iTunes on Windows) it's possible, even for the latest version of iTunes, to strip off the encryption without any transcoding or burning. I'm not sure what the legal implications of describing it in detail would be, so I'll just leave it at that: It is possible.