Iain Thomson notes that the stimulus bill that recently cleared the American Congress might work to legitimize ISP packet inspection practices under the guise of ‘network management’. Specifically, the amendment in question reads:
In establishing obligations under paragraph (8), the assistant secretary shall allow for reasonable network management practices such as deterring unlawful activity, including child pornography and copyright infringement.
While Thomson takes this to (potentially) mean that ISPs and major content producers/rights holders might use this language to justify the use of packet inspection technologies, it’s possible that alternate management methods could be envisioned. This said, given that copyright infringement is explicitly noted, there is a very real worry that this might legitimize this clause to push for ISP ‘policing’. Any such effect, I suspect, would further escalate the war between P2P and Media; encryption would become more common and effective, and result in a greater sophistication in avoiding inspection devices. This is a real loss for any and all groups who rely on non-encrypted traffic for intelligence purposes; any drive that will get ‘common folk’ thinking about encrypting more and more of their traffic, accompanied with relatively easy ways of doing so, will substantially hinder the capture of actual content. How you read the implications of this depends on your perspective on privacy and surveillance, but it seems to me that it threatens to further escalate a ‘war’ that criminalizes huge swathes of the population for actions that are relatively harmless.
Full disclosure, up front: I’m reviewing Canadian Copyright – A Citizen’s Guide (published through Between the Lines) as part of the Mini Book Expo. Now, on to the review…
Canadians are inundated with news about copyright on a regular basis. Where copyright was once a little spoken of technical subfield of law, it has blossomed into a vibrant and relevant facet of Canadian cultural discourse. Unfortunately, such discourse is often clouded by the ‘facts’ of copyright that accompany vast swathes of American media that is projected into Canada; discussions of fair use, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), and the definitions of copyright infringement are regularly grounded in American legal statutes. This book offers itself as an accessible panacea that promises to reorient popular discussions of copyright in Canada.
The text is neatly divided into four parts; Ideas, Law, Practice, and Policy. I’ll address each in turn, noting what I appreciated, and what I found lacking (where appropriate). Given that I spend a little bit of time reading and thinking about copyright, I’ll scatter some comments through the review.
Part I – Ideas
This section of the book is meant to give some background to copyright today. It begins by broadly distinguishing between natural rights-based and utilitarian arguments for the value of intellectual property broadly, and copyright specifically. At the same time, the authors recognize copyright as a means to make non-exclusive property (i.e. ideas) exclusive property; copyright functions to cordon off particular ‘things’ from the public. With this theory behind them, they delve into the history of Canadian copyright by examining the traditions of Britain, the United States (US), and France – copyright law in Canada is found at the crossing of these various legal traditions. While the historical basis of copyright often find themselves into texts on the subject, even elementary theory is often hidden from view – the authors should be congratulated for even taking a stab at the theory behind copyright. Given that the book is meant for a general audience, it’s hard to fault them for not digging into the theory too deeply. Read more…
In Lessig’s most recent book, Remix, he avoids directly endorsing any particular method of alleviating the issues with copyright infringement. Rather, he notes that there are models that have been proposed to alter how monies are collected for copyright holders. I want to briefly attend to the notion that file signatures can be used to identify particular copywritten works, and how deep packet inspection (DPI) could be used to facilitate this identification process.
The idea for using file signatures to track the movement of copywritten files goes like this: when you create a work that you want to have copywritten, the work is submitted to a body responsible for maintaining records on copywritten work. We can imagine that this could be national libraries. When the libraries receive the work, they create a unique signature, or hash code, for the copywritten work. This signature is stored in the national library’s database, and is known to the copyright holder as well. We can imagine a situation where we can choose what kind of signature we want copywritten work to have – there could be a full-stop copyright, a share-and-share alike non-commercial style copyright, and so forth. By breaking copyright up in this fashion, it would be possible to more granularly identify how content can and should be used. Read more…
So, there is a great new technology that all the newest TVs and computers have: it’s called HDCP. This technology is great – it offers incredible resolutions for you movies, bringing a level of clarity to them that hasn’t ever been seen before.
The problem is, you might not be able to watch movies from iTunes on your TV at home if you’re using one of Apple’s new Macbooks.
HDCP encrypts data from point A to point B, largely in an effort to prevent people from copying the data (i.e. making your own copy/backup of the data while it streams from point A to B). Ars is reporting that iTunes’ Fairplay Version 3 DRM requires that you have a HDCP source and destination to play content wrapped in this DRM. If you’re going from HDCP to analogue, then you’re out of luck.
While I can appreciate that Apple has a real need to ’secure’ the content in the iTunes library if they’re to keep ‘Big Media’ happy, it seems unreasonable that customers may be prevented from watching their videos on non-HDCP enabled screens if they want to. No wonder Jobs was pushing the new Apple monitors so hard when he revealed the new macbooks…
