Not as bad as it seems...

Sometimes people think that some countries have no respect for copyrights and artists rights. They typically refer to poorer countries, where copyrights infringement is rampant. Well, things aren't as clear cut as it seems.

I am returning from a trip to Thailand where clearly I got to see first hand all the fake CD's stands. 100 Baht (roughly 2.50$) gets you all the American cds you want... Why do I say American? I was trying to buy the CD of a local artist. The only copies I found were originals (essentially I would ask everywhere they sold cds if they had it, and the only places that had his CD was legitimate stores)! That was so funny. While they might not respect the rights of artists oversees, they seem to care about local artists. I thought that was funny...

D-R-Aime?

A blog to check out...

Why do we have the worse representatives...

From the Kazaa lawsuit, it looks like they added code to their application to give them all the information possible about what was going on on the users machine. This brings us back to the napster model where it's easy to point the finger at one responsible party and they argue they could either do something to control the filesharing or to argue that they are profitting from it. So from one end we have cases where the authors cannot defend themselves because they are too small and from the other end we have groups like Kazaa which clearly are too greedy.

A service for the rest of us...

For those that haven't jumped on the DRM bandwagon, and that like things with clout (because there are already other legal mp3 providers out there, like emusic) it looks like mp3.com will be making a come back selling popular music.

Exactly my thought...

From an extreme tech article:

However, it's difficult to conceive of any computerized system that
could distinguish "fair use" from "security hole" and consequently, many fear that DRM could tilt the scales in favor of copyright holders at the expense of consumers.

This is exactly what I was talking about a few days ago. I have a hard time seeing what kind of system can achieve no "false positives" (cases where a task is prevented for no good reason).

EFF Announces Endangered Gizmos List

After endangered species, here come endangered gizmos!

Obviously, these devices are endangered not because they are not good, but really because they are under the treath of lawsuits. This might be obvious, but it really isn't. If you look at the products, it's not clear why they would be instinct, right? I mean all these products were "good", although one could argue some of them were illegal. It's kind of shocking.

Take a product like DVD X-Copy. Do we really need to have a law that protects your right to make a backup of the product you buy? Still, a lawsuit was able to cripple DVD X-Copy. The interesting part for me in this is that the copyright laws, the DMCA, and all those laws are there to protect the society as whole, not simply to protect a few people. It sometimes might be hard to keep a balance, for example I would really like to see what balance would be like for the VSDA, but the debate seem so one sided, simply because congress does not appear to really represent our rights.