drm

DRM by mandate? Belgium court imposes a filtering duty on ISP

Zohar Efroni — Thu, 05 Jul 2007 14:18:03 -0700

In a press release from today the IFPI hails a Belgium court decision, which reportedly imposes a duty on an Internet Service Provider to use filtering technology for stopping illegal file sharing activities running through its network. From the press release:

DRM-free music from Apple & Microsoft

Christian Laux — Mon, 09 Apr 2007 09:47:23 -0700

Apple has announced it would offer DRM-free music through iTunes. The offer is limited to the music catalog of one of the Major Labels, EMI.

Customers still can get the DRM-protected songs at the old price. The DRM-free songs are available for an extra price of 30%. In exchange, the consumer (also) gets better file quality.

Apple says No to DRM? Maybe, if it only could…

Zohar Efroni — Fri, 09 Feb 2007 12:27:49 -0800

Steve Jobs published on Tuesday this article on Apple’s website. It definitely deserves a comment.

Open Source Licensing - Revisioning the Good

Bruce B. Cahan — Tue, 30 Jan 2007 10:04:44 -0800

This morning I came across Stacy Cowley's article GPL 3: An Open Source Earthquake?. As a member of OGC Consortium, the group responsible for developing geospatial interoperability standards, I've suggested review of their standards' ownership, branding and licensing.

Sony and DRM

Zohar Efroni — Sat, 25 Nov 2006 00:56:07 -0800

The German American Lawyers Association held last Wednesday in Berlin a panel discussion titled The Current of Ideas in Cyber Society. Patrick Strauch, the German Managing Director of Sony/ATV Music Publishing (sitting rather uncomfortably in his chair as the industry's advocate vs. Prof. Larry Lessig) offered his views about some of the topics that are usually discussed in these forums. Presumably still under the impact of the rootkit disaster, Mr. Strauch expressed disillusionments about DRMs and their capacity to fulfill the promise of content control in the cyber-environment. (As if to add insult to injury, the Librarian of Congress, upon recommendations of the Register of Copyrights, declared in its recent 2006 DMCA Rulemaking - pp. 53-64 in the Register’s report of Nov. 17, 2006 - a new “rootkit exemption” allowing circumvention of such mechanisms for purpose of finding security vulnerabilities.)