It’s true: EMI’s entire music catalog will be available DRM-free next month:
Apple® today announced that EMI Music’s entire digital catalog of music will be available for purchase DRM-free (without digital rights management) from the iTunes® Store (www.itunes.com) worldwide in May. DRM-free tracks from EMI will be offered at higher quality 256 kbps AAC encoding, resulting in audio quality indistinguishable from the original recording, for just $1.29 per song. In addition, iTunes customers will be able to easily upgrade their entire library of all previously purchased EMI content to the higher quality DRM-free versions for just 30 cents a song. iTunes will continue to offer its entire catalog, currently over five million songs, in the same versions as today—128 kbps AAC encoding with DRM—at the same price of 99 cents per song, alongside DRM-free higher quality versions when available.
Some details:
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Again, I quote with permission from Jim on the ipcentral blog:
Obviously, last week’s release of new draft of GPLv3 was a big deal in the software world, but the discussion has taken a strange turn. The tech media all did their job — reporting, interviewing, analyzing. But the discussion boards, both “community” and business, are oddly uninformative.
Some big questions swirl around how GPLv3 would work in the real world, and, above all, how would it affect the customers’ and the whole tech world’s need for both interoperability and transaction costs that are low and predictable.
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Over at Ars, I give a qualified endorsement to the Holt e-voting reform bill:
Serious concerns were raised regarding the flaws with the printers used to produce paper audit trails. Norris cited a Las Vegas survey in which fewer than 40 percent of voters actually checked the paper record of their vote before leaving the polling place. An election official in North Carolina reported that there were hundreds of printer failures in that state during the 2006 election. He cited a Georgia study about the logistical challenges of storing, tracking, and manually counting thousands of votes recorded on unwieldy rolls of paper tape.
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The Wall Street Journal says ($) that EMI and Apple will announce tomorrow that “significant amounts” of EMI’s catalog will be available on iTunes sans copy protection. Fantastic. If this proves true, they’ll have earned at least one new customer—me.
Early this morning, I came across an AP story about a breach of the NAPHSIS EVVE system. At this point, it looks like it has been taken down and I can’t find it anywhere on the Web – I could imagine national security folks wanting to contain the PR damage. I’ll reproduce it below from my cache. If anyone can find it on the Web – especially an update – please let me know in the comments.
I think the implication of this are huge. Beyond billions in welfare fraud going to whatever criminal organization might have placed this software, we have a security hole a mile wide in the passport issuance system, social security cards, and drivers’ licenses. Good thing this has been caught now. Imagine if REAL ID were in place and we were relying on this system for ID security.
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Mark Blafkin and I have been having an interesting and productive discussion in the comments to Braden’s post about the GPL v. 3. Mark says:
The FSF and the GPL itself actively attempt to limit collaboration between proprietary and free software communities. As you’ll find in the article previously mentioned, Mr. Stallman says that it is better for GNU/Linux to not support video cards rather than include a proprietary binary.
In fact, the entire basis of the GPL is to frustrate cooperation between the immoral proprietary software guys and free software. The viral nature of the GPL (if you use code and integrate or build upon it, your code must become GPL) is designed to prevent that cooperation because it will lessen the freedom of the free software itself.
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The Washington Post reports today on a couple of Virginia high school students who are suing anti-plagiarism service turnitin.com for copyright infringement. According to press accounts, the service is used by 6,000 schools, including Harvard and Georgetown. The way it works is that students turn in papers to their teachers by submitting them through Turnitin’s website. Turnitin then compares the submitted papers to a snapshot of the web, to databases of published articles, and to its own database of millions of other student papers. The problem is that the submitted papers are added to the company’s database of student papers without student permission. Plaintiffs in the case specifically marked their papers asking that they not be archived but they where nonetheless. The students have a website at dontturnitin.com.
What’s striking to me is how similar this is to Google Book Search. It remains to be seen whether Turnitin will make a fair use defense, but their past statements suggest that they will. (Here is a PDF of a legal opinion that Turnitin commissioned.)
Google is copying books without the copyright owners’ consent and storing them in a searchable database, just as Turnitin does with student papers. Google copies the whole book, but argues it’s a fair use because they only display a “snippet” of the text in search results. Turnitin also copies the whole work and only displays snippets to teachers if there’s a plagiarism match. Both Google and Turnitin make commercial use of the works they copy and they both arguably serve educational purposes. And If Google’s use doesn’t affect the “potential market” for licensing books to be included in searchable databases, then Turnitin’s use certainly doesn’t affect the potential market for licensing papers to be included in a plagiarism database.
So, can these cases be distinguished? If not, are they both fair use? I’m still thinking about this one, and I’d like to hear what your analysis is.
I’m starting a research project on network neutrality, and I’m hoping some of our smart readers can point me to stuff I ought to be reading. Below the fold I’ve got a brief summary of what I’m looking for. If you’ve ever studied the technical, economic, or political aspects of Internet routing policies, I would be eternally grateful if you could click through and give me your suggestions.
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Tech Policy Weekly from the Technology Liberation Front is a weekly podcast about technology policy from TLF’s learned band of contributors. The shows’s panelists this week are Jerry Brito, Drew Clark, Hance Haney, and Tim Lee. Topics include,
- Patent reform looms large on the D.C. agenda
- What does the FreeConference controversy have to do with net neutrality
- A new e-voting bill makes the rounds
There are several ways to listen to the TLF Podcast. You can press play on the player below to listen right now, or download the MP3 file. You can also subscribe to the podcast by clicking on the button for your preferred service. And do us a favor, Digg this podcast!
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I thought this was interesting and with permission I quote in its entirety from ipcentral:
Having examined the latest draft of the Free Software Foundation’s General Public License version 3 (GPLv3) several times, and having looked over the Rationale document, I have come to a diagnosis.
If GPLv3 were a human being, one would say that it has delusions of grandeur. It thinks it is a law rather than a license.
Legally speaking, GPLv3 is a license, which is a form of contract. It specifies the terms on which the holder of copyrights or patents on software will permit others to make use of it. It is a bit of a special case because it is open to the world at large; anyone may use it, without payment, as long as they abide by its terms, which is unusual in contract law. However, there are doctrines of promissory estoppel and third party beneficiaries that take account of such things, and GPLv3 is firmly within the legal genre of contract.
But the GPLv3 was apparently drafted on the assumption that it is something quite different — that it is a regulation controlling a range of general behavior by software users, and that it is being promulgated by a governmental body with law-creating power.
The difference between a contract and a regulation is extremely important.
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The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.