Great Stories

Cory is telling some great stories about, particularly the EFF’s campaigns vs. the NSA about crypto exports. The audience is mostly law students.

Cory gets 12,000 spam emails a day! Digging at the people (“secret police”) trying to intervene with internet’s network effectss.

Moving on to p2p. The p2p wars challlenge the internet’s ability to be free and open, as it was designed to be.

- Anti-circumvention: WIPO’s copyright updates treaty. Treated internet’s openness as a flaw. DVD region coding is an example. Geography isn’t on the copyright law! The law maker’s left it out on purpose.

- DMCA was passed by congress by using a lie. No time for review. Based on junk science. Illegal to look inside your computer to record an unencrypted dvd for example.

- DRM is broken, and means you pass control of your record player while you listen to your record. And is usually broken in days at most.

- Computers telling selective and beneficial lies is a tradition. Ecosystem relies on this.

- Skipping ads is “theft”!

- Some maths in the US is illegal!

- SDMI broken in hours. Blocked the presentation, sued presenting team and the conference.

Look at the difference between CDs and DVDs. CDs are open and you can invent new features. Happens all the time. DVD hasn’t changed 10 years.

Broadcast Flag: relies on switch to digital only tv networks. Pushed by Hollywood, despite them being a poor judge of what is good for their business model. Need to address possible copying problems that may appear tomorrow, today. “The plane’s about to crash, I’ll eat my seatmate now!”

Tech industry sold us out: Intel and Sony lobbied for broadcast flag. “Unforgivably reprehensible.”

Talking about software defined radio now (gnu radio). Eric Blossom has built an FM receiver to receive all fm broadcasts at once – that’s cool. He thinks the best bit is using the spare spectrum for communication, but that will be illegal when broadcast flag comes into effect.

Europe is working to bring the worst elements of US regulation such as broadcast flag, cable plug and play, and live feature removal from STBs! How wonderful.

They want to get rid of VGA displays

Broadcasting Treaty: if you receive my signal, even if the creative isn’t mine or is public domain, I can tell you what to do with the signal for 50 years! And they want to apply this to webcasting as well.

Database Treaty: unless you are the incumbent, there is no value to database copyright.

EFF is undertaking to break all this, but what if it can’t?

Cory is imploring us to take action, as no companies are stepping up to fight for us like Sony did for the VCR. Use Creative Commons licences, open science journals, turn up at WIPO, join the Campaign for Digital Rights and support BBC Creative Archive by asking for the required changes to be included in the charter renewal.

The End.