Answer Guy Central

Ah, to be Australian. Lower population density, plenty of beautiful places, great weather much of the year, and now a little bit more freedom to use the Internet to download movies illegally.

Hey! And Nicole Kidman is in Moulin Rougue!

OK, so that wasn’t her finest work, and not a great film, but many people disagree with me and at this very moment are trading little pieces of the film across the Internet. Which is illegal. But the Internet is such a wild and flexible place that the question of what exactly is illegal and who’s responsible has gone almost nowhere despite repeated efforts to create an answer. Today, a court ruling in Australia made things a little more clear. Or less. Or, if you don’t live there, had no impact at all.

Here in The States, where the number of people using the Internet and our prominent position in global business and politics makes us ” more important “, we’ve been struggling for years to find the right way to protect the rights of people who “own content”. It’s so complicated that even an intellectual property lawyer couldn’t really explain it, and certainly not before you lost interest. But the short is that when you create a movie (or music, or a book, or whatever) you own it and get to decide who can see it/hear it/read it, and under what conditions.

Or more simply: you pay when you go to the movies or buy a book or music, and whoever owns it gets some of that money.

But the Internet makes sharing those things very easy, and services like the original incarnation of Napster, file sharing libraries like The Pirate Bay, and software like BitTorrent make sharing more efficient and exist so that passing files around can be as simple and efficient as possible.

The Pirate Bay went away last year, when courts in several countries shut them down. Napster, of course, was shut down many years ago. The issue of why is still being debated, though. Napster held copyrighted materials for redistribution, and that’s pretty obviously a no-no anywhere with a developed legal system. The Pirate Bay, on the other hand, merely told people where they thought illegal materials might be stored, which if illegal is not the same thing as what Napster used to do. Nonetheless, they’re gone, too.

Bittorent, the best software that’s yet come along to make sharing files easy, has a unquestionably legal purpose, so it continues to exist. But given their non-success to date, people who want to clamp limits on how their property is passed around need somewhere new to go. So why not try to make ISPs, the companies that give us access to the Internet, responsible for policing what we pass around?

Today, at least in Australia, that terribly Orwellian idea has been squashed. Let’s hope that ruling becomes a trend, or we’ll see a whole lot of stories like this one. And I promise: that’s not a business change anyone wants.

Is your web site yours? Does anyone disagree? Is your business change, business practice, or any other part of your business REALLY yours?

How do you know?

I was working on a few domain transfers this week for a client. And it wasn’t fun. There’s a process in place for doing this that’s supposed to protect everyone, and when it works it does its job wonderfully. When it doesn’t, though, business change becomes business impossible. And the clock is running, both on the client’s business change choices and on my “meter”.

I got through it, because making business change happen is what I DO. But not without some pain. I may write about this in detail some time, because having a road map of someone else’s pain is the kind of thing people can benefit from.

Here’s another: this, as well as the issue of communicating in a way that doesn’t infringe someone else’s rights, could come in handy. The Electronic Frontier Foundation talks here about the latter. Unless you’d prefer to hire a few lawyers it’s an important read.

Nothing about the work I was doing today or what’s in that document should be too much of a surprise. But it’s real. It stands in the way of doing business or changing your business. It’s what Business CHANGE means.

Last week I commented on the debacle that Amazon.com created by reaching into Kindle devices and deleting George Orwell’s Animal Farm and 1984. Read that story again, here, and check out the update in comments.

Bad as that was, and Amazon’s CEO Jeff Bezos has acknowledged it was a mistake, here’s something worse: The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), who watch out for the “best interests” of that business and have spent the last few years terrorizing people who . . . <ahem>, share music, have now weighed in with the opinion that if you buy music on-line, legitimately, and it’s protected by Digital Rights Management (DRM) software, you shouldn’t expect that the computers controlling your rights should stay up and running.

Meaning that what you buy becomes worthless.

Wow.

So I can buy a physical CD, and as long as I take good care of it have it forever. I can back it up (this is legally protected action in the US, as long as you follow some rules and don’t share your backup with other people), and be protected against accidentally scratching the disk. I can buy non-copy-protected versions of music on-line and not need anyone else to protect them. But if I buy DRM-protected media—which the RIAA champions—I should accept it when the company holding the keys to my vault loses the keys?

I’m not a fan of DRM, and I do my best to protect myself from it. But we have clients who buy DRM-protected music and don’t understand the details—and shouldn’t need to—and have then paid us to fix the problem that crop up because it’s already too hard. Thanks, RIAA. You were already the bad guys. Now you’re standing up and saying so.

from lifehacker.com 2/8/07

(http://lifehacker.com/software/recipes/find-restaurant-secrets-at-top-secret-recipes-234768.php#viewcomments)

there’s a fine-line distinction here. you’re correct about the p.r., but there’s a long history of companies suing over unauthorized dispersement of their trade secrets/recipes. mrs. fields is especialy fond of this tactic.

that said, the internet has changed alot of things, so I see lawsuit as a down-the-road scenario. but these guys are attributing the recipes (copyright-enforcable or not) to trademarked coporate entities, and those guys just plain don’t like that kind of thing. oh: and technically, if your trademark is being infringed you are OBLIGATED to pursue it once you find out, and one other side-effect of the internet is that they’d have a hard time claiming not to have!

listen, at pc-vip.com we are walking these lines all the time. two decades in the technology business have taught me mostly that as much as people think I’m smart, I’m mostly good at being adaptive. my commenst are a discourse on that.

BY PC-VIP AT 11:41 AM Hey . . . pretty darned cool, and far be it for me to pass moral judgement, but has it occurred to anyone that these guys are not always giving away, but mostly SELLING copyrighted information and attributing the trademarks to the correct holders?

They’re gonna get sued, and if they’re keeping records and those get conficated and you’ve bought anything from them, you’re