Amazon's chutzpah

There's a lot to like about Amazon, but also a lot to dislike, such as their ridiculous "One Click" patent and their spamming of customers. But you have to admire their chutzpah. They're running ads for their e-book reader, the Kindle, which includes this image promoting BoingBoing:



What does BoingBoing have to say about the Kindle?

Mark Pilgrim has a great, incisive post about the Amazon Kindle e-reader that sums up almost all of the reasons I won't be buying it -- it spies on you, it has DRM (which means that it has to be designed to prevent you from modding it, lest you mod it to remove the DRM), it prevents you from selling or lending your books, and the terms of service are nearly as abusive as the Amazon Unbox terms (and worse than the thoroughly dumb-ass Amazon MP3 terms).

Last major music labels give up on DRM

The last two of the big music labels -- and of course the independent labels weren't stupid and arrogant enough to install spyware and rootkits on their customers' computers -- Warner Music and Sony BRM, have finally stopped trying to hold the tide back and have given up using DRM on their music downloads, at least for most of their catalogues. Warner caved to the inevitable in December last year and allowed Amazon to sell mp3s, and in January Sony BRM also announced that they are giving up DRM for music downloads.

This isn't quite the death of DRM for music, but it's close.

Another reason to hate Flash

There's a lot to hate about Flash video. And yes, I'm aware of the irony of saying this when I myself put Flash videos on my blog. If YouTube would use a decent format, I'd be onto it so fast your head would spin.

It's not a fully open standard, making it near impossible for anyone to create Flash applications that don't depend on Adobe. There are a zillion movie players for .avi, .mpg, and even a handful for .mov, there's only one player for Flash .swf applications. (In fairness, mplayer can, sometimes, play .flv videos. mplayer is awesome!) That's a warning sign of data obsolescence.

Specifications for the Flash formats are only released to developers on the condition that they don't create Flash players. Flash videos contain executable code, which is a serious security hole: it's only a matter of time before somebody creates a virus which runs through Flash, even on Linux. Most Flash applications are poorly written, with terrible user interfaces and buggy implementations: Flash sites frequently lock up my browser. You can't index or search Flash sites, or copy text out of them, and if you are blind and use a screen-reader, web designers who use Flash are giving you a big F-U. And if you're a movie creator, why on Earth would you be happy with the crappy, low resolution, compression-artifact-filled ugliness that is the typical .flv file?

I could go on, but I'll just link to one more reason to avoid Flash if possible: Adobe is now adding Digital Restrictions Management software to the format.

Finally, there's a classic suite of arguments against DRM that will be as true for online video as they were for music. DRM doesn't move additional product. DRM is grief for honest end-users. And there's no reason to imagine that new DRM systems will stop copyright infringement any more effectively than previous systems.

Windows Vista, DRM and security

Some interesting (as in the Chinese curse) things happening with Windows Vista and DRM:

Bruce Schneier writes:

Windows Vista includes an array of "features" that you don't want. These features will make your computer less reliable and less secure. They'll make your computer less stable and run slower. They will cause technical support problems. They may even require you to upgrade some of your peripheral hardware and existing software. And these features won't do anything useful. In fact, they're working against you. They're digital rights management (DRM) features built into Vista at the behest of the entertainment industry.

[...]

It's all complete nonsense. Microsoft could have easily told the entertainment industry that it was not going to deliberately cripple its operating system, take it or leave it. With 95% of the operating system market, where else would Hollywood go? Sure, Big Media has been pushing DRM, but recently some -- Sony after their 2005 debacle and now EMI Group -- are having second thoughts.

It seems also that Microsoft's commitment to increased security isn't necessarily a commitment as such... after Joanna Rutkowska found a serious security hole in Vista, one senior engineer and Microsoft Technical Fellow suggested that:

...potential avenues of attack, regardless of ease or scope, are not security bugs.

Well, I suppose if you define away security bugs by fiat, Microsoft will be able to say they have got rid of all security bugs in Vista.

At this point it is worth bringing up Peter Gutmann's cost analysis of Windows Vista content protection:

Providing this protection incurs considerable costs in terms of system performance, system stability, technical support overhead, and hardware and software cost. These issues affect not only users of Vista but the entire PC industry, since the effects of the protection measures extend to cover all hardware and software that will ever come into contact with Vista, even if it's not used directly with Vista [...]

In order for content to be displayed to users, it has to be copied numerous times. For example if you're reading this document on the web then it's been copied from the web server's disk drive to server memory, copied to the server's network buffers, copied across the Internet, copied to your PC's network buffers, copied into main memory, copied to your browser's disk cache, copied to the browser's rendering engine, copied to the render/screen cache, and finally copied to your screen. If you've printed it out to read, several further rounds of copying have occurred. Windows Vista's content protection (and DRM in general) assume that all of this copying can occur without any copying actually occurring, since the whole intent of DRM is to prevent copying. If you're not versed in DRM doublethink this concept gets quite tricky to explain [...]

It's a fantastic document, long but not too technical.

Canadian copyright snake oil

Music publishers have attempted to smuggle a provision into Canada's copyright law which would make Digital Restrictions Management software compulsory for on-line music distributers, effectively banning DRM-free music and forcing musicians to pay good money for DRM software -- even if they don't want it.

eMusic is the second largest on-line seller of digital music, all legal, all free of Digital Restrictions Management software. If the music publishers provision became law, eMusic would have to either stop selling to Canadians, or add DRM software to the music they sell, against the express wishes of the copyright owners.

This is just insanity, but it clearly demonstrates that DRM cannot survive in a free market. It is snake-oil. Making bits uncopyable is like making water not wet. The only way DRM suppliers can stay in business selling software snake oil is to take advantage of the frightened (or greedy, or both) music producers. The producers themselves have realised that their business model is dead, made obsolete by technology. Rather than adapt to changing markets, they turn to the government to outlaw -- or at least hamstring -- competitors who have adapted to the new technology.

Exceptions to TPM legislation

Expect to see more from me about this topic, but for now just a quick word: the Australian Federal Government has put up their DRAFT legislation regarding exceptions to the Technological Protection Mechanism laws.

Nutshell: under pressure from the US government, out government has passed laws not just outlawing copyright infringement (which was already illegal) but making it a criminal offence to bypass technology which could be used to prevent infringement. So, hypothetically, if a music CD hijacks your computer and installs a root kit that takes over the functioning of your computer and allows viruses to break in, but by doing so it also prevents you from illegally burning copyies of the CD, it is illegal to remove that root kit.

The draft legislation can be downloaded from here.

We don't have much time to move on this -- the government is putting it up for comments only until the 22nd of September.

A quick look at the summary (not the legislation itself) makes me say -- "phew! we dodged a bullet!". The government seems to be relatively clueful, maybe, and is recommending that the offence be tied to actual copyright infringement, rather than a blanket ban on bypassing the TPM:

The scope of the scheme is limited to preventing circumvention of TPMs designed to stop copyright piracy. The scheme will not cover TPMs which are not designed to prevent or inhibit people from infringing copyright. The scheme will not apply to TPMs solely designed for other purposes, such as market segmentation (eg region coding) or the protection against competition in aftermarket goods (eg spare parts) where the TPM does not have a connection with copyright.

In other words, if you bypass the TPM in order to break copyright law, you've broken the law, but if you don't, you don't.

We know the US government really doesn't like this, and has been pushing hard to make any bypassing of TPMs illegal. The next few weeks/months will be interesting. We'll see how much of a lapdog we are to the US, or whether our government is prepared to act in our best interests instead of the RIAA and Microsoft.

Keep your fingers crossed.

Two train wrecks masquerading as products

Cory Doctorow from Boing Boing sometimes has a lovely turn of phrase. Referring to disappointing sales for Blu-Ray and DVD-HD, he describes them as "two train-wrecks masquerading as products", and explains:

No one seems to want to buy a box whose selling price has been doubled through the inclusion of "security" measures that treat the box's owner as a potential criminal. What's more, the actual performance of the devices is reportedly poor, the picture just not as sharp as promised (standard DVD pictures are substantially degraded through a series of superfluous digital-analog-digital-analog conversion steps meant to frustrate home copyists).

Why would you pay more to get less?

Details here.

Can you legally play an overseas DVD?

Virtually all DVDs have "region encoding", one or more codes on the disc that tells the player where in the world you are supposed to watch the DVD.

Needless to say, consumers are split into two groups: those who don't notice region encoding, and those who hate it passionately. For example, there are millions of fans of Japanese anime across all DVD regions, but anime DVDs are typically only released on Region 2 discs, making watching them difficult in the US or Australia. Hence, there are thriving black- and grey-markets for "mod chips" and other technologies for removing region encoding.

Kim Weatherall looks at the legality of playing DVDs from other regions in Australia. Although it is a very simple question -- "Can I legally watch this legally purchased DVD from overseas?" -- the answer is not simple at all.

After looking at various laws, including the Australian Copyright Act, the Aus-US Free Trade Agreement, and various legal rulings, the conclusion is that it is legal to watch those overseas DVDs -- but only just. It assumes two factors: firstly, that the copyrights on the computer code and video on the DVD disc, in both countries, are owned by the same person, and that the amount of video copied into the DVD player's temporary memory is not "substantial" -- whatever that means.

Weatherall's conclusion is sobering:

your right to play a DVD legitimately purchased overseas rests on as slender a thread as this: if a copyright owner can prove that a substantial part of the film is embodied in RAM at some given moment, they will be able to show that you are making a temporary copy, which is not covered by the section 43B defence.

Is this likely? Well, the question is effectively open. And Sony tried quite hard to demonstrate this after the fact in Stevens v Sony, using a demonstration of how much game could be played without keeping the disk in the machine.

PRM wars

Ed Felten discusses so-called "Property Rights Management" here. Worth reading if you want an early warning of the next stage in the battle over control and ownership.

I discussed this earlier.

DRM Wars: Return of the Sith

Professor Ed Felten of Freedom To Tinker discusses signs that the debate over DRM is about to shift away from copyright.

For the last few years, proponents of Digital Restrictions Management software have claimed that it was all about enforcing copyrights. Opponents of DRM have observed that this was transparently false: DRM is more than just copy protection, which doesn't work. Bits, by their very nature, are copyable. Trying to make bits uncopable is like trying to make water not wet. DRM is more about controlling access to information, not about protecting copyright.

But, despite DRM, there is no shortage of copies of protected content available on the Internet. As Felten says:

The usual argument in favor of bolstering DRM is that DRM retards peer-to-peer copyright infringement. This argument has always been bunk — every worthwhile song, movie, and TV show is available via P2P, and there is no convincing practical or theoretical evidence that DRM can stop P2P infringement. Policymakers have either believed naively that the next generation of DRM would be different, or accepted vague talk about speedbumps and keeping honest people honest.

It seems that the music and movie companies and the policymakers have started to realise that water is wet DRM-as-copy-protection doesn't work. Consequently, DRM advocates are switching to two new arguments: price discrimination and lock-in. Naturally, they're in favour of both. Naturally, consumers (as well as many suppliers!) are opposed to both.

The first argument is that DRM allows suppliers to price discriminate -- charge different customers different amounts for the same product -- and that this is good for society.

The second is that DRM allows suppliers to lock their customers in to a single supplier, and naturally this too is supposed to be good for society.

And, naturally, these free market capitalists want the threat of government force to protect their efforts to disciminate and lock-in customers. Heaven forbid that they sell their crippled products in a truly free market, one where consumers are free to remove the DRM if they don't want it. You paid for it, you own it and can do anything you want with it, right? Not if the DRM advocates get their way. In their world, it's "you paid for it, we control it, if you don't like it, tough".

Like Felten, I'm going to skip over the merits and limitations of these two arguments for now, and merely observe that the DRM advocates' rhetoric is moving away from the P2P bogeyman and towards these "greed is good" arguments. (One might speculate whether or not the record labels' hopes to use P2P technologies for distributing music is one of the reasons they're cutting back on the "Napster and Kazaa are evil" rhetoric.)

Felten observes:

Interestingly, these new arguments have little or nothing to do with copyright. The maker of almost any product would like to price discriminate, or to lock customers in to its product. Accordingly, we can expect the debate over DRM policy to come unmoored from copyright, with people on both sides making arguments unrelated to copyright and its goals.

If the music and movie companies succeed in having consumer lock-in elevated to a legally-protected right, expect this disease to spread. It might not happen overnight, but eventually manufacturers of all sorts will demand a piece of the pie. Next will be printer manufacturers, who will demand protection against competitors who make compatible print cartridges. (That's a dead cert: they've already tried.) Car manufacturers, in partnership with tire manufacturers, could easily use RFID technology so that the car would refuse to start if the "wrong" brand of tires was put on. As more and more consumer products become computerised, we might easily find that we can do less and less with them.

This will be a very interesting time indeed. I'd like to think that if the false platitudes of the pigopolists get stripped away revealing their naked greed, there will be fewer well-meaning but naive politicians supporting them.

Yeah, I think that's funny too.

The CBC and DRM

Dr. Michael Geist explains why the CBC is wrong to claim that they have no choice about using Digital Restrictions Management software to lock their streaming music.

Tod Maffin, who runs the blog, defends the CBC's use of DRM, arguing that DRM is required under its commercial music broadcast licenses and that the CBC invites lawsuits if it fails to adequately protect its streams.

While I'm a big fan of CBC's streaming services, the suggestion that CBC must use DRM is plainly wrong. First, there are many other public broadcasters who not only reject DRM, but have adopted open licenses (RadioBras in Brazil makes all of its content available under Creative Commons licenses). Second, there is no legal requirement to use DRM under Canadian law. If certain rights holders demand DRM use, the CBC has an alternative. It can reject those demands and choose instead to use only music that rights holders permit to be broadcast without DRM.

As Dr. Geist goes on to explain, there is no shortage of open music: hundreds of thousands of songs published under Creative Commons licences, and thousands of public domain recordings. In addition, most Canadian independent labels have given DRM a resounding No! As those independents are creating 90% of new Canadian music, the CBC has lots of Canadian content to choose from, instead of sticking with the same old forgettable foreign labels promoting foreign artists.

Second biggest on-line music store is DRM-free

Boing Boing is reporting that the world's second-biggest seller of legal on-line music is entirely DRM free.

USA Today is surprised at eMusic's success, given that the major labels refuse to licence their "big hits" to them. That means no Shakira, Beyoncé or U2 -- but plenty of jazz, classical and indie music: Johnny Cash, Ray Charles, Credence Clearwater Revival, Miles Davis, Van Morrison, Moby, the White Stripes, Diana Krall, Scott H. Biram, the Pipettes, Dashboard Confessional and Peaches.

Rebutting the piracy report

Dr. Michael Geist rebutts the mischaracterizations and omissions (or, in the vernacular, "crap") of the IFPI's latest piracy report.

Among other points, Geist notes that the IFPI's characterisation of Canada as having the highest per capita rate of peer-to-peer piracy in the world is false:

Not true. While CRIA regularly makes this claim, the 2004 OECD report refers only to P2P usage, without reaching conclusions on whether the activity infringes copyright. In fact, the same report specifically notes that "P2P is not simply downloading of MP3 files. In fact, file sharing has already moved to the next level and will be applied for all types of on-line information, data distribution, grid computing and distributed file systems." The OECD data captured all of these activites and made no claim that Canada has the highest per capital incidence of unauthorized file swapping in the world.

Geiss also points out that the report fails to mention:

• the dozens of major Canadian artists who oppose DRM and the suing of fans


• the revenue from private copying


• the six leading independent music labels who defected from the CRIA


• the study which found that Canada's recording industry grew steadily from 1999 to 2004


• that 90% of new Canadian music comes from independent labels which are thriving under the existing copyright laws

France sticks it the public and Open Source

The French Constitutional Court has just given the public and Open Source developers a fist to the face with their decision about the French DADVSI legislation.

The decision effectively blows away principles of fair use, criminalises even private copying of legally purchased works, and makes it virtually impossible for developers of software to go into competition against any software company that uses Digital Restrictions Management software.

French consumers already pay a levy on recordable media for the purpose of compensating copyright holders for copying.

The law effectively turns the French police and courts into private enforcers for DRM software producers, and allows corporations like Vivendi-Universal and Apple to use the threat of criminal charges against competitors. It makes French criminal law reinforce anti-competitive behaviour. It is especially a threat to Open Source developers.

It effectively outlaws peer-to-peer software, even if used for legal purposes, merely because it could be used to transmit copyrighted works. Arguably, the wording of the legislation would equally outlaw email or Internet or any other method of transfering files.

Worst of all, inexcusably after the Sony rootkit debacle, the legislation makes no provision for allowing the removal or bypassing of DRM even in the event it behaves as malware or threatens lives.

Countdown to the Australian DMCA

Kimberlee Weatherall has written a detailed article about the current situation in Australia with our local DMCA, why it is vitally important for all Australians, how we could end up with bad copyright law, and a couple of suggestions for how we might avoid having that bad law forced on us.

In the USA, the DMCA has been a terrible law. Originally passed by the government under the expectation that it would lead to more innovation and creativity, it quickly became obviously that it was a failure in that regard. Instead it has had a chilling effect on scientific research and creative industries like the software industry. The DMCA has, effectively, made the US government the enforcer for certain major companies as they behave anti-competitively. When it comes to so-called "intellectual property" like copyright, the US government is strongly opposed to free markets, giving legal privilege to anti-competive technologies that wouldn't survive a month in a free market. The US government has been the bully-boy supporting the entertainment cartel's efforts to snatch away consumers' ordinary property rights and replace them with a limited "licence to use".

(When you own property, you can choose how, when and where you use it; the entertainment cartel doesn't want you to own that DVD, they want to sell you a licence to watch it under conditions they set, such as the particular type of player you are allowed to use.)

While the DMCA has caused plenty of misery among (for example) security researchers and computer scientists. Of course, misery loves company, and so the USA has forced the provisions of the DMCA onto trade partners like Australia. When negotiating the so-called Free Trade Agreement, it was made clear to our diplomats that the demand that we introduce the same sorts of draconian, foolish copyright laws as the US was not only non-negotiable, but it was the only non-negotiable demand in the entire treaty.

I could speculate as to why that might be -- after all, the US government isn't into suffering for its own sake. Let's just say that while innovation has suffered under the DMCA, not everybody welcomes innovation. Companies with large investments in outmoded business models fear innovation, because it stirs up the market, allows competition to flourish, and threatens their revenue stream.

Convenience more important than price

Ed Felten at Freedom To Tinker discusses evidence that people choose to download songs from file-sharing sites, not because they are free of cost, but because they are more convenient and free of Digital Restrictions Management software:

In explaining the popularity of Napster and other file-sharing systems, commentators have often overemphasized the price factor and underestimated convenience. Here we see students given the option of a free subscription service, and passing it up to use another free (though illegal) system, or a for-pay system that is more convenient than the free one.

(Emphasis added.)

Recording Industry vs The People

Ty Rogers and Ray Beckerman, two lawyers from New York, have a blog Recording Industry vs The People which records the legally dubious war being waged by the RIAA against music fans and computer users -- with, it seems, the full approval of the US Department of Justice.

Of particular note is How the RIAA Litigation Process Works.

In a nutshell, the RIAA plays fast and loose with both the intent and letter of the law. Defendants are sued without any investigation, let alone evidence that they violated copyright. Defendants have included people who have never even used a computer, or have never engaged in illegal file-sharing. In many cases, no music downloading even took place. The RIAA games the system, turning it into a unfair case where the defendant is denied a fair trial.

On occasion, the RIAA's own technical witnesses have admitted that as far as they knew, the only downloads that ever took place off the defendants' computers were when they, the witness, copied files off the computer. You'd think that admission alone would be enough to sink the lawsuit, but in the lottery of the American justice system, not necessarily. Just because no crime took place doesn't mean that the defendant doesn't have to suffer for committing it.

Undoubtedly, there is illegal file-sharing taking place somewhere -- the RIAA hasn't invented that claim out of nothing. (They have however undoubtedly invented the figures they claim for financial losses due to file-sharing.) However, the lawsuits seem to be based on the idea that, since the crime of copyright infringement occurred somewhere, somebody has to be punished for it, and it is hardly necessary to bother making sure that the person punished is the person who committed the crime.

Unfortunately, it seems that between the DoJ taking the attitude that giant corporations like the RIAA can do no wrong, and individual judges with imperfect understanding of copyright law and even worse understanding of the technology involved, the RIAA has a nice little money-spinner going for them. In an example that is unusual only for the judge's honesty, in Interscope v. Duty, the judge denied the motion to dismissal, not because he agreed with the RIAA, but because he admitted he didn't understood the technology well enough to tell whether or not there was a case to answer.

I was going to say the lawsuits were a winner for the RIAA, but since the stated aim of the lawsuits is to discourage file-sharing, and file-sharing is even more prevalent now than before the lawsuits began, they certainly aren't having the effect the RIAA says they want. They are, however, bringing in a bucketload of money into the RIAA's coffers -- with absolutely no indication that one single cent of that money ends up being paid to the artists the RIAA claims to represent.

Also worth reading is Andrew Harden's warm-and-fuzzy guest op-ed, Between the RIAA and a Hard Place. Much of Harden's op-ed comes perilously close to soppy computer-hugging (which doesn't make it wrong, merely unconvincing to hard-headed politicians and judges) but, if nothing else, it is important for his explanation of why the RIAA's tactics threaten virtually every computer user in the world:

In the case of Elektra v. Barker, attorneys for the Recording Industry Association of America have made the argument that simply having a "Shared" folder on your computer can be considered grounds for infringement and, by extension, prosecution. [...]

The problem with this is that nearly every PC in use right now, running a modern operating system like, for example, Microsoft Windows XP, has a "Shared" folder on it. In fact, it might even have several. But you know who created these folders? Not the people using them, not some fiendish Internet pirates (sans eye patch and cool boat), but rather, Microsoft itself.

The RIAA has successfully fooled judges into imagining that "file-sharing" is just another word for "copyright infringement". But it isn't. The RIAA might like to believe that they are the only copyright holders in the world, but they aren't. File-sharing is just what it says: a way of sharing files between computers. It can be used to share your own files from one computer to another, which is not infringement, or it can be used to infringe copyright. It is dishonest of the RIAA's lawyers to suggest that the mere presense of file-sharing technology is evidence of a crime; and it will be disasterous if they get their wish to make it a criminal offence to even possess so-called "anti-circumvention" tools.

Tough questions for the Entertainment Industry

The EFF is asking the entertainment industry some questions they don't want to answer, including:

• The RIAA has sued over 20,000 music fans for file sharing, who have on average paid a $3,750 settlement. That's over $75,000,000. Has any money collected from your lawsuits gone to pay actual artists? Where's all that money going?


• Major entertainment companies have repeatedly brought lawsuits to block new technologies, including the VCR, Digital Audio Tape recorders, the first MP3 player, the ReplayTV PVR, and now P2P software. Why is your industry so hostile to new technologies?


• Unlike the major record labels, many popular indie labels offer mp3 downloads through sites like eMusic. Why won't you let fans purchase mp3s as well?


• The major movie studios have been enjoying some of their most profitable years in history over the past five years. Can you cite to any specific studies that prove noncommercial file sharing among fans, as opposed to commercial DVD piracy, has hurt the studios' bottom line in any significant way?


• Is it legal for me to skip the commercials when I play back time-shifted TV recordings on my TiVo or other PVR? How is this different than getting up and going to the bathroom?


• Why are there region-code restrictions on DVDs? How does this prevent copyright infringement? Is it illegal for me to buy or and use a region-free DVD player, or to modify a DVD player to be region-free?

WGA false positives

There's nothing official, as yet, but the rumour-mill has it that Microsoft's beta WGA software, pushed out as a critical update, is finding a lot of false positives:

And you really, really don't want to inform a client like Proctor and Gamble that it is pirating code; and, my sources insist, that's exactly what the beta code has been doing.
[...]
When the rumour started spreading, users got together to share outrage. It quickly became apparent that some of them weren't at P&G and instead of having corporate rank, were quoting military rank. Yes; the USAF has also been tagged, say my sources, as a corporate pirate.

DRM harms innovation and discriminates against buyers

Computerworld is reporting that Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) is likely to stifle innovation, increase the cost from litigation to legitimate businesses, and fail to put a dint in piracy rates.

Sydney lawyer Brendan Scott is quoted as saying:

"It is one in which small business is thriving [and] we didn't get there by asking for handouts from the government," Scott said. "We're there because we took our soundings and adapted to the new conditions."

True capitalism at its best.

The article goes on to say:

Scott said the [Open Source software] community encourages older industries to embrace the opportunities the future holds, rather than running to the government to help keep them "and the rest of us" in the past.
[...]
Scott believes the DRM provisions have already created an environment of risk and that Australians are reluctant to engage in digital publishing because of it. For example, most Linux distributors are "so scared of being sued" they don't include DVD playing software.

"Digital publishing is in a parlous state in Australia because of overregulation and DRM is a large part of it," he said. "Australian publishing is destined to languish until these risks of publication are dramatically reduced - not dramatically increased."

Sadly, the provisions of the so-called Free Trade Agreement with the U.S.A. have forced upon Australia laws which will go a long way to ensuring we'll always be a consumer, not a producer, of software and digital content.

Scott goes on to discuss the Australian Kazaa file-sharing software case, which gave the litigants a resounding win -- at enormous legal cost to all those involved -- but has done absolutely nothing reduce illegal Internet downloads:

"There is no evidence that these provisions do anything other than increase risks for legitimate businesses and waste time and money on litigation," he said. "There has been a deluge of copyright litigation over the past decade, but the litigants keep asking for more ways to sue people, this time by way of DRM."
[...]
"The OSIA [Open Source Industry Australia] wants strong and sensible copyright laws, not laws which encourage even more wasteful and quixotic litigation," he said.

Scott also points out the elephant in the room which so many interested parties wish to avoid mentioning. The primary use of DRM is to segment the market, to discriminate against buyers in one market compared to another. Under the guise of "Free Trade", the U.S.A. has gone in to bat for their corporate interests, forcing Australia to accept legislation that allows those American corporations to discrimate against Australian buyers. What other possible use does technology like "Region Encoding" for DVDs have?