Copyright nagware accord reaches 30
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Diamond jubilee This month marks the 30th anniversary of the agreement that means legitimately purchased DVD/video owners everywhere have to sit through a minute of footage warning them about piracy.â¦
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(InfoWorld) - Under a licensing agreement in its final stages, consumers may get the right to make several legal copies of HD DVD and Blu-ray Disc movies they've purchased, a concession by the movie industry that may quell criticism that DRM (digital rights management) technologies are too restrictive. The agreement, if supported by movie studios and film companies, could allow a consumer to make a backup copy in case their original disc is damaged and another copy for their home media server, said Michael Ayers, a representative of an industry group that licenses theÂ AACS (Advanced Access Content System) copy-prevention system. AACS is used on HD DVD and Blu-ray discs, the new high-definition DVD formats, to prevent unauthorized copying of the discs. The concept, called "managed copy," would undercut one the strongest arguments against DRM technology, which critics say deprives buyers of their legal right to fair uses such as moving their content to other digital systems and devices. The licensing agreement is under negotiation between the AACS Licensing Adminstrator, which Ayers represents, and companies using AACS technology, including film makers. AACS LA members include Sony, IBM, The Walt Disney Co., Warner Bros., and Microsoft. AACS LA is pushing the studios to support managed copy and offer consumers the option of making at least one copy, Ayers said. "We want to be able to maximize the number of movies that are able to be offered," he said. The idea is that the content companies could charge a premium according to how many copies are allowed, Ayers said. It remains a possibility that consumers, if given the chance to make three copies of "Spider-man 2" could give those copies to their neighbors, which technically would qualify as low-volume piracy. But AACS LA believes that movie studios will see higher sales with the managed copy option, even with the chance it could be abused, Ayers said. "Studios will have to take that into account when they select pricing," Ayers said. On the technology side, a system of servers, run by the studios or third parties, could enable the authorization of copies. Newly minted discs could be prevented from further copying by employing DRM technology from companies such as Microsoft, Ayers said. AACS LA is now working out what rights studios and film companies would have under the complex licensing agreement. "We are optimistic that the studios will see this as a benefit that will drive sales," Ayers said.
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Blog: After 18 months of debate--and 16 years following GPL 2's release--the General Public License has finally turned 3.
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One of the most important recent events in the world of free software has been the release of version 3 of the GNU GPL.  There were fierce arguments about its utility while it was being drawn up, and although the rhetoric has abated somewhat, there is still a big question mark over its eventual success.  Some evidence suggests that GPLv3 uptake is coming along nicely, while other reports indicate a reluctance to adopt it (but note also Matt Asay's neat reconciliation of these contradictory messages).  To see what's likely to happen in the long term, it's useful to look back at the past history of licence adoption.
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Record labels say no deal has been finalised with site which promised legal downloads of over 25m tracks
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A US court has upheld the legitimacy of peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing application Morpheus, finding against 28 of the world&#39;s largest entertainment companies which had alleged that the P2P firm&#39;s software violates copyright law.
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The operators of a Spanish-based Web site that sold music downloads have agreed to pay &#36;10.5 million to settle a copyright infringement lawsuit brought by several recording companies.
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Electronic Data Systems Corp. said Tuesday it has agreed to pay &#36;50 million to extend an agreement with Opsware Inc. for software used in running data centers.
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The company behind eDonkey will pay $30 million to avoid the legal wrath of the recording industry. It's also disappearing from the scene.
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Windows XP users interested in trying out the release candidate of Service Pack 3 for the operating system should be able to download the software later today. Be forewarned, it weighs in at 580MB.
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Nextance last week announced its Intellectual Property Optimization Suite, which enables users to manage valuable intellectual property (IP) assets and associated contractual agreements in order to more effectively optimize revenue and mitigate legal risk related to IP. Nextance's IP Optimization Suite manages the entire lifecycle of IP assets and addresses such issues as underutilized IP assets, underpaid licensing and royalty revenue, unnecessary risks related to legal compliance, and sluggish time-to-market for new solutions that increasingly depend on IP. Pricing starts at $500,000 and ranges to over $1,000,000 depending on the size of the organization and sophistication of the implementation.
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(InfoWorld) - A controversial update to the GNU GPL (General Public License) is set to be released Friday by the Free Software Foundation, a representative of the organization said on Tuesday. GPL version 3 is arriving 16 years after version 2 of the license for open-source software. Questions remain, however, about who exactly will adopt it. Among improvements is a copyright technology not found anywhere in the world with the goal of providing uniformity in different jurisdictions, said Brett Smith, licensing compliance engineer for the foundation. "There's a lot of copyright laws that talk about distribution, but they don't mean the same thing," in different places, he said. "Now, GPL talks about propagation and conveying," Smith said. With this new provision, the terms are the same everywhere worldwide, he said. Version 3 also works to ensure that users can modify software installed on personal computers or in household devices. If software is conveyed inside a device, users must be given enough information so they can modify the software in the device, Smith said. An explicit patent provision in GPL 3 means people who contribute to free software cannot sue users for patent infringement, Smith said. This was not clear in the GPL previously. "This will make sure it's very clear and works across the board," he said. Microsoft and Novell recently forged an agreement not to sue each other's customers over patent issues. The foundation in version 3 provides what has been described as "patent-insurance" in response to the Microsoft-Novell arrangement. GPL 3 also spells out requirements for license compatibility. In May, the Foundation expressed intentions to iron out incompatibilities with other open-source licenses such as the Apache license. With this provision, users can copy Apache-licensed code into GPL projects, said analyst Stephen O'Grady of RedMonk. "For a variety of folks, that's a big deal," O'Grady said. Whether to actually migrate to GPL 3 is a developer decision, Smith said. At Digium, which produces the Asterisk open-source telephony platform, no decision has been made yet, said Mark Spencer, chairman and CTO of Digium. "There are some complications around the patent terms that place some additional requirements upon the developers and distributors that we need to fully understand in more detail," Spencer said. Patent provisions add uncertainty about being able to distribute software covered by someone else's patent, he said. But GPL 3 has its merits, he noted. "GPL version 3 does clean up a lot of things about the GPL that were sort of implicit in previous and become much more explicit here," such as how the GPL interacts with other licenses, Spencer said. Sun has expressed the possibility of offering its Solaris OS under the GPL 3. The Linux kernel has been offered under the GPL previously. Novell, Microsoft, and the Linux Foundation deferred comment on Tuesday until the actual release of the license. The FSF has published an essay by FSF President Richard Stallman in which he argues for the benefits of GPL version 3. âThe reason to migrate is because of the existing problems which GPLv3 will fix, such as 'tivoization,' DRM, and threats from software patents. Further advantages of GPLv3 include better internationalization, gentler termination, support for BitTorrent, and compatibility with the Apache license," Stallman said in a statement released by the foundation in May. Tivoization, which refers to Tivo's software, is when computer appliances feature GPL-covered code that cannot be changed because the appliance will shut down. Actual impacts of GPL version 3 could take a year or more to gauge, said Doug Levin, CEO of Black Duck Software, which offers a software compliance management platform. "Right now, it appears there will only be a small number of projects that will adopt the license," but that could change, Levin said.
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com November 16, 2004, 4:00 AM PT. After years of bitter battles between copyright holders and file-swapping services, the outlines of a partial truce are emerging that may soon see
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Letter Can collective database licensing cure this tragedy of the commons?
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'Managed copying' license would support users' fair use right to move content across devices.
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The older version better matches his vision of what a license should do. Plus, he said, "Because I have accepted code over the last 15 years by people who kind of accepted my original choice of the GPL Version 2, I'm not just, I think, ethically bound by those people's choices, I am also actually legally bound."
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Germany's National Library is now fully licensed to duplicate copy protected electronic books and other digital media such as CDs and CD-ROMs. The object and scope of the agreement seems pretty limited, anyway.