Many publishers put restrictions on how digital books and journals can be used.

Such digital rights management (DRM) controls may block some legitimate uses, the British Library has said.

And there are fears that restricted works may not be safe for future generations if people can no longer unlock them when technology evolves.

The British Library spends £2m of its £16m annual acquisitions budget on digital material, mainly reference books and journals." [ more... ]

"LONDON (Reuters) - Sony BMG, the world's second-largest music company, is rolling out CDs with new technology that serves as a "speed bump" to hinder people who want to make illicit copies.

Sony BMG's new copy-protection effort comes with at least one downside: PC users are unable to transfer the songs to Apple's popular iPod portable music player, because Apple has declined to make its software compatible with Microsoft's Windows Media digital rights management (DRM) system.

The copy-protection technology is also far from ironclad. Apple Macintosh users currently face no restrictions at all. What's more, if users go to a Web site to complain about the lack of iPod compatibility, Sony BMG will send them an email with a "back door" measure on how to work around the copy protection."  [ more... ]

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia said the FCC had "exceeded the scope of its delegated authority" with the 2003 rule.

The FCC has said copyright protections were needed to help speed the adoption of digital television, which offers higher quality signals.

Dan Lockton is working on an Interesting dissertation at Cambridge-MIT Technology Policy programme entitled "Architectures of Control," the way that technology is designed to control how its owners make use of it.

"Examples with primarily commercial control intentions range from the technology-intensive—such as Hewlett-Packard’s alleged use of embedded chips in printer cartridges which ‘expire’ the cartridge, even if unused, on a certain date, thus forcing the user to buy new cartridges—to the simple, such as the Audi A2’s bonnet which cannot be opened by the car’s owner, only by an Audi dealer.

There are, equally, numerous examples with more socially beneficial intentions, such as breathalyser or seat belt interlocks for car ignitions, blue lighting in nightclub toilets (to make intravenous drug use difficult), and growing opportunities in terms of coercing consumers to behave in more environmentally friendly ways—e.g., products could cease to function if the intended operation would cause excessive energy use.  [ More... ]

A French appeal court just issued a ruling preventing the inclusion of anti-copying measure on DVD. This is after a man who was not able to copy a DVD he purchase to a VHS cassette so he can watch it at his mother's place. Which is considered private copying and is a consumer right in France. He got the help of a consumer protection group to sue the Film Studio that produced the DVD. Film studios have one month to unprotect DVDs.  [ more... ]

"An international forum aimed at standardizing digital media and copy protection technologies is set to achieve a major milestone in its drive toward creating interoperable Digital Rights Management. This month, the International Digital Media Project (DMP)—which brings together more than 25 member companies across the digital content and device industries including Panasonic, Mitsubishi Electric Corp., Telecom Italia, and the BBC—is expected to release the industry's first DRM technology specifications for Portable Audio and Video devices (PAVs).

Hopes are high that the group's recommendations, largely focused on existing technologies, will bring more realistic content protection plans into the digital mainstream. The current approach—one that links DRM and specific playback devices from manufacturers including Apple, Microsoft, and Sony—restricts the content market along with the freedom of consumers to access content they've paid for across platforms and devices."  [ more... ]

Allison has put up nearly three hours of video clip debates between EFF Senior IP Attorney Fred Von Lohmann and Media Studies Prof Siva Vaidhyanathan as they discuss the MPAA, RIAA, Napster 2 and Universal Studios. (Note: The remaining hour of the debate will be there in the next day or so).

Round One:
Siva Vaidhyanathan, Professor of Communications, NYU (188 MB)
Fritz Attaway, Executive VP and general counsel, Motion Picture Association of America (242 MB)
Avery Kotler, Senior director, Business and Legal Affairs Napster (217 MB)
Cary Sherman, President, Recording Industry Association of America (358 MB)
Fred von Lohmann, Senior staff attorney, Electronic Frontier Foundation (367 MB)
Alec French, Senior counsel, Government Relations, NBC/Universal (335 MB)

Round Two, Rebuttals:
Siva Vaidhyanathan (164 MB)
Fritz Attaway (74 MB)
Cary Sherman (83 MB)
Fred von Lohmann & everybody (222 MB)

Round Three, Queries and Responses:
Query: This seems to be a distribution issue—it's not an issue of wanting a system where everybody's paying nothing. It's an issue of being entrenched in this old system of everybody paying too much to distribute things in a modern world where distribution is cheap. I would like you to address that.  more... ]

According to this press release from Texas Instruments, "Latens Systems has ported its IP CAS to Texas Instruments' (NYSE: TXN - News; TI) digital media processor platform. Now, a new generation of content-oriented services, such as Pay-TV and Video on Demand (VOD) services via IP settop boxes, personal video recorders (PVR), personal computers (PC) and other consumer devices, will be protected against piracy. The combination of Latens' solution with TI's TMS320DM64x generation of high performance, fully programmable digital media processors, delivers an optimal and secure transaction system to equipment manufacturers and IPTV operators, protecting their broadband content and revenue streams. This new solution will be showcased at TI's booth (# SL3845, south hall) at the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) conference in Las Vegas, April 18-21, 2005.

Enabling flexibility in design and rapid implementation of new services, Latens' open platform content and revenue protection system has been designed to protect and control access to valuable content in Video on Demand (VOD), IPTV and other content delivery applications. Latens' security systems employ new IT security techniques and use the power of two-way digital networks to provide next generation Conditional Access (CA) for broadband and digital cable networks through Secure Software Modules (SSM) in the settop box. The SSMs are monitored and managed across the network and whenever necessary are updated or replaced through the network."

Last month, Cory Doctorow blogged about the "deceptively named Open Mobile Alliance that provides DRM for music/movies on cellphones. The OMA licensing cost was $1 per handset, which means that buying OMA for all of last year's phones would have cost $684 million -- more than the total market for digital music.

The OMA has responded by generously cutting that licensing fee to $0.65/handset, which brings the cost of outfitting all the phones sold this year in line with the approximate market for digital music." [ More... ]

German news site Heise has to pay €500,000 in damages to the music industry because it provided links in a news report to Slysoft.com, a company that advertises software that can play, copy and rip protected audio CDs.

A Munich court ruled that, by providing a link to the company's homepage, Heise online had intentionally provided 'assistance in the fulfillment of unlawful acts' and is therefore liable as 'an aider and abettor', in accordance with Section 830 of the German Civil Code.  [ more... ]

The US Congress is pondering laws to force digital music companies to use a single, unified DRM system, in order to allow songs purchased from any download service to run on any hardware.

The House of Representatives' intellectual property sub-committee met yesterday to discuss such a move, proposed by Lamar Smith, a Texas Republican, and Howard Berman, a Democrat from California.

Their beef is the ongoing incompatibility between, say, Napster's download service and Apple's iPod. The shiny white music player will happily handle songs downloaded from Apple's iTunes Music Store and protected with Apple's FairPlay DRM system, but not DRM'd Windows Media Audio files, for example.

"This interoperability issue is of concern to me since consumers who bought legal copies of music from Real could not play them on an iPod," Smith said at the hearing, Internet News reports.

Apple apparently wasn't there to add its two cents to the debate - Smith described its failure to appear as a "mistake" - but other industry players, including Napster CTO William Pence, along with consumer groups and public policy bodies, were present to tell the Congressmen to leave the emerging digital music market alone.

Essentially, opponents argue that it should be for the market to decide which services - and thus which DRM systems - dominate.  [ more... ]

Handset manufacturers already balked at the price to license the Open Mobile Aliiance DRM patents; carriers have now chimed in as well. Is the DRM that was supposed to unite the mobile world now in danger?

At the beginning of the year, the MPEG LA intellectual-property licensing firm said it had pooled together the necessary patents needed for OMA DRM, and would license them to handset vendors for $1 per handset, a price device makers decried as too high. They may have a point -- after all, had the price been paid on all 684 million handsets sold last year, the revenue generated would be greater than those of music downloads on the Web.

MPEG LA also said it would license the patents to service providers for 1 percent of each transaction involving them, and now mobile carriers are objecting. OMA DRM 2.0 was envisioned as being the single DRM technology used across the entire mobile industry, and being licensed to other consumer electronics manufacturers as well, paving the way for users to be able to share content between their mobile phones and other devices. But with these two large blocs of players objecting, what's going to happen?

There are two possibilities. First, MPEG LA and the patent holders could relent and lower the price, which seems the most reasonable choice. It's hard to see what return handset vendors get from the $1 they have to spend for the rights to the technology. Essentially, they're paying $1 to license technology that's part of an ecosystem with no guaranteed spot for them. Operators, too, won't give up any revenues for which they don't think they're getting a decent return -- and if no one wants to implement the OMA DRM spec, it's only going to hit MPEG LA and the holders in the pockets. "The patent holders would be better off to lower their royalties and get a smaller piece of a much bigger pie than a big chunk of a small pie," Reuters quotes a sensible DRM software exec as saying. [ more... ]

Andrew Orlowski reports for The Register that, "Mobile phone networks dissatisfaction with the copyright interests has gone public. The association representing the GSM standard, with over a billion users worldwide, has declared that the proposed tariff for DRM is too high and is unworkable. Members of the GSM Association think that the per-transaction model agreed by the MPEG Licensing Authority - and proposed to the Open Mobile Alliance standards group - harms users in the long run.

The proposal put to OMA by the MPEG LA in January requires carriers to pay one per cent of transactions and $1 per handset back to the DRM patent holders, which include ContentGuard, Intertrust, Matsushita, Philips and Sony.

In a statement, GSMA CEO Rob Conway described "significant discontent" with the licensing proposal, and characterized the plan as "impractical, excessive and short-sighted". The GSMA objects to both the ‘per transaction’ fee that carriers must pay, as well as the $1 a handset DRM fee."

A new Microsoft KB article has been published which instructs users with corrupted DRM license stores on how to reset DRM to a "clean"state.

SYMPTOMS: You’re receiving one of the following error messages when attempting to play DRM protected content:

The licenses for your media files are corrupted. (Error code 0xC00D2754)

Windows Media Player cannot play the file because the associated license is either corrupted or not valid. (Error code 0xC00D11D6)

CAUSE: This issue occurs when the DRM system on your computer is corrupted.

RESOLUTION: To work around this issue, restore the DRM system on your computer to a clean state. To do so, follow these steps:

WARNING: This procedure deletes all the current licenses for media files on your hard disk. To play your existing licensed media files, you may have to acquire and purchase a new license from the content provider.

Click here for more details...

The Windows Media Player FAQ has been updated again, for all of you that heard that you can get a computer virus by playing a protected WMA or WMV file check out the following link.

The Inquirer is featuring an article by Nick Farrell who writes, “ the latest version of iTunes, 4.7.1, has introduced a limit to the number of people who can access iTunes shared music each day.

It all came about because of a Rendezvous feature in which users on the same subnet could share the same tunes by streaming.

However, Apple has moved to restrict the streaming capability. In the good old days it used to support five simultaneous listeners, but now allows only allows five listeners a day.”

In an article for BetaNews.com, Ed Oswald and Nate Mook write, “Both Microsoft and Time Warner have decided to not proceed with a hearing over the takeover of digital rights management software company ContentGuard.  Under EU antitrust laws, a company has the right to request a hearing in front of the Commission to plead their case as to why regulators should approve a deal. The Commission will then consult with the various authorities of member nations and decides whether to approve or deny the merger or takeover.  ContentGuard offers technology to prevent copying of protected files and has created eXtensible rights Markup Language (XrML), which it is pushing for industry adoption.  The EU's initial concern stemmed from whether Microsoft's control of ContentGuard will broaden its dominance in the digital media space, and allow Redmond to vertically integrate into other markets.”