A D.C. appeals court circuit said on tuesday that the FCC has no authority to mandate DRM technology in all digital television tuners made after July 1, 2005. The American Library Association and many other organization bought the suit against the FCC last year on the grounds that this rule harms the general consumer by raising prices and allowing the FCC and the content providers to dictate how computers, TVs and other equipment is manufactured. The court did not say that it would rule in favor of the ALA and the other organizations since they may or may not have legal standing.

Hopefully the ruling will be against the DRM mandate, since that generally leads to more content control (e.g. the new Napster service). Why is this even an issue? Wasn’t it already established that we can copy all content that was freely broadcasted (Sony v. Universal)? And how does simply changing the medium (analog to digital) entitle the broadcaster to new rights? Once you let the content out into the air for all to see, you cannot possibly be expected to have control over its usage. As one Slashdot reader pointed out last week, “You can’t control the genie if you’re throwing it out of the bottle at the speed of light.”

When professional journalists and writers are jailed for their work, it’s a tragedy. With the blogging revolution, that tragedy is mushrooming. A new technology which allows individuals to more widely participate in their culture can still fall victim to those who oppose participation — if we allow it to happen.

The Committee to Protect Bloggers has declared Feb. 22 “Free Mojtaba and Arash Day” in honor of two Iranian bloggers currently jailed in Iran. Bloggers around the world today are posting a message like this, and nothing else. We can write tomorrow; they can’t.

I will be speaking at two law conferences over the next couple weeks, one at Yale Law School and one at the University of Iowa!

First, I will appear at Yale’s 11th Rebellious Lawyering Conference, on a panel entitled “Reclaiming Culture”, alongside Glenn Otis Brown and Siva Vaidhyanathan. The panel is scheduled for Saturday, Feb 19th at 4:30pm. The event is free for current Yale and Quinnipiac students and affiliates, but even if this does not apply to you, you should come anyway ;-)

Then I will be speaking on the “Fair Uses” panel at this University of Iowa symposium, “Intellectual Property: An Interdisciplinary Conversation,” on Friday, February 25th, at 11:15am. Hopefully I’ll have gotten along well with Siva at the last conference, because I’ll be seeing him again :-) Update: I went and grabbed a coffee with Siva and Glenn after the Yale talk, and it seemed to go swimmingly! At least I don’t think Siva will throw rotten tomatoes at me in Iowa ;-)

I’m really looking forward to both events, and I know that some people from Harvard and NYU will be meeting up at the Yale conference… maybe we’ll discover some supporters in Iowa when I go there!

Last month, the FreeCulture.org chapter at the University of Florida tabled at our law school‘s Music Law Conference with information on Creative Commons licenses. Today, the display is featured on the Creative Commons blog. I continue to be embarassed by Neeru’s fawning over the display — I still think it looks like a sixth-grade science project — but different strokes for different folks, I guess.

You can read the full story over at the original entry on the Florida Free Culture blog.

I’ll be the first to admit I don’t have a clue how the European Union operates. To me, it’s a viper’s nest of funny acronyms and ever-shifting political alliances.

But there are folks who understand it, and according to them, the EU will likely take yet another stab at adopting — as Cory Doctorow put it — “disastrous, ridiculous American-style software patents” this week. This article in the UK’s Register seems to do a good job of summarizing events. This piece in the Polish Warsaw Business Journal (in English) adds a bit of context.

But though we at FreeCulture.org may not know much about the EU bureaucracy, we know we don’t like software patents. The European Parliament has said it doesn’t, either. Neither do the Dutch Parliament, Spanish Senate, and Danish government. Poland, who put the kibosh on the measure twice so far, said they won’t kill it this time, but rather seek changes.

The public, too, is organizing. The European Foundation for a Free Information Infrastrcture has issued this call to action to collect signatures opposed to software patents. Several members of the European Parliament (MEPs) are signed on, along with other political types, free software folks, companies like MySQL and Opera, student groups — over 26,000 in whole. Signatures from U.S. citizens surely don’t hold as much weight as those from EU member states, but Americans can still sign on to show their solidarity. In addition, the FFII is organizing demonstrations this week — Tuesday in Berlin, Thursday in Brussels — in protest.

Beyond solidarity, there’s more at stake than just Europe. In today’s eWeek, Jim Rapoza calls Poland heroic for fighting software patents, saying:

I do hope that U.S. politicians will take a look at what’s happening in Europe and see enough incentive to take concrete steps toward fixing some of the worst patent abuses and problems—steps such as getting rid of business process patents (goodbye, one-click) or requiring actual working programs rather than broad ideas to patent.

By helping Europe fight its war, we may be helping ourselves fight our own. Register your support while there’s still time. Maybe seeing so many American signatures on a European document will make U.S. legislators wonder what they’re doing wrong.

For more background information on software patents and why we oppose, see my previous blog post.

P.S. The “Thank you, Poland” letter, and its 30,000 signatures, will be presented to a commission of the Polish parliament on Wednesday.

This week’s Nature includes an article about two new technologies in plant biology, but perhaps the most significant aspect of these discoveries is their open-source nature.

The researchers in the study, led by Richard Jefferson at CAMBIA, an affiliated research center of Charles Sturt University in Australia, created a method for using different species of bacteria to transfer genes to plants, as well as a way to visualize the location and function of the genes. The scientists licensed their work under an agreement provided provided by the Biological Innovation for Open Society. Essentially, anyone who wishes to build off of these technologies can do so as long as they follow the terms of the flexible license.

Like other open-source efforts, the success of this move depends on the involvement of the community. For farmers to benefit from this technology, local scientists, businessmen, and government representatives first need to understand the effectiveness of open-source biology, and why it is so important not to impose barriers on certain discoveries:

“This is important, fundamental agricultural technology moving into the commons,” said John Wilbanks, executive director of Science Commons, a group working to make it easier, and legal, to share scientific data. “This is the type of tool that, in increasing numbers, is being patented. To use the operating system metaphor, this is Print-F for plant genomics. Imagine trying to build any piece of software if the print function required a patent license.”
[Wired]

Open-source projects, biology-related or not, contribute to a repository of ideas (or an intellectual commons, as Lawrence Lessig would say) that other people can build upon, resulting in a lot more innovations and discoveries than would be unearthed under more restrictive intellectual property systems. In the context of this discovery in plant gene transfer, scientists and members of the community working together and openly could genetically engineer certain crops in a way that bodes well economically for the farmer and still benefits the consumer. Such a collaborative process would be difficult at best if patents were imposed or if decisions were motivated by the financial interests of a company.

Still, open-source doesn’t necessarily mean minimal profit.

“Even large companies, if they embrace a very different business model, can make serious money — probably more than current earnings — by decreasing costs of accessing technology, litigation and developing early-stage innovation,” Jefferson said.

At any rate, the decision to “open-source” this research is indeed a positive step, one that will hopefully motivate other scientists and ultimately bring the open-source science movement to the forefront of scientific pursuit.

On Sunday, Americans collectively tossed back a beer, wondered when the pizza would arrive, and hoped Paul McCartney wouldn’t have a wardrobe malfunction.

Napster was buying selling them a world where they don’t own the things they buy.

In Napster‘s advertisement which aired during Super Bowl XXXIX — coincidentally, viewer’s least favorite commercial of the night — Napster’s cat mascot holds up a sign informing music downloaders that filling their iPod to capacity with music would cost them $10,000, while Napster’s To Go service offers unlimited downloads to a compatible MP3 player for $15 per month.

What a bargain!

But let’s examine the history first.

Napster, of course, was the program that first brought music downloading and filesharing to the masses. Lauded by some, decried by others, the old Napster suffered legal attacks and succumbed.

But the cat had more lives to live. Napster went legit, paying copyright owners the dues they demanded.

In the intervening time, though, Apple’s iTunes service stole the limelight. The iPod became the dominant portable digital music player — for many, an MP3 player is an iPod, as a photocopier is a Xerox and a digital video recorder is a TiVo .

Some hailed the “$0.99 per song” pricing system, popularized (if not invented) by Apple, as revolutionary. It did seem the logical next step in music downloading. “If consumers want greater selection, if they want the freedom to only buy the tracks they want, here it is,” the industry seemed to say. But Napster says no.

Napster says, “Consumers don’t want to buy music at all: they want to rent it.” Napster To Go charges customers $15 per month for access; if you stop paying, guess what happens to all those songs you downloaded? Well, they’re unplayable.

Imagine: rather than buying a stereo, music lovers pay a monthly fee so their CD player continues to be able to play CDs. Stop paying the RIAA tax, and Hotel California becomes nothing more than a shiny drink coaster.

This is not to say there were no problems with iTunes: there were. But Napster To Go represents a much more extreme departure from past distribution models. Change isn’t always bad, but such a major change warrants more discussion than Napster’s promotional materials grant it.

Additionally, both Napster and iTunes, along with many other for-sale download services, package their product with Digital Rights Management, technological restrictions on the customer’s capabilities. Some of these restrictions can infringe on a customer’s fair use rights; all of them take power away from the paying customer.

Before we accept such a major shift in distribution — perhaps even more major than that which the original Napster wrought, which still relied upon “possession” of songs in some manner — we should confront the issue of if, as a culture, this is the future we want. Otherwise, it may be too late.

It’s not a radical question at all. In President Bush’s inaugural address, he promoted his desire to advance America as an “ownership society.” Do you want to be a permanent tenant in your own computer, in your media, in your culture? Or do you want to own it?

As for me, I want to right to do as I see fit with the things I purchase. I want fair use. I want an ownership society.