Sinabro

Mr. Tenenbaum appears to concede a lot of grounds even when he could make RIAA work for it:

“This is me. I’m here to answer,” said Tenenbaum. “I used the computer. I uploaded and downloaded music. This is how it is. I did it,” he testified before a packed courtroom, whose spectators included an all-star cast of Harvard Law School copyright scholars: Lawrence Lessig, John Palfrey, and Jonathan Zittrain.

“Are you admitting liability for all 30 sound recordings” on which the record labels brought suit, asked the plaintiffs’ attorney Tim Reynolds.

“Yes,” said Tenenbaum.

Tenenbaum then admitted that he “lied” in his written discovery responses, the ones in which he denied responsibility.

“Why did you lie at that point?” asked Tenenbaum’s attorney, Harvard Law School professor Charles Nesson. “It was kind of something I rushed through,” responded Tenenbaum. “It’s what seemed the best response to give.” At the time he gave the admittedly false discovery responses, Tenenbaum testified that he was being advised by his mother Judith, a family law attorney who works for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

It probably can’t be said that Mr. Tenenbaum’s attorney is ignorant of the law, or even that he is negligent (given that he’s volunteered to take the case and has given unusual attention to it). And given that this is his attorney’s question, it is quite clear that the questions and the responses were planned.

So, what’s their plan here?

If I had to take a guess, I am guessing their strategy is the exact opposite of Jammie Thomas, who was seen by two different juries as lying in the face of plain evidences (which could only imply that she thought the jury was stupid) and got hit with huge, punitive damages. That is, they are trying to say Mr. Tenenbaum is an honest guy. He might have given false representation earlier (not under oath), but that was a moment of weakness, and on the whole, he is an honest, average American who is being asked to pay $4,000 (if he settled) or upwards to $1 million (if the jury goes for maximum damage, like in the Jammie Thomas case). Now, does he really deserve to get punished like that for doing what an average American does?

Of course, if the jury sticks to the law and finds willful infringement (which may as well be the case, because Mr. Tenenbaum probably knew the songs were copyrighted and couldn’t have been unaware that what he was downloading were not authorized copies), then the minimum damage they can award is around $24,000, which is still quite a bit.

But here’s the real reason constitution guarantees a right to trial by jury of our peers: the jury does not have to “follow the law”, if they find the law unjust. This is a check on our legislative bodies by ordinary informed citizens. They cannot pass arbitrary, clearly unfair laws and expect the citizenry to uphold them. The jury is the final arbiter of facts in any trial, and if a clearly unbiased jury finds someone innocent, the legal professionals are very unwilling to question that fact as found by the jury (appeals are usually on the basis of technicalities and how the jury might have been led toward a particular bias).

Of course, the legal counsels on either side cannot mention jury nullification during the trial (if they do, they will probably be held in contempt of the court and the judge will instruct the jury to ignore the call to ignore the law), but so many unusual things happened with this trial, so who knows how it will end up?

Perhaps we should considerably reduce the power of copyright in academic journals (via Slashdot), but we should do it through reasoned discourse, not mindless fear-mongering:

We’ve discussed a few times over the years how copyright gets in the way of academic work. Journals (who get all of their writing and reviewing totally for free) insist on holding the copyright for those works in many cases. I’ve even heard of academics who had to redo pretty much the identical experiment because they couldn’t even cite their own earlier results for fear of a copyright claim. It leads to wacky situations where academics either ignore the fact that the journals they published in hold the copyright on their work, or they’re forced to jump through hoops to retain certain rights.

Oh, please. Data is not copyrighted. I am fairly sure they are not even copyrightable in most cases, even though a particular presentation of the data might be, especially if it shows some evidence of creativity. One must be either fairly stupid or have a really horrible legal department to get an idea that data in a published journal article is copyrighted and cannot re-use or even cite the data (who wouldn’t want citation? citation increases the impact factor of the journal) without “re-doing the experiment”. (Say, how does one know whether the “new data” is from new experiment or the old one? Aren’t they supposed to be the same within experimental error?)

Of course, I can only speak for the situation in physics, but I am fairly sure the situation is as bleak as presented in this page, at least not in natural sciences. APS (which does retain copyright) and Nature (which does not retain copyright) both allow the author to do pretty much whatever they want with the author-formatted preprints of the article. The allowances are less on the journal-produced, professional versions of the article, but that’s understandable (that particular copy represents the combined effort of the author and editor) and does not have that much impact on open access as long as one doesn’t mind the amateurish document formatting by many scientists (just look at arXiv.org).

On the whole, I do think copyright in U.S. does need to be reformed, and particularly so in academic journal publishing (textbooks have … different goals so it’s not so clear whether academic textbooks should be treated any differently from other books). But we will gain nothing by inciting unreasonable fear in the sheeple and eroding our own credibility. After all, don’t we believe that our cause is strong enough to prevail when we present the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth (as well as it can be determined from data and statistics, anyway) to the public?

Well, this is it. I no longer support RMS’s crusade.

According to Stallman, the Pirate Party’s proposal of a five-year limit on copyright would remove the freedom users have to gain access to source code by eventually allowing its inclusion in proprietary products. Stallman suggests requiring proprietary software to also release its code within five years to even the balance of power.”

Somehow, I had always believed that RMS and, by extension, FSF’s goal was to limit the destructive power of copyright in software business by using its own rules against itself. I had believed that, given the choice between strong, draconian copyright, with GPL taking all its power from the same law, and having no copyright at all for software (or something very short like 5 years), RMS and FSF would choose the latter.

I was wrong. I have said before (not here, ‘probably on Slashdot) that if I ever find out that RMS’s (and, by extension, FSF’s) position was pro-copyright (even if it’s for strengthening copyleft), then I would stop supporting him. This is it.

I do, in general, like free software and will continue to use it, but as a political force I am opposed to the free software movement, now that I know for sure that the movement is led by a statist liberal whose central agenda is forcing others to his will (i.e. forcing proprietary software authors to release the source code, even if they didn’t use any copyleft codes).

As one of the immediate consequences, my FSF associate membership will not be renewed at the end of this month.

P.S. I had been getting fairly annoyed with RMS’s bashing of libertarians (I count Gov. Palin as one, although she may not know that yet) and capitalists (insurance companies and banks) recently anyway. He had, before this, the merit of … being seen as having the right opinions and position on one issue I deeply care about (copyright), but apparently I was wrong about that.

Edit: After all, there is no reason to force arbitrary obligation upon proprietary software authors. Just as the way original patents worked, copyright can be a two-way street. If the authors want copyright protection, they can submit the source code along with copyright registration (as apparently they already have to do, at least for small programs), and this will be public record once the work passes into public domain. If they want to keep the source code secret, then they can do it the same way it’s done in every other industry: keep it a trade secret and don’t tell it to anyone, including the copyright office (and since it was never “published”, it won’t be under copyright protection).

The very first thing we should do with this copyright mess is probably requiring copyright registration (say, within 1 year of original publication, as is done with patents) for copyright protection. If it wasn’t worth registering, then it’s not worth protecting.

There was a security breach involving Twitpics (which apparently isn’t run by Twitter but is somehow … authorized to get users to type in their passwords somehow) a while ago. And now, a breach involving Twitter itself.

Well, from a broader perspective, I guess nothing of value is lost for me here, since I don’t store anything sensitive on Twitter (or, formerly, on Facebook). All my profiles are as public as I can make them. After all, only criminals and other malcontents with things to hide use any privacy features, right?

I guess, in some sense, if someone takes control of my Twitter account, they can send messages to my friends pretending to be me, but, well, one would hope that my true friends will be able to recognize when it is me talking and when it is not—and if they do anything significant without verifying it with me through some secured channel, well, they’ve become a security liability to me.

But this breach should serve as a warning: don’t trust online service providers, and trust big online service providers (Google, Yahoo, etc.) even less. I don’t mean not to use them. That would be near impossible if you have any sort of online presence. The services they provide are valuable and useful in daily lives. I use Flickr (Yahoo) and Google Voice myself.

But I use these services because they have nothing of security value. I don’t speak on the phone regarding anything sensitive—I assume all the phones I use are tapped, and I don’t leave electronic or paper trails when the situations warrant it—and although I did mark some photos in my Flickr account as “private”, they are hardly sensitive documents (they are pictures of my nephew and, well, I don’t feel I have the authority to distribute them widely).

I have moved away from Gmail more than a year ago, and I make sure that anything sensitive doesn’t even go through Gmail (instead, I use randomly generated email addresses on my own domain and server), and no one who handles sensitive data from corporate or national perspective should be using Gmail (or any other public email provider) for those purposes.

As the saying goes, just because I’m paranoid doesn’t mean everyone isn’t out to get me (or was it “If everyone is out to get me, it’s not paranoia”?).

This looks like one of those gadgets that you wish you had a use for … but when you honestly ask yourself you don’t really have a use for:

Quad-band GSM Personal GPS Tracker Bug with SOS (850/900/1800/1900MHz)

• Powered by the high performance SiRF Star III GPS Chipset
• Fast GPS signal acquisition
• Perfect for hikers and cross-country skiers to call for rescues when needed
• Great to install in cars/vehicles, safe-guard against auto-thefts
• Supports on-demand GPS tracking or continuous GPS tracking (remotely configured via SMS/Text Messaging)
• In on-demand tracking mode GPS turns on only when tracking information is requested via SMS (thus saving power)
• Built-in security features allows tracking requests from only authorized cell phones
• Built-in quick dial and SOS buttons can instantly send current location (GPS coordinates) to designated receivers via SMS
• Built-in rechargeable lithium battery (AC and Car Charger Included)
• Support “geo-fencing” — when person leaves preset geological area SMS will automatically be sent to designated receivers

It looks like a nice toy to play with, but $150 is too much to sink in a toy without an actual usefulness (at least for me; I already own a handheld standalone GPS that’s more than good for personal travel, although not for remote tracking).

According to Ars Technica,

A new report from iSuppli highlights the recent, very dramatic rebound in NAND flash prices, and suggests that this is bad news for SSD adoption in the cost-sensitive netbook market. But at least Samsung is smiling.

These are, I think, flash devices for permanent storage (as opposed to RAM), such as USB flash drives, SDHC (and microSDHC), and other memory cards.

Will this mean stabilization of prices on these memory devices and maybe possibly even increase? That’s what I want to know. I’ve been waiting for price of 32GB USB flash drives to come down (the largest one I currently own is 16GB), but this could mean I may need to wait a very long time …

Well, Ars Technica says that the market for flash suppliers is still in “awful weather” condition, so I can probably afford to wait longer—at least we don’t expect the prices to rise, it probably just won’t fall as quickly as it had in the past.