Jeff Ubois's blog

Jennifer Urban: “Digital Rights Management is broken”:

Jennifer Urban and Cory Doctorow spoke in tandem at the December 14 DIY Media seminar. I will post separate entries, although their presentations were closely related.

“DRM is broken,” Urban declared, at the beginning of her talk about “Bits will never get harder to copy: the limits of copyright online.” (Apparently, according to a separate report, Bill Gates agrees) The problem, as the graphic below illustrates, is that until DRM started building legal restrictions on the use of cultural products into the hardware used to access those products, the relationship between technological capabilities, laws, and social changes was flexible enough to allow copyright laws to evolve with the times. When radio came along and enabled the broadcast of music that had previously been accessed through live performance or sheet music, the legal remedy of compulsory licensing enabled rights owners to be compensated and for a new medium for musical performance to grow. DRM, together with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which criminalizes circumvention of DRM measures, puts an end to that flexibility by instantiating in technology a social agreement that used to be mediated by courts: “DRM stops the change process” that been evolving since the establishment of copyright laws.

“Fair use,” fundamental to education, scholarship, and the arts, is broken because the rights holder, not a legal process, determines the boundaries, and “DMCA makes breaking DRM to enable fair use illegal.”

In addition to the social damage caused by cutting the legal system out of the process of determining the limits of licenses for cultural products, Urban pointed out that DRM leads to disasters like the Sony rootkit fiasco, in which hundreds of thousands of Sony CDs were distributed with DRM protections that installed malware on the computers of people who simply wanted to listen to music—compounded later by the exploitation of the malware by hackers.

Jennifer Urban is a Fellow at the USC Annenberg Center and a Clinical Associate Professor of Law at USC. She teaches Intellectual Property and classes related to Technology Law and Policy. She also is the Director of the USC Intellectual Property Clinic, where students learn intellectual property law through hands-on work with cutting-edge, real-world projects. She is a faculty member of the USC Center for Communication Law and Policy.

Originally posted by Howard Rheingold from DIY Media Weblog, ReBlogged by yatta on Dec 19, 2006 at 12:08 AM

I’m a bit late reporting on Flurry, which offers a free application that will work on any Java-capable phone, and allow subscribers with a data plan to send, receive, and filter email, manage an address book, and read RSS feeds. Flurry highlights email addresses, telephone numbers, and links so that clicking will initiate a message, call, or web session. Given how many of the phones now given away with new subscriptions run Java, and can work with a data plan, this seems like a promising low cost alternative to higher end phones, at least for reading mail (sending without a real keyboard is painful). Flurry works with IMAP accounts, and in contrast to the Gmail mobile app, with any standard email service. Other Java-based clients that worth looking at include Renzoo, ProfiMail and Google’s GMail for mobile application.

A bit like trying to read tea leaves, but ‘Yours Truly,’ the E-Variations suggests that “The sign-off of an e-mail message can be a land mine involving the subtleties of relationships and hierarchies.”

The EU reports that more than half e-mails are spam:

AP - Unsolicited e-mails continue to plague Europeans and account for between 50 and 80 percent of all messages sent to mail inboxes, the European Commission said Monday.

Osterman Research and three leading vendors will hold an interactive, one-hour webinar on messaging archiving on on Wednesday, December 6, 2006, at 1pm ET. Michael Osterman, President of Osterman Research, will share some of the key insights and findings from his recently published research report, Messaging Archiving Trends, 2006–2009. Executives from Infocrossing, Patron Systems, and Zantaz will also share their insights from leading customers and their perspective on where Messaging Archiving is today, and where it is headed for 2007.

Registration is free, and attendees will learn answers to questions like:

• What are the most common reasons to archive email and how are organizations archiving today?
• How can you archive to reduce storage costs, gain compliance, and reduce e-Discovery costs?
• What is the difference between backup and archiving?
• How pervasive and effective are today’s archiving solutions, and what are the trends for 2007?
• How do messaging archiving strategies differ by types of organizations, including governments, financial services organizations, and public and private companies?

Brice Dunwoodie

Brice Dunwoodie points to a review of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007, which is finally out this month. The dependence on Internet Explorer is gone, but there may be new dependencies on Office 2007.

Last week’s announcement of the new relationship between Microsoft and Novell took a lot of people by surprise. The promise of better interoperability between Windows and SUSE Linux, and between Microsoft Office and Open Office via Office Open XML, could increase Linux adoption in corporate environments.

Microsoft’s new willingness to back away from patent claims against Novell and open source developers and users (Brad Smith, senior vice president and general counsel at Microsoft noted “If you buy SUSE Linux, you also get a patent covenant from Microsoft”) may be driven by a desire to compete with Red Hat, which recently entered into a new agreement with Oracle. More details on the IP issues are in Jason Matusow’s blog.

Frost & Sullivan predicts the web collaboration and conferencing market will grow to $2.6 billion in 2010, up from $682.7 million in 2005. F&S notes “SMBs represent a particularly attractive target group since they need to access and harness the power of collaboration services but are unable to invest substantial amounts in complex technology or the skills to support it. For large global businesses, the key driving force is the need to communicate effectively across company boundaries and firewalls.” True enough.

Join Osterman Research and three leading vendors in an interactive webinar about one of the hottest topics in messaging today, Email Policy Management. This Webinar Summit is co-sponsored by Messaging News, the only publication that covers all news and issues related to messaging.

This 60 minute session will take place on Wednesday, November 1, 2006 at 1:00pm ET / 10:00am PT / 1800 UK Time and is available at no-cost but is limited to the first 250 attendees.

Michael Osterman will share some of the key insights and findings from surveys of your peers from Osterman Research’s just published research report, Messaging Policy Management Trends, 2006-2009. Product managers and email policy experts from EMC, MessageOne, and Symantec will also share their insights from leading customers and led their perspective on where Email Policy Management is today and where it is headed for 2007.

In this session you will learn answers to questions like:

• What are the most common email policies and how are they enforced?
• What are some email policies that reduce storage costs, increase security, and reduce liability?
• What are organizations doing with outbound emails?
• How pervasive and effective are email compliance training programs, what are some best practices?
• How do email policies differ by types of organizations, including governments, financial services organizations, and public and private companies?

This webinar will give messaging professionals a primer on email policies today for effective messaging management. They will gain key strategies and tactics that they can use in their organizations. In addition to an interactive Q and A session, two lucky attendees will be chosen as live case studies. They will get strategies specific to their organization discussed by the moderator and all three panelists.

Matthew Prince offers useful insight on the Spamhaus case over at the Securiteam blog:

… 1. Make no mistake: this is serious. To make that point, consider what is likely to come next. When Spamhaus continues to operate, the plaintiffs will implore the court to enter criminal contempt charges against the company and its principals. It’s not clear how broadly such charges could be, but this judge has certainly not shied away from broad orders to this point. At the very least, this could mean that Mr. Linford will be at risk if ever he decides to pay a visit to the United States. The worst case, of course, is that U.S.-based volunteers could be criminally at risk as well….