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Inside, wide-eyed

A weblog on digital civil rights, Free Software and Access to Knowledge.

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Guardian essay on "Owning Ideas"

gerloff

21. noviembre 2005

The Guardian has an Essay by Andrew Brown titled "Owning ideas". While not going into great detail, the text covers many problems that arise from treating ideas as if they were spare parts for cars.

It starts:

The difference between ideas and things is obvious as soon as someone hits you over the 
head with an idea - so obvious that until recently it was entirely clear to the law. Things could 
have owners and ideas could not. Yet this simple distinction is being changed all around us. 
Ideas are increasingly treated as property - as things that have owners who may decide who 
gets to use them and on what terms.

And it ends:

This is madness. Ideas aren't things. They're much more valuable than that. Intellectual 
property - treating some ideas as if they were in some circumstances things that can be owned
 and traded - is itself no more than an idea that can be copied, modified and improved. It is this 
process of freely copying them and changing them that has given us the world of material 
abundance in which we live. If our ideas of intellectual property are wrong, we must change 
them, improve them and return them to their original purpose. When intellectual property rules 
diminish the supply of new ideas, they steal from all of us.

I highly recommend reading the middle part for yourself.

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Sony's legalese rootkit

gerloff

21. noviembre 2005

While everyone was digging into their Windows machines to check if they had been hit by one of Sony's rootkits (no, no link here; you can't go online these days without stumbling about five stories on the topic), the EFF people took the pains of actually reading the EULA (end user license agreement) on those CDs.

It is just as amazing, if not more so, as the technical rootkit. (Hm, I wonder what other legalese treasures are hidden in those windows people simply click away when installing proprietary software?)

Here are a few of my faves:

If your house gets burgled, you have to delete all your music from your laptop when you get 
home. That's because the EULA says that your rights to any copies terminate as soon as you 
no longer possess the original CD.

Sony-BMG can install and use backdoors in the copy protection software or media player to 
"enforce their rights" against you, at any time, without notice. And Sony-BMG disclaims any 
liability if this "self help" crashes your computer, exposes you to security risks, or any other 
harm.

If you file for bankruptcy, you have to delete all the music on your computer. Seriously.

Uhm. If these are the terms you agree to when listening to a CD you legally bought, is it a surprise that people get to prefer alternatives that do not impose such absurd restrictions.

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