Bag of Beans

A very entertaining story when the author’s curiosity gets the better of her.

I mean, what kind of nanny state am I living in right now? I can’t even buy cold medicine anymore without the government all up in my shit? Why is my right to privacy being invaded in favor of incompetent police officers who lack the ability to catch drug dealers without spying on the average law abiding citizen?

Then, out of nowhere, I thought, I wonder what would happen if I tried to buy all the Nyquil on the shelf?

Would they laugh? Would they get angry? Would they sell it to me? Would they call the cops? Would they interrogate me until I told them what it was for?

• Link (via Thomas Hawk’s Digital Connection)

This article from the Economist touches on a recent case involving fair use and digital rights. Now, if only we could convince companies like Microsoft to stop crippling their products (*cough* Vista *cough*) with draconian DRM measures.

IS IT legal to make a copy of that DVD you’ve just bought so the family can watch it around the home or in the car? In one of the most watched copyright cases in recent years, a judge in northern California ruled last month that copying DVDs for personal use was legal, given the terms of the industry’s licence and the way the copies were made.

The wider implication of the ruling remains clouded—not least because the DVD Copy Control Association, the loser in the case, has 60 days to appeal. But whatever the video industry may like to think, the writing is on the wall for copy protection.

• Link (via Slashdot)

Further Reading:

• The Vista Suicide Note (a.k.a. A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection)

Watch out for this scam. Not only do they hike up the price once you are trapped there, they also don’t allow you to take pictures with some flimsy excuse about people dropping their cameras.

We walked in to get the tickets and met a very long line of people waiting to do the same. After 10 minutes of waiting, a “Question Answerer” came by and made it clear why it was taking so long: the sales people had to explain the “packages” and pricing to each and every person in the line. This was not because the package was that complex, but because each person in the line thought they were going to be paying $25 per person. In reality, the tribe was charging another $50 on top of the $25 for each person. You read that right, 75 bucks a pop. The “Question Answerer” explained it to us:

“The investor wants to get his, that’s the $25. But it’s our land, and we don’t get any of that $25, so we have to get ours too, you know?”

• Link (via Digg)

A new tool has been announced in the piracy arms race. This tool can be deployed by network administrators to monitor network traffic in order to identify people using P2P services, and can automatically boot them off the network. The question is whether or not it can distinguish legitimate uses of those P2P technologies. The price: “$1 million price tag for installation and $250,000 yearly operation costs.”

Red Lambda says that cGrid monitors “a large variety of different P2P clients, in addition to other avenues of file-sharing including Windows file sharing, FTP, IM, and others,” and that cGrid does not perform content inspection but instead focuses on the behavior of the protocols being monitored. But the company does not expand on how it differentiates between legitimate uses of those technologies and illegal ones, raising questions of its effectiveness in an academic setting where students may be using P2P and other services potentially flagged by the system for legitimate, academic reasons.

• Link (via Digg)

This looks like an interesting documentary that examines the reality of piracy. You can watch and even download the documentary for free.

Each day, millions of youths from Canada and around the world download music and movies off of the Internet. This epidemic of “unauthorized” downloading has been cited by the record and film industries as being the prime cause for billions in losses. Politicians have come under tremendous pressure to pass legislation on the issue.

But despite all the media frenzy on the piracy crackdowns, there’s been very little attention to the topic itself. At the very best, news reporters regurgitated the contents of an industry press release. There was nothing of substance, which is where this documentary fits in: we wanted to cover the issue in-depth. We interviewed industry execs, copyright lawyers, pirates, consumers, artists, and everyone we could think of - and made you this film.

• Link (via Digg)
• The official website of the documentary is here
• View on Google Video: Part 1, Part 2
• Download the DVD ISO image torrent from The Pirate Bay

Vanity Fair has profiled the popular torrent tracker site, The Pirate Bay.

Pirate Bay has now taken careful steps to ensure that any future raids will inflict minimal disruption to the service. “We have divided the servers up geographically—they are hidden,” explains Svartholm. “If they come after us again they will only find our front end. A single metal box with a short message stuck on the front: ‘You forgot to take my label writer.’”

In reality Svartholm does not expect another raid: “At this point it would be political suicide,” he says. Shortly after the raid more than 1,000 citizens attended Pirate Bay rallies in central Stockholm and Sweden’s second-largest city, Gothenburg, events which were captured by the quickie documentary Steal This Film. The recently formed Pirate Party doubled its membership, and even mainstream politicians—mindful of Sweden’s million or so file-sharing voters—weighed in on the Pirates’ behalf.

• Link (via Slashdot)

Bill Gates made some interesting comments regarding DRM during a recent meeting with a group of bloggers.

According to TechCrunch:

Gates said that no one is satisfied with the current state of DRM, which “causes too much pain for legitmate buyers” while trying to distinguish between legal and illegal uses. He says no one has done it right, yet. There are “huge problems” with DRM, he says, and “we need more flexible models, such as the ability to “buy an artist out for life” (not sure what he means). He also criticized DRM schemes that try to install intelligence in each copy so that it is device specific.

His short term advice: “People should just buy a cd and rip it. You are legal then.”

• Link (via Boing Boing)

This is an interesting article on those store policies that harass their customers and treat them like criminals, and what you can do about it.

If you possess an ounce of personal pride or perhaps two ounces of fortitude, then the 100 percent correct move is to proceed immediately out the door. Why? There are many reasons, chief among them being that rational adults should not instantly obey mechanical voices (unless that voice instructs us to exit a burning aircraft). Also, if you haven’t stolen anything and therefore do not require interrogation, there is absolutely nothing that should compel you to linger post-transaction. It’s depressing enough simply being there in the first place. Another good reason to make a quick exit is that you aren’t being paid to assist some giant retailer with its security measures. You aren’t part of the team, and you didn’t clock in. The clearest reason for leaving the store, however, is that there exists absolutely no legal obligation to remain there, and the store has no right to detain you.

Here’s an older account by a Best Buy shopper who refused to stop and show his receipt at the door after having paid for his merchandise. Be sure to read the epilogue as well for some interesting responses.

But this verification step is purely voluntary. Merchants basically have two rights covering people entering and exiting their stores. They can refuse to let you enter the premises and/or to sell you anything, and they can place you under citizens arrest for attempting to leave the premises with any property that you haven’t paid for. But the second you hand over the appropriate amount of cash, they lose all rights to the items. They can’t legally impair you from leaving the store with your property.

• Link (via reddit)

The Escapist has written an article on the world’s most hated copy protection.

In any forum topic about StarForce, embittered players across the spectrum speak in one voice about crippled operating systems and ruined CD drives. Many players report they bought honest, legal copies of StarForce-protected games, could not make them run and finally, in desperation, visited pirate sites to download no-CD cracks or warez versions. A dominant theme in these posts is resentment toward StarForce and game publishers for screwing up their customers’ computers without warning. Publisher representatives seldom post to apologize or ask details.

• Link
• Boycott Starforce keeps a running blog and has a list of games and publishers that continue to use StarForce
• Another site urging you to boycott StarForce-protected games
• Boing Boing’s reaction to being bullied with legal threats for criticizing StarForce
• At least one publisher has dumped StarForce due to the public outcry and a $5 million lawsuit brought on by gamers with crippled machines

Freedom to Tinker has an interesting post on how HDCP could be broken.

Every new HDCP device is given two things: a secret vector, and an addition rule. The secret vector is a sequence of 40 secret numbers that the device is not supposed to reveal to anybody. The addition rule, which is not a secret, describes a way of adding up numbers selected from a vector. Both the secret vector and the addition rule are assigned by HDCP’s central authority. (I like to imagine that the central authority occupies an undersea command center worthy of Doctor Evil, but it’s probably just a nondescript office suite in Burbank.)

• Link (via Boing Boing)