"After being in development since 2019, the huge NetBSD 10.0 is out today as a wonderful Easter surprise," reports Phoronix: NetBSD 10 provides WireGuard support, support for many newer Arm platforms including for Apple Silicon and newer Raspberry Pi boards, a new Intel Ethernet drive, support for Realtek 2.5GbE network adapters, SMP performance improvements, automatic swap encryption, and an enormous amount of other hardware support improvements that accumulated over the past 4+ years.

Plus there is no shortage of bug fixes and performance optimizations with NetBSD 10. Some tests of NetBSD 10.0 in development back during 2020 showed at that point it was already 12% faster than NetBSD 9.
"A lot of development went into this new release," NetBSD wrote on their blog, saying "This also caused the release announcement to be one of the longest we ever did."

Among the new userspace programs is warp(6), which they describe as a "classic BSD space war game (copyright donated to the NetBSD Foundation by Larry Wall)."

Rick Lane reports via PC Gamer: KeeperFX has been in the process of rescuing Dungeon Keeper for a decade and a half. The project originally started in 2008, and experienced something of a bumpy road up until 2016. Since then, though, it has gradually added support for Windows 7, 10, and 11, support for hi-res and 4k screens, modernized controls, and even additional campaigns. With this latest version, KeeperFX's developers say "all original Dungeon Keeper code has been rewritten, establishing KeeperFX as a true open-source standalone game." 1.0 also introduces some new features, such as higher framerates, AI that is better at digging and less likely to "instantly" throw its entire army at you, and "higher quality landview speeches" for the additional campaigns. That refers to the introductions and epilogues to missions which, in the game's original campaign, were voiced by Richard Ridings, aka Daddy Pig.

Perhaps most intriguing of all, KeeperFX's 1.0 adds a couple of new units to play with. First up is the Druid, a sort-of color-flipped version of the Warlock who uses ice spells rather than fire. The other unit is the excitingly named Time Mage, a recolor of the Wizard who can cast teleport and speed spells, and also turn enemy units into chickens (presumably through rapid devolution). You won't find these units in the original campaign, but you will encounter them in the custom campaigns bundled with the 1.0 version. You can download KeeperFX here, although it still requires you to own Dungeon Keeper "for copyright reasons."

An anonymous reader shared this report from Ars Technica: Following the passage of California's repair bill that Apple supported, requiring seven years of parts, specialty tools, and repair manual availability, Apple announced Tuesday that it would back a similar bill on a federal level. It would also make its parts, tools, and repair documentation available to both non-affiliated repair shops and individual customers, "at fair and reasonable prices."

"We intend to honor California's new repair provisions across the United States," said Brian Naumann, Apple's vice president for service and operation management, at a White House event Tuesday...

"I think most OEMs [Original Equipment Manufacturers] will realize they can save themselves a lot of trouble by making parts, tools, and other requirements of state laws already in NY, MN, CA, and CO available nationally," wrote Gay Gordon-Byrne, executive director of The Repair Association, to Ars... Gordon-Byrne noted that firms like HP, Google, Samsung, and Lenovo have pledged to comply with repair rules on a national level. The US Public Interest Research Group (PIRG) communicated a similarly hopeful note in its response to Tuesday's event, noting that "Apple makes a lot of products, and its conduct definitely influences other manufacturers." At the same time, numerous obstacles to repair access remain in place through copyright law — "Which we hope will be high on an agenda in the IP subcommittee this session," Gordon-Byrne wrote.
Besides strong support from President Biden, there's also strong support from America's Federal Trade Commission, reports TechCrunch: FTC chair Lina Khan commented on the pushback many corporations have given such legislation. Device and automotive manufacturers have argued that putting such choice in the hands of consumers opens them up to additional security risks. "We hear some manufacturers defend repair restrictions, claiming that they're needed for safety or security reasons," said Khan. "The FTC has found that all too often these claims are backed by limited evidence. Accordingly, the FTC has committed itself to using all of our enforcement and policy tools to fight for people's right to repair their own products."
A cautionary note from Ars Technica: Elizabeth Chamberlain, director of sustainability for iFixit, a parts vendor and repair advocate, suggested that Apple's pledge to extend California's law on a national level is "a strategic move." "Apple likely hopes that they will be able to negotiate out the parts of the Minnesota bill they don't like," Chamberlain wrote in an email, pointing specifically to the "fair and reasonable" parts provisioning measure that could preclude Apple's tendency toward pairing parts to individual devices. "[I]t's vital to get bulletproof parts pairing prohibitions passed in other states in 2024," Chamberlain wrote. "Independent repair and refurbishment depend on parts harvesting."
The Washington Post reports that currently repair shop owners and parts vendors "have had to find ways to reassure their customers they haven't made a mistake by choosing an independent fix." If the digital identifier tied to a replacement part doesn't match the one the phone expects to see, you'll start seeing those warnings and issues. "Only Apple pairs parts in an intrusive way where you get these messages pop up," said Jonathan Strange, owner of two XiRepair gadget repair shops in Montgomery, Alabama. To ward off those unnerving messages and restore full functionality, repair technicians are required to go through a "system configuration" process that authenticates the part after making the fix. Some small operations, like Strange's XiRepair shops, can do that in-store because they've gone through a process to become a certified Apple Independent Repair Providers. But that process can't happen at all in shops that haven't gone through that certification, or if more affordable parts like third-party replacements were used.
The Post also shares this reaction from Aaron Perzanowski, a repair researcher and law professor at the University of Michigan.

"The fact that companies want to use technology to essentially undo the notion of interchangeable parts is something we ought to find deeply disturbing."

Emilia David reports via The Verge: A bipartisan bill seeks to create a federal law to protect actors, musicians, and other performers from unauthorized digital replicas of their faces or voices. The Nurture Originals, Foster Art, and Keep Entertainment Safe Act of 2023 -- or the No Fakes Act -- standardizes rules around using a person's faces, names, and voices. Sens. Chris Coons (D-DE), Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), and Thom Tillis (R-NC) sponsored the bill.

It prevents the "production of a digital replica without consent of the applicable individual or rights holder" unless part of a news, public affairs, sports broadcast, documentary, or biographical work. The rights would apply throughout a person's lifetime and, for their estate, 70 years after their death. The bill includes an exception for using digital duplicates for parodies, satire, and criticism. It also excludes commercial activities like commercials as long as the advertisement is for news, a documentary, or a parody. Individuals, as well as entities like a deceased person's estate or a record label, can file for civil action based on the proposed rules. The bill also explicitly states that a disclaimer stating the digital replica was unauthorized won't be considered an effective defense.

Bill Omar Carrasquillo, better known by his YouTube name Omi In a Hellcat, has been arrested after the feds found Carrasquillo had amassed a $30 million fortune with a large-scale piracy scheme in which he was buying and reselling copyrighted material from cable TV. Jalopnik reports: He was sentenced to five years in prison for "piracy of cable TV, access device fraud, wire fraud, money laundering, and hundreds of thousands of dollars of copyright infringement," along with having to forfeit his millions and pay $15 million in restitution. Those millions helped pay for the car collection now going up for auction.

[Road & Track reports Omi In A Hellcat's entire 57 vehicle collection is up for auction.] As of this writing, the auction features 32 cars and 25 bikes and off road vehicles. Despite his crimes, the man had decent taste in cars. There's good stuff to be had like.

From an EFF announcement this week: Technical standards like fire and electrical codes developed by private organizations but incorporated into public law can be freely disseminated without any liability for copyright infringement, a federal appeals court ruled Tuesday.
The judge ruled that posting the materials constituted fair use — so the nonprofit group doing the posting won't be liable for copyright infringement. The American Bar Association Journal reports: The decision is a victory for public-domain advocate Carl Malamud and the group that he founded, Public.Resource.org. The group posts legal materials on its websites, including the standards developed by the three organizations that sued... "It has been over 10 years since plaintiffs filed suit in this case," said Malamud in a press release by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "The U.S. Court of Appeals has found decisively in favor of the proposition that citizens must not be relegated to economy-class access to the law."
In 2012 Carl Malamud answered questions from Slashdot readers.

And now, finally, from the EFF's announcement: Tuesday's ruling by a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit upholds the idea that our laws belong to all of us, and we should be able to find, read, and share them free of registration requirements, fees, and other roadblocks... "In a nation governed by the rule of law, private parties have no business controlling who can read, share, and speak the rules to which we are all subject," EFF Legal Director Corynne McSherry said. "We are pleased that the Court of Appeals upheld what other U.S. courts, including the Supreme Court, have said for almost 200 years: No one should control access to the law."
Or, as the EFF puts it on another page, "Copyright cannot trump the essential public interest..."

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the news.

Slashdot has covered the legal hijinx of Malibu Media over the years. Now Ars Technica reports that the studio could be destroyed by unpaid taxes: Over the past decade, Malibu Media has emerged as a prominent so-called "copyright troll," suing thousands of "John Does" for allegedly torrenting adult content hosted on the porn studio's website, "X-Art." Whether defendants were guilty or not didn't seem to matter to Malibu, critics claimed, as much as winning as many settlements as possible. As courts became more familiar with Malibu, however, some judges grew suspicious of the studio's litigiousness. As early as 2012, a California judge described these lawsuits as "essentially an extortion scheme," and by 2013, a Wisconsin judge ordered sanctions, agreeing with critics who said that Malibu's tactics were designed to "harass and intimidate" defendants into paying Malibu thousands in settlements.

By 2016, Malibu started losing footing in this arena — and even began fighting with its own lawyer. At that point, file-sharing lawsuits became less commonplace, with critics noting a significant reduction in Malibu's lawsuits over the next few years. Now, TorrentFreak reports that Malibu's litigation machine appears to finally be running out of steam — with its corporate status suspended in California sometime between mid-2020 and early 2021 after failing to pay taxes. Last month, a Texas court said that Malibu has until January 20 to pay what's owed in back taxes and get its corporate status reinstated. If that doesn't happen over the next few weeks, one of Malibu's last lawsuits on the books will be dismissed, potentially marking the end of Malibu's long run of alleged copyright trolling.

"Creators aren't getting paid," says Cory Doctorow. "That's because powerful corporations have figured out how to create chokepoints — that let them snatch up more of the value generated by creative work before it reaches creative workers."

But he's doing something about it.

Doctorow's teamed up with Melbourne-based law professor Rebecca Giblin, the director of Australia's Intellectual Property Research Institute, for a new book that first "pulls aside the veil on the tricks Big Tech and Big Content use..." But more importantly, it also presents specific ideas for "how we can recapture creative labor markets to make them fairer and more sustainable." Their announcement describes the book as "A Big Tech/Big Content disassembly manual," saying it's "built around shovel-ready ideas for shattering the chokepoints that squeeze creators and audiences — technical, commercial and legal blueprints for artists, fans, arts organizations, technologists, and governments to fundamentally restructure the broken markets for creative labor."

Or, as they explain later, "Our main focus is action." Lawrence Lessig says the authors "offer a range of powerful strategies for fighting back." Anil Dash described it as "a credible, actionable vision for a better, more collaborative future where artists get their fair due." And Douglas Rushkoff called the book "an infuriating yet inspiring call to collective action."

The book is titled "Chokepoint Capitalism: How Big Tech and Big Content Captured Creative Labor Markets and How We'll Win Them Back." And at one point their Kickstarter page lays down a thought-provoking central question about ownership. "For 40 years, every question about creators rights had the same answer: moar copyright. How's that worked out for artists?" And then it features a quote from Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales. "Copyright can't unrig a rigged market — for that you need worker power, antitrust, and solidarity."

A Kickstarter campaign to raise $10,000 has already raised $72,171 — in its first five days — from over 1,800 backers. That's partly because, underscoring one of the book's points, their Kickstarter campaign is offering "an audiobook Amazon won't sell." While Amazon will sell you a hardcover or Kindle edition of the book.... Audible has a hard and fast rule: if you're a publisher or writer who wants to sell your audiobook on Audible, you have to let it be wrapped in "Digital Rights Management," aka DRM: digital locks that permanently bind your work to the Audible platform. If a reader decides to leave Audible, DRM stops them taking the books they've already bought with them.... Every time Audible sells a book, DRM gives it a little bit more power to shake down authors and publishers. Amazon uses that stolen margin to eliminate competition and lock-in more users, ultimately giving it even more power over the people who actually make and produce books.
The announcement says their book "is about traps like the one Audible lays for writers and readers. We show how Big Tech and Big Content erect chokepoints between creators and audiences, allowing them to lock in artists and producers, eliminate competition, and extract far more than their fair share of revenues from creative labour. No way are we going to let Audible put its locks on our audiobook.

"So we're kickstarting it instead."

The announcement notes that Cory Doctorow himself has written dozens of books, "and he won't allow digital locks on any of them." And then in 2020, "Cory had an idea: what if he used Kickstarter to pre-sell his next audiobook? It was the most successful audiobook crowdfunding campaign in history."

So now Cory's working instead with independent audiobook studio Skyboat Media "to make great editions, which are sold everywhere except Audible (and Apple, which only carries Audible books): Libro.fm, Downpour, Google Play and his own storefront. Cory's first kickstarter didn't just smash all audiobook crowdfunding records — it showed publishers and other writers that there were tons of people who cared enough about writers getting paid fairly that they were willing to walk away from Amazon's golden cage. Now we want to send that message again — this time with a book that takes you behind the curtain to unveil the Machiavellian tactics Amazon and the other big tech and content powerhouses use to lock in users, creators and suppliers, eliminate competition, and extract more than their fair share....

Chokepoint Capitalism is not just a rollicking read, and a delightful listen: it also does good.

Your willingness to break out of the one-click default of buying from the Audible monopoly in support of projects like this sends a clear message to writers, publishers, and policymakers that you have had enough of the unfair treatment of creative workers, and you are demanding change.
Rewards include ebooks, audiobooks, hardcover copies, and even the donation of a copy to your local library. You can also pledge money without claiming a reward, or pledge $1 as a show of support for "a cryptographically signed email thanking you for backing the project. Think of it as a grift-free NFT."

Craig Newmark says the book documents "the extent to which competition's been lost throughout the creative industries, and how this pattern threatens every other worker. There is still time to do something about it, but the time to act is now."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom does not seem like a happy man right now. After accusing two of his former colleagues [Mathias Ortmann and Bram van der Kolk] of facilitating Chinese spying, Dotcom says that a report is being produced to show that mass infringement is taking place on Mega, a company he co-founded. Surprisingly, he says it will include live pirate links to content posted by Mega users. [...] Turning his attention to former colleagues Ortmann and van der Kolk, last week Dotcom publicly blamed them for his exit from Mega, claiming they had "stolen" the company from him. How this dovetails with previous allegations related to his major falling out with former Mega CEO Tony Lentino, who also founded domain name registrar Instra, is unknown.

Local media reports suggest that Dotcom hasn't spoken to former friends Ortmann and van der Kolk for years but their recent deal to avoid extradition in the Megaupload case by pleading guilty to organized crime charges puts Dotcom in a tough spot. "My co-defendants who claimed to be innocent for 10+ years were offered a sweet exit deal for a false confession," he said last week. And he wasn't finished there. After a research team found that Mega was vulnerable to attacks that allow for a "full compromise of the confidentiality of user files", Ortmann himself responded via a security notification stating that the issues had been fixed. In response, Dotcom accused Ortmann and van der Kolk of creating "backdoors" in Mega so that the Chinese government could decrypt users' files. "Same shady guys who just made a deal with the US and NZ Govt to get out of the US extradition case by falsely accusing me," he added.

Whether this reference to the no-extradition-deal betrayed what was really on Dotcom's mind is up for debate but whatever the motivation, he's not letting it go. In a tweet posted yesterday, he again informed his 850K+ followers that the company he founded "is not safe" and people who think that their files are unreadable by Mega are wrong. Shortly after, Dotcom delivered another message, one even darker in tone. It targeted Mega, the company he co-founded and where his colleagues still work. It's possible to interpret the tweet in several ways but none seem beneficial to his former colleagues, Mega, or its users. "In addition to security vulnerabilities a comprehensive report about mass copyright infringement on Mega with millions of active links and channels is in the works," he said. "[P]erhaps the most worrying thing about this new complication in an escalating dispute is its potential to affect the minority of users that actually store infringing files on Mega," adds TorrentFreak. "Any detailed report of 'mass copyright infringement' will draw negative attention directly to them, especially if the report includes active hyperlinks as Dotcom suggests."

"Couple that with Dotcom's allegations that the content of user files can be read, any conclusion that this upcoming infringement report hasn't been thought through from a user perspective can be easily forgiven..."

A new article on the Verge argues that the era of fixing your own phone "has nearly arrived." When I called up iFixit CEO Kyle Wiens, I figured he'd be celebrating — after years of fighting for right-to-repair, big name companies like Google and Samsung have suddenly agreed to provide spare parts for their phones. Not only that, they signed deals with him to sell those parts through iFixit, alongside the company's repair guides and tools. So did Valve.

But Wiens says he's not done making deals yet. "There are more coming," he says, one as soon as a couple of months from now. (No, it's not Apple.) Motorola was actually the first to sign on nearly four years ago. And if Apple meaningfully joins them in offering spare parts to consumers — like it promised to do by early 2022 — the era of fixing your own phone may be underway. Last October, the United States effectively made it legal to open up many devices for the purpose of repair with an exemption to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Now, the necessary parts are arriving.

What changed? Weren't these companies fighting tooth and nail to keep right-for-repair off the table, sometimes sneakily stopping bills at the last minute? Sure. But some legislation is getting through anyhow... and one French law in particular might have been the tipping point.

"The thing that's changing the game more than anything else is the French repairability scorecard," says Wiens, referring to a 2021 law that requires tech companies to reveal how repairable their phones are — on a scale of 0.0 to 10.0 — right next to their pricetag. Even Apple was forced to add repairability scores — but Wiens points me to this press release by Samsung instead. When Samsung commissioned a study to check whether the French repairability scores were meaningful, it didn't just find the scorecards were handy — it found a staggering 80 percent of respondents would be willing to give up their favorite brand for a product that scored higher.

"There have been extensive studies done on the scorecard and it's working," says Wiens. "It's driving behavior, it's shifting consumer buying patterns." Stick, meet carrot. Seeing an opportunity, Wiens suggests, pushed these companies to take up iFixit on the deal.

Nathan Proctor, director of the Campaign for the Right to Repair at the US Public Interest Research Group (US PIRG), still thinks the stick is primarily to thank. "It feels cheeky to say 100 percent... but none of this happens unless there's a threat of legislation... These companies have known these were issues for a long time, and until we organized enough clout for it to start seeming inevitable, none of the big ones had particularly good repair programs and now they're all announcing them," Proctor notes.

"Old songs now represent 70 percent of the U.S. music market, according to the latest numbers from MRC Data, a music-analytics firm." So writes Ted Gioia, author of the Substack music/pop culture newsletter "The Honest Broker". But it gets worse: "The new-music market is actually shrinking. All the growth in the market is coming from old songs. The 200 most popular new tracks now regularly account for less than 5 percent of total streams. That rate was twice as high just three years ago....."

The signs are everywhere — including the fact that viewership for the music industry's Grammy awards plummeted 53% this year to just 8.8 million. "More people pay attention to streams of video games on Twitch (which now gets 30 million daily visitors)."

And even then, "When a new song overcomes these obstacles and actually becomes a hit, the risk of copyright lawsuits is greater than ever before.... Adding to the nightmare, dead musicians are now coming back to life in virtual form — via holograms and 'deepfake' music — making it all the harder for young, living artists to compete in the marketplace."

But in the end the real problem may ultimately be that "nothing is less interesting to music executives than a completely radical new kind of music." Who can blame them for feeling this way? The radio stations will play only songs that fit the dominant formulas, which haven't changed much in decades. The algorithms curating so much of our new music are even worse. Music algorithms are designed to be feedback loops, ensuring that the promoted new songs are virtually identical to your favorite old songs. Anything that genuinely breaks the mold is excluded from consideration almost as a rule. That's actually how the current system has been designed to work.

Even the music genres famous for shaking up the world — rock or jazz or hip-hop — face this same deadening industry mindset. I love jazz, but many of the radio stations focused on that genre play songs that sound almost the same as what they featured 10 or 20 years ago. In many instances, they actually are the same songs.

This state of affairs is not inevitable. A lot of musicians around the world — especially in Los Angeles and London — are conducting a bold dialogue between jazz and other contemporary styles. They are even bringing jazz back as dance music. But the songs they release sound dangerously different from older jazz, and are thus excluded from many radio stations for that same reason. The very boldness with which they embrace the future becomes the reason they get rejected by the gatekeepers. A country record needs to sound a certain way to get played on most country radio stations or playlists, and the sound those DJs and algorithms are looking for dates back to the prior century. And don't even get me started on the classical-music industry, which works hard to avoid showcasing the creativity of the current generation. We are living in an amazing era of classical composition, with one tiny problem: The institutions controlling the genre don't want you to hear it.

The problem isn't a lack of good new music. It's an institutional failure to discover and nurture it.
So while the author acknowledges that "The fear of copyright lawsuits has made many in the industry deathly afraid of listening to unsolicited demo recordings," far deeper than that is the problem that, "The people running the music industry have lost confidence in new music."

Yet if there's any hope, the author argues, it's that people "crave something that sounds fresh and exciting and different.... Songs can go viral nowadays without the entertainment industry even noticing until it has already happened. That will be how this story ends: not with the marginalization of new music, but with something radical emerging from an unexpected place...."

"The CEOs are the last to know. That's what gives me solace.... The decision makers controlling our music institutions have lost the thread. We're lucky that the music is too powerful for them to kill."

David Bowie's estate has sold his entire songwriting catalog to Warner Music, including classics like "Space Oddity," "Let's Dance" and "Heroes," in the latest blockbuster deal for music rights. The New York Times reports: Warner's music publishing division, Warner Chappell, announced the agreement on Monday, saying that it encompassed Bowie's entire corpus as a songwriter, from the material on his 1967 debut album, "David Bowie," to his final album, "Blackstar," released just before Bowie's death in 2016 at age 69. The deal, for more than 400 songs, also includes soundtrack music; the material for Bowie's short-lived band Tin Machine from the late 1980s and early '90s; and other works. The price of the transaction was not disclosed, but is estimated at about $250 million. "These are not only extraordinary songs, but milestones that have changed the course of modern music forever," Guy Moot, the chief executive of Warner Chappell, said in a statement. David Bowie, the so-called "most wired rock star on the planet," has been featured in a number of Slashdot stories over the years.

In 2002, Bowie talked about his new album, distribution deal with Sony, and how he's "fully confident that copyright, for instance, will no longer exist in 10 years, and authorship and intellectual property is in for such a bashing."

In the late 90s, Bowie advocated for MP3s, telling The Guardian that they "could change the entire idea of what music is -- and that isn't so bad." Years later, he seemed to agree that concert ticket prices needed to increase to offset the rise in P2P file sharing and illegal downloads.

2021 saw record numbers of people checking out ebooks from libraries, reports the Boston Globe — 500 million, according to figures from the ebook-lending platform OneDrive.

But some Massachusetts lawmakers want to require publishers to make sure all their digital products are available to libraries — and at "reasonable terms" — because currently libraries pay much more than consumers: According to the American Library Association, libraries currently pay three to five times as much as consumers for ebooks and audiobooks. Thus, an ebook selling for $10 at retail could cost a library $50. In addition, the library can only buy the right to lend the book for a limited time — usually just two years — or for a limited number of loans — usually no more than 26. James Lonergan, director of the Massachusetts Board of Library Commissioners, believes that publishers settled on 26 checkouts after calculating that this is the number of times a printed book can be checked out before it's worn out and in need of replacement.

And that's what happens to a digital book after 26 checkouts. The library must "replace" it by paying full price for the right to lend it out 26 more times.

Lonergan admits that this approach makes a certain sense. Traditional printed books can only be borrowed by one user at a time, but in theory a digital book could be loaned to thousands of patrons at once. Also, printed books wear out and must be repurchased, but digital books last indefinitely. "You can't have a book be available forever at the same price point," Lonergan said. "The publishers need to make money." Lonergan thinks libraries and publishers can work out less expensive and more flexible terms. Publishers might charge a lower up-front cost for their digital products, for instance. Or they might expand the number of times libraries can lend out an ebook or audiobook. Lonergan believes that passing the Massachusetts law would give publishers further incentive to deal.

But the Association of American Publishers (AAP), which represents most of the nation's leading publishers, is ready to fight. An emailed statement from AAP said the Massachusetts bill "raises significant constitutional and federal copyright law concerns and is an unjustified intrusion into a vibrant and thriving market for ebooks and audiobooks that benefits authors and publishers, booksellers, libraries, and the general public."

The AAP has already sued in federal court to block enforcement of the Maryland law, arguing that only the federal government can regulate digital publishing practices.
The head of the Massachusetts Board of Library Commissioners counters that if enough individual states pass ebook-pricing laws, "then Congress will step in and do something about this on the federal level."

After the U.S. Copyright Office's once-every-three-years review of allowed exemptions, "We have some good news to share...." reads a new announcement this week from the Free Software Foundation: The FSF was one of several activist organizations pushing for exemptions to the anticircumvention rules under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) that make breaking Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) illegal, even for ethical and legitimate purposes. We helped bring public awareness to a process that is too often only a conversation between lawyers and bureaucrats.

As of late last week, there are now multiple new exemptions that will help ease some of the acute abuse DRM inflicts on users.

However, the main lesson to be learned here is that we should and must keep pushing. Individual, specific exemptions are not enough. The entire anticircumvention law needs to be repealed. We want to thank the 230 individuals who co-signed their names to our comments supporting exemptions across the board. We should take this as a sign that even though it can be difficult, anti-DRM activism yields practical results.

Section 1201 is one of the most nefarious sections of the DMCA. The provisions contained in 1201 impose legal penalties against anyone trying to circumvent the DRM on their software and devices or, in other words, anyone who tries to control that software or device themselves instead of leaving it up to its corporate overlords.... It takes the hard work of hundreds to secure the anticircumvention use exemptions we already have, and even more work to eke out a few more. Yet thanks to the support of citizens, activists, and researchers around the world, the U.S. Copyright Office has approved a few more, while at the same time demonstrating the DMCA's serious flaws.

In coverage of the new round of anticircumvention exemptions we've seen so far, something that stands out is the U.S. Copyright Office's approval for blind users to break the digital restrictions preventing any ebooks from being processed through a screen reader. At least at first glance, it looks like a big win for all of us concerned with user freedom, but a closer look shows something more sinister, as the U.S. Copyright Office refused to make this exemption permanent. The message this sends to all user freedom activists, but especially the visually impaired among us, is: "we're giving you this now because it would seem inhumane otherwise, but we hope that you'll forget to fight for it later so we can allow corporations to keep on restricting you...."

[P]articipating organizations have been able to make progress on other important exemptions, whether that's the right to install free software on wireless routers or the right to repair dedicated devices like game consoles. It's the coalescing of groups like these that is "chipping away" at Section 1201. At the same time, it's telling that we're forced to fight tooth and nail for the meager exemptions we're granted, even with such a broad base of support. The corporations who have a vested interest in the DMCA and Congress itself are content with the status quo, but we shouldn't be content with patches on a broken system. Incremental progress against Section 1201 is of course a good thing, but we shouldn't lose sight of our goal as user freedom activists: a complete repeal of Section 1201, and all other laws that codify or mandate DRM.

The Defective by Design campaign takes a radical stance when it comes to DRM and the laws that support it. We believe that they should not exist at all, under any circumstance, and we need your help to support this mission....

wiredog shares a ZDNet report: I have literally been covering SCO's legal attempts to prove that IBM illegally copied Unix's source code into Linux for over 17 years. I've written well over 500 stories on this lawsuit and its variants. I really thought it was dead, done, and buried. I was wrong. Xinuos, which bought SCO's Unix products and intellectual property (IP) in 2011, like a bad zombie movie, is now suing IBM and Red Hat [for] "illegally Copying Xinuos' software code for its server operating systems." For those of you who haven't been around for this epic IP lawsuit, you can get the full story with "27 eight-by-ten color glossy photographs and circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one" from Groklaw. If you'd rather not spend a couple of weeks going over the cases, here's my shortened version. Back in 2001, SCO, a Unix company, joined forces with Caldera, a Linux company, to form what should have been a major Red Hat rival. Instead, two years later, SCO sued IBM in an all-out legal attack against Linux.

The fact that most of you don't know either company's name gives you an idea of how well that lawsuit went. SCO's Linux lawsuit made no sense and no one at the time gave it much of a chance of succeeding. Over time it was revealed that Microsoft had been using SCO as a sock puppet against Linux. Unfortunately for Microsoft and SCO, it soon became abundantly clear that SCO didn't have a real case against Linux and its allies. SCO lost battle after battle. The fatal blow came in 2007 when SCO was proven to have never owned the copyrights to Unix. So, by 2011, the only thing of value left in SCO, its Unix operating systems, was sold to UnXis. This acquisition, which puzzled most, actually made some sense. SCO's Unix products, OpenServer and Unixware, still had a small, but real market. At the time, UnXis now under the name, Xinuos, stated it had no interest in SCO's worthless lawsuits. In 2016, CEO Sean Synder said, "We are not SCO. We are investors who bought the products. We did not buy the ability to pursue litigation against IBM, and we have absolutely no interest in that." So, what changed? The company appears to have fallen on hard times. As Synder stated: "systems, like our FreeBSD-based OpenServer 10, have been pushed out of the market." Officially, in his statement, Snyder now says, "While this case is about Xinuos and the theft of our intellectual property, it is also about market manipulation that has harmed consumers, competitors, the open-source community, and innovation itself."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Hollywood Reporter: Providing relief via direct assistance and loans to struggling individuals and businesses hit hard by COVID-19 has been a priority for federal lawmakers this past month. But a gigantic spending bill has also become the opportunity to smuggle in some other line items including those of special interest to the entertainment community. Perhaps most surprising, according to the text of the bill being circulated, illegal streaming for commercial profit could become a felony.

It's been less than two weeks since Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) released his proposal to increase the penalties for those who would dare stream unlicensed works. In doing so, the North Carolina senator flirted with danger. About a decade ago, Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar made a similar proposal before it ended up dying as people worried about sending Justin Bieber to jail. This time, Tillis' attempt was winning better reviews for more narrowly tailoring the provisions toward commercial operators rather than users. That said, it's had very little time to circulate before evidently becoming part of the spending package. If passed, illegal streaming of works including movies and musical works could carry up to 10 years in jail. That's not the only copyright change either.

The spending bill also appears to adopt a long-discussed plan to create a small claims adjudication system within the U.S. Copyright Office. [...] Among the other parts of the omnibus bill of interest to Hollywood is an extension of Section 181, a tax provision that allows for immediate deduction of television and film production costs up to $15 million. That incentive was scheduled to expire at the end of the year, but would now get an additional five years.

In a lengthy blog post, Twitch told streamers that they must stop playing recorded music on their streams (unless it's officially licensed) and that "if you haven't already, you should review your historical VODs and Clips that may have music in them and delete any archives that might." Variety reports: The Amazon-owned live-streaming platform also claimed that it is "actively speaking with the major record labels about potential approaches to additional licenses that would be appropriate for the Twitch service." However, the company also said that the "current constructs for licenses" that record labels have with other services (which typically take a cut of revenue from creators for payment to record labels) "make less sense for Twitch." "We're open-minded to new structures that could work for Twitch's unique service, but we must be clear that they may take some time to materialize or may never happen at all," the company said in the blog.

Twitch's music-copyright communique comes after several major U.S. music organizations -- including the RIAA, the Recording Academy, the National Music Publishers Association, the Music Managers Forum, the American Association of Independent Music and SAG-AFTRA -- sent a letter last month to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos (copying Twitch CEO Emmet Shear). The letter, among other things, accused Twitch of "allowing and enabling its streamers to use our respective members' music without authorization, in violation of Twitch's music guidelines." Twitch said it was caught off guard by the music industry's crackdown on unlicensed music on its service. According to the company, starting this May, reps for music companies began sending thousands of Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) copyright-takedown notices targeted at users' archived content, "mostly for snippets of tracks in years-old clips." Before then, Twitch said, it received fewer than 50 music-related DMCA notifications per year.

Twitch said it analyzed DMCA notifications received from the end of May through mid-October and found that more than 99% of them were for tracks that streamers were playing in the background of their stream. Twitch apologized to creators for the angst the DMCA takedowns have caused, noting that a warning email it sent to many last month about the videos deleted from their accounts "didn't include all the information that you'd typically get in a DMCA notification." "We could have developed more sophisticated, user-friendly tools a while ago. That we didn't is on us," it said. "And we could have provided creators with a longer time period to address their VOD and Clip libraries -- that was a miss as well. We're truly sorry for these mistakes, and we'll do better."

While the RIAA has objected to a tool for downloading online videos, EFF senior activist Elliot Harmon responds with this question. "Who died and put them in charge of YouTube?"

He asks the question in a new video "explainer" on the controversy, and argues in a new piece at EFF.org that the youtube-dl tool "doesn't infringe on any RIAA copyrights." RIAA's argument relies on a different section of the DMCA, Section 1201. DMCA 1201 says that it's illegal to bypass a digital lock in order to access or modify a copyrighted work. Copyright holders have argued that it's a violation of DMCA 1201 to bypass DRM even if you're doing it for completely lawful purposes; for example, if you're downloading a video on YouTube for the purpose of using it in a way that's protected by fair use. (And thanks to the way that copyright law has been globalized via trade agreements, similar laws exist in many other jurisdictions too.) RIAA argues that since youtube-dl could be used to download music owned by RIAA-member labels, no one should be able to use the tool, even for completely lawful purposes.

This is an egregious abuse of the notice-and-takedown system, which is intended to resolve disputes over allegedly infringing material online. Again, youtube-dl doesn't use RIAA-member labels' music in any way. The makers of youtube-dl simply shared information with the public about how to perform a certain task — one with many completely lawful applications.
Harmon wants to hear from people using youtube-dl for lawful purposes. And he also links to an earlier EFF piece arguing that DMCA 1201 "is incredibly broad, apparently allowing rightsholders to legally harass any 'trafficker' in code that lets users re-take control of their devices from DRM locks..."

And EFF's concern over DMCA 1201 has been ongoing: DMCA 1201 has been loaded with terrible implications for innovation and free expression since the day it was passed. For many years, EFF documented these issues in our "Unintended Consequences" series; we continue to organize and lobby for temporary exemptions to its provisions for the purposes of cellphone unlocking, restoring vintage videogames and similar fair uses, as well as file and defend lawsuits in the United States to try and mitigate its damage. We look forward to the day when it is no longer part of U.S. law.

But due to the WIPO Copyright Treaty, the DMCA's anti-circumvention provisions infest much of the world's jurisdictions too, including the European Union via the Information Society Directive 2001/29/EC.

"It's finally happening: Twitch is taking action against copyrighted music — long a norm among streamers — in response to music industry pressure," reports Kotaku.

But the Verge reports "there's some funny stuff going on here." First, Twitch is telling streamers that some of their content has been identified as violating copyright and that instead of letting streamers file counterclaims, it's deleting the content; second, the company is telling streamers it's giving them warnings, as opposed to outright copyright strikes...

Weirdly Twitch decided to bulk delete infringing material instead of allowing streamers to archive their content or submit counterclaims. To me, that suggests that there are tons of infringements, and that Twitch needed to act very quickly and/or face a lawsuit it wouldn't be able to win over its adherence to the safe harbor provision of the DMCA.
The email Twitch sent to their users "encourages them to delete additional content — up to and including using a new tool to unilaterally delete all previous clips," reports Kotaku. One business streamer complains that it's "insane" that Twitch basically informs them "that there is more content in violation despite having no identification system to find out what it is. Their solution to DMCA is for creators to delete their life's work. This is pure, gross negligence."

Or, as esports consultant Rod "Slasher" Breslau puts it, "It is absolutely insane that record labels have put Twitch in a position to force streamers to delete their entire life's work, for some 10+ years of memories, and that Twitch has been incapable of preventing or aiding streamers for this situation. a total failure all around."

Twitch's response? It is crucial that we protect the rights of songwriters, artists and other music industry partners. We continue to develop tools and resources to further educate our creators and empower them with more control over their content while partnering with industry-recognized vendors in the copyright space to help us achieve these goals.

"Having re-open-sourced MS-DOS on GitHub in 2018, Microsoft has now released the source code for GW-BASIC, Microsoft's 1983 BASIC interpreter," reports ZDNet, adding that GW-BASIC "can trace its roots back to Bill Gates' and Paul Allen's implementation of Microsoft's first product, the BASIC interpreter for the Altair 8800 computer."

"Interested to look at thousands of lines of glorious 8088 assembly code for the original 1983 GW-BASIC...?" writes Slashdot reader sonofusion82, adding "there are not Makefiles or build scripts, just a bunch of 8088 ASM files."

Or as Hackaday jokes, "Microsoft releases the source code you wanted almost 30 years ago." In the late 1970s and early 1980s, if you had a personal computer there was a fair chance it either booted into some version of Microsoft Basic or you could load and run Basic... Now you can get the once-coveted Microsoft Basic source code...

They put up a read only GW-BASIC repository, presumably to stop a flood of feature requests for GPU acceleration...

From what we understand, GW-Basic was identical to IBM's BASICA, but didn't require certain IBM PC ROMs to operate. Of course, BASICA, itself, came from MBASIC, Microsoft's CP/M language that originated with Altair Basic... We did enjoy the 1975 copyright message, though:

ORIGINALLY WRITTEN ON THE PDP-10 FROM FEBRUARY 9 TO APRIL 9 1975

BILL GATES WROTE A LOT OF STUFF.
PAUL ALLEN WROTE A LOT OF OTHER STUFF AND FAST CODE.
MONTE DAVIDOFF WROTE THE MATH PACKAGE (F4I.MAC).
Bill Gates was 19 years old, Paul Allen was 22.