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I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "EU Commissioner Charlie McCreevy has unveiled a plan to retroactively extend musical copyrights by 45 years, which would make EU musical copyrights last 95 years total. Why? They're worried that musicians won't continue to collect royalties when they retire and this will give them an additional 45 years during which they won't have to produce any new music. Perhaps the only good point is that the retroactive extensions won't take effect for any works which aren't marketed in the first year after the extension. Additionally, while there are many non-musical retirees wishing they could get paid for 95 years after they finish working, McCreevy has not announced any new plans to help them."

The players own a copy of the software. It doesn't matter what EULA/ToS or "license" Blizzard claims to have with them. The players paid money at a retail outlet and bought a boxed copy of the software. They own it. They own the disc with the bits on it, and those bits constitute the copy of the software. Their right of first sale allows them to transfer that copy to another person (though Blizzard does not have to let the new person use their servers, obviously; but you can sell the box and the disc with its copy of the software, that is what's important).

Blizzard owns the copyright, so they get to control who can make new copies and who can prepare derivative works and who can give public performances of their work.

But other than the specific rights reserved to Blizzard by copyright law, end users can do anything they want with the copy of the software that they own.

Now, in the past some courts were interpreting their loading of this software into RAM as copying, and finding them guilty of infringement. Which caused troubles, and section 117 was added to resolve those troubles. Section 117 clearly says that if you copy a software program which you own into RAM in order to use it on your computer, and as long as you don't do anything with this copy in RAM other than using it on your computer (for example, transferring the bytes of it to a printer), then you are NOT infringing Blizzard's copyright on the software.

The judge's findings in this case are just wrong, he interpreted section 117 incorrectly. I hope it gets reversed on appeal.

IANAL ymmv wtfbbq

Much more importantly, you're guilty of copyright infringement simply by using the product that you paid to use. Quite the precedent. It's all this nonsense about per-device licensing, except in some sort of insane micromanagement level (which I suppose is to be expected from a company that's developed as many RTS games as Blizzard). This could very well outdo the RIAA in their quest to banish everyone from listening to music while simultaneously charging everyone for every song a dozen times.

This kind of bullshit really makes me want to avoid D3 (as if not losing four years of my life wasn't reason enough).

Ololiuhqui writes "During the writer's strike, Joss Whedon came up with a musical idea. Now his diabolical plan is about to be unleashed in the form of a streaming-only release, with a DVD shortly to follow. The three-part Doctor Horrible series stars Neil Patrick Harris as the eponymous doctor, Felicia Day as the woman of his dreams, and Nathan Fillion as the doctor's nemesis, Captain Hammer. Reportedly made for 'less than six figures,' the series has already received rave reviews and will no doubt showcase Whedon's musical facility, as well as his proven ability to squeeze the most out of a budget."

PC Games connecting to a central server to send information (outside of MMO's) have got a (deserved) bad reputation in recent years. The huge outcry about Mass Effect and Spore are evidence enough of that. But in gamers hurry to prevent intrusive DRM systems and dubious privacy-breaking data harvesting, are we throwing out the good with the bad? In this column, Indie developer Cliff Harris outlines why in certain cases, letting PC games phone home with hardware and usage data is not only harmless, but a good thing both for the developer, and ultimately the gamer. Have gamers taken hostility to games phoning home too far?
http://www.positech.co.uk/

Keeper Of Keys writes "According to newteevee.com, The Pirate Bay, those fun- and freedom-loving Swedes, have embarked on a project to encrypt all internet traffic, probably by means of an OS-level wrapper around all network connections, which would fall back to an unencrypted connection when the other end is not similarly equipped. The move has been prompted by a recent change in Swedish law, allowing the authorities to snoop on network traffic. This will be a boon to filesharers and anyone else concerned about authorities and trade groups' recent moves towards 'policing' network traffic at the ISP level."

I worked for SafeNet in "quality assurance" when I was in high school (I'm 23 now) to test the quality of their hardware security solutions. And let me tell you, they are one of the worst companies on earth to work for. They treat their employees like crap, as they started laying off some of their best employees and brought in foreign help on H1B visas.

They really lost their way when they got out of the hardware based security business and became the cronies for the RIAA/MPAA. Contradiction is not a new thing to SafeNet. They claimed (and still claim) to be supporting the local economy in Harford County, Maryland, where their Corp HQ is, when all they were doing was outsourcing jobs and bringing in H1B workers to cut costs.

Terrible company, and I'm not surprised that they finally got caught in the web of their pathological lies.

It's sad. I often travel between the US and China on business ( I live on the China side ). I've always been careful with sensitive data, but now I'm absolutely fascist. Why? I have no fear of the Chinese government. Besides, I work for a Chinese company. I fear my own country illegally accessing files to which they have absolutely no rights whatsoever.

Honestly. If someone works for the US government, pulls some CEO's laptop at the boarder for "inspection" and gets free access to all the company financials, would they do the right thing? How many semi-intelligent people wouldn't be tempted to start buying stock options or call their best friend with a really good "tip"? Even if they SEC investigated, they would never find the link.

Over the last several years, I've always been treated very respectfully inside China and going to and from. It is in the US, my own country, where I'm treated as if I'm already guilty.

Back to the topic at hand. TrueCrypt is a wonderful product. Everyone should be using it.

An anonymous reader writes "Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation, has an article in the BBC in which he maintains that Gates' departure from Microsoft doesn't mean the end of proprietary software and that the free software community needs to stand strong to undo the damages Bill Gates, Microsoft, and other proprietary software vendors (explicitly naming Apple & Adobe amongst them) have done. And he slips in a claim that the Bill and Melinda Gates charity foundation doesn't really help the poor; it just pretends to while actually subjecting them to greater harm."

Dekortage writes "The NYTimes has a piece up about the paradox of privacy: 'Normally sane people have inconsistent and contradictory impulses and opinions when it comes to their safeguarding their own private information.' More specifically, it's all how you ask: if you don't talk about privacy, people won't worry about it. In one survey, 'When the issue of confidentiality was raised, participants clammed up. For example, 25 percent of the students who were given a strong assurance of confidentiality admitted to having copied someone else's homework. Among those given no assurance of confidentiality, more than half admitted to it.'"

You can't steal data. Its a physically nonsensical concept. The only way I can see actual theft working is if you were to use quantum teleportation to extract the electrons from one persons computer and place them in your own.

Distribution of trash media is part of what helps level the playing field. It means that people used to getting their data through conventional means now get it through the new medium, and thus are looking in the right place to find user generated content.

theodp writes with a link to a Reuters report, based on a WSJ story, that "Verizon, Google, Cisco, and HP are among the companies that have joined a secretive group called the Allied Security Trust. Each of the companies will reportedly put $5 million in escrow to allow AST to snap up intellectual property on their behalf before it falls into the hands of parties that could use it against them. Patents will be resold after AST member companies have granted themselves a nonexclusive license to the underlying technology. According to AST CEO Brian Hinman, a former VP of IP and Licensing at IBM, the arrangement will keep member companies out of antitrust trouble." (The WSJ's story itself is more detailed, but it's subscriber-only.)

How much does your PC really draw in terms of power when idle, when in sleep, and when playing a demanding game? I don't trust everything the manufacturers of hardware say, so I thought I'd get myself a watt measuring device and run a few tests on some of the gear I leave on all the time, and the gear I go to the trouble of turning off. The linksys router drew 8 watts, the monitor drew a fairly noticeable 30-31, but what surprised me was how little power the base unit drew, even when playing company of heroes. Also, the variance of power draw for vista seemed minimal, regardless of what you got the machine to do.
http://positech.co.uk/cliffsblog/?p=21

The RIAA are getting stupider by the minute. It's high time they learned that people aren't going to take this shit sitting down for much longer.

The more the courts resist their moves, the more people will stand up for their rights.

Actually, it's about $12.99/month... Some people just like to whine without exploring their legal options first because the criminal options are marginally cheaper and they like to play the part of a martyr whose piracy rights are being violated. If you want copywritten material, buy a copy. Otherwise, live without it (or boycott it if you feel the need to protest.)

Here come the (-1 Troll) mods... Sig embarrassingly related.