Larry Lessig and the AMV kids

An “AMV” or “anime music video” is a fan-produced recording made by overlaying a soundtrack with spliced-together clips from Japanese animated films. Needless to say, a good deal of the source material (both audio and visual) in the “AMV scene” is used without permission, which has raised the ire of some of the copyright holders.

Larry Lessig posted today about music-industry opposition to the kids who make AMVs, lamenting it as the latest effort by Big Media to hammer the Internet into a “consume-only” medium.

While I’m generally sympathetic to Prof. Lessig’s arguments about copyright, the AMV scene strikes me as a particularly misleading example. An typical AMV contains several minutes worth of a movie or movies and the entirety of a recorded song. The defense in a copyright-infringement suit would face an uphill battle. But there’s no reason AMVs have to be distributed that way – it’s an issue of technology, not a legal issue.

There is nothing about modern computers that prevents AMVs from being distributed not as an audiovisual recording, but as a set of instructions a computer program could follow to assemble the AMV from the source material. If you (the viewer) have all of the source materials on your computer, the program will reassemble and play the AMV. Some media owners might sue, but their chances would be considerably less likely (Galoob v. Nintendo, for instance, confirmed a user’s right to apply patch-files to media they own.) As a bonus, the AMV files would be much smaller – a few kilobytes, instead of several megabytes.

If the AMV scene wants to avoid copyright problems, technological solutions are well within reach.

16:11 EST | permalink | /computers/internet/law

Summary of the RIAA vs. Everystudent cases

Zack Rosen has posted a summary of the four cases the RIAA has brought against college students who ran SMB network search tools. Don’t miss the network diagrams of the various services at the bottom.

15:37 EST | permalink | /computers/internet/law

Microsoft fires a shot across the RIAA’s bow

Zachary Rosen has discovered an insidious, evil feature buried inside Windows XP: a SMB network search function!. Will they be next on the RIAA’s list?

18:01 EST | permalink | /computers/internet/law

Analysis of RIAA vs. Peng posted

I’ve posted my analysis of the complaint against Dan Peng.

18:33 EST | permalink | /computers/internet/law

Dude! We’re getting sued!

Slashdot (update: and freedomtotinker) report that we‘re being sued by the RIAA. I gather from the CNET article (linked by leerpm on Slashdot) that the RIAA is going after individual students (so perhaps I should change `we’ to `some Princeton students, but not the University’) running index servers, not KaZaA file-swappers. This would fit with the fact that all of the index servers I know about are down as of this writing (7:32 pm on the 3rd of April).

Update: Wired has more details. Thanks to Jonathan in pu.cos.491 (probably accessible only on the campus).

Update II: FindLaw has the complaint. Thanks to Adam in pu.cos.491. All of the other complaints are also on FindLaw.

For reference, the index servers I know of trawl the Windows File Sharing network, recording the names of publicly shared files (a la Google, but without indexing the contents).

The irony is that this happened the same week we discussed the Napster case in Prof. Felten’s class.

00:36 EST | permalink | /computers/internet/law

Stay out of Michigan!

THE MICHIGAN PENAL CODE (EXCERPT)
THIS AMENDED SECTION IS EFFECTIVE MARCH 31, 2003

750.540c.amended Prohibited conduct with regard to telecommunications access device; violation as felony; penalty; amateur radio service; forfeiture; order; definitions.

Sec. 540c.

(1) A person shall not assemble, develop, manufacture, possess, deliver, offer to deliver, or advertise an unlawful telecommunications access device or assemble, develop, manufacture, possess, deliver, offer to deliver, or advertise a telecommunications device intending to use those devices or to allow the devices to be used to do any of the following or knowing or having reason to know that the devices are intended to be used to do any of the following:

(snip)

(1)(b) Conceal the existence or place of origin or destination of any telecommunications service.

(snip)

(4) A person who violates subsection (1), (2), or (3) is guilty of a felony punishable by imprisonment for not more than 4 years or a fine of not more than $2,000.00, or both. All fines shall be imposed for each unlawful telecommunications access device or telecommunications access device involved in the offense. Each unlawful telecommunications access device or telecommunications access device is considered a separate violation.

(9)(c) “Telecommunications service” shall have the same meaning as in section 219a.

Moral: if you live in Michigan and run Freenet, Mixmaster or any other anonymizing services, connect to any server on this list, or make any attempt to conceal your location on the Internet, you may get a very personal visit from the Michigan Mounties.

The intent behind these laws baffles me. We have no lack of legislation forbidding the theft of telephone or Internet services. Nor do we we lack laws for dealing with those who use the relative anonymity of the Net to commit crimes. What on earth compels a legislature to this? If we assume no malice on the part of the lawmakers, it is at best an anti-spam measure — but not a very good one.

Salute: Prof. Felten’s Freedom to Tinker. He also articulates some other problems with this law.

14:58 EST | permalink | /computers/internet/law