SlashNOT

Matthew writes: The MPAA announced today that it had developed its own Digital Rights Management (DRM) protocol that defeats all forms of file copying. The announcement surprised serious DRM researchers, who didn’t realize that the MPAA had the technical and security acumen to develop an uncrackable rights management scheme.
“Basically, early attempts at DRM would move the “decryption” component closer to the user–for example, with DVD, decryption was done in the player by hardware, but hackers got around that by doing a key swap with a legitimate player and then ripping tracks. We tried moving decryption to the display drivers, but then the hacked the players and transcoded to the easily swappable DiVX format.”
“We realized that no matter what we did, someone could just make a display device that captured the screen and re-encoded it. It only takes one pirate on the Internet to crack a title and release it, so the odds of someone doing this are very high.”
“Then we looked at the market. Users who buy DVDs typically only watch them once. It’s really more about ownership than viewership, and they’re not supposed to be loaning them out anyway.”
“Our new protocol addresses all of these problems by eliminating the decryption phase. By leaving the media encrypted throughout the play process, we never lose control of our content, and the consumer is only inconvenienced and average of one time. They still get the exact same ownership experience, and that’s what buying DVDs is really about.”

Matthew writes: CNN reports that a copyright on silence has been successful. In 1952, American composer John Cage included a track called 4′33″ on an album he released, which consisted of that length of silence.

The John Cage trust sued Mike Batt for his composition, “One minute of Silence”, claiming that he had plagiarized the earlier work. Mr. Batt settled out of court for hundreds of thousands of dollars, claiming that while the case had little merit, he deeply respected Mr. Cage’s work (and apparently, six figures is chump change for him).

[Note: Stories in the True Stories section are true and highlight current news items that are just too silly to satirize.]

Matthew writes: RIAA has recently launched a new program to teach teens the evils of disrespecting intellectual property rights. Cleverly dubbed “Teens Respect Intellectual Property (TRIP) Day”, the program travels from school to school teaching Junior High School students the perils of downloading, ripping, burning, and otherwise disrespecting the license agreements that Teens didn’t know they’d made with the the major label publishers when they purchased CDs.
“Yeah, it really hit home with me.” said teen Gary Lowman. “I think I got it when they explained that if I didn’t respect the IP rights of the big labels, then they wouldn’t have to respect my IP rights in the extremely remote chance that I ever create anything copyrightable. I think they called it the theory of reciprocity. I think.”
“Oh yeah, and when they had those kids speak who had been ripping MP3s, and what happened to them, I was totally like wow, that could be me. And when I thought about it, I guess Jesus probably wouldn’t have ripped CDs and uploaded them like they said.”
Chris Rocher, another teen, disagreed. “When they explained that buying a CD doesn’t mean that you’re buying the song, but just that you’re buying some plastic and they still own the song, I was like, F*** that noise. If I’m not getting anything for my money I’ll just keep ripping. Gnutella Rulez!”
RIAA spokesman Howard Berman explained that TRIP was raising awareness. “We think that getting to the kids right as they become consumers is key. We’ve been very happy with the way these kids seem to understand the consequences of IP piracy to the global economy and its dampening effect on knowledge production, and how that applies to them. It’s great to reach a market segment so well known for abiding the law, as well.”

FBI Director Robert S. Mueller, III has urged Congress to enact a law making it illegal to “mistype, misspell, or obfuscate any word in the English language in an e-mail message”. According to Mueller, “poor spelling and typos are dramatically imparing the efforts of our brave automated Internet wiretapping technologies such as Carnivore. Carnivore can’t pick up every possible permutation or misspelling of a word. For example, it will miss ‘missle’, ‘bom’, ‘explosevs’, ‘nukular’ and ‘divice’. When we looked at the processing cost of soundexing every word and comparing soundex codes to our ‘triggers’, we realized it would be much easier to simply make misspelling illegal. This will certainly stop all the 31ite h@NO_SPAMx0rs from browsing for pr0n.” The directory also mentioned that he’d like to see legislation on criminalizing heavy Arabic accents over the telephone as well.

Capt. Tako writes: British Telecom filed suit today against Logitech and Microsoft today, asserting that those companies not only violated their trademark rights to the letters “B” and “T” by releasing “various devices” that include the two letters, but also induced billions of computer users to infringe BT’s rights by creating devices that allow users to add those two letters to other trademarks.

“It’s quite clear to us that if these ‘key boards’ didn’t contain the letters “B” and “T”, then computer users wouldn’t be unknowingly including our trademarked letters in their own trademark applications. The monir inconvenience of not being able to utilize the full alphabet on a computer is no justification for infringing our strong historical rights to “B” and “T”.

Those historical roots go back pretty far. BT is an outgrowth of the original “British Telegraph” when predated the QWERTY keyboard layout, and British Telegraph is decended from the Havershirefordhamington-upon-avon fishery, which predates middle English when the letters “B” and “T” were first incorporated into English. It is this length of history which give BT’s claim merit.