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Ian Hickson, the googler who is overseeing the HTML5 standard at the W3C, has written a surprisingly frank piece on the role of DRM. As he spells out in detail, the point of DRM isn't to stop illegal copying, it's to stop legal forms of innovation from taking place. He shows that companies that deploy DRM do so in order to prevent individuals, groups and companies from innovating in ways that disrupt their profitability:

The purpose of DRM is to give content providers leverage against creators of playback devices.

Content providers have leverage against content distributors, because distributors can't legally distribute copyrighted content without the permission of the content's creators. But if that was the only leverage content producers had, what would happen is that users would obtain their content from those content distributors, and then use third-party content playback systems to read it, letting them do so in whatever manner they wanted.

Here are some examples:

A. Paramount make a movie. A DVD store buys the rights to distribute this movie from Paramount, and sells DVDs. You buy the DVD, and want to play it. Paramount want you to sit through some ads, so they tell the DVD store to put some ads on the DVD labeled as "unskippable".

Without DRM, you take the DVD and stick it into a DVD player that ignores "unskippable" labels, and jump straight to the movie.

This is the first third of my recent Guardian column, What I wish Tim Berners-Lee understood about DRM, but there's two other important points to make, apropos the W3C:

1. DRM always involves patents with onerous licensing terms that are incompatible with the W3C's patent policy, because patent licensing is the hook by which those disruptive -- but legal -- features can be prohibited

2. DRM can't be implemented in free/open code. For DRM to work, anyone who implements it has to design their implementation to prevent users from changing it. This is reflected in the "robustness" rules that always accompany DRM licensing, which always prohibit "user modifiability."

In other words:

1. DRM's purpose is to prevent legal innovation

2. DRM requires onerous patent licenses

3. DRM is incompatible with free/open code and systems

Discussions about DRM often land on the fundamental problem with DRM: that it doesn't work, or worse, that it is in fact mathematically impossible to make it work. (via /.)

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"There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary to public interest. This strange doctrine is not supported by statute or common law. Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back." - Robert A Heinlein, Life-Line

Chrome: With the death of Google Reader, a number of people are jumping ship to popular alternatives like Feedly, NewsBlur, and OldReader. RSS Subscription Extension is an extension that makes adding RSS feeds to those readers a breeze.

RSS Subscription Extension is a fork of the original Google RSS Subscription, but with updated RSS readers. WIth it installed, you get a small RSS subscription bar in the omnibar to instantly add feeds to the reader of your choice. Since Google Reader won't see support anymore, this extension does the exact same thing as the original extension, but supports readers that are actually still working. If you've jumped ship to Feedly, Digital Inspiration also has a bookmarklet for Feedly that works in Firefox.

RSS Subscription Extension | Chrome Web Store via Digital Inspiration

Google has released a new Drive API that will enable developers to make use of Drive's realtime editing functions. By tapping into the API, developers will be able to make apps that can edit Google Drive text, spreadsheet, and presentation documents, with web users seeing the changes in realtime.

One of Drive's most popular features is the ability to collaborate on documents. Users can work on different parts of a document, with changes and comments appearing for other users almost instantly. Until now, apps with Google Drive integration had relied on clunky methods like downloading full documents and uploading them later. Today's API release should put an end to that — let's hope developers take notice and start integrating Google...

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Barely a week passes without yet another website being taken down because somebody objected to its existence. This would have been conceptually unthinkable two decades ago, but the copyright monopoly has encroached on civil liberties to a degree many haven’t realized.

Let’s return to the idea of the analog letter. It embodies much of what we cherish about freedoms of speech and expression. A key aspect of the letter is the concept of the messenger immunity – the idea that the mailman is never responsible for the contents of a carried message.

To illustrate how throughly fundamental this principle is, consider that the largest distributor of narcotics in pretty much every country is that country’s postal services. Yet, nobody would dream of holding the postal services as such responsible for the fact that some people use it to transport contraband – the responsibility for this rests solely with those who send narcotics through the mail, not with the mail system itself.

If a random director of a country’s postal service were called on this fact in a discussion panel, they would respond, “Well, that is indeed a problem. But it’s not our problem, nor should it be.” And they would be right.

For some reason, this fundamental principle of law doesn’t apply online, which is yet another sign the policymakers don’t seem to believe the Internet is for real, a lack of understanding that the net is actually a part of the real world.

This is a result of skilled lobbying from copyright monopoly extremists who have been talking to policymakers – policymakers who are at such a level of digital literacy that they get their e-mails printed for them by secretaries. (I wish I was making this up, but I’m not.) The result is a mishmash of laws with so-called Safe Harbors – implying that they would protect the messenger immunity – but where these laws are actually the exact opposite of Safe Harbors, as they introduce conditions for the immunity.

More specifically, the messenger is only immune as long as nobody has objected to their carrying the message. Most infamously, this is the case in the United States’ disastrous DMCA law, a mechanism that has gradually and partially crept into EU courts as well through a number of precedents.

When so-called Safe Harbors are conditional, and you risk liability for not killing the message, the correct business decision is almost always to drop the message and not risk liability – it is not the messenger’s responsibility to safeguard freedom of speech as such: it is their responsibility to run a business, and this is as it should be.

This is part of a deliberate conflation between business interests and civil liberties, and gradually letting business interests supersede civil liberties just because they are exercised online. That is not acceptable. Freedoms of speech were never safeguarded as a business interest. They were always safeguarded as an overriding political and civil liberties interest; it was never a particular entrepreneur’s responsibility to shoulder the responsibility of protecting freedom of speech for an entire nation.

Unfortunately, this has left us without anybody who takes responsibility for freedom of speech. The feeling that this was somebody’s intended result subtly creeps under your skin.

The very purpose of freedom of speech is to give everybody the ability to say things that aren’t popular. You never needed a constitutional protection to say that unicorns, kittens, and rainbows are pretty.

Freedom of speech is the freedom to state anything for any reason with the intent of conveying a message, either to a specific recipient or to the public at large. Successful political speech (which doesn’t have to include spoken words just to be called “speech”) more often than not points at somebody else’s expression and puts it in a new light.

At this point, copyright monopoly extremists are never late to claim that freedom of expression only is the freedom to state your own expressions, not a freedom to broadcast other people’s expressions. To put it in technical terms, this argument is utter bullshit.

When I sing “Happy Birthday” to somebody, it is trivial to observe that I do so to express a message of my own at the recipient, despite the fact that the song is under copyright monopoly, which is what is implied by the garbage of “somebody else’s expression”.

We are currently without a functioning legal protection of freedom of speech online, as Internet Service Providers get threatened the instant something is communicated that somebody else doesn’t like. If this had been the case when postal services were created, we would not have postal services today – nor the telephone, nor the Internet.

Messenger immunity is fundamental, and we need to fix this. It must be unconditional.

About The Author

Rick Falkvinge is a regular columnist on TorrentFreak, sharing his thoughts every other week. He is the founder of the Swedish and first Pirate Party, a whisky aficionado, and a low-altitude motorcycle pilot. His blog at falkvinge.net focuses on information policy.

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Source: Who Protects Freedom Of Speech When It Isn’t Profitable To Do So?

Earlier this week, Google killed a beloved service of theirs, but now it looks like they might be bringing another one back from the dead in the form of a new note-taking service called "Google Keep." Remember Google Notebook? It's back!

We've got pictures! Google Keep's website went live for a short while and we took a bunch of screenshots. Check them out.

1E100 dug through the Google Drive website's source code and discovered the unreleased app. For starters there's this icon, which was located at www.google.com/images/icons/product/keep-512.png:

It looks like it's a good match with the other Google Drive app icons.

Done With This Post? You Might Also Like These:

• Google Keep Is Live! Google Launches A Note-Taking Service [Update: And It's Gone]
• [Rumor] Google's Cloud Storage Competitor, Drive, Could Launch In First Week Of April
• Google Instant Previews Are Now Mobile
• Google Instant For Android 2.2+, iOS 4 Now Available In 28 Languages, 40 Countries

'Google Keep' Spotted In Drive Source Code - Is Google Taking Another Shot At A Note-Taking Service? was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

Android: PAUL is a handy app that downloads videos from your favorite news sources and social networks in the background, and lets you watch them all in one place.

PAUL could be best thought of it as a smart podcatcher for video. You can subscribe to various video services, including YouTube, ESPN, and CNN, and also connect your social networks to download videos posted by your friends. The app will learn your preferences over time, and adjust its algorithms to download the most relevant content, and a variety of included home screen widgets will keep you updated on the latest videos available.

The app also provides some fine-grained controls like specifying how many videos PAUL should download for each channel, and how long they should stay cached. PAUL will only download videos over Wi-Fi, so you can also specify what times of day you're usually connected.

If you want to stash some great video for offline viewing, and access it all in one place, PAUL is a great resource. Best of all, it's available for free on Google Play.

PAUL the app (Free) | Google Play via AddictiveTips

Ever since the very first file-sharing lawsuits (or at least threats of them) raised their heads in the last decade, people have wondered if they might become the next victim. Many carried on oblivious and haven’t had a single problem, but others wonder if there is some kind of magic formula to staying out of trouble.

A decade on and what we are faced with is a constantly developing picture, one that’s complicated by varied jurisdictions and legal frameworks plus rightsholders with diverse sensitivities and attitudes as to how the ‘problem’ might be solved. We’re not going to attempt a detailed worldwide sweep today, but before moving onto the situation in the United States let’s first consider two countries in Europe with extremely different approaches to the issue.

In Switzerland, file-sharers can literally go nuts and pretty much download whatever they like. The overwhelming odds are that no-one is going to do anything, since monitoring file-sharers in Switzerland is banned.

Summary: Free-for-all.

In Germany the situation is very different. Internet subscribers can be held liable for almost everything that goes on via their connections, a situation which has attracted hundreds of thousands of troll lawsuits, not only from bottom-feeding opportunist purveyors of third-grade media, but also the major record labels too.

Summary: Consider everything dangerous and connected to a potential pay-up-or-else letter.

Somewhere between these two countries is the UK, where there is the occasional troll lawsuit, but only against those who have shared porn manufactured by a single producer. Personal file-sharing is being monitored by the major labels and movie studios for intelligence purposes, but no-one ever gets punished for doing so. ‘Strike’ warnings will probably go out in the next few years, but nothing is imminent.

Summary: Overwhelmingly unlikely to get sued or busted for anything – movies, TV shows or music (mainstream or otherwise) – but file-sharers are definitely being watched.

The Netherlands offers a different position again. Downloading movies, books and music for personal use is legal, but downloading software isn’t. Adding to this complexity, file-sharers are not allowed to upload anything, which means that sharing copyrighted material via BitTorrent is outlawed. Troll lawsuits have not arrived in The Netherlands yet, but copyright watchdog BREIN has threatened to go after file-sharers if downloading movies and music isn’t outlawed.

Summary: Downloading movies and music is legal, sharing copyrighted material isn’t. Overwhelmingly unlikely to get sued or sued for anything, but this may change in the future.

As widely reported, France and New Zealand are “three strike” zones. Major music, movie and TV show rightsholders are heavily monitoring P2P networks for infringements and sending out warnings to file-sharers. In New Zealand the movie companies feel the process is too expensive for them and are currently sitting on the sidelines, but residents of both countries should be aware that on P2P networks such as BitTorrent they are definitely being watched.

Summary: Chances of being monitored sharing mainstream products are higher than they’ve ever been, but the warning system means that file-sharers will get a heads-up or two before the proverbial hits the fan. At a few hundred NZ dollars punishments are not particularly punitive but whether they offer a sort of perverse ‘value for money’ or not depends on how much people download.

Of course the big one that most readers will be interested in is the United States, and it’s the country with the most complex situation. The risks and punishments are loosely split across product vendor lines.

First off, DMCA notices. Although mainly sent to sites to have content removed, these are also sent out by the major movie, TV show and record labels as a warning to Internet subscribers caught sharing their products. They should be taken seriously, but in the real world are largely toothless. It’s a heads-up that an activity has been monitored but as the particular download has probably long since completed, most people can simply ignore them. At this point it’s still unclear, but it seems likely that DMCA notices sent to individual Internet subscribers will now be replaced by alerts under the so-called “strikes” mechanism.

This six-stage warning system is being used by the major recording labels and the members of the MPAA. These companies’ products dominate the music charts, movie theaters, rental stores and TV channels, so when looking at music or video featuring the world’s biggest stars, chances are those products are being monitored as part of six strikes.

Without going into the politics of whether the strikes project is fair, what it does provide is a warning mechanism. People can get caught sharing mainstream media many times before they face even the possibility of some kind of legal action. People shouldn’t be complacent though as that still might happen for the most persistent of offenders.

Six-strikes also removes most of the concern that a petty file-sharer will have his door kicked in by the authorities at 5am in the morning, but that’s still a possibility if the individual is involved in providing content to a well-run file-sharing release group or site. If people involved in this kind of activity aren’t already presuming they’re being watched, they should be.

But of course, the burning question is which content is being monitored? Which TV shows, which movies, which music albums? In the absence of any central source of information that question can only be answered accurately by rightsholders, but let’s try to solve this puzzle with what we do know.

For a moment let’s presume that the removal of links to illicit online content shares the same motivation as the monitoring of end users for the purposes of warning them. Google receives millions of takedowns every month and lists these in its Transparency Report, so a trawl through that database will show which content rightsholders want to protect. That’s not exactly a two minute job though, but there is an easier way.

To find out if a rightsholder is actively enforcing its rights by sending takedowns, simply search Google for any content followed by the word ‘torrent’. (Tip: “Game of Thrones” + torrent illustrates this perfectly)

Once the results appear, scroll down to the bottom of the page and see if listings have been removed and replaced with a line saying that the takedown notice can be found on Chilling Effects. The notices can be checked for a date to see if the monitoring is current or historical, i.e whether rightsholders used to be interested or still are. It’s not a guaranteed or fully comprehensive method of discovering what’s being monitored, but it should give a general idea.

While people might complain about ‘six strikes’, it is much, much better than the digital disease that spread to the U.S. from Europe in recent years – the detestable copyright trolls and their horrendous lawsuits. These people scan file-sharing networks for infringements and do not give out ANY warnings whatsoever before demanding huge sums of money to make supposed lawsuits go away.

Sadly, with these people the Google technique doesn’t work at all. These companies overwhelmingly make zero effort to take any content down since it’s in their interests for it to stay up – more content, more people to sue and receive settlements from.

Fortunately though (with a few notable exceptions – Hurt Locker, The Expendables), their content tends to flow massively from one direction so can be more easily avoided. It’s become evident that trolls love porn and as a result have targeted as many as 300,000 people in the United States in recent years. Amazingly and thanks to a frankly herculean effort, a list of movies recently monitored by trolls is available here. It’s not a complete database, neither can it predict which titles will be targeted in the future, but it’s somewhat of an eye-opener.

Conclusion

To pick a slightly unpleasant analogy, asking about the risks associated with downloading copyright material is a bit like wondering whether the guy or girl in the bar tonight is likely to result in a ‘good time’, or whether that will be followed up by call from the local clinic. We all know there are people who throw caution to the wind and ‘partner up’ whenever they can, take no precautions and come out just fine. Equally, there are those who slip up just once and end up paying the price.

Just like in the ‘real world’ it’s possible to reduce the risks to almost zero by using some sort of protection. Otherwise the outcome will always be unpredictable, but at least within the parameters detailed above.

So….do you feel lucky?

Source: Don’t Download That Bro, You’re Going to Get Busted!

http://www.buzzfeed.com/adambvary/joss-whedon-on-kickstarter-and-firefly

He says that the success of the Veronica Mars Kickstarter campaign "doesn't just open the floodgates" for Firefly/Serenity.

Today Dropbox announced that it has acquired email app Mailbox, just one month after the app hit the market to much critical acclaim. "Rather than grow Mailbox on our own, we've decided to join forces with Dropbox and build it out together," Mailbox CEO Gentry Underwood wrote in a blog post. "To be clear, Mailbox is not going away. The product needs to grow fast, and we believe that joining Dropbox is the best way to make that happen."

All 14 members of the Mailbox team will join Dropbox, The Wall Street Journal reports. No price tag has yet been attached to the deal, though Mailbox (formerly Orchestra to-do) has $5.3 million in venture capital behind it. Mailbox will continue as a "stand-alone app," while Dropbox will use some of the...

Continue reading…

This should be fun! Here's a really early peak at Google's latest content push: it's called "Google Play News," and these bits of News come in "Issues" and "Subscriptions," so we're guessing Google's getting into the newspaper business. "Play News" will be a new, "colored" Play Store section to go along with Apps, Music, Books, Magazines, Movies, and Devices.

Our smoking gun in this case was this piece of JavaScript, (mirror) from the web version of the Play Store. It's a little hard to read, but you should be able to control+f your way to interesting bits of text like this:

To read Google Play News, you must have a supported Android phone or tablet

Please sign in to get this News edition.

Done With This Post? You Might Also Like These:

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• DROID RAZR HD And RAZR M Developer Edition Sites Go Live - RAZR M $550, Pre-Orders Ship Week Of 9/13

Introducing 'Google Play News' - A Newspaper Section Is On Its Way To The Play Store was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

The HTC One is due to launch globally in the next month, so how does it compare to Sony's latest, the Xperia Z?

The Xperia Z is Sony’s best smartphone yet, and it’s one of the first major flagship devices of 2013 to hit the market. But there’s competition coming, and not just from Samsung. HTC will be launching the HTC One in Europe from the end of the month, and the Taiwanese manufacturer’s going all-out with its very best build quality, redesigned software and a new kind of smartphone camera.

So how does HTC’s latest hold up against Sony’s glass-clad beast? We’ve got comparisons in video, pictures and words after the break.

read more

Google announced today that it'll be closing Google Reader's doors on July 1st of this year, meaning you'll need to find a new way to get your news fix. Here's how to export all your feeds and put them into a new reader.

Step One: Find a New RSS Reader

RSS is the mechanism by which Google Reader subscribes to web sites, and lets you know which articles you've read. Luckily, it's far from the only RSS reader out there, so chances are you shouldn't have too much trouble finding one you like. In general, they fall into two categories. Here are your options.

Option One: Cloud-Based News Readers

If you read your RSS feeds in more than one place (that is, if you want to read them at home, at work, or on different devices), you'll want to try a web-based RSS reader, similar to what Google Reader is now. NetVibes (pictured above) is one of the most popular web reader, offering a Google Reader-like interface as well as a snazzy iGoogle-like homepage.

NewsBlur is also a great option, with an interface that's very similar to Google Reader (and arguably a little more polished). You create an account with them, subscribe to your favorite sites, and can read them on any computer. They even have Android and iOS apps that'll sync your feeds, too. Update: It looks like NewsBlur has suspended free accounts for the time being, likely because of the influx of new users. Either way, it's one to keep an eye on.

Feedly is popular, but definitely different than Google Reader. Its interface is less traditional and a bit more "newspaper-like," but it's very pretty. You can, however, get a more traditional Reader-like interface if you prefer. You need to download a browser extension for Chrome or Firefox to use it, but you'll be able to sync your feeds between browsers and even to Feedly's mobile apps. Update: Feedly has also said that they'll have a "seamless" transition method in place when Reader goes down.

Update: A lot of you have mentioned The Old Reader as a great alternative, and it is! In fact, its design is based of Google Reader's before the recent redesign, so it's a fantastic option to check out if you're looking for something familiar.

Option Two: Desktop-Based News Readers

Your other option is to go with a desktop app. Desktop readers often offer many more features than their web-based counterparts, but with one big downside: all desktop apps currently sync with Google Reader. That means, unless the developers get it syncing with a different service, you'll only be able to read your feeds on the machine you used to subscribe to them. Of course, Google Reader doesn't shut down until July, so there's enough time that we could actually see that happen.

For Windows, we really like FeedDemon (pictured above) for its high level of customizability. (Update: with Google Reader's demise, FeedDemon's developer has announced FeedDemon's death as well). Check out our App Directory entry to read more about it and get some alternatives. Mac users should check out the beautiful, feature-packed Reeder and its alternatives. If you do most of your reading on your phone or tablet, you might try some of the Android- or iOS-based feed readers as well.

Step Two: Import Your Google Reader Feeds

Once you've found a new RSS reader, you should import your Google Reader feeds so you don't have to re-subscribe to everything. Luckily, migrating your feeds from Google Reader is very simple. Here's what you need to do:

1. Head to Google Takeout's Reader page and click the Create Archive button. It'll start building a file with all your feeds, the people you follow, starred items, and more (though most of these won't be importable to other sites).
2. Once it's finished building, click the Download button that appears to get your subscriptions.
3. Open up the ZIP file you just downloaded and go through the folders inside. Inside the Reader folder, you should see a file called subscriptions.xml. Extract that to your desktop.
4. Open up your new feed reader of choice, head into its settings, and find the Import option. Select it, and choose the subscriptions.xml file you just extracted. All of your feeds should appear in your new reader.

This won't import your starred items or know which articles you've already read on Google Reader, but at least you'll still have all your subscriptions. Alternatively, you can download a desktop reader that syncs with Reader—our favorite ones for Windows, Mac, Android, and iOS all do—let it sync, and then turn off Google Reader syncing once it's done. That way, you should at least be able to pick up where you left off.

You've still got until July to figure out which RSS reader you want to move to, so try a few different services out and see what you like. Hopefully, by the time July rolls around, some of the desktop apps might even have other options for syncing to the cloud. In the meantime, join us in the discussions below and share your favorite non-Google RSS reader.

Title image remixed from MARSIL (Shutterstock) and sspopov (Shutterstock).

We're all well aware that YouTube is great for sharing videos, but tech blog Digital Inspiration points out that it can also be used to create easily shareable slideshows in a matter of seconds.

The process is incredibly easy. Just login to your YouTube account, and head over to the upload area. Navigate over to "Photo slideshow," and click create. Now you just need to drag your photos into the upload area. When you're done, head to the next screen to change time duration, transition effects, and add some background music. You can always set your slideshow to private or unlisted if you're just trying to share vacation pictures with you grandma and not the entire world.

Not Just Videos, Upload your Photos to YouTube | Digital Inspiration