It is just under 29 minutes long, and highly recommended.

As a personal note – it’s awesome to see the FSF bring together two of its campaigns, End Software Patents and PlayOgg, while staying true to its founding principles: the film was produced entirely with free software.

This site touches on two points that have irritated me for a very long time in the whole copyright debate: copying is not stealing, and if the media industry would simply start selling quality goods – i.e. unencumbered, no DRM – at a fair price, people would most certainly buy them.

The big music labels seem to have finally understood the latter point – they are slowly starting to offer their music in DRM-free formats. The big movie studios are still a ways from that point. But neither the big music labels nor the big studios have understood the difference between stealing and copying. In simple terms: stealing implies that you derive someone of a good, by taking it away from them. Making a copy of a digital file by its very nature leaves the original intact – ergo, the original owner is not derived of anything. Equating copying with stealing is nonsense.

The counterargument is that by copying a digital file, the citizen is somehow ‘stealing’ revenue from the big content publishers. All I can say is – wake up and smell the coffee. Perfect digital copies are a fact of life, and they are here to stay. It’s been almost 10 years since napster – big content has had a very, very long time to adjust their business models to that fact, and for the most part have simply refused.

So what can ordinary citizens do? Buy music from independent labels that understand todays digital reality: see Audiolunchbox, Cdbaby or Emusic.

Support the artists – go to concerts, buy merchandise. If you want music that’s published on a big label, buy second hand CDs or buy DRM-free songs, for instance at Amazon.

If content publishers don’t want to adapt, they will go out of business.

A lot of it applies world-wide, in my opinion. This is great stuff, worth a read.

However, I still swear by djbdns, which does all that I need my nameservers to do, without all the bloat and history of security issues that come with Bind (though admittedly bind 9 is a heck of a lot better than its predecessors when it comes to being secure).

From my perspective, the biggest problem with djb’s software has been the licensing. Djb did not put his software under a standard free software license; he rolled his own license(s) that were not entirely compatible with free software. See a copy of the djb distributors page from August 2007 for more details.

So what’s the news? Djb has announced that he is to release all his software into the public domain (video). The qmail distribution page has already been updated, stating that qmail has been put into the public domain (compare with a copy from last August at archive.org).

I hope the main djb distribution page gets updated soon; I can’t wait to see djbdns, daemontools and the like officially packaged in Debian. Thank you, Dan!

UPDATE 2008-01-02: Dan’s distributors page has now been updated; daemontools, djbdns, primegen and ucspi-tcp are now all listed as public domain software.

Patents are supposed to cover inventions. Genes are most certainly not inventions. They are ‘features of the natural world’, as Crichton puts it. Patenting genes is as idiotic as patenting rocks, or sunsets. There’s a big difference between discoveries and inventions. It’s high time the USPTO starts to learn that difference.

Let us get this straight – on the one hand they are saying ‘oh but the poor starving artists’ (you know, Sir Cliff Richard might stop receiving royalties from his hits from the late 50s! Horrible! What about the upkeep on his villa on Barbados!). The extension is so important that even some deceased artists support it.

On the other hand the labels are saying that for ‘innovative’ music distribution – read that as in ‘digital’ – the artists should receive lower royalties, so that the labels get to keep a bigger cut. It makes total sense, right? The distribution costs are practically zero, as a consequence the justification for the record labels as a middleman is becoming, well, let’s say ‘questionable’, so the artists should get a smaller slice of the pie.

Music industry logic at its best.

* anyone can now ‘unlock’ cell phones

* film professors can break CSS to make compilations of short clips from DVDs

* blind people can use software that circumvents DRM on e-books to allow them to use screen readers (I’m sure mr Sklyarov is happy about that one)

* if hardware is no longer available for legacy computer software and games bypassing the technological protection measures is allowed for archival

* if you have software that requires a dongle that can not be replaced, you are allowed to circumvent the dongle if it breaks

* researchers can do what they need to to test crippled audio CDs for security flaws

So, great, some small exceptions. But they don’t address the root of the problem – the DMCA is a bad piece of legislation that needs to be repealed. One comment on the Slashdot story summarizes the situation as follows:

I feel as if I got punched in the face and the LoC is passing by and helpfully giving me a tooth back. What about all the other missing teeth?

Amen. Congress needs to do something about the DMCA.