“Next up: habeas corpus for the CD rack”

It is heartening to see mainstream media sources understand (a bit of) the issues concerning copyright and DRM that we have been discussing for so long. It gives one hope that sanity will eventually spread to the US and A, and some day perhaps even to Fox News.

For now, though, there is The Globe and Mail, Canada’s largest newspaper, reporting on the “Canadian DMCA” which, thanks to a public outcry, has been put off for now.

To quote:

[…]As anyone who has bought music from Apple has learned the hard way, companies are in the business of putting technological locks on their content. The classic example is songs bought on iTunes, which have built-in limits on where they can be played (iPods only!) and how they can be copied (hardly at all). The happy euphemism for this technique is Digital Rights Management, or DRM.[…]

[…]After all, not every act of copying is necessarily a copyright violation.[…]

[…]Surprise, surprise: The thought of making casual criminals of people who prod a piece of media in the wrong manner did not go down well. The thought that the contents of your personal video recorder might have certain unalienable rights is discomfiting, all right. Next up: habeas corpus for the CD rack.[…]

[…]While neither the law nor the lawsuits have managed to end music piracy by creating a climate of fear, they have succeeded quite nicely at creating a climate of resentment. The music industry displayed an uncanny knack for choosing media-friendly targets for lawsuits – grandmothers, little children, puppies – and have crafted for themselves a very public image as cigar-chomping, out-of-touch corporate bullies.[…]

[…]Copyright law matters. We’re lucky that, when the time came, the ground was so well prepared for the revolt that followed.[…]

Hooray for anti-Americanism :D

Free and legal

Some links to media that are out of copyright:
Foremost, of course, is Project Gutenberg. (I remember the days when it was only at its old site.) As the world’s first digital library, it has been, for about 35 years now, rendering great service to mankind, publishing hundreds of free ebooks every year. It has nearly 20000 free ebooks available at the moment, and 2 million are downloaded every month. Look at etext 2852 for something slightly interesting ;-)

And then there is the Internet Archive. Apart from being the home of the immensely useful Wayback Machine, it also hosts a large amount of public-domain material, including books, radio shows, and movies. I’ve already seen movies such as D. O. A and Hitchcock’s 1934 version of The Man Who Knew Too Much (BTW, Que Sera Sera is in the 1956 remake, not this one) and plan to eventually seen Nosferatu, Battleship Potemkin and (just for the heck of it) Night of the Living Dead.
See Movies → Movies and films → Feature films → Sorted by popularity or look at the staff picks on the last page.
Another source of these movies (to save the archive.org folks’ bandwidth) is publicdomaintorrents.com.
A list of public domain movies is available on Wikipedia.

There are also two other sources: the Digital Archive Project which has some MST3K episodes, and radiolovers.com which has some old radio shows.

A lot more movies and books would have been in the public domain by now, if not for the deplorable Mickey Mouse Protection Act. Please take the time to also read Sprigman: The Mouse That Ate The Public Domain and The Online Books Page‘s informative page.