Jude Umeh outlines an interesting idea on his BCS blog on DRM. He notes the recent Memorandum of Understanding between the UK recording industry and six major ISPs, which essentially means that ISPs will monitor their networks for illegal filesharing in return for the music industry relaxing its previously zero-tolerance, anti-consumer position. Umeh notes that, [...]

“Non-competes put the brakes on innovation and job creation, and the effects are felt far beyond the VC community … Employer non-compete agreements are literally handcuffs. We need to ask whether their impediments to innovation serve a greater good by protecting employers’ legitimate rights.”
Bijan Sabet has some interesting thoughts on non-competition agreements. While I can [...]

Jack Schofield blogs on The Guardian website that Microsoft are to expand their support of open file formats in Office. Next year’s service pack will bring XPS, PDF, PDF/A, ODF, and (in a sign of the increasing importance of Chinese business) the Chinese national file format UOF as standard. Additionally, the next version of Office [...]

In another post that I never got round to blogging, Boing Boing linked last month to a new study into copyright. Economist Rufus Pollock takes into account that the optimal copyright period on intellectual property will fall as costs of production reduce, and that the optimal level will fall over time in general. Putting this [...]

The founder of Perfect 10, a website which specialises in “tasteful nude images”, has announced that he is suing Microsoft. Norm Zada’s convoluted claim argues that because some people illegally copy and post his images on their own sites, and because Microsoft in turn indexes and displays these images in its search results, Microsoft is [...]

The BBC reports that Google Video is to shut down its premium content service, leaving users who have purchased videos from the site high and dry. While the DRM’d media will stop working, Google is refusing to refund users and is instead only offering credits for its Checkout service. That’s bad enough, but factor in [...]

“It looks as if a serious class-action lawsuit is brewing against Google, as a music trade association joins a growing list of unsettled copyright owners looking for reprieve from YouTube’s copyright-violatin’ ways.”
When Google bought YouTube, it was widely expected that copyright holders would eye the tech company’s massive cash reserves and start suing. [...]

“The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) filed the suits in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles against YouTVpc.com and Peekvid.com on behalf of the studios, the first such case where MPAA is going after link sites.”
The MPAA is suing sites which only link to pirated content, rather than actually hosting it. Trying to censor [...]

Ars Technica reports on Australian ISP Exetel, which indiscriminately deletes all multimedia files with given extensions - including .avi, .mp3, .wmv and .mov - from customers’ accounts every night. Jumping to the conclusion that all of your customers’ music and video files are all illegally pirated content is not only an insulting assumption, but surely [...]

Ars Technica takes a look at the recommendations made by a Canadian Parliamentary committee on copyright infringement and piracy, which effectively amount to a Canadian DMCA. However, it turns out that all the data the committee have based their recommendations on are out-of-date and have no empirical evidence to back them up. And for a [...]

“Early sales indicate that DRM-free music is noticeably more popular than DRMed music, EMI senior VP Lauren Berkowitz recently told Bloomberg.”
Who would have guessed? Users prefer it when they aren’t told how they can use the songs they’ve paid for. From Ars Technica, here, via BOL, here.

Slashdot links to an article about a 1906 record, which shows that the music industry’s stringent EULAs and licensing terms are nothing new. The back cover of the sleeve states that unless the disc was sold to them for more than one dollar, the user does not have a licence to play it and it [...]

Andrew Dubber has published an e-mail exchange between himself and a member of the IFPI and BPI, similar to the US RIAA. Dubber had posted a link to a report on someone countersuing the RIAA. Paul Birch of Revolver Records responded, effectively claiming it was inappropriate to link to anything critical of the RIAA because [...]

I had my call played on CNET’s Buzz Out Loud podcast today, which excited me no end because I’m a total geek. It has, however, served to emphasise that I hate hearing recordings of my own voice. Anyway, my point was this: Apple are rumoured to be planning a movie rental store, which would require [...]

“Some of the privacy problems, in light of this, is that anyone who steals an iPod that includes purchased iTunes music will now have the name and e-mail address of its rightful owner.”
The US Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is crying foul at Apple’s inclusion of customer details in DRM-free tracks now available in its iTunes [...]

In order to comply with American law, sites must immediately remove posted material which can be used to circumvent encryption. However, after Digg.com took down a link to an encryption key which could be used to crack the DRM on HD-DVD, users flooded the site with the hexadecimal code in a protest against censorship. After [...]

The RIAA and MPAA are lobbying legislators in California for an exemption to a new bill. The new law aims to make pretexting - the use of deception to find out personal information - illegal. However, the music and movie bodies want to be given special permission to carry on misleading people and using false [...]

“It seems that some students in Virginia are not happy with the anti-plagiarism service Turnitin. The company checks prose submitted by its customers for signs that it has been copied in whole or part by comparing it to a large database of works that it maintains. Trouble is, it also adds the submitted prose to [...]

“An online petition set up by Microsoft to fast-track the standardisation of its Office Open XML document format masks Redmond’s concern over the procedure, according to a leading open-source advocate … Pointing out that the specifications for Open XML run to 6,000 pages, he [a different expert] suggested that a fast-track would be inappropriate as [...]

“If more labels follow EMI’s lead, and the other online music stores of the world are offered the same conditions on DRM-free music as Apple, Microsoft will have completely failed to corner the digital-music market, and by this time next year, there will be talk of it pulling the plug on its WMA-based efforts entirely.”
Has [...]