me rite gud

xkcd tickles my math funny bone:

Happy Pi day y’all!

3.1415926535897932384626433832795028841971693993751
058209749445923078164062862089986280348253421170679
821480865132823066470938446095505822317253594081284
811174502841027019385211055596446229489549303819644
288109756659334461284756482337867831652712019091456
485669234603486104543266482133936072602491412737245
870066063155881748815209209628292540917153643678925
903600113305305488204665213841469519415116094330572
703657595919530921861173819326117931051185480744623
799627495673518857527248912279381830119491298336733
624406566430860213949463952247371907021798609437027
705392171762931767523846748184676694051320005681271
452635608277857713427577896091736371787214684409012
249534301465495853710507922796892589235420199561121
290219608640344181598136297747713099605187072113499

I could go on, but I'm really more a fan of e.

The kids really haven’t been watching much TV lately.   Yet tonight we managed to waste almost an hour on YouTube  watching stuff get blended. My favorite was the glowsticks.  Eamon was not happy about the transformers getting blended.

I have a bad habit of spewing my DRM rants to anyone who will listen, often forgetting to mention what this “DRM” thing is. At which point my attempts to back track and explain tend to fail miserably. Well, Jeremy Allison has an excellent piece (complete with Star Trek analogies) over on ZDNet: Why DRM Won’t Ever Work (found via BoingBoing). He does a much better job of explaining it than my bungled attempts. So there you go.

I’ve been trying hard to avoid reposting stuff that I read on slashdot, but this is one I want to remember for later. According to their press release Media Rights Technologies (MRT) has decided to send cease and desist letters to Apple, Microsoft, Adobe and Real for not using MRT’s digital rights management (DRM) software to prevent users from illegally copying things like Internet radio streams. From the MRT press release:

“The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) was signed into law by President Clinton in 1998 to disseminate and protect the arts in the digital age. It makes illegal and prohibits the manufacture of any product or technology that is designed for the purpose of circumventing a technological measure which effectively controls access to a copyrighted work or which protects the rights of copyright owners.”

Somehow they have made a fantastical leap of logic in concluding that if a company provides content in the clear – without DRM – that they are violating the DMCA:

“MRT asserts Apple, Microsoft, Real and Adobe have produced billions of these products without regard for the DMCA or the rights of American Intellectual Property owners, actively avoiding the use of MRT’s technologies. Failure to comply with this demand could result in a federal court injunction to any of the above named parties to cease production or sale of their products and/or the imposition of statutory damages of at least $200 to $2500 for each product distributed or sold.“

I am definitely not a lawyer or have any competency in reading law, but no where in the DMCA does it say anything about it being illegal to disseminate content in the clear (without rights management). It also says nothing about it being illegal for companies to producing technology that deals with clear file formats. The anti-circumvention clause they are referring to makes it illegal to distribute tech (software or hardware) to circumvent DRM that has been embedded by the content’s creator. If they didn’t embed DRM then you aren’t circumvent it. The idea that all media be in a protected format is ludicris. It would be a very disturbing world in which information was locked down in this manner. Are they suggesting that all digital cameras store every photo I shoot in a protected format? What if I want to distribute my music with a creative commons license?

My hunch is that this company is just trying to stir up some publicity but it would be sad if this actually made it into a court.

does this show up on the front page?