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My personal thoughts about the new copyright law

(27 Dec 2005 1:17)

As most of our regular users already know, Finland has adopted a new copyright legislation that will come in force on 1st of January, 2006. The new copyright legislation has been adopted to comply with European Union Copyright Directive, which was approved by European Parliament and European Commission back in 2001. Most of the other EU countries have already adopted the directive to their local legislations, Finland being one of the last countries which hadn't done so yet.

The Directive makes it very clear that each member of the Union has to make it illegal to distribute, manufacture, sell and advertise tools that allow circumventing copy protection mechanisms. The directive doesn't state how effective or strong the protection has to be in order to be covered by the legislation, so basically the directive states that text which is written backwards can be considered a copy protected text and people can't provide tools to circumvent it. However, the directive leaves breathing room for each country to consider their own special needs -- part which Finnish parliament failed to consider, IMO. Additionally, Finnish parliament decided to make distribution of services and tools aimed to circumvent copy protection punishable upto 1 year in prison, which is the minimum punishment that provides police rights for full search warrant in suspects home, office, etc.

Most idiotic thing about the law is the fact that Finland has enjoyed one of the most relaxed copyright laws in Western World for ages. In Finland it has been legal to copy CDs and DVDs, even those borrowed from local library or from your friends, for personal use. Additionally, copying a copy of a CD or DVD (or book, etc) has been perfectly legal. This right has been compensated to copyright owners via blank media levy, sorta copyright tax added on blank CDs, blank cassettes, blank DVDRs, etc. Blank DVDR costs about 3 times the price that it costs in countries without levy, such as UK. People have accepted that levy quite widely, as they have understood that it compensates for their extended rights.

Now, the new copyright legislation makes it illegal to provide guides and software to circumvent copy protections, like CSS found on virtually all commercial DVD-Video discs. This effectively means that copying DVDs is considered to be illegal. Despite this, the blank media levy remains on blank DVDRs, CDs, etc. Same applies for copy-protected CDs -- two days after Finnish parliament approved the new law, Sony BMG Finland announced that all of their upcoming audio CDs released in 2006 and onwards, will contain some form of copy protection, thus making it illegal to copy them, even for personal use. And the blank media levy still remains on blank CDRs, portable MP3 players (its typically 25 euros per player), etc. And the most absurd fact is that the law was justified on grounds that only 2% of available audio CDs are currently copy-protected -- and MPs didn't even ask from media industry whether that ratio will stay the same if the law is passed. Well, now we know.. And DVDs weren't even mentioned in the parliament's discussions, considering the fact that more than 99% of all commercial DVDs are copy-protected already.

Considering the fact that several European Union countries added exceptions to their legislations that allow personal backups, distribution of copy-protection breaking tools for free, etc, I think that Finnish government and parliament failed miserabely to consider the law's effect on regular consumers. What makes the whole legislation hilarious is that downloading from P2P networks (assuming you don't upload anything that violates existing copyrights) is perfectly legal. So, share legal stuff via DC++ and download the already-ripped-and-compressed version of King Kong in DVDR format and burn it for yourself -- legal. Buy the same movie on DVD and make a copy for yourself because you're afraid that your kids will damage the disc -- illegal.

It should be also noted that while the old copyright legislation gave quite good rights for consumers, it also made it illegal to distribute copyrighted material to general public -- including sharing movies, music, etc via P2P networks. So, the general piracy via P2P networks was already well-covered under the existing law, the new legislation just annoys people's rights to make backups of movies, music, e-books, etc that they have purchased legally and doesn't limit piracy at all.

These are just my personal thoughts about the law that makes American DMCA to pale in comparison.

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Net makes everything mobile? Not so...

(16 Dec 2005 12:15)

People who know me know that I truly believe in "mobile computing", some might say that I'm the biggest advocate of the term, yet the world and IT undustry tends to let me down each year when I hope for a change to better.

With "mobile computing" I mean a situation where I can use a computer and Net everywhere I am, with all my data, documents, history, etc with me. And no, I don't want to log in to some silly website via local Net cafe to use webmail, etc. No. I want to have better experience, to have the exact same stuff available to me whether I'm at home next to my desktop, at office or stranded in some middle-of-ocean island.

Lets focus on basics. Some of you might remember a browser that made Web possible, Netscape? Sure, there were others before it and company sorta failed with its vision, yadayada. But those of you who used Netscape in sophisticated way, do remember that it had built-in roaming profiles. By roaming profiles they meant a system where you enter a server details, your login to the server and your password to the server in browser's settings. Once. And then all of your browsing history, bookmarks, browser settings, pre-filled form data, etc were stored at your local HDD and also to the remote location. Ok? Now, it also synchronized that data both ways -- say, you had the same remote profile server set at home and work. That meant that you had exact same bookmarks, history, settings, etc available at both locations. And if you popped into Net cafe in Kenya, used NS as your browser, entered your roaming profile details to settings - bang, you had all your data available right in the browser you were using. No websites to store your history, links, etc, but instead, the browser's built-in system simply synchronized everything to be available, anywhere. No VPN stuff, no contacting to your home desktop via VNC, nothing like that. Just clean WebDAV implementation.

Now, my question is -- where in the heck is that feature now when we use FireFox? There are only couple of promising 3rd party projects planning to implement that feature as an FF extension, but no plans to integrate the feature into FF, as far as I know. Huge leap backwards in my mind -- the most promising browser in the world lacks a feature that was widely available already in 1998..

Then to my biggest misery. ICQ -- and instant messengers overall. I've been using ICQ ever since 1997 or 1998. I have about 300 people on my contact list. I've virtually abandoned email years ago, although I still receive about 200-400 emails a week and write about 100-200 emails each week. But that is nothing compared to my ICQ use. AfterDawn Ltd is ran with ICQ. It has always been ran with ICQ. Most likely without ICQ or similar system, the whole site would not exist. Now. I use computers in various locations -- at office, at home, use my laptop sometimes on holidays, sometimes I use public computers and use Flash-ICQ on them, etc. Now. The problem is that ICQ and all the open-source varieties of it (I actually use Miranda, you can get it from here) lack one major feature -- centralized history. I'm so sick and tired of the situation that when I'm online at home, I remember that I had to check something someone sent to me via ICQ, only realizing 30seconds later that he/she sent it to me when I was at office, thus the history log entry is stored on my work computer. Now, why can't somone build an extension or tool or whatever that would synchronize the inbound and outbound messages sent from/to ICQ to some remote server?

Best way IMO, would be to create an extension to Miranda IM that would allow user to enter database server's IP address, port, login and password. Then the extension would create one or two tables in that database server to store the message logs. After that, everytime the Miranda would be launched, the plugin would kick in, connect the db server, check whether there are logs on the server that aren't on the local log file on my computer. If there are some, it would merge those and store the "downloaded" messages to my comp's local log as well. Also, it would also "upload" all messages that exist in my local log file, but not in database server (whether due using the Miranda before the plugin was installed or due communications problem to the db earlier or whatever). After that, all messages sent/received to/from my Miranda would get also added straight away to the database server's logs. And that's it. Then, whenever I'd install a new instance of Miranda on a new computer, I could install the plugin, enter details and years and years of my ICQ history would get downloaded immediately to my new Miranda instance and I'd have that data available on all of my computers, wherever I am and it would be synchronized always.

Luckily my email situation is quite alright -- IMAP4, webmail interface when needed and IMAP4-capabale cell phone help quite a lot :-)

</rant>...

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December 2005

My personal thoughts about the new copyright law

Added keywords, etc..

Couple of bugs fixed

Net makes everything mobile? Not so...

Profile pages launched as "public beta"

Profile pages getting ready...


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