Group items tagged

Here's the world's shortest, fairest, and simplest licence agreement: "Don't violate copyright law." If I had my way, every digital download from the music in the iTunes and Amazon MP3 store, to the ebooks for the Kindle and Sony Reader, to the games for your Xbox, would bear this - and only this - as its licence agreement. "Don't violate copyright law" has a lot going for it, but the best thing about it is what it signals to the purchaser, namely: "You are not about to get screwed."

I think we should permanently cut off the internet access of any company that sends out three erroneous copyright notices. Three strikes and you're out, mate.

Every legislative and normative proposal recapitulates the worst mistakes of the spamfight: from Viacom's demand that Google automatically detect copyright-infringing videos while they're being uploaded; to the three-accusations-and-you're-offline proposal from the BPI; to the notion in the G8's Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement of turning copyright holders into judge, jury and executioner for what content can travel online and who can see it.

Cory Doctorow's column on DRM Cory Doctorow is a digital activist, science fiction author and co-editor of the popular blog Boing Boing. Each fortnight he writes about copy protection, digital rights management (DRM) and the entertainment industry.