Paper War

This fine piece of research just about sums it up. Copyright protectionism amounts to a blighted war zone. The new economy will not thrive until the monopolies of old are defeated. ie. If the pace of technology defines itself in Moor's Law, the technology is morphing onto the Internet, and the Internet growth remains flattened by monopolistic interests, therefore growth in technology finds itself blocked by these traditional interests.

To protect its own intellectual property, Sony BMG appears to blatantly infringing the copyright of others. Undoubtedly, many of you have heard about the _[rootkit][2]_ that is[installed on Windows PCs][3] upon inserting [recent CDs][4] from SonyBMG Entertainment record labels. This has become a veritable fiasco asthis piece of spyware can be used to cloak all manner of things from[viruses][5] to [cheating software][6]. However, it now appears thatthe code written by the company that Sony BMG hired, First4 Internet,may actually infringe the LGPL by using code from the [LAME][7] mp3encoding library (from _["Spyware Sony seems to breachcopyright"][8]_):> This software is licensed under the so called Lesser Gnu Public License (LGPL). According to this license Sony must comply with a couple of demands. Amongst others, they have to indicate in a copyright notice that they make use of the software. The company must also deliver the source code to the open-source libraries or otherwise make these available. And finally, they must deliver or otherwise make available the in between form between source code and executable code, the so called objectfiles, with which others can make comparable software.> Sony complied with non of these demands, but delivered just an executable program. A computerexpert, whose name is known by the redaction, discovered that the cd "Get Right With The Man" by "Van Zant" contains strings from the library version.c of Lame. This can be conluded from the string: "http://www.mp3dev.org/", "0.90", "LAME3.95", "3.95", "3.95".> But the expert has more proof. For example, the executable program go.exe contains a so called array largetbl. This is a part used in the module tables.c of libmp3lame.[1]: http://groups.sims.berkeley.edu/osdddi/?p=57[2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rootkit[3]: http://www.cnet.com/4520-6033_1-6376177.html? part=rss&subj=edfeat&tag=DRM+this%2C+Sony%21[4]: http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/004144.php[5]: http://news.google.com/url?sa=t&ct=/ 5-0&fp=437795daf1dddc4f&ei=Hph3Q_jsMs7wFJ2WiEM&url=http%3A// www.itweek.co.uk/vnunet/news/2145874/virus-writers-exploit-sony- drm&cid=0[6]: http://news.google.com/url?sa=t&ct=/ 2-0&fp=4377899f9163d8b8&ei=QJh3Q6aTMqaWFpexzEQ&url=http%3A// www.theregister.co.uk/2005/11/04/secfocus_wow_bot/&cid=0[7]: http://www.mp3dev.org/[8]: http://dewinter.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=215--

Joseph Lorenzo HallPhD StudentUC Berkeley, School of Information (SIMS)<http://josephhall.org/>blog: <http://josephhall.org/nqb2/>