Culver City, DRM town
p2pnet.net News:- Culver City in California, the “Heart of Screenland” and a “significant center for motion picture and later television production,” has now added another proud boast to its claim to fame.
The first Los Angeles municipality to offer the public a free all-access Wi-Wi, it’s also probably just become the first US city to fall to the blandishments of DRM snake-oil salesmen. And it did so on the strength of a bald-faced, vested interest marketing scheme scantily dressed up as a study.
DRM, short for digital restrictions management, aims to stop people from doing what they want with products they’ve bought and paid for. The major corporate movie and music companies have, however, started using their massive PR and media machines to re-invent a purchase as a rental contract under which people who thought they’d bought CDs or DVDs suddenly discover they have only very limited use of them.
Nothing has been signed by purchasers to that effect, but that doesn’t matter to the cartels. If they say it’s so, it’s so, and the mainstream media, large segments of which they own outright or control directly or indirectly, will back them to the hilt..
Now Culver City says it’s added Audible Magic’s “CopySense Network Appliance” in the city’s formerly pristine Wi-Fi system, “to filter illegal and problematic content”.
Most “problematic content” is produced by the cartels themselves and incredibly, according to a city puff piece, the decision to “implement filtering technology” followed a CopySense network “analysis” that “disclosed” the “fact” that Culver City’s open network included, “illegal trading of copyrighted music, movies and other video content, including pornographic videos and access to pornographic web sites”.
DRM, call it Consumer Control, is an entertainment cartel wet dream. But the reality is: anything which can be seen or heard can be copied. Period. But thanks to the Net, ‘consumers’ are again becoming customers – people with free choice and the will to exercise it, a horrifying prospect for the corporate world. And as Bruce Schneier once said, digital files can’t be made uncopyable any more than water can be made not wet.
“Our campaign initially said ‘free and open Wi-Fi access to everybody’,” says Culver’s director of information technology, John Richo. “As part of the incentive plan to bring pedestrian traffic to Town Plaza, people were quick to sign up and it was clear this was going to be a popular offering. It was only after we saw an activity report from CopySense Appliance that we realized there were potential problems.
“The report reflected illegal-download use and some bandwidth was being consumed as a result of accesses to pornographic sites. This activity is clearly not something tax dollars should be paying for. This type of content defeats the purpose of the wireless hotspot.
“CopySense has allowed our Wi-Fi network to operate smoothly by identifying and blocking certain transmitted files that represent undesirable or unlawful material.”
The name Audible Magic also turned up briefly in the days before Kazaa owner Sharman Networks had maneuverered itself into position alongside the entertainment cartels.
Then, Kazaa was being held up in the Australian courts as a facilitator of file sharing and Australian judge Murray Wilcox had ordered Sharman to modify Kazaa to include keyword search filters.
“However the Sharman parties’ legal team claimed that audio-fingerprinting technology from U.S. company Audible Magic would provide more effective filtering,” said ZDNet Australia. “They cited Wilcox’s judgment in September, which allowed that the modifications to Kazaa could include more effective solutions than keyword filtering.”
But, “the record companies’ legal team described the technology as ‘ineffective’,” says the story.
RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) boss Mitch Bainwol spent months touting Audible Magic through congress and to anyone he could get to listen. Today, with Hollywood in the shape of the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) backing the company, expect to see other US cities falling to CopySense nonsense.
Stay tuned.
Also See:
Heart of Screenland – Culver City, California Implements Pornography and Copyright Filtering Technology on Their Public Wireless Network, August 22, 2006
maneuverered itself – Kazaa owner’s DRM plan, August 4, 2006
ZDNet Australia – Kazaa keywords to be blocked, Australian judge rules, November 28, 2005
