This caught my eye last week — Julian Bond posting about two stories:
Wayback Machine sued: DMCA
IFPI vs Heise vs Allofmp3
The first is about a law suit being brought in the USA where an old copy of a company's web site appears in the Wayback Machine. They are claiming copyright abuse using the much discredited DMCA. Crucially, they claim that old snapshots are available even though more recent snapshots have been prohibited via a robots.txt file that is being honoured. This is a problem that I've hit on Ecademy with Google where somebody has chosen to hide their profile from Google, but Google still maintains an entry in the index and a cached copy of the page from before they made the change.
The second is about a new law in Germany, where promoting a service which is illegal in Germany is also illegal. A German magazine website that specialises in copyright issues has a link in an article to Allofmp3, the Russian paid for music download site. They are being sued in Germany by the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI). And this despite the fact that they have not yet brought a case *in Germany* proving that the Allofmp3 site is illegal under German law and within the German jurisdiction.
I looked into Allofmp3 in March of 2004, going so far as to ring The New Statesman to discuss their reporter's judgement that the site is legal. As Tom Armitage reported back then: 'All the music on the site is licensed by ROMS, the Russian Organisation for Multimedia and Digital Systems, and the assistant to the lawyer of ROMS assured music portal Museekster.com that: “the sites you mentioned conduct their business legally and are licensed by ROMS, in full accordance with Russian and international law“. … The site demonstrates a clear understanding of the internet and how best to exploit it, applying local copyright law to a global marketplace. Whether the record industry will be as impressed with it as the public remains to be seen.' Indeed.
I can't say Colin Greenwood was wowed when I told him about Allofmp3, either, but since then (November of last year) I think things have moved on and many musicians are reconsidering how to distribute their music, how the punter should pay for it and what rights the buyer should then have over his/her purchase. One of the reasons why Allofmp3 has attracted praise is because, as Tom Armitage pointed out, 'The files it provides have no digital rights management information attached to them. This means that there are no restrictions on how many times you copy or distribute the files once they’ve been downloaded. The files can be copied between an unlimited number of computers and electronic devices. It is still illegal to give the files to people who have not paid for them, but Allofmp3.com clearly feel they can trust their customers to keep the law, rather than potentially crippling the files they have paid for.'
And as for this nonsense about the Wayback Machine … I've long been a fan and user of it, but since the advent of Firefox and the wonderful extension from Kristof Polleunis that adds a right-click menu which 'allows you to check the page you are browsing or any link in the waybackmachine archive' — well, I use it many times a day and it's an indispensable tool. (There's another great extension there for Google cache, Gcache: 'It will add an entry called "Gcache This Page" to your contextmenu'.)
Julian winds up his post with a great comment and a terrific quotation from Doc Searls:
Like Doc Searls, I'm scared that this vast, free and open system will get tied down, monetized and ruined as more and more commercial and governmental interests try to control it.
This is what we are fighting, folks. The open and free marketplace the Internet provides is shortly going to look like the best darn mess of few-to-many distribution systems for "content" the world has ever known. It will not be the free and open marketplace it was in the first place, and should remain. The end-state will (be) a vast matrix of national and private silos and walled gardens, each a contained or filtered distribution environment. And most of us won't know what we missed, because it never quite happened.
