Seegras Logbook

A world fragmented

I recently got “upgraded” from google android market to “google play” which supposedly lets you also buy movies, music and books apart from android apps. Guess what?

We’re sorry. The Google Play music player is currently only available in the United States.

And

We’re sorry, the document you requested is not available in your country.

That’s when I started to realize that I’m probably not the only one, that Switzerland is probably not the only country, and google play is probably not the only service that experiences this. Indeed, it’s what happened to the webmaster of Depeche Mode too. With the same predictable reaction.

I find it rather strange that anyone on this planet can cope with the “content industry” blaming the results of their distribution mess onto “dearth of copyright enforcement”; including some morons of legislators which seem to believe it and start rows upon rows of new copyright-toughening. Don’t they see an industry producing a total fuck-up in their attempt to fragment the market in order to sustain their obsolete business-model?

You do realise what happens in the world of “things” if you try to do the same? Yes, smuggling and black markets develop.

And, didn’t anyone notice that I can very well fly to the USA, buy CDs, DVDs and books there, and take them home? I can even order CDs, DVDs and physical books via the internet, and they will deliver it. Across borders. With the same content they don’t want to sell me in digital form? (We’ll ignore those ridiculous region-codes for now)

Does not work here

The stupidity does not end there. Maybe, maybe somebody in your or some other country, will actually want to sell you something. But then, this happens:

Our eBooks are AdobeDRM protected. That means that your eBooks can only be read on devices which support the DRM protection (certain eReader, iPad-Apps, programmes on PC/Mac etc). Please beware of the following limitations:
* You need the Adobe Digital Editions and an AdobeID to unlock and read the eBooks.
* Up to 6 devices can be authorized with the same AdobeID.
* You can not print out eBooks.

You’re kidding me? You deliberately made it impossible for me to read my books on the platform and operating system of my choice? In the above case, that means not on Linux. Since 2007, by the way.

Obviously, this is a blatant attempt to control the market of media-players and book-readers to the detriment of the customers. Why didn’t consumer-protection and antitrust-law already step in? Instead, which morons let this kind of monopoly-making practice even be given protection by law?

And, in reference to the title, what do you think will happen if you couple your content to some specific player? The customers will happily buy both content and player, change their operating system, not use their hardware they already have, and submit to the whim of arbitrarily instituted restrictions like “no printing”? No, they won’t. They’ll just get their movies, media and books from somewhere else.

We locked it up again

Now with that situation of deliberate or accidental market fragmentation and institutionalized incompatibility, you might want to avoid the whole mess altogether, and decide that you do not want to participate in that market. Instead, you might want to read, watch or listen to something older.

Foiled again! The very same industries managed to retroactively expand the duration of copyright again and again. When Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote “Tarzan”, he could expect 28 years of copyright protection after publication. The last “Tarzan”-Novel was theoretically out of copyright in 1972. But that’s not what happened. 1976 this was extended retroactively, and 1998 extended again; so it was placed under copyright again and will only be out of copyright in 2020. Unless someone expands it again.

Obviously if you’re going to disfranchise the public via lobbying in copyright extensions, you do not exactly foster the respect for said copyright.

Instead, what happens is what Thomas Babington Macauley predicted 1841: “And you will find that, in attempting to impose unreasonable restraints on the reprinting of the works of the dead, you have, to a great extent, annulled those restraints which now prevent men from pillaging and defrauding the living.”

To recap

So you’re whining about the public violating a law (you extended in scope and duration by factors) refuse to sell some media in some countries (because the distribution system you installed doesn’t allow it) in a format everyone can use (with a system you put into place to control the players market)? Well, just shut the fuck up!

I’ve already written about Debian GNU/Linux on the Asus EeePC and how to Upgrade Debian on the eeePC to Squeeze, but this weekend, the power supply of my workstation died, and I had to work exclusively on the eeePC. These are the lessons.

My eeePC 701 is heavily space-constrained, I’ve partitioned it with 2.5GB for system, and 1.5GB for /home. Apart from performance, space was the major consideration.

No Gnome, no KDE

I decided earlier to only not to use gnome, and only to install KDE. Both come with about the same footprint in packages and libraries. As it turns out, KDE wasn’t a good idea either. With Akonadi and Nepomuk it tried to fill up my /home, and it generally proved to be a ressource-hog. I decided to get rid of it, and to replace all remaining KDE-software, mainly Kmail, Kaddressbook, Kopete, Kword and Kspread.

Dead Firefox

If you haven’t noticed, the firefox/iceweasel still delivered with Debian “squeeze”, 3.5.16, is dead. Dead like in “there are no more extensions which can be installed”. Like AdBlock Plus. You’ll need a Mozilla Backport, thankfully provied by the Debian Mozilla Team.

Embedded Debian

Use it. It saves about 25% to 30% of harddisk-space, solely by not installing documentation and translations, and by sometimes not having as many dependencies as the normal debian packages. The packages are binary-compatible with the normal debian-packages, so all you have to do is to add their repositories to your system:


deb http://www.emdebian.org/grip/ squeeze main dev debug java doc
deb-src http://www.emdebian.org/grip/ squeeze main dev debug java doc


As said, they integrate seamlessly, but due to their “em1” suffixed to the package-version, they will get preference (and some 2/3 of all packages will automatically be upgraded). You could control that with apt-pinning, of course, but I saw no need yet.

Big Screen

Since I had screen, mouse and keyboard available, I connected those to the eeePC. The monitor wouldn’t work at first, until I deleted /etc/X11/xorg.conf as the easiest thing to do. Also, it was unusable at 1920×1080 at 60Hz, so I calculated some modelines and made a small script for xrandr, to use 59.8Hz.


xrandr --newmode 1920x1080_59.80 172.50 1920 2048 2248 2576 1080 1083 1088 1120 -hsync +vsync
xrandr --addmode VGA1 1920x1080_59.80
xrandr --output VGA1 --mode 1920x1080_59.80


Applications

Now the applications I installed.

• Desktop Xfce4
• Mail Claws. Small and fast, and does a lot
• Jabber Psi. I also have mcabber, but this is more comfortable.
• Word-Processor abiword. Which I only did because with the emdebian-packages, it didn’t pull in the whole of gnome
• Spreadsheet gnumeric. Same as with abiword
• E-Reader fbreader
• PDF-Reader xpdf
• Movie-Player smplayer
• Editor tea. Apart from mcedit which does all my editing needs on the console, you sometimes need a graphical one.
• Terminal xfterm and rxvt-unicode. These took a lot of time to decide on. The first one is pretty basic, well-integrated into xfce and has tabs. The latter supports font-resizing, does utf-8, and generally does everything right that aterm, wterm, Eterm and mlterm do wrong.

I’ve been programming. First a fast replacement for displaying metadata of an EPUB-file:

$ epub-meta -v 1632.epub File: 1632.epub
Title: 1632
Author: aut: Eric Flint(Flint, Eric )
ID: ISBN (Unspecified:0-671-31972-8)
ID: uuid (uuid_id:b1d2b16c-f68d-4a80-9d02-f6fcac36e1f3)
Subject: Science Fiction
Publisher: Baen Publishing Enterprises
Date: Unspecified: 2000-02-07T05:00:00+00:00
Lang: en
Contrib: bkp: calibre (0.6.51) [http://calibre.kovidgoyal.net](calibre (0.6.51) [http://calibre.kovidgoyal.net])
Meta: calibre:series_index: 1.0
Meta: calibre:timestamp: 2010-05-07T16:59:51.299000+00:00
Meta: cover: 0671578499_Cover
Meta: calibre:series: Ring of Fire
Meta: calibre:user_categories: {}
Meta: calibre:author_link_map: {}

It has commandline-switches to selectively choose which metadata should be displayed. And it does it very fast, 3ms on my system, as opposed to 670ms ebook-meta from Calibre needs. However, it can only display the metadata, not change it. For changing metadata, you still need ebook-meta.

Having the ability to display metadata fast, made it possible to rename EPUB-files. Initially, I had the idea to do that in C too, but working with strings is actually quite tedious in C, so I decided on perl. So there’s now also a program called epub-rename, which renames EPUB-files according to it’s metadata in the format Author - Series SeriesIndex - Title. Moreover, it also has, trough ebook-meta, the ability to fix certain issues in metadata-tags. Namely change inverted Title/Author tags, fix Author-Tags which are in the wrong(!) Last, First-Format, and some more.

Well, here’s the “–help”
$ epub-rename --help
Usage: [options] [directory ...]

-v|--verbose
Show how all files would be renamed, not just those really
renamed.

And here’s the program itself: epub-meta-0.2.tar.gz. MIT-Licensed. Enjoy.

If you don’t like the spaces, punctuation and UTF-8-characters in the output filenames, I’d recommend another program of mine: bicapitalize.

If you have a certain library of E-Books from different sources (e.g. Baen, Gutenberg, Archive.org, Google Books) you will notice a disparaging plethora of different styles of annotating EPUB-files, sometimes blatantly wrong and in violation of the EPUB Standard itself.

So this is a Howto on how to enter these metadata correctly. I’ll mostly cover the program “ebook-meta” (part of Calibre) which is available on about every platform.

Encoding

EPUB uses UTF-8, and UTF-8 only. Still, if you don’t use things like left-and-right quotes and backquotes, you’ll make sure your tags don’t get messed up. Ideally, only use the single quote “‘”.

Vocabulary

Try to be consistent in the vocabulary for tags (genres, categories). Sadly, no vocabularies are specified by the standards right now.

Tags

• Title: This will contain the Title as it’s read. Don’t put in the author (yes, seen that). Don’t anticipate sorting by naming it “Title, The”, this is the task of the library program which sould do this. Don’t enter Series and Series Index. Don’t enter the author here.
• Title sort: You don’t need to enter that; at least ebook-meta usually sets this correctly.
• Author(s): Enter the author as named. Don’t enter the title here (also seen..), and don’t enter things like series or title after the author’s name. Don’t anticipate sorting by naming it “Name, First Name”. Enter it in the form “First Middle Last”. If the authors name is usually used with initials, use these. Don’t enter “John Ronald Reuel Tolkien”, but “J. R. R. Tolkien”. After an initial, enter a dot and a space. If there are several authors, enter all of them, when using “ebook-meta” separate them with “&”.
• Author sort: You don’t need to enter that; at least ebook-meta usually sets this correctly.
• Publisher: This is the original publisher. If you’re preparing an out-of-copyright e-book, don’t enter yourself. Also, don’t anticipate sorting but enter it as given.
• Languages: At least one language must be set, you can set several if the book is multi-lingual. The language-code is the 2-letter iso-code. Apparently it ignores localized ones such as “en-gb”.
• Published: This is the original publishing date. Not the date you’re preparing the e-book!
• Rights: Enter the year and copyright holder, if applicable, and a license if necessary. Like this: “Copyright 1954 by J. R. R. Tolkien” or “Copyright 2012 by Peter Keel, License CC-By-2.5” or “Public Domain” if the work is not protected by copyright anymore.
• Identifiers: Here go ISBN or ISSN (for magazines) or UUID. You can put in as many as ou like. “ebook-meta” allows only to set the ISBN and a BookID specifically.
• Comments: This is actually the “Description”-tag, and it’s supposed to hold the blurb which would otherwise go onto the flap or the back of a physical book. And it should not contain HTML-tags. Also, don’t make this too long.
• Series: This is a Calibre-specific tag, however it’s honored in many e-book-readers, so you really want to use this. Enter the series as spelled. Don’t take sorting into account. Don’t enter any series number.
• Series Index: Also Calibre-specific, but goes with support for the “Series”-tag. Enter a number here, corresponding to the number in the series.
• Tags: This one is really the “Subject”-tag. It contains as many tags as you wish on what the book is about. Enter the genre here as well. Enter tags separated by comma. Do NOT enter a blurb here.
• Category: This is probably the “Type” tag but support seems to be rather limited. in any way, the genre does NOT go into that, but rather things like “textbook” or “novel”.

There is a thing I’m pretty good at, and that’s playing Cassandra. I’ve got a knack on realizing what “unforeseen” impact and unwanted side-effects legislature will have. And usually after the shit hits the fan I can tell you “I told you so”. So this post here is to make sure I can say “I told you so” in a few years ;).

Well, this is what the patent system will look in the end. Essentially, we’ve got two possibilities:

1. Finish the bugger off. Abort it. Ditch those government-granted monopolies for good, so innovation can prosper once again.
2. Continue as before. Pump more money and resources into a machine for corporate-warfare.

The patent-system is a relatively modern law; some countries adopted something like it in the early 18th century, but most followed up only at the end of the 19th century, often on foreign pressure (well, it’s not easy to explain why you should pay patent-holders in e.g. France if you want to export there, while not having the same stick to punish French imports into your country, see? Incidentally, that’s what patent law boils down to…).

There had been lively debates about it then, with the gist of it being “we can very much do without it and it doesn’t help innovation, but if the other country is doing this to us, we should do the same to them…”.

Of course, all these debates and the evidence that a patent-system as such has profoundly NO impact on innovation have been forgotten long ago. The patent-system has found its proponents, first of course among lawyers, which swayed the public opinion around to “it’s necessary and it’s needed for innovation” (a propaganda produced superstition).

Only in the last few decades, patent-proponents made a land-grab in widening ever more the definitions on what’s patentable: processes instead of just products, software, business-processes and genomes. And with that finally tripped onto the toes of people which until then had nothing to do with patents, and who started to realize that there is something wrong with patents. And some others noticed too, how nicely patents can be used to kill their competition.

Nowadays, with the patent-wars in the mobile sector, it’s plain to see that there is something fundamentally screwed about patents. And if we don’t stop the whole mess, it’s also quite clear where this will lead to: The patent tax.

Simply put: Everyone producing anything (apart from art) will need patents. These might be patents one owns, but these won’t be enough. Since patents do not grant a positive right (If I have a patent, it does not grant me the right to make something, since this something could be covered by other patents as well; it only grants me the right to withhold someone else from making it without paying me) but only a negative one, everyone will need to license an arbitrary number of patents from everyone else.

There is (or will be), from a macro-economic point of view, absolutely nothing to be gained from patents. For the inventors neither, they will only get some small cut for their patents back, from what they will have to pay for licensing all those other patents. In fact, the only winners in this game are the patent offices themselves, and the lawyers.

There are estimates that about 20% of the cost of any mobile phone are patent costs even now. This will, or already has, spread to all other possible devices and patentable matter: computers, cars, planes, finance (business methods!), housing, agriculture, health-care and so on. And of course, you can expect this percentage to rise. In the end, what we will have is at least a 20% lawyers-tax on everything.

Do you really think this is a prospect for a sustainable society? All entities producing anything of value having to pay taxes to lawyers? A strange world indeed..

After having tried OpenEtna 6.3-rc7 (which is essentially Cyanogen-mod 6.X (Froyo) modified for the LG Eve) and constantly having problems because of some weird Bugs I decided to install some other version. Besides, OpenEtna appears rather dormant.

Luckily I found OpenEve, which is a patched Cynogen-mod 7.x, which in turn is a patched Android 2.3.4 (Gingerbread), snapshot 20110514a. Which happens to work nicely.

Initially I had some problems with the keyboard special keys not working correctly, but I managed to find a workaround; and the maintainer is actually fixing bugs and commenting in the bugtracker, as opposed to the OpenEtna-project which seems to have died.

The keyboard-issues might even stem from my earlier OpenEtna-settings, because I did not flush them. But all the other settings posed no problems, so it’s kinda nice to not have to restore backups.

Most important binaries are there, like a bash, busybox and dropbear (altough I still have to find out how to turn on dropbear). Midnight Commander is missing and I still didn’t manage to compile it, but I found a binary which somehow works, and can be disciplined with some tinkering (something which probably gets its own blog-post).

Sadly OpenEve’s development pace isn’t exactly fast, but you get new releases every few months.

Some time ago, I read Lock down your Android APK permissions by benn from Intrepidus Group.

I decided to automate the whole procedure, at least the unpacking, signing and repacking. Each app has to have it’s own key (lest the apps signed with the same key can access each others ressources!) which was the thing that most needed automation.

So I wrote some shell-scripts. The scripts are not only useful for changing the permissions of an app from any source (unpack, edit AndroidManifest.xml, resign), but also for android developers themselves. it’s much easier to manage keys and sign different apps with them.

So here they are:

• android-unpack Stupid script to decode .apk-files, all of those in a directory, actually.
• android-resign Script to pack .apk-files, and sign them. Each project with it’s own key.

Of course, if you re-sign foreign apps with your own key, they won’t be the same ones as on the Android Market, and thus not automatically upgradeable and will not use the same configuration.

I’ve got a n LG GW620. I chose this because it a) runs android and not some more stupid operating system b) it has a keyboard and c) it’s supported by an open project, namely OpenEtna, which among other things provides an updated operating system with a bash and a root-shell.

Now, I’m not the guy who stores anything on “The Cloud”. If there is anything out there that I deliberately store data on, it’s my own server, my own cloud.

So before upgrading I naturally decided to do a Backup, and of course I decided to use the software which advertised to Backup Everything. As it turned out, it doesn’t.

First off, the upgrade didn’t go very smoothly. After not having wiped cache and userdata, the Phone refused to continue at the “Welcome to GW620” screen. After wiping and flashing again, this worked.

Of course, all the settings were lost, and all the apps. So clearly, just put the backup-software onto the phone, and restore them. Turns out, the settings for going to the Android Market are lost as well, AND the friggin idiots only let you download the App from the Market! Thank you very much, you stupid twits. So make a backup of the apk-file onto your SD-card or harddisk before relying on it…

After having found some old version of “Backup Everything” which was thankfully downloadable with something other than the phone itself, I was able to restore “something” or “a bit”. SMS-archive, caller logs, access points, all there. Applications, Contacts, WLAN-credentials missing. It tried to reinstall some applications, but that mostly failed. At least it has a list of applications which you then can click on individually which opens a search on the Marketplace and install them.

The contacts I had to restore from an adressbook vcf from my harddisk (kaddressbook can export the addresses you choose to a vcf), but doubtless, some are missing. I only realized afterward that the android provides an “export contacts to SD-card” option by itself. But then, I didn’t expect “Backup Everything” not to backup everything.

I’m pretty sure some configuration-options of android itself, and also of applications are still wrong or missing. We’ll see.

Upon my research on 18th and early 19th century England, I stumbled upon a process that was taking place from the 16th to the 19th century in rural England.

It’s enclosure.

Basically, the medieval system is, that a village has, in addition to the fields of the individual farmers, a large commons, where all the inhabitants of that village can gather wood, graze livestock and so on.

This commons was now more and more split up amongst the villagers, with wealthier people buying land of the less wealthy ones, making subsistence-farming more and more impossible, and finally leading to widespread poverty in the 19th century.

And this is exactly the same process that’s happening since about 250 years with our intellectual commons.

Copyright, which was initially just that, a “right to make copies” and sell them, and which lasted 14 years from the publication of a work, became extended to “70 years after the death of the author” and incorporated more and more provisions for the copyright-holder.

Other laws wrapped under “intellectual property” are also working in the same spirit, none more so than patents, which provides not a monopoly on “being allowed to do something” (as copyright does) but a right of “prohibiting others to do something”. Which is of course much more far-reaching.

Trademarks also play a part in this, disallowing references to trademarks not only on ground of competition (as initially meant), but with any spurious explanation the trademark-holder can come up with to quash criticism, satire, art, history and everything else related to that trademark.

The theory, and thus the title, is of course, that these intellectual property laws are the equivalent of enclosures, and will lead to very much the same outcome in another dimension: poverty of intellectual capital and depredation of culture.

And with rows and hedges (read “technical measures”) to keep the now-inclosed commons in private hands, this will only get worse as the century wears on.

I was somewhat baffled about the success of Apples iTunes-Store.

As I detailed in an earlier article Schwarzkopien und Marktwirtschaft in german, illegal providers of copies of works are effectively a competition to legitimate providers. In principle, they offer the same product for less money. Market says, in that case, people will acquire the cheaper product. However, there are some factors which can change the outcome in different ways.

The works itself

• Digital Restrictions Management (DRM). This will somewhat alleviate the availability of people illegally giving out copies; on the other hand, it effectively punishes people buying from the legitimate vendor. It decreases the value of the legally obtained product.
• Metadata. This increases the value of products, especially if every product of this type supports the same metadata, ordered the same way. If I can offer 100’000 works, all tagged the same way, I have a distinctive advantage over people offering illegal copies, because those copies will not adhere to any common standard where metadata is concerned, as a result of the very fragmented nature of that “market”.
• Quality. This is another thing that increases the value of the product, and also something that can work in favor of the legitimate vendor, because here too, he can offer products of consistent quality all over the whole portfolio. Of course, if your quality is lower than the average quality of illegally offered works, you’re going to loose.
• Usability. This is on one hand related to DRM (which decreases usability by placing restrictions on what one can do; but also trough the demands of the DRM-system itself, i.e. the 50% increase in processing power needed by the Content Scrambling System of the DVD), but on the other hand also determined by other factors, like interoperability (can I access the work from different devices and operating systems), availability of software that can manage and/or process the work, bandwidth needed to transfer the work and processing power needed (which can be unrelated to DRM. For instance, compression needs processing power too). It’s a bit difficult to tell who can achieve an edge here, but generally, widely used and patent-unencumbered standards will have an edge here, because they attract programmers and manufacturers to produce software and devices designed to work with the content.

Distribution

These all apply to the works itself. But there are other factors which seem to make a crucial difference to shift the advantage towards the legitimate provider, and we can see that most prominently in the case of iTunes.

• Availability. How easy is it to get the desired works? And here, legitimate providers can really ramp up, in ways people offering illegally the same products can’t compete.
• Other competition. Actually, all works are in competition to each other. There are more works on this planet than anyone will ever be able to listen to, to read or to watch ever in his lifetime. This doesn’t affect people who illegally provide works; but it very much afflicts legitimate providers, insofar one can sell somebody only a limited amount of works. Since the body of works is so much bigger than anyone can consume, and there are even a great many works available legally for free, so apart from advertising and trend-setting, it can only mean one thing: Price.
• Price. On the outset, it looks like you can’t compete with a price-tag of “zero”. However, as it turns out, combined with easy ways to access and pay for the works, there is a price that is “low enough”. There are of course challenges for a legitimate provider to achieve this price, because historical precedents (i.e. “a book on paper was always this expensive”) and grown structures (like the byzantine ways of music- and movie-distributions) tend to get in the way. Right now, people illegally offering copies have the edge, but by abolishing of price fixing and radically re-structuring collecting agencies this could be fixed.

Law

And with “collecting agencies” and “byzantine distribution channels” we arrived at another very different factor influencing the competition between legitimate and illegitimate providers of works: The law

This is actually a bit hard to dissect, since it not only covers the relation between the creator and the final recipient of a work, but it also rules the relation between intermediaries and sometimes even institutes them.

• Acceptance. Right now, the law is not working in favor of the legitimate provider of works, although it was written by them, and designed to grant them rents. Which is precisely one of the problems, because nobody respects the law anymore, after all, it’s just right-holders giving themselves more and more rights to allow them to collects rents.
• Complications. The structure of how works should be distributed and the return-paths of payments have been cemented in by laws, sometimes instituting collection agencies who should work on behalf of rights-holders, and making it generally very difficult for someone who wants to re-sell works.
• Unknown rights. A further problem induced by law, is that for a large body of works, the right-holders are unknown (orphaned works), impossible to get (because they were split amongst heirs) or very difficult to get (because of byzantine machinations of right-holder cartels sanctioned by law, e.g. right-holders representatives differing regionally, making it impossible to (re-)sell a work in an international market).
• Outlawing tools. This is a bit nonsensical. A solution looking for a problem. The idea is to outlaw tools which can be used to break DRM systems. However, apart from decreasing acceptance of the law, it also produces problems regarding accessibility, and reliance on it might lead to very grave problems in the future, for instance with archival. Right now, it does not help legitimate vendors and is mainly used to quench competition in fields unrelated to illegal copying.

Final notes

Finally, a lot hinges on the law.

Ideally, you want to have rights to a lot of works, in order to make them easily available in high quality with consistent meta-data and no DRM for a low price. This will allow you to compete successfully against copies offered illegally, which are more or less tedious to get, of wildly varying quality, have inconsistent meta-data, but no DRM and a price-tag of zero.

To get that body of works, the law isn’t helping you right now, it’s hindering you in various ways. Also, the sheer land-grab by previous generations of right-holders has left the general public with disdain and with no respect for copyright.

There will always be people illegally offering works, but the point is that this phenomenon should be relegated to a small percentage of the market. Because it should be easier for you to legally publish works, and easier for the public to acquire such works, leaving only people who really can’t afford even to pay very low prices to need to revert to illegally offered copies.

References

I’ve written a lot about these issues. So if you think there is too little evidence presented, or would like to have addressed some issues a bit more in-depth, here’s the other things I’ve written:

• Ways out of Darkness – Re-Attenuating Copyright How to fix Copyright.
• Aufstand der Toten — per Urheberrecht On the consequences of granting rights beyond the death of the creator.
• Artificial Scarcity When old works compete with your new ones.
• Stealing from the Public Domain Indulging in Copyfraud by claiming copy rights to public domain works.
• Intellectual “Property” and other contradictions The rhetoric of proponents of a prohibitionist and mercantilist copyright
• Urheberunrecht Outlawing cryptanalysis for the sake of “protecting content”.
• Copyprotection doesn’t work On the futility of Digital Restriction Management (DRM).
• Schwarzkopie und Marktwirtschaft Illegal copies are in competition with legal ones.