It's a huge shame, but the EU Parliament has voted to extend copyright on performances from 50 to 70 years despite the fact that this breaks the deal made with the public, goes against the entire purpose of copyright law and has been shown to cause significant harm to the music business. The various member states still need to agree to this individually, but it's ridiculous that it could even get this far. This is a huge boost for some record labels and some big name musicians, who will simply pad their earnings at the expense of new and struggling musicians. If you want a sense of how ridiculous the whole thing is, just read this section of the linked article:

The measure must still be passed by individual countries, and even if this is done by this summer, only recordings made in the 50 years before that point will qualify for the extended copyright.

This means that Sir Cliff [Richard] will lose control of income from his first hit, Move It, as well as from Living Doll, his fourth single, written by Lionel Bart and recorded in late April 1959, which sealed Cliff's place as Britain's answer to Elvis Presley.

This will not necessarily dismay him. Sir Cliff was unavailable for comment yesterday at his holiday retreat in Barbados, but when he travelled to Brussels last year for talks on the proposals he said: 'I'm absolutely fed up with singing Living Doll but I have sung it constantly since 1959 because every time I sing it live, it generates sales of the original record and royalties to me.'

Poor Cliff Richard. He's at his holiday retreat in the Bahamas, consoling himself over the fact he no longer has to sing a song he hates just to generate royalty checks... but his other songs from 50 years ago will just keep paying off.

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The latest joke of a lawsuit from Hollywood, over Real Networks' RealDVD software, began today. The movie studios were actually able to get the judge to close the courtroom and kick out the press, despite not following the normal procedures to request such a move. If you haven't followed the case at all, basically Hollywood is suing RealNetworks for making software that allows you to back up your own DVDs, though it places significant limitations on them. What's really odd about this is that there are tons of free DVD rippers out there that put no restrictions whatsoever. In Real's case, it puts significant limitations on the backup copies -- and courts have shown in the past that making a backup of a digital good is accepted as fair use. Taking Real's product off the market makes almost no sense at all.

However, it seems like Hollywood's argument is based on the claim that Real somehow is using 'hacker' technology in its product that violates the DMCA. It's not clear why using hacker technology should make the situation any different than having built your own. The MPAA is also claiming that there is no fair use defense to backing up a DVD, which is difficult to believe, given that fair use covers backups of music and software. What makes a movie so different? Well, the MPAA, of course, will claim (as it did in a previous case, against 321 Studios) that the encryption makes it illegal.

And that's where the problems come in. Thanks to the anti-circumvention clause of the DMCA, an action that is clearly fair use (backing up a movie) becomes illegal not because of the backup, but because of the circumvention of the DRM. That should go against all common sense: if the action itself is legal fair use, why should it matter how it's done (or who made the software)? Unfortunately, we don't often see common sense win out in these cases... and the early reports from the court room suggest that the judge is siding with the MPAA. Perhaps this isn't a surprise. Marilyn Hall Patel is the same judge who declared Napster illegal as well, despite a strong safe harbor defense. In this case, she told RealNetworks:

'They have the copyright. That's the issue here right? They have the copyright. They have the right to exclude.'

That's actually a somewhat scary quote from the judge who should know better. Copyright does give them a right to exclude, but a limited right, which is supposed to be weighed against the rights of consumers, including their rights to fair use for things like (drum roll....) making a backup.

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While The Pirate Bay ruling is now quite tainted, and about to go through at least an appeal if not a full retrial, it seems that the entertainment industry has wasted no time at all using the ruling to threaten a bunch of other sites, telling them that the're next if they don't shut down. In fact, some already are shutting down, as they'd rather not deal with a similar lawsuit.

Obviously, the entertainment industry still thinks it won this case. But, as we noted when the ruling came out, it's actually quite a loss for the industry, because it makes them think the legal response is working. Their reaction to the result highlights that. But look a bit closer at the details and you realize just how badly the industry is shooting itself in the foot (repeatedly). Lots of people have pointed to the fact that the Pirate Party in Sweden has rapidly grown in membership, making it one of the larger political parties in the country, and its political ambitions are growing.

But... even more interesting, as pointed out by Michael Scott is the news that The Pirate Bay itself has seen its own traffic and popularity grow noticeably thanks to the trial. Once again, the entertainment industry's strategy has only driven more people to find out about the site and what it does. What's amazing is that the entertainment industry should already know this. After all, what kicked this whole trial off was a big raid which briefly shut down The Pirate Bay, but which also put the site into the worldwide media, and massively increased awareness of the site... a trend that only grew as the press coverage continued.

By far, the biggest promoter of The Pirate Bay has been the entertainment industry itself. If the Pirate Bay guys owe the entertainment industry any money at all, it should be for all the promoting the entertainment industry has done for the site.

Meanwhile, as Hollywood stupidly celebrates all this as a victory, others are noting that the next generation of file sharing systems coming down the road will be nearly impossible for the entertainment industry to stop. The entertainment industry doesn't even realize what battle it's fighting, which is why it still thinks this trial has been a victory.

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Congress is apparently holding hearings this week about behavioral advertising -- the controversial online practice of targeting ads to people based on where they surf. In the past, Congress has suggested that firms such as NebuAd that do this are breaking the law. However, it appears that AT&T may have been less than truthful in its own testimony. The company took a hardline stance against behavioral advertising that wasn't clear and set up as an opt-in approach. Yet, as MediaPost notes, a top behavioral advertising company named Audience Science, lists AT&T as a customer and has a testimonial on the site. When a Congressional Rep asked AT&T's policy VP who was testifying about the company (accidentally calling it 'Audio Science'), AT&T claimed it didn't have a relationship with the company. When the MediaPost reporter asked Audience Science about all of this, AT&T's logo suddenly disappeared from the company's website.

Now, it seems quite likely that this is all a rather innocent mistake -- and the AT&T VP, Dorothy Attwood, simply didn't know about the company's relationship with Audience Science. AT&T is a big company, and certainly the left hand might not always know what the right hand is doing -- but that's a big part of the problem here. Even when an official company policy might be to avoid these sorts of things, there's as half decent chance that someone lower down on the totem pole has signed off on a deal to make use of these technologies.

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With Oracle purchasing Sun, there's been some fretting over whether or not the company will harm MySQL (which Sun bought a few years back), as it's certainly a competitor to Oracle's core database product. My guess is that Oracle's a lot more interested in owning Java than harming MySQL, and am hopeful that Oracle recognizes the benefits of supporting MySQL. But, even if the company does go in the other direction, it's difficult to see much to worry about. The demand and opportunity for an open source database is so big, that others would quickly pop up (and, of course, there are already other open source databases out there -- some of which are already considered superior to MySQL). However, even more interesting is the news (pointed to us by Tim Lee) that many of MySQL's main developers have left the company (or are planning to), and one of MySQL's founders is already looking to hire other key MySQL developers to fork the software and keep on developing the software. Sometimes it's pretty difficult for a fork to get the attention it needs to survive, but certainly it can work, especially if there are concerns about the direction of the original product.

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So Time Warner Cable has supposedly backed off its metered broadband until it can figure out how to do a better job presenting it (though, it's also threatening to delay upgrades if people don't accept caps or meters). Yet, as reader Matthew Henry alerts us, it appears that Time Warner Cable has instead just started kicking 'unlimited' users offline without much warning. Apparently, when the user called to ask what was up, he was told he shouldn't have used so much of his unlimited broadband account. This is the sort of stuff Comcast used to do years ago and which helped contribute to its awful reputation. Nice of Time Warner Cable to try to fix its own reputation by going down the same bad path.

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A bunch of folks have sent in this story about a copyright lobbying group in Finland that is threatening to sue a website that helps people rent textbooks, oddly calling it 'The Pirate Bay for textbooks.' That makes no sense if you understand what the site actually does. It's not hosting ebooks. It's literally connecting people who own textbooks to others, so they can rent their physical textbooks. It's difficult to see how that could be considered copyright infringement at all, let alone anything similar to The Pirate Bay. But, in this day and age, where the copyright lobbyists see almost anything as infringement, perhaps it's no surprise they'd freak out about this as well.

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There have been plenty of questions about YouTube's fingerprinting system and how it works, and the EFF notes that an enterprising YouTube user figured that with a little experimentation, he could perhaps figure out how the system worked. Basically, he uploaded 82 different versions of a song, to see what YouTube caught... and what it didn't. He's put together a list of what he found out that's worth reading through, noting that it could still 'catch' plenty of distorted content and that it reviews every video as soon as it's uploaded. But perhaps the most interesting (and surprising) bit: it seems to only look at the beginning of the video. He found that if he left the first 30 seconds blank, the system didn't catch anything. But if just played the first 30 seconds of a song, the video got flagged... There are some other interesting findings as well, that pretty much highlight how questionable some of these fingerprinting systems are in terms of accurately identifying the content in question.

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First up, a disclosure: back in college, Nathaniel Stern, one of the main characters in this post, was a very close friend of mine -- someone I hung out with a lot. After college, though, he and I mostly lost touch -- other than a random email or Facebook message back and forth. The last time I heard from him, in fact (and the first time I'd heard from him in at least two years), was when he sent out an email alerting me to the fact that he (along with one other artist) had launched a project called WikipediaArt. The idea was to create an art project on Wikipedia, but which stayed within Wikipedia's rules. Nat's become a pretty well-known artist over the years, often experimenting in new media art, and the project itself struck me as quite interesting, though I doubted it was even remotely possible, given the way Wikipedia works. You knew that it would get deleted. However, I never expected the folks behind Wikimedia to go legal on them.

But, that's what's happened.

Both the EFF and Paul Levy (who has agreed to represent Wikipedia Art) have alerted us to the news that Wikipedia is demanding the artists hand over their domain by threatening legal action. As the EFF and Levy point out, this is a rather surprising move by the Wikipedia foundation, who should know better than to make a bogus demand on a URL just because it includes Wikipedia's name in it:

Wikipedia should know better. There is no trademark or cybersquatting issue here. First, the site is entirely noncommercial, which puts it beyond the reach of U.S. trademark law. Moreover, even if U.S. trademark laws somehow reached this noncommercial activity, the artists' use of the mark is an obvious fair use. Wikipedia Art uses the 'Wikipedia' mark to refer to the project: a critical comment on Wikipedia and creativity. The disputed site describes the project, provides links to media coverage of the project, and so on. It does not use any more of the Wikipedia mark than need be; for example, it doesn't even use the Wikipedia logo. Simply put, the site does not purport to be, nor does it look anything like, Wikipedia and the artists have done nothing to suggest Wikipedia endorses their work. Finally, the creators are engaging in precisely the kind of critical speech sheltered by the First Amendment.

While the EFF does note how odd it is for Wikipedia to be taking these actions, it leaves out the fact that Wikipedia is represented by Mike Godwin, (of Godwin's Law fame), who was also the first EFF in-house lawyer and absolutely should know better than this. Hopefully Godwin and Wikipedia come to their senses, apologize and back down.

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Earlier this week, the blogworld spent plenty of time analyzing a ridiculously bad WSJ 'article' by pollster Mark Penn about the number of professional bloggers and how much they make. Having been in the 'profession' for about as long as anyone, it took one glance to know that the number he was talking about didn't even come close to passing the laugh test. It was so silly that I didn't even think it was worth posting about it (beyond an offhand comment on Twitter. However, plenty of others went through the numbers and pointed out how ridiculous they were. Scott Rosenberg and ReadWriteWeb are two examples of bloggers doing a great job digging into the numbers and showing how Penn's number aren't even close to accurate. There's also a separate issue about why the WSJ is allowing a PR guy like Penn to write an article presenting him as if he were a regular journalist, but we'll leave that aside for now.

However, (and here's where it gets funny), another mainstream source, Bonnie Erbe, of US News & World Report, used Penn's report to write an article trashing bloggers. And yet, pretty much everything she accuses bloggers of doing, she or Penn do themselves:

They are the technology age's equivalent of reporters and columnists, but without the degree of separation that used to protect readers and consumers from being targeted for commercial or political purposes, that old-fashioned edited newspapers and magazines used to (and to a limited extent, still do) provide.

Hmm. So, it's the bloggers who are sneakily providing commercial or political messages... and not Mark Penn, a political pollster and corporate PR flack being able to write his own biased, poorly fact checked and often just incorrect article in the 'prestigious' Wall Street Journal? And Erbe simply believes this professional spinmaster over those who actually have some knowledge and experience with what he's talking about... and then claims it's the bloggers who are likely to write for commercial or political purposes? Wow.

The problem is, veracity is deleted and placed in the trash bin. Unverified opinion is taking its place. Well-written, fact-checked opinion has a storied place in journalism history. But off-the-cuff, on-the-take opinion does not. Yet there is much more of the latter on the Internet than the former.

Yes, again, she seems to have gotten it exactly backwards. In this case, it was the WSJ article where 'veracity' was deleted and placed in the trash bin, replaced by Penn's unverified opinion. Meanwhile, the well-written, fact-checked opinion came from (oops) the bloggers she now accuses of not doing it.

The column goes on to say that the way to generate traffic to an Internet site is to make it as outrageous as possible. 'Outrageous' on the Internet usually comes in one of two forms: 1) pornography or 2) wildly unsubstantiated, extreme opinions.

Hmm... wildly unsubstantiated, extreme opinions like 'Internet, Bloggers' Half-Truths Are Killing Newspapers and Journalism' (which happens to be the title of Erbe's writeup here...

The fact that, as Penn discloses, some bloggers are making as much as $200,000 per year and many of them are doing so by shilling for companies or selling consumer goods is downright scary. Consumers need a filter. They need to know if someone is saying something just to grab one's attention, or touting a product because that person is being paid by an advertiser to tout it.

How much does Mark Penn make shilling for companies? Isn't that scary?

I used to be friendly with a woman who quit a high-level job at a cable news organization because she insisted on the old 'two source' rule. That rule, observed by all reputable news organizations, insisted that no one could publish or broadcast a source story, unless that story was confirmed by two independent sources. The cable network wanted to put on air stories based on information from one source and she quit rather than comply. How old-fashioned of her!

So, let's see... Erbe bases this entire article on a single source (which was proven wrong by multiple other sources) and 'goes to press' with it, and then says that 'all reputable news organizations' observe a 'two source rule,' which she totally ignores herself. How new media of her!

Honestly, reading her complaints about bloggers and realizing she commits every single one of them, while missing out on the fact that it was the 'bloggers' she dismisses who actually provided the credible analysis and reporting on this story, would make me think that her piece was pure satire. But, looking over her other columns, it doesn't appear that she's the satire sort of person. Or perhaps I'm wrong. I haven't checked that with two sources, so clearly I'm part of the crew that's destroying journalism. But I'm sure fond of irony.

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Following up on the earlier story of Time Warner Cable going the political route to try to block municipal competition in Wilson, North Carolina, Broadband Reports has a story pointing out two interesting side stories:

1. During hearings about the law to ban such municipal competition, the politicians pushing the bill that would ban municipal competition were asked to clarify, and rather than answer themselves, the politicians 'turned to a Time Warner staff member and an attorney who represents the industry to speak on their behalf.' In other words, they outright admitted they didn't understand their own legislation and that the corporate lawyers from the company that would benefit from the legislation understood it better than they did. It's certainly no surprise that lobbyists write the legislation that politicians pass, but usually they at least try to hide it a little bit. Here they're basically flaunting the fact that Time Warner Cable wrote the bill, and the politicians just shuffled it through the process without understanding it. Isn't it great to be a servant of the people?
2. Time Warner Cable is complaining about what a huge cost municipal broadband is to the people of Wilson, but leaves out the fact that Time Warner Cable's CEO's compensation from the past two years is greater than it cost the city of Wilson (via a bond measure, so not taxpayer dollars) to fund the deployment of the fiber network. And you have to wonder if Time Warner Cable will end up spending more trying to block this competition than it would have cost to have built out a competitive quality service as well.

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Earlier this year, we took on why journalists who were quoting Thomas Jefferson's famous line: 'were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate to prefer the latter' were missing the point, noting that he really meant journalism not newspapers -- and journalism isn't going away at all. However, Jay Rosen points out that the quote is actually out of context. The full Jefferson quote even more clearly makes the point that it's not physical newspapers, he's concerned about:

'The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter. But I should mean that every man should receive those papers and be capable of reading them.' -- Thomas Jefferson

From that quote, it seems likely that Jefferson would be quite a fan of the web and the fact that news on the web was free and widely available -- contrary to the point made by most old school news folks quoting it.

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Earlier this year, we noted that with the rise of the ability to film and broadcast video directly from mobile phones, it was only a matter of time until we ran into some legal battles about fans filming and 'broadcasting' a live sporting event. Now, while those who control the venues can certainly put their own restrictions about what you do while on their property, it's going to become increasingly impossible to stop people from filming with their mobile phones. The next question, though, is what happens to that footage?

A bunch of folks have sent in a story by Rory Cellan-Jones about how YouTube took down a video he had uploaded of 37 seconds of a football (soccer for us Americans) match in the UK he had attended. As he noted, he knew that the football leagues in the UK were angry over their content being webcast, but he thought it was for taking the official stream and rebroadcasting it online.

This actually raises a lot of questions. I'm not sure of the details on UK copyright law here, so perhaps it's different, but in the US, the copyright on the video would belong to Cellan-Jones, since he took the video. The league would have every right to demand he stop or to remove him from the stadium, but it's not clear if it could stop him from posting it online afterwards -- and it certainly wouldn't be allowed to file a copyright notice demanding it be taken down, as that would be falsely representing themselves as the copyright holder on the content. It doesn't sound like Cellan-Jones is looking to fight this, but this question isn't going to go away, and I'm sure eventually we'll see some lawsuits on this very topic.

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You may recall last summer that we wrote about Gary Odom (as known as Patent Hawk) who has been known to stop by our site here to throw around an insult or two (nice guy!). It seems that Odom, who had previously worked with Microsoft, doing prior art research for its patents, had decided to turn around and sue Microsoft for having software toolbars that take different toolbar items and group the items together (stunning innovation, there). It later turned out that he may have violated his contracts in suing Microsoft.

That case is still ongoing, but why stop with just suing one company? Especially when that company is big and has lots of lawyers. Why not sue 28 other companies over the same patent. Amusingly, when Joe Mullin from IP Law & Business called Odom to comment, Odom refused, saying: 'You're a hack job, man.' Always a pleasant guy, that Odom. However, Odom had no problem discussing at length the lawsuit on his own blog -- amusingly referring to himself in the third person, and (this is great) offering his own 'expert' opinion on the validity of his own patents and lawsuit. Very credible.

While it seems quite likely that the patent in question (Tool group manipulations) is invalid following the Bilski decision, Odom brushes aside those concerns saying anyone suggesting that '[doesn't] know what they are talking about' and then offers his own interpretation of the Bilski ruling, which doesn't seem to mesh with what the ruling actually said, or how the courts and the USPTO have been interpreting the ruling. Still, let's give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he's right, and that the patent is still valid. So what does he want?

Well, from his post, it appears he wants these companies to shut up and hand over 25% of their profits, based on a rule of thumb from half a century ago. Think about this back here in reality for a second. He's asking for 25% of all profits on nearly 30 different software products, because those software products happen to have toolbar menus where the buttons are in editable groups. This is an obvious minor feature on a minor feature of a minor feature. And he thinks it's fair and equitable to get 25% of all profits.

People like to point out these days that pretty much any high tech product in some way or another violates tens to hundreds of patents, thanks to the happy rapidity with which the USPTO approves any old obvious idea. Imagine if each one got to demand 25% of all profits as a license? It doesn't take a math major to recognize how the assertion makes no sense.

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Over the years, we've had plenty of stories about companies trying to limit the ability of resellers to sell their products online, with companies claiming that reselling shampoo or cosmetics on eBay is somehow illegal because of a contract the wholesaler made with its own resellers. Usually these lawsuits don't get very far. Whatever agreement the wholesaler and the reseller had, the eventual seller online usually wasn't a party to those agreements and isn't bound by them -- and (reasonably) the courts recognize that you shouldn't be barred from reselling a product you legally purchased (that whole first sale thing).

However, there are some exceptions, and Eric Goldman points us to the latest one. A reseller of radar detectors has effectively been barred from selling a certain brand on eBay, claiming that it was trademark infringement. But what about those first sale rights? Well, apparently this case gets around them by claiming that the product being resold by this company Midwest Inventory Distribution is a different product, because it doesn't come with the same warranty (Midwest offers its own warranty and the original company, Beltronics, refuses to honor warranties on these resold radar detectors). The court also seemed to have problems with the fact that Midwest didn't properly 'disclose' this information, even though every auction stated clearly that Midwest offered its own warranty and Beltronics wouldn't provide any warranty coverage.

As Goldman notes, this seems based on some questionable theories, and conceivably could allow companies to skirt around first sale rules, by claiming that anyone reselling their products online are engaging in trademark infringement, because the 'warranties' on the products are different -- even if the products themselves are really identical. As Goldman rights:

The net result then is that eBay buyers willing to pay a discount for an identical radar detector but with only Midwest's warranty instead of Beltronics' won't get that choice. Instead, they get the pleasure of buying at the minimum resale price set by Beltronics.

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Via Romenesko comes the news that the Chicago Tribune's own 'recession reporter' wasn't just laid off in the latest round, but was then stopped from posting a story about the experience. Well, he actually published it and it was quickly taken down by Trib editors. Of course, because of the takedown, the text of his blog post is now getting a lot more attention. Reading it over, it's difficult to see what the Trib was concerned about. It seems like the type of writing they would want in their publication -- humanizing the situation, while still being respectful of what's happening.

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For about five years, there's been an effort to whip up hype around the supposed threat of mobile viruses and malware. Pretty much all of that hype's come from anti-virus vendors, so it's been pretty suspect, particularly as this threat they've been hyping for so long has failed to materialize. It's true that there have been quite a few pieces of mobile malware, but they've failed to spread for a number of reasons. The biggest factor is fragmentation: different vendors use different operating systems on their phones, rendering all sorts of software, including malware, incompatible from one handset to the next. Mobile operators also play a part, since it's relatively easy for them to filter out malware traveling across their networks via SMS. In short, the mobile environment is vastly different from the PC world when it comes to security, so it's unreasonable to think that malware will operate in the same way in both.

Some academic researchers are now saying that the only thing holding back a tidal wave of mobile malware is that no single operating system has sufficient market share, but once one hits 10 percent, phones running it are dead meat. But that argument doesn't wash, nor do the researchers' claims that an MMS-based virus could infect an entire population of devices in a matter of hours. First, the market share figure doesn't make a lot of sense, given that platforms like Nokia's Series 40 already feature in hundreds of millions of devices, creating a large target population. Second, MMS messages still have to travel through operators' servers, so they're much easier to scan for malware than PC-based communications. As long as operators' malware filters are working as they should, it won't be too difficult to stop the spread of an MMS virus. But perhaps the biggest factor holding back mobile malware is that there really isn't any money in it for virus authors. Botnets of mobile phones aren't much use for sending out spam, and generally, the money trail created by any sort of premium-message scam can be relatively easily tracked. The closed nature of mobile networks and mobile devices makes them much less susceptible to malware than internet-connected PCs, and no amount of hype will change that.

Carlo Longino is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Carlo Longino and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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We pointed out last week that it was no surprise that the new InDenver Times operation, that sprang forth from reporters from the defunct Rocky Mountain News, was unable to meet its target of 50,000 subscribers before launching. However, it turns out that they only got around 3,000 subscribers, or around 6% of their goal. Not surprisingly, the folks who originally wanted to finance the operation have now backed out, over disagreements over how many people to employ. As some are noting, the reporters seem to think that you can just recreate a fully staffed newsroom from scratch, rather than building it up organically like a startup. Sure, there's obviously a feeling of bringing along a team from the old Rocky, but the idea is to get it right where that paper failed as a business -- and you don't do that by setting up the same bad cost structure (or... by trying to charge for subscriptions online).

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There's a popular saying among copyright maximalists, that if copyright must be 'for limited times,' it should be 'forever minus a day.' And, in fact, part of the problem with the so-called 'education' campaign that copyright supporters have been pushing over the past decade or so is that they never bother to spend much time on consumer rights, fair use or the importance of the public domain. So, it should come as little surprise that the default thinking among many is that copyright does, in fact, last forever. Witness this story that plenty of folks have been sending in, about the United Nations new World Digital Library that has posted ancient texts from around the world. Just one problem... the site is claiming that the texts may be covered by copyright, even though many of the texts are older than 8,000 years. Obviously, the copyright claim is wrong, but it seems to be the default position taken by lawyers these days, and many people who have falsely been told that 'sharing' equals 'theft' will believe that copyright lasts forever. For anyone who actually recognizes the importance and value of the public domain, and how it's helped expand our creative culture over the years, this should be quite depressing.

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If you have an old Nokia 1100 phone, maybe it's time to dust it off and try selling it in Germany where hackers claim to have figured out a way to use certain Nokia phones to steal authentication codes for bank transactions. There are a few reports that these old phones (if they were made in a very specific factory, not just any old model...) are selling for ridiculous amounts -- ranging from $700 to $30,000 -- presumably because the handsets are so hard to find and are valuable to hackers prone to crime. So far, Nokia says it can't imagine any way for these old phones to be hacked for banking fraud. But not surprisingly, security vendors are quick to point out the plausibility of this type of phone hacking -- since security firms can obviously benefit from unfounded fears that encourage consumers to buy security software regardless of the actual need for it. Is it really that hard to ask a security vendor what the likelihood would be for a criminal to actually succeed in such a scam? Hopefully, the odds of actually stealing any money with these ancient phones are approaching zero -- especially now that the tools to implement the fraud are known and apparently getting quite expensive. Perhaps the real suckers in this story are the gullible hackers who are buying old phones in shady forums for prices that are well more than the phones are worth?

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