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 From : Sergey Lentsov                       2:4615/71.10   01 Mar 2001  18:11:07
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 Subject : URL: http://lwn.net/2001/0301
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    See also: [44]last week's LWN.
    
 Leading items and editorials
 
    Ogg Vorbis, the Xiph foundation, and a licensing change. Some readers
    have suggested that our coverage of Ogg Vorbis could be improved...
    given the announcements from the project this week, this seems like a
    good time to catch up. So here goes...
    
    The Ogg project has given itself the goal of creating a
    high-performance, [45][Ogg Vorbis Logo] free multimedia system. All
    kinds of goodies are planned for the future; for now, the project
    offers:
      * The "Vorbis" compressed audio format. This format has been put
        into the public domain, and is thus freely usable by anybody. It
        is, of course, offered as a way around the patent problems with
        the popular MP3 format. Vorbis users need not pay patent royalties
        to anybody. The open nature of the format also encourages
        improvements; the project claims that Vorbis files already sound
        better than MP3 files of the same size, and that things are
        steadily improving.
      * A set of libraries for working with Vorbis files. Python bindings
        are available as well.
      * Various application-level goodies, including player plugins for
        xmms and FreeAMP, encoders and players, and more.
        
    Those who are curious about the origin of the name can check out
    [46]this page, which describes it in detail. "Ogg," as it turns out,
    comes from the classic Netrek multiplayer space war game (once the
    cause of much lost time on your editor's part); it signifies a suicide
    attack - though, in this context, it has been reinterpreted slightly.
    "Vorbis" comes from a science fiction novel. And the logo:
    
      The 'Thor-and-the-Snake' logo is drawn somewhat from Norse
      mythology; the real symbolism is the sine-curve shape of the snake.
      Thor is hefting Mjollnir about to compress the periodic signal
      JЖrmungandr... See, it all makes sense.
      
    Ogg Vorbis has the potential to have an impact far beyond the free
    software community. The MP3 patent is a problem for just about anybody
    (or any company) working with audio. Solid-state audio players, game
    consoles, desktop software, and more are all affected. A clearly free
    alternative with better performance characteristics will be appealing
    in many applications.
    
    To help Ogg Vorbis achieve world domination in its niche, its
    developers threw in a couple of important announcements along with
    [47]the beta 4 library release. They are:
      * A new foundation, the "Xiph.org Foundation," has been created to
        promote the use of open multimedia standards. It will be a
        nonprofit organization, which will be hitting up companies for
        funds to carry out its work.
      * As of the beta 4 release, the Ogg Vorbis libraries are no longer
        licensed under the LGPL; instead, the BSD license will be used.
        
    The purpose of the license change, of course, is to help establish the
    Ogg Vorbis standard by allowing vendors to use the library code in
    proprietary products. Establishing the standard is important enough
    that even Richard Stallman, who normally [48]advocates more
    restrictive licensing for libraries, has [49]endorsed the Ogg Vorbis
    license change:
    
      Ordinarily, if someone decides not to use a copylefted program
      because the license doesn't please him, that's his loss not ours.
      But if he rejects the Ogg/Vorbis code because of the license, and
      uses MP3 instead, then the problem rebounds on us--because his
      continued use of MP3 may help MP3 to become and stay entrenched.
      
    In other words, Ogg Vorbis, despite its attractive features, has an
    uphill battle ahead of it. Some flexibility in licensing is, in this
    case, warranted; it may be the deciding factor which establishes a
    free audio (and, eventually, video) encoding standard. We wish them
    luck.
    
    Copyright law and business models. The February 24 issue of The
    Economist has a leading editorial on the Napster case. Therein, it is
    written:
    
      But the Napster case is not just, or even mainly, about piracy. It
      is about business models. The industry wants to stick to its old
      one - selling expensive compact discs - and to protect it. But
      Napster's success shows that there is a lot of appetite for a new
      model. The old model is legal, but the new one is not, since the
      industry refuses to endorse it.
      
      Artists' interests deserve legal protection, within limits;
      business models do not.
      
    Unfortunately, the Economist's business model states that [50]this
    article is "premium content," available only to subscribers.
    
    Very little coverage of the current intellectual property disputes
    have pointed out this basic fact - piracy is not the issue. It is,
    instead, a dishonest smokescreen put up by those who feel that a
    lucrative business is threatened by new technologies. This despite the
    fact that, usually, those businesses do better than ever after new
    technologies become established.
    
    Thus, the music industry decides to shut down Napster, rather than
    work with it to create a new business that would clearly have willing
    customers. Similarly, the DVDCCA tries to employ the Digital
    Millennium Copyright Act to put the DeCSS genie back in the bottle.
    DeCSS has nothing to do with piracy of movies, but it is lethal to
    things like the "region coding" scheme that prevents people in the
    U.S. from watching European DVDs (and vice versa).
    
    There is, of course, nothing new here. For some perspective, we
    recommend a perusal of [51]Chapter 2 of Digital Copyright, a book by
    Jessica Litman. It discusses how copyright holders have worked for
    many years to have copyright law serve their interests, and how users
    of copyrighted material have not been represented in the process.
    
      If Congress were in the habit of looking hard at copyright
      proposals to see whether their substantive provisions were good
      policy, or would interact in good ways with other policies, one
      might have expected this exercise to come to an early end. People
      who aren't copyright lawyers, after all, would look at the digital
      copyright agenda and say, "there's something wrong with this
      picture". But, because the tradition in copyright legislation
      involves getting a bunch of copyright lawyers to sit at a
      bargaining table and talk with one another, a lot of important
      questions were never asked.
      
    Reading the entire chapter takes some time, but is worth the effort.
    
    An obvious question comes to mind here: given this pattern of using
    copyright law (and other legal tools) to attempt to preserve lucrative
    business models, what kind of response will free software generate?
    Free software does indeed threaten business models based on
    intellectual property, and it is starting to make some companies
    nervous.
    
    We have seen some responses already. The CueCat affair was an attempt
    by Digital Convergence to head off a free software threat to its
    business; in that case, the company eventually declared victory
    without actually changing anything. DeCSS threatens the film
    industry's control over how its customers can use films they have
    bought, and the industry has responded with a copyright-based
    challenge.
    
    The battle against free software will be fought with proprietary
    formats, reverse engineering bans, software patents, and so on. Expect
    it to get ugly. But the free software community has a number of strong
    weapons that the copyright industry has not had to face before. It is
    a large, global, and vocal group, which is easily able to organize
    itself electronically. Free software increasingly has the backing of
    large businesses which see it as an important part of their future.
    And the nature of free software makes it hard to stop - it is an
    interesting exercise to see how long it takes to find a copy of DeCSS,
    despite over a year of constant, well-funded effort on the DVDCCA's
    part. And, of course, the free software community's ability to create
    great code is unparalleled. A fight is coming, but we should be able
    to win.
    
    (And we'll have fun doing it. For those who haven't seen it, the
    [52]haiku version of DeCSS is very much worth a look).
    
    Inside this week's Linux Weekly News:
      * [53]Security: Vulnerability reporting, wireless tresspassing,
        vulnerabilities in Java, CUPS, sudo, Zope, elm, PHP-Nuke and joe.
      * [54]Kernel: Per-process namespaces; ext2 directory indexes and
        backward compatibility; NFS and ReiserFS again.
      * [55]Distributions: Aleph ARMLinux, Apt merges RPM and .deb, new
        betas from Red Hat and Linux-Mandrake, Intel XScale support.
      * [56]On the Desktop: KDE 2.1 hits the streets, Apple patents, and
        Miguel de Icaza talks to the world.
      * [57]Development: Kilo Cluster, ht://Dig 3.20b3, Python 1.6.1,
        CLiki.
      * [58]Commerce: Red Hat Acquires Planning Technologies, Caldera
        Quarterly Results.
      * [59]History: Two years since the first LinuxWorld conference;
        remember Ed Muth?; how low could VA go?
      * [60]Letters: Allchin's remarks; the MPAA's threat to Dr Touretzky.
        
    ...plus the usual array of reports, updates, and announcements.
    
    This Week's LWN was brought to you by:
      * [61]Jonathan Corbet, Executive Editor
      * [62]Elizabeth O. Coolbaugh, Managing Editor
      * [63]Michael J. Hammel, Senior Editor
        
    March 1, 2001
    
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    [67]Eklektix, Inc. Linux powered! Copyright Л 2001 [68]Eklektix, Inc.,
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    Linux (R) is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds
 
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    3. http://lwn.net/2001/0301/security.php3
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    5. http://lwn.net/2001/0301/dists.php3
    6. http://lwn.net/2001/0301/desktop.php3
    7. http://lwn.net/2001/0301/devel.php3
    8. http://lwn.net/2001/0301/commerce.php3
    9. http://lwn.net/2001/0301/press.php3
   10. http://lwn.net/2001/0301/announce.php3
   11. http://lwn.net/2001/0301/history.php3
   12. http://lwn.net/2001/0301/letters.php3
   13. http://lwn.net/2001/0301/bigpage.php3
   14. http://lwn.net/daily/
   15. http://lwn.net/cgi-bin/webcal.pl
   16. http://lwn.net/stocks/
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   18. http://lwn.net/Gallery/
   19. http://lwn.net/archives/
   20. http://lwn.net/op/headlines.phtml
   21. http://lwn.net/op/Contact.html
   22. http://linux.tucows.com/
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   24. http://unixthemes.tucows.com/
   25. http://lwn.net/2001/features/djbdns.php3
   26. http://lwn.net/2001/features/linuxworldny/
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   28. http://lwn.net/2001/features/LarryWall/
   29. http://lwn.net/2001/features/Momjian/
   30. http://lwn.net/2000/features/Timeline/
   31. http://lwn.net/2000/features/ESR/
   32. http://lwn.net/2000/features/Comdex/index.php3
   33. http://lwn.net/2000/features/Comdex/RansomLove.php3
   34. http://lwn.net/2000/features/Guido.php3
   35. http://lwn.net/2000/features/PaulEveritt.php3
   36. http://lwn.net/2000/features/ESC/
   37. http://lwn.net/2000/features/ESC/ELC.php3
   38. http://lwn.net/2000/features/OLS/
   39. http://lwn.net/2000/features/CBunks/
   40. http://lwn.net/2000/features/pcb/
   41. http://lwn.net/2000/features/Axis/
   42. http://lwn.net/2000/features/FSLCluster/
   43. http://lwn.net/2001/0301/
   44. http://lwn.net/2001/0222/
   45. http://www.vorbis.com/
   46. http://www.xiph.org/xiphname.html
   47. http://www.vorbis.com/press/20010226.txt
   48. http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/why-not-lgpl.html
   49. http://lwn.net/2001/0301/a/rms-ov-license.php3
   50. http://www.economist.com/opinion/displayStory.cfm?Story_ID=512979
   51. http://lwn.net/2001/0301/a/digital-copyright.php3
   52. http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/DeCSS/Gallery/decss-haiku.txt
   53. http://lwn.net/2001/0301/security.php3
   54. http://lwn.net/2001/0301/kernel.php3
   55. http://lwn.net/2001/0301/dists.php3
   56. http://lwn.net/2001/0301/desktop.php3
   57. http://lwn.net/2001/0301/devel.php3
   58. http://lwn.net/2001/0301/commerce.php3
   59. http://lwn.net/2001/0301/history.php3
   60. http://lwn.net/2001/0301/letters.php3
   61. mailto:lwn@lwn.net
   62. mailto:lwn@lwn.net
   63. mailto:lwn@lwn.net
   64. http://ads.tucows.com/click.ng/buttonpos=lwnbutton125top
   65. http://ads.tucows.com/click.ng/buttonpos=125-001-016
   66. http://lwn.net/2001/0301/security.php3
   67. http://www.eklektix.com/
   68. http://www.eklektix.com/
 
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