3 Count: Rogue DRM

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1: US piracy crackdown delayed until 2013

First off today, the BBC is reporting that the “six strikes” system in the US, also know as the “Copyright Alert System”, has been delayed until early 2013. The Center for Copyright Information, the organization overseeing the cooperative effort between ISPs and rightsholders, has said that Hurricane Sandy and other factors affected their testing schedule and they will not begin until early next year. The system, which will send warning letters to those believed to be sharing files illegally, will take action such as throttling repeat infringers after a high number of warnings. Verizon, Time Warner, Cablevision, Comcast and AT&T have all agreed to the plan.

2: Mozilla and German Lawmakers Spar in Increasingly Furious ‘Link Tax’ Row

Next up today, David Meyer at ZDNet is reporting that Mozilla, the non-profit behind the popular Firefox browser has, in a blog post, joined the fray against an upcoming “ancillary copyright” legislation in Germany that would require search engines to pay royalties on snippets they display in their results. Mozilla joins Google in this fight, but not for the same reason. Google worries about having to pay extra fees to newspapers and other content providers for the right to index their content while Mozilla is worried such a law could actually entrench Google, making it impossible for other, less-funded, search engines to compete. The law goes before the German Bundestag (Parliament) this week.

3: Rogue DRM “Vandalizes” Video Game Creators’ Projects

Finally today, Enigmax at Torrentfreak writes that some legitimate users of YoYo Games program GameMaker, a tool designed to make game development easier, have been bitten by the program’s DRM. A recent flaw in GameMaker’s DRM caused legitimate users to have artwork they had designed to be overwritten by a skull and crossbones. The system was designed to break pirated copies of the software but ended up harming at least some legitimate users and users of the free version. YoYo Games has released a fix for the problem, removing that component of the DRM, but they have said that they will not remove DRM entirely.

Suggestions

That’s it for the three count today. We will be back tomorrow with three more copyright links. If you have a link that you want to suggest a link for the column or have any proposals to make it better. Feel free to leave a comment or send me an email. I hope to hear from you.

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