Apple is trying to use the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) to stop the iPodHash project, and thereby to restrict the freedom of iPod owners who'd prefer to use alternatives to iTunes, such as Songbird and WinAmp...

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has offered to get involved, and has published Apple Confuses Speech with a DMCA Violation, a Legal Analysis by Fred von Lohmann. He says: "Short answer: Apple doesn't have a DMCA leg to stand on." There's also a long answer.

Apple has replaced Microsoft as the chief foe of open source...

Will the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s latest slam of Apple, over its attempt to kill a BluWiki thread with a DMCA order, mark a turning point?

Today (September 30) Yahoo is shutting down the DRM servers used in the Yahoo Music store. In a stand up move, the company is offering coupons or refunds to customers who find their songs unplayable after the shutdown. The action was praised by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which was lobbying the company to delay the DRM shutdown.

In a statement, the EFF says: "Yahoo's decision sets a good precedent for when this problem inevitably arises again, vendors that sold DRM-crippled music must either continue supporting tech neither they or their customers like - as MSN Music chose to do - or take Yahoo's path and fairly compensate consumers with refunds."

With all of the Big Four record labels now jettisoning digital rights management, music fans have every reason to rejoice. But consumer advocates are singing a note of caution, as the music industry experiments with digital-watermarking technology as a DRM substitute.

Watermarking offers copyright protection by letting a company track music that finds its way to illegal peer-to-peer networks. At its most precise, a watermark could encode a unique serial number that a music company could match to the original purchaser. So far, though, labels say they won't do that: Warner and EMI have not embraced watermarking at all, while Sony's and Universal's DRM-free lineups contain "anonymous" watermarks that won't trace to an individual.

Still, privacy advocates were quick to point out that the watermarking is likely to produce fresh, empirical data that copyright material is ping-ponging across peer-to-peer sites -- data the industry would use in its ongoing bid to tighten copyright controls, and to browbeat internet service providers to implement large-scale copyright-filtering operations.

"It gives them the ability to put pressure on policy makers and ISPs to do filtering," said Fred Von Lohmann, an Electronic Frontier Foundation attorney.

Amazon.com (Nasdaq: AMZN) has picked up the third major record label to let the online music retailer sell MP3 songs without digital rights management (DRM) schemes attached. Warner Music Group announced Thursday that Amazon customers can now buy and download songs from its artists... Amazon.com's DRM-free music store, Amazon MP3, launched in September and now boasts 2.9 million songs from more than 33,000 record labels. The company hasn't reported sales figures, but Bill Carr, Amazon.com's vice president of Digital Music, said its customers are delighted with Amazon MP3 and that the company has received thousands of e-mails thanking the company for offering DRM-free MP3 tracks.

"Ironically, it seems that DRM-free music actually decreases piracy somewhat," Peter Eckersley, a staff technologist for the Electronic Frontier Foundation , told the E-Commerce Times. "There are two reasons for that. One is that despite burning billions of dollars on DRM, nobody has ever implemented a DRM system that prevents any media from being available to pirates -- once media is available to pirates, it can be copied without limit. The second reason is that DRM sucks for the users ... people often choose to pirate stuff not because of the price, or not just because of the price, but because the DRM ruins the product they would have bought," he explained.

Their names keep coming up over and over again in courtrooms and corridors of power across the country--those groups whose interests always seem to run counter to those of technology companies and consumers. They come in many forms: associations, think tanks, money-raising organizations, PACs, and even other tech-oriented industries like telecommunications.

The RIAA and MPAA have exercised considerable political and economic influence to push a legal and policy environment in which the content owners keep tight control of the way their content is distributed and used. "I think it's fair to say that their approach is that any innovation that they haven't signed off on is bad," says Fred von Lohmann, senior intellectual property attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

When Amazon.com launched its MP3 store last week, I thought the Seattle company had found the perfect formula for selling digital music.

Does that mean it's time to say goodbye to the neighborhood record store?

I'd say no, after reading the fine print in Amazon's user agreement. That's when I decided to keep buying CDs, maybe forever.

Concerned that I was being paranoid, I floated this past Fred von Lohmann, senior staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco, a public-interest advocacy group.

He was surprised by the language and said it appears to enable record companies to pursue a breach of contract if, for instance, you loaned your mother an iPod containing MP3s bought from Amazon.