by Thomas Yohannan

Last month, a federal court in New York ruled on a case where an artist wanted to shift the burden of seeking out infringing works from herself to a website. Similar to the vein of a few hundred cases in the realm, the court decided in favor of protecting innovation.

The Drumbeat festival was an intense but enjoyable 3 days.

The sheer amount of interesting people and projects that were available to immerse yourself in was a bit overwhelming at times. That said, the structure of the event made you a participant, not just an attendee, and kept you engaged from start to finish. Mozilla’s Mark Surman laid out a call to action for the event, which really involved applying a hacking, innovative, disruptive mentality to an educational and learning system in need of just that.

The most important take away for me will be the amount of meaningful connections that were made. Meaningful connections happen when people engage in building something together, whether its a tool for automatically attributing Creative Commons licensed material, or building a “sculpture” from a pile of “junk” in front of the hackbus.

Each individual’s Drumbeat experience will be unique, here’s how mine went.

I recently shared the concept of developing data portability policies, standards, and best practices as a potential project for New Media Rights' Drumbeat San Diego event, and as project that could fit within Mozilla's larger Drumbeat initiative fostering projects that celebrate and ensure and open web.

This project begins with the concept that user choice, and user control over their experience, should remain a distinguishing feature of the open internet.

To maintain a healthy competition amongst online services heavily reliant on user-submitted data, it will become increasingly important to make sure user data is easily portable. This will help ensure that popular services make changes according to the interests of their users, and that new services can compete on the basis of their merits and usability, without artificial barriers to competition. Keeping data in the hands of users, rather than allowing confusing legal and technological techniques to lock upconsumer data, will help ensure an open and competitive internet.

Regardless of how one feels about the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) as a whole, it’s clear that the Copyright Office's recent rulemaking process has appropriately further limited the DMCA's anti-circumvention provision. In February 2009, New Media Rights submitted comments in support of these changes that have now been enacted.

The Office's ruling attempted to clarify the DMCA's prohibition on “circumventing” digital rights management (DRM) and “other technical protection measures” -- a prohibition that, up until now, has given Apple the theoretical right to intimidate iPhone users with “jailbroken” phones with legal action. The Office ruled that this jailbreaking does not constitute violation of the DMCA. Although Apple has never prosecuted any iPhone jailbreaker under the DMCA, Apple did strongly object to any exemption to the anti-circumvention rule. This has led many general interest news sources to label these recent exemptions as a victory specific to iPhone jailbreakers which isn’t true.  The victory is a broader one, for cell phone users, video remix artists, documentarians, and educators, among others.